Housing

The US Census Bureau has released preliminary data for residential building permits by metropolitan area (housing market). This article provides data for all of the 384 metropolitan areas, with emphasis on the 113 with populations exceeding 500,000 residents (Note).  read more »

The metropolitan areas that form the “Texas Triangle” —Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio— are emerging as distinctive models of 21st century urbanism.  read more »

A poll by highly respected IPSOS, released by BILD-GTA, shows a strong awareness of the Greater Toronto Area’s severely unaffordable housing.  read more »

An author should be pleased to see his thesis bolstered by events. Yet since writing The Coming of Neo-Feudalism in 2020, I have not found any joy in the continued growth of the West’s class divides  read more »

Tune out the noise of various tenant-landlord tiffs in our pandemic-altered world and consider this fundamental question that carries actual signal from—of all places—the Broadway stage: What is the purpose of rent control?  read more »

This chapter describes general urbanization trends in the United States and around the world, from 1950 to the present. Cities can be glamorous or exciting, but what matters most is how they facilitate higher incomes and standards of living.  read more »

An on-line site called the Dumber, er, I mean Intelligancer says that, for cities to survive, developers must be allowed to convert office buildings into housing.  read more »

If you’ve read this blog over the years you know that I’ve increasingly written about a general staleness in urbanist discourse. I’ve characterized it as seeing a need for new ideas in urbanism discourse, superstar cities becoming the victims of their own success, or the needs of interior cities being glossed over in favor of the coasts.  read more »

The newly published US Census Bureau state and District of Columbia population estimates contain some surprises about changing growth and net domestic migration (movement between states) patterns.  read more »

In a recent YouTube video Avoid These Cities (Housing Crash 2022) EPB Research provides an analysis of the national market. In general, West Coast is bad and East Coast is OK, especially the southeast. The overly regulated western states with higher raw land prices and huge city fees result in higher home prices.  read more »