Emily Hamilton
@ebwhamilton
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Excuse me, do you have a moment to talk about zoning?
Joined September 2011
I have mostly ascended to Bl** Sk*. If you like less of an incentive for posting rage bait on your microblogging platform, I think you should do the same 🦋 . I'm back over here, though, to share this awesome resource for data on land use regulations ⬇️.
Data alert! . The national zoning atlas includes dozens of variables on restrictions across residential zones. Not all of the NZA's raw data is being made public, but you can find complete information on HI, MA, MT, NH, and some regional atlases here:
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Every time you pay rent instead of putting that money toward your own home, you’re flushing money down the toilet. Every time you buy groceries instead of a farm, same thing. Don’t even get me started on aluminum foil.
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this kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most american cities
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Infill Friday. A McDonald's turns into a McDonald's + 377 apartments in Rosslyn.
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Two very bad ideas:. 1) Tying schools to real estate.2) Tying health insurance to employment.
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“Deadly Fixed Object” stopped this drunk driver from mowing down a playground full of children
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I, for one, am thankful that zoning wasn't in place to freeze some of the country's most valuable land as single-family houses.
The Jerome Mansion NYC, torn down in 1967 and replaced with a black glass penis. Great work New York 😬
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In 1998 Houston reduced in minimum lot size from 5,000 square feet to effectively 1,400 square feet within the city's inner beltway. Then in 2013 they expanded the reform to the whole city:
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Step 1: Make it impossible to build low-cost housing.Step 2: Say that you support housing only if it's affordable to very-low-income people.Step 3: Profit!.
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Every purchase of title insurance is a massive policy failure.
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Every time someone criticizes Houston townhouses in my mentions, I'm posting more of them
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Infill Friday. Two storefronts and 12 apartments with no parking in Buffalo. Made possible by their 2017 parking reforms.
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As absurd as U.S. rail construction costs are, I think the out of control costs of tiny projects like this really make the U.S. infrastructure cost problem hit home.
Today I learned that installing one single curb bump-out costs $50,000.
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Michael and I are expecting. 🥁🥁. TWO babies this summer.
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This long-delayed DC requirement for daycare workers to have college degrees will be truly terrible for everyone except Montessori daycares where workers already have college degrees if it goes into effect
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This type of dense, walkable mixed use urbanism is illegal to build in much of the United States.
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“The worst thing that many American cities have done, for low-income people, is create a world in which you need a car.”.
What's your favorite Donald Shoup quote?.
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Been trying to radicalize my dad on housing policy for a decade, but now that his book club read The Color of Law he is finally hopping mad.
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Seattle's apartment building boom has been pretty incredible and needs more urbanist love. In 20 years the city’s housing stock increased by 38% with with multifamily units making up 73% of that growth ✨🏗️✨
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Infill Friday. In honor of Wisconsin’s new law that makes it harder for NIMBYs to sue, here’s the world’s tallest mass timber building in Milwaukee:
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Obviously low-income people are those suffering the most from housing constraints, but even for the people who “benefit,” NIMBYism is a pact to put all your money into highly mediocre housing
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DC cancelling the Adams Morgan car-free 18th St over health and safety concerns while also allowing indoor dining 🤔.
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New research!. I have a working paper out on the effects of Houston’s minimum lot size reform on assessed land values. I look at the effect of the 2013 reform that reduced the amount of land required to build a house outside of the city’s I-610 Loop:
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A new-to-me frontier in car-oriented development--little visitor parking lots within cul de sacs
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The public notice requirement I support in development is that construction sites should be required to alert neighborhood kids when something big is going to happen. We missed the opportunity to see a crane pull an excavator out of a giant hole due to this lack of notice.
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This purpose of this dorm is not student housing, it's to soften the ground for building the cube
Thread on the @ucsantabarbara cube dorm:.- no windows 👀.- next to airport and hazmat facility 👀 👀.- more expensive to build than normal dorms 👀 👀 👀.@UofCalifornia needs to (and can) do better.1/.Pictures from CA Environmental Quality Act report at
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Zoning creates out a cartel out of property owners who benefit from scarcity, but without government protection, cartels can't last. My favorite example of this is the Gilded Age mansions on 5th Avenue. The Vanderbilts owned a whole block.
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WOW, Nebraska is the latest state to get a bill that would eliminate single-family zoning in cities with at least 5,000 residents!
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Every time someone says "buildings in DC cannot be taller than the Washington Monument," the height limit will get 1 foot taller.
Bowser has been hinting at picking up the fight over the Height Act basically ever since I began covering her new housing initiatives nearly four years ago. Is this finally a real possibility in her third term?
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New from me at Works in Progress, a long-read on the history of transit-oriented development in Arlington and the DC region. This is my favorite thing I've written in a while:
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Infill Friday. One house became three "tall skinnies" in East Nashville.
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The Arlington County Board has passed missing middle 🥳🥳🥳.
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Someone should invent a financial product for transferring a fixed-rate mortgage to a new property.
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When environmentalists are holding up land use reforms due to potential increased "pedestrian traffic," they've really lost the plot
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┏┓ .┃┃╱╲ In this.┃╱╱╲╲ detached .╱╱╭╮╲╲ house,.▔▏┗┛▕▔ we.╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲ . want a developer .to buy it, knock it down, and. build a fourplex.╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲ .▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.[no setback].
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Wow, the proposed 2040 General Plan Update for Sacramento would replace R-1 zoning with zoning for 1, 2, 3, or 4 unit buildings with a floor area ratio limit of 1. This is how you get rid of single-family zoning. 👩🍳💋 .
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My address has been selected for the ACS! Won the Census lottery!.
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Awfully quiet on Arlington Nextdoor tonight following a shellacking of the anti-Missing Middle candidate for County Board.
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Men packing up a house be like “your grandma’s china can beat it, but we must preserve this at all costs”
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New policy brief! . Following minimum lot size reforms in Houston, nearly *80,000* small-lot houses have been built. What can other cities and states learn from this model?.
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The detached townhouse has become popular in Houston as a result of small lot size requirements and very small side setback requirements. Many zoning ordinances wouldn't allow these because if a house isn't attached, it has to have a 5-foot+ side setback.
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Some 💕personal news💕 . We’ve upgraded our family vehicle to the Trek Fetch+ 4. It’s one of the only bucket bikes on the market that can fit two toddlers and an infant car seat. Baby Girl Hamilton will be joining the family this winter!.
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One beloved dive bar and its parking lot ➡️ 326 apartments over retail
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Woo, down with parking requirements!.
Minneapolis City Council just voted UNANIMOUSLY to fully eliminate minimum parking requirements citywide, 13-0!.
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On the other hand independent grocery stores are known for their low food prices.
Giant grocery store chains force high food prices onto American families while rewarding executives & investors with lavish bonuses and stock buybacks. I'm demanding they answer for putting corporate profits over consumers and workers during the pandemic.
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Here are the single-family houses with the smallest lot sizes built since Houston's most recent minimum lot size reduction. Knight Rd townhouses on cute little 820 square foot lots:
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Completed my Zoom dissertation defense! Thank you @ATabarrok, @tylercowen, and Dick Wagner!
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tfw a public comment zigs with "as an owner of a single-family home for 40 years" and then zags to "what we need is more housing for more people".
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On the 200th viewing I found it, the single mistake in Home Alone:. Flights don’t leave from Chicago to Paris in the morning.
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Point of clarification: eliminating single-family zoning is fantastic, but it is not the same as eliminating exclusionary zoning. I'll say a locality has eliminated exclusionary zoning when it has no residential density restrictions.
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Great step, now let’s legalize dorms for anyone who wants to live in one.
Today, I'm proud to announce that we've partnered with @BrownUniversity to provide free single-occupancy dormitory housing to frontline workers.
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Points for honesty in this NIMBY column about Takoma Park parking lot preservationists
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How did PA get blessed with so many street grids and relatively narrow streets compared to other old parts of the U.S.? . Legacy of William Penn? Lots of cities and towns hemmed in by mountains?
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I'm at CityLab today with a piece on the rules that need to be reformed to make lots of missing middle housing construction feasible on top of ending single-family zoning
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Dozens of migrants died after paying €8,000 for a dangerous boat trip from Izmir, Turkey to Italy. A flight from Izmir to Rome costs $136. A flight from Izmir to DC costs $551. We just don’t let them take the safe route.
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I’m not against giving away bicycles to youths, but I don’t think the cost of a bike is the major barrier to cycling in the U.S.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s transportation chief said city would be giving away 5,000 bicycles. That plan is starting slowly, just a tenth being given this year, costing $231,000 so far — story with @srfreish @chicagotribune
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Bye bye NE DC!. 5500 square feet of rowhouses are on their way to ~25,000 square feet of multiplex after we sold with four of our neighbors
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Some of these boomers obsess about the lights for environmentalist reasons while living in a detached single-family house and driving around an 8 passenger car for 1 person.
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Here are the average annual housing starts per 1000 households by decade in the United States:. 60s: 24.2.70s: 25.6.80s: 17.3.90s: 14.3.00s: 13.3.10s: 8.1.:(
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Changes in rents for one-bedroom apartments from this time last year for the 10 most expensive cities:. San Francisco -12%.San Jose -8%.Los Angeles -4%.Seattle -3%.New York -2%.Boston -2%.San Diego -1%.Miami +1%.DC +1%.Oakland +5%.
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Where do we go from here on the bounds of the First Amendment? . Design review is unconstitutional. Vinyl siding is speech.
The Court is much more protective of "low-value" speech than at any other time in history. Everything from depictions of animal cruelty to violent video games to vile protests by the Westboro Baptist Church to lies about having received military honors have been held protected.
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The Cairo, simultaneously non-conforming with federal law and also on the National Register of Historic Places
What's the best building in your city?.
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Public Service Announcement for people complaining about the cost of Door Dash these days: burgers and fries are not even good delivery foods.
This whole order costs 30% less if you make it for pickup rather than delivery. The only way for sporadic delivery work to be cheap is to have low wages — not necessarily my idea of a dream economy — though maybe soon we’ll have delivery robots.
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This rule would shut out non-English speakers from the daycare labor force when, imo, having someone speak another language to babies and toddlers is much more valuable than them being cared for by someone with a college degree. End rant.
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The big critique of setting aside outdoor space for pandemic eating and drinking seems to be that it creates a “festival atmosphere.” Are we fighting this virus with Puritanism?.
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City Describer: Rosslyn and its suburbs across the river
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Last mile transportation works better when the bike dock isn’t 1/10 of a mile from the Metro station
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I like Elizabeth Warren’s near use of “apartment ban” to describe single family zoning.
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The Colorado Municipal League says it’s “speculation” that allowing more housing to be built across Colorado will improve affordability, but as @nbminor says, the research shows otherwise:
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Insurance companies should write traffic laws and building codes.
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Seven (!!!) Ukrainian refugees have been resettled in the U.S. so far
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So many people think that buildings in DC can't be taller than the Washington Monument, let's just make that the new rule.
It’s interesting which widely held false beliefs are and are not on the “misinformation” agenda.
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I often think about how if someone was familiar with U.S. values and culture but not land use, and then they learned about how the extent to which entitlement process lets people control their neighbors' property, the only response would be "I thought this was America!?!".
idk who needs to hear this, but if you want to exercise control over what your neighbors build on property that they own, you can (a) buy that property yourself or (b) move to an HOA. (yes, I'm subtweeting my neighborhood listserv again.).
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Kids probably walk and ride bikes a lot less than they used to, especially without adult supervision. This is probably causally related to a dramatic decline in deaths among kids, which is a difficult reality for people who would like to see kids walking and riding bikes more.
The death rate for children ages 5-14 as pedestrians and bike riders has fallen about 95% since the 1970s. What does this tell us about trade-offs?. I explore in my @EconsEveryDay post:.
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"I was at a reception at the governor's house a few weeks ago and when I pulled up, I noticed that literally directly across the street here in Helena was a triplex," Cotton said. "I asked the governor about it and he said, 'Oh, yeah, it's no big deal.'".
"The deep red state of Montana is full of Republican YIMBYs, and they're using the time-honored bipartisan tradition of mocking California to alleviate their state's housing affordability crisis.". #mtpol.
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My take adjacent to this distressing conversation: more men and women would be happier if they would get comfortable with relationships where the woman earns more money.
New >> Are young men becoming more sexist? . I dive in with the incomparable @_alice_evans who is somehow a walking, talking library! . We explore the causes and variation of the newest flavor of gender egalitarianism trying to find purchase in younger generations.
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A year and a half after we moved out, and ~450 basis points later, our old house has finally been demolished. 5 rowhouses are on their way to becoming 40 condos.
Bye bye NE DC!. 5500 square feet of rowhouses are on their way to ~25,000 square feet of multiplex after we sold with four of our neighbors
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Do NIMBYs feel shame when they read this to their grandkids?
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Happy due date to Brian and Jack, who joined the outside world on July 2nd! Body language nature or nurture?
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Vanderbilt law professor argues that construction materials for a proposed apartment building could cause a risk during flooding, doesn't have the same concern for materials that would be used to build single-family houses on the same site:
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On-site labor hours required to build 100 square feet of single-family house:. 1962: 85 .1969: 82 .2022: 86.5 .
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I just learned that Redfin now includes zoning information in some listings, like this example:
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Soooo, now that Arlington has legalized missing middle, what can be built? Here's my take on the great, the good, and the bad. .
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@holz_bau @jdcmedlock Ok the bar is high, but the might be the darkest NIMBYism I’ve ever heard of.
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Ground floor residential is fine and activates a street more than vacant retail.
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Hard to believe that this time last year, legislators in CA, MD, NE, VA, and WA introduced single-family zoning preemption bills. Here are some of the land-use bills I’ll be following in 2021 🧵.
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Infill Friday. Taxi dispatch lot —> 267 apartments in Arlington.
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100% of Americans who receive paychecks live paycheck to paycheck after you account for everything they spend and save.
It's sort of funny that the viral, ill-sourced "paycheck to paycheck" numbers now exceed "the number of Americans who receive paychecks" (60.1%).
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Infill Friday. 553 apartments will be replacing the sad Macy’s at the Ballston mall.
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95% of the time that I talk about zoning reforms to allow for more manufactured housing with policymakers they are not interested, but I keep at it for the 5%.
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Guy inventing condos was like “I have a great idea for creating a bunch of collective action problems where there weren’t any”.
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