States can grant regulatory authority to local governments to amend zoning and tax laws to increase housing affordability and not put a hole in city budgets In this paper we explore three approaches to solving the growing housing affordable housing crisis. First, I summarize some… Read More »A Pathway to Opening the Urban Land Market to Affordable Housing
Tom Daniels, Crossways ProfessorDept. of City and Regional PlanningUniversity of Pennsylvania IntroductionThe research project on the California Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation (SALC) program combined the broader exploration of how the SALC might serve as a national model—both to preserve farmland from conversion to development and… Read More »Methodology and Findings for the ‘California Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program: Evaluating the Use of Cap-and-Trade Funds to Promote Climate Mitigation and Adaptation.’
The Persistence of Poverty Amid Advancing Wealth “What happens when government abandons its proper role? At the top, we get fraud. Corruption. Gross incompetence. For the rest of us? We get unemployment, inequality, poverty, and inadequate healthcare, retirement, and welfare.” L. Randall Wray, Making Money… Read More »The Great Enigma of Our Times: MMT and GCE
In the Netherlands, the government is trying to combat the housing crisis with more subsidies for first time house buyers. But this will only make prices go up even more. There is a better solution, which would make housing cheaper for everyone: a land value tax. But as long as homeowners are in the majority, no politician dares to burn its fingers on this idea.
On a lazy Sunday morning I managed to get my son Miran (9) and his friend Tinus (10), who lives next door to us, to play a game of Monopoly. They were not very enthusiastic at first; they find the game boring and predictable. The player who can build houses first quickly gets ahead in the game. Especially if he reinvests the money he earns in new houses. For the others, it’s hard to catch up. The winner accumulates piles of money, the other players are broke and frustrated. There’s hardly any strategy involved. It’s just a matter of being lucky or unlucky.
The current housing market in the Netherlands looks a lot like a Monopoly game. If you bought a house at the right time, your wealth is growing. If you don’t own a house yet, it is almost impossible to get in on this wealth growth.
In The Privatization of Everything, Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian argue that, over the past four decades, private entities have wrested control of many of the functions of federal, state, and local governments. Free-market ideologues and cost-cutting “small government” bureaucrats have cooperated with business firms… Read More »The Privatization of Everything
Over time, social mores and acceptable political views shift; as a result, historical individuals may find themselves seen in an entirely different light than they were in their own time. This is sometimes a matter of interpretation, or a question of perspective. However, at other… Read More »Placing George on the Political Spectrum
On legal process grounds, the U.S. Supreme Court has just ended the Federal eviction moratorium about halfway through its sixty-day extension. But eviction moratoriums in seven states and the District of Columbia continue, as the homelessness crisis the Federal moratorium was intended to curb persists.… Read More »The Eviction Crisis: Noise and Insight
The current conflict in Washington, dealing with the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, is the much anticipated, frequently promised, but poorly defined ‘infrastructure bill’. As it stands, two versions are possible – one preferred by centrist Democrats and a few moderate Republicans that… Read More »Infrastructure Problems Exacerbated by a Poor System of Taxation
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