Zak Yudhishthu
@zyudhishthu
Sidewalk enthusiast and adopted Midwesterner (Twin Cities, Chicago). I like to write and research about housing and cities. PhD student at UW-Madison.
In Madison, here’s a weird, distorted version of courtyard apartments: the homes completely turn their backs on the street for a terrible pedestrian experience, while the strangely landscaped courtyard limits how much you can actually hang out in the there
I really like this telltale chart: both before and after the reform, essentially all 4-story buildings used Type III, while none of the small number of 5-story buildings did. After the reform, 5-story buildings almost entirely switched to Type III.
Type I requires all concrete, steel or brick, like highrises. Type III is more flexible so it costs a lot less. (Why was 5 stories previously the threshold for all Type 1 in Chicago? And why did they adjust it upwards?)
Learning about building codes: before 2021 Chicago had few 5-story buildings, even where zoning allowed. But plenty of 4-story ones. Why? 5-story buildings previously had to use pricey Type I construction instead of cheaper Type III. When that changed, they more than doubled!
Been in Minneapolis a mere 15 minutes before getting my first ever fare check on Metro Transit
Chicago is having some serious growth in rents and home values lately. Interestingly, however, bc it had really flat/negative prices after COVID, the cumulative price growth since Jan 2020 is still among the lowest in the Midwest.
Another fond goodbye to the corner bar 50 feet down the road, grandfathered into the zoning after decades of existence… but this also certainly could not be built today!!
A fond goodbye to my Avondale apartment, which breaks every part of its RS-3 zoning and could never be built today ❌ 12 units (2 unit max) ❌ 40 ft tall (30 ft max) ❌ 260 sq ft lot area/unit (2,500 min) ❌ 0 ft rear setback (35 ft min) And way above the 0.9 floor-area ratio cap
By the way, I don’t think this challenge sounds very hard. But who am I to say
Heard there were some new chairs at Buckingham Fountain. So you know I had to have that #FontanosAtTheFountain
Another finding from Guren and co-authors is that rental and ownership housing markets are segmented, so loosening credit standards can disproportionately raise home values. i.e. a diverging price-to-rent ratio does not necessarily imply a "bubble" people.bu.edu/guren/gg_Ren...
This figure shows the places with the biggest pre-2006 booms had bigger busts, but also bigger rebounds and more long-term price growth. "The boom was not ephemeral." people.bu.edu/guren/CRGM_h...
Adam Guren and co-authors have research that’s helpful for reconciling the bubble view with the long-run fundamental view on 2008. Two things can be true: - Fundamentals incl. amenities and supply constraints have driven overall price growth the last few decades - Some over-optimism caused a bubble.
Regarding some discourse on the other app: Can we reconcile the ideas that 2008 was a housing bubble, vs. housing costs have been driven by long-run fundamentals? I think that we can!
This isn't easily changed by policy choices, either: you can try to make income limits stricter, switch to a fair lottery, or give preference to nearby residents for new buildings. But these selection dynamics persists strongly regardless of whatever policy change you might make.
This shapes net impacts from LIHTC, e.g. on segregation. When you allow for changes in tenant composition by building location (red line vs. blue), this largely mutes the decline in segregation from new housing in a high-opportunity area, as more residents are white.
Why? Many people have outside options, and don't have to live in any particular LIHTC building. Thus, more white and moderate-need tenants selectively apply for buildings they see as better-located. (results from their model of the LIHTC market, letting them model counterfactuals)
Here's their key descriptive figure. Among the pool of eligible households, when LIHTC buildings are in higher-opportunity neighborhoods the tenants have - more education - higher incomes in prior years - fewer children and are more likely to be white. www.cody-cook.com/papers/affor...
It's common to emphasize affordable housing development in higher-opportunity neighborhoods. This paper raises a nuanced tradeoff: in better n'hoods, LIHTC applicants that are (relatively) better off crowd out other tenants. Households with the highest need benefit less.
I don’t exactly know what this mural is saying about housing affordability. But I prefer to interpret it as a statement about how migration chains enable new housing to lower prices for homes across the price spectrum
In the last few years, Chicago has built a lot of new housing, often near transit, with less than 0.5 parking spaces per unit. Made possible by multiple reforms over the past decade-plus elevatedchicago.org/wp-content/u...