We have just released the 9th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey covering 337 metropolitan markets in Australia, Canada, China (Hong Kong), Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. As usual, the most unaffordable markets are those in with urban containment policy (also called by other names, such as smart growth and [...]
Voters in Atlanta, with some of the worst traffic congestion in the nation, are being asked to approve a new tax that would spend more than 50% on transit, in an urban area where transit carries only 1% of travel (Figure). No one is naive enough to think that the new billions for transit [...]
Smart growth on steroids, or the radical densification policy of California, was the subject of my recent commentary in The Wall Street Journal — “California Declares War on Suburbia” (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577323353434618474.html?mod=rss_com_mostcommentart). Regional transportation plans in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Los Angeles area and the San Diego area seek to force the vast majority of [...]
www.dhi.pdf EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Rating Housing Affordability The 8th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey covers 325 metropolitan markets in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey employs the “Median Multiple” (median house price divided by gross [before tax] annual median household [...]
We at the NCPA have for a number of years written about how public policies and private actions intended to protect the environment often end up causing environmental harm. Such unintended consequences continue to this day. We first warned of the misguided policies that harmed the natural environment in our national parks and national forests [...]
Anyone familiar with housing affordability in the Washington (DC-VA-MD-WV) metropolitan area is aware that prices have risen strongly relative to incomes in the last decade However, a recent Washington Post commentary by Roger K. Lewis both exaggerates the contribution of higher construction costs and misses the principal factor that has driven up the price of [...]
“Soaring” land and house prices “certainly represent the biggest single failure” of smart growth, which has contributed to an increase in prices that is unprecedented in history. While this finding could well have been from our NCPA Policy Report, The Housing Crash and Smart Growth, they were actually from one of the world’s leading urbanologists, [...]
Population Density and Air Pollution: For years, regional transportation plans, public officials, and urban planners have been seeking to densify urban areas, using strategies referred to as “smart growth” or “livability.” They have claimed that densifying urban areas would lead to lower levels of air pollution, principally because it is believed to reduce travel by [...]