Greetings from Germantown, TN, where my family has stopped over at the local Hyatt during our trip from Montgomery to Searcy. We plan to do some sightseeing in the Memphis area today. My wife and I both spent a lot of time here in young adulthood, but our kids have only seen the city from the interstate, so we hope to show them a few points of interest.
What I’m Writing
After a short delay, my latest piece, “How to Fix the Broken Housing Market,” has been published on the Law & Liberty website. It’s a review of the new book Escaping the Housing Trap by the Strong Towns organization’s Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges.
Here’s an excerpt:
The book’s final section lays out the Strong Towns organization’s recommendations for addressing the housing crisis. Marohn and Herriges insist that none of the tools available in the current paradigm, e.g., Wall Street investments or federal programs, will provide sufficient new housing units at affordable prices without adversely affecting the existing housing market, nor will they increase net investments in communities while growing cities’ tax bases without adding to their liabilities. They call instead for a completely new paradigm.
The authors propose a set of guiding principles for a new housing policy. Among these are cheap entry-level housing (think multitudes of 600-square-foot homes) and the insistence that every neighborhood be allowed to change incrementally (but not radically); an example would be a policy of allowing any property owner in a neighborhood of predominantly single-family homes to convert a house into a duplex by right. A corollary of this openness to incremental change is the cultivation of “neighborhood-level economic ecosystems” in which small-scale commercial and retail units are incorporated into existing neighborhoods as their density increases.
The usual suspects of big corporate developers and the banks that finance them make their profits largely from economies of scale and do not wish to operate on this level. Marohn and Herriges suggest that the existing system of financing, permits, and regulations continue as is for these entities while municipalities undertake a drastic deregulation of smaller-scale projects. They urge local officials to study how codes and regulations interact to create unintended consequences that often sabotage small-scale development projects such as converting unused bedrooms into studio apartments and adding accessory dwelling units (granny flats) to lots with single-family homes. These regulations include, among other things, height limits, parking requirements, setbacks, and commercial stormwater requirements imposed on residential buildings, not to mention zoning restrictions on single-room occupancy and mixed-use developments. To make incremental development both legal and financially viable, local governments need to cut through this “Gordian knot of regulatory complexity.” Moreover, they should prioritize getting empty lots in the urban core into the hands of people who are prepared to pull permits and begin building immediately, giving these lots away for free instead of auctioning the tax liens off to speculators.
This new paradigm, Marohn and Herriges argue, will bring new capital off the sidelines in the form of a “swarm” of incremental developers. They point to South Bend, Indiana, as a case study of this phenomenon. Following a disastrous decade in the early 2000s during which the municipality lost 7.5 percent of its households, an informal network of small-scale developers began to work with the city on zoning reform that would make more infill development possible. The network has a low barrier to entry and now collectively controls more property than the largest corporate developer in the area. South Bend’s planning director claims that the city’s new zoning code requires merely a high school education and an hour of reading to understand and use.
Read the whole thing at this link.
What I’m Reading
After several delays, I finally finished Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be this week. The book is unexpectedly long, maybe 40-50% longer than most books of its type, but it’s worth the read, particularly the chapters on technology and the “culture of sterility.” I have begun writing a review of it and hope to have that finished by next weekend.
I also began reading Felicia Song’s Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age this week. This book was published waaaaayyy back in 2021, and I have half a fear that it’s already dated considering all the changes that have happened in the past three years, but the introduction seemed to speak to the conditions of 2024 just fine, so I’m giving it a chance. It was published by Intervarsity Press, a Christian publisher, and was among a number of review copies sent to me in my capacity as a book review editor. I’ve had it on my shelf for a while and decided it was time to dust it off.
Update
We spent most of this week in Montgomery. Faulkner’s fiscal year ends on May 31, and I always have a fair amount of administrative paperwork to process during its last few weeks. Unfortunately, I arrived on campus Sunday night to discover the power was out in my office’s building. After maintenance briefly restored it Monday morning, it went out again and stayed out the remainder of the week. Not having an office during a week that I had counted on spending in the office was extremely inconvenient, and at a minimum it means I’ll be late in submitting some of my end-of-year documentation.
The week wasn’t a total bust, though. Ivy Classical Academy took advantage of my presence in town to have its quarterly board meeting, and we got several encouraging updates about the state of enrollment for the fall and progress on our facilities and systems. We’re on track to have a full complement of more than 640 students when we open, and almost all the teachers and staff have been hired. Some are scheduled to begin training in mid-June, with the rest to start in July. The school year will launch on August 7.
Next week will more or less be family vacation for us in the great state of Oklahoma. More details on that to come.
I’m sure many of you are either on the road or hosting guests during this holiday weekend. I wish you all the best!