- “An Innovative Way to Title Property in Poor Countries” [Ian Vasquez on Peter Schaefer and Clay Schaefer Cato study]
- Berman v. Parker, “1954 U.S. Supreme Court case that approved large-scale modern urban renewal”, facilitated a bulldozer redevelopment of Washington, D.C.’s SW now viewed as “crushing failure” [Gideon Kanner]
- Time for a radical step: strip local government of its project-blocking powers [Edward Glaeser, Cato]
- When reporting on European anti-fracking movements, try not to think of a Bear [Jonathan Adler]
- “The EPA wants to redefine ‘the waters of the United States’ to mean virtually any wet spot in the country.” [M. Reed Hopper and Todd Gaziano, WSJ] Overcriminalization, EPA, and wetlands: the Jack Barron case [Right on Crime video]
- Exhaustion of state remedies on takings: “Supreme Court Should Remove Kafka-esque Burden to Vindicating Property Rights” [Ilya Shapiro and Trevor Burrus]
- “Proposition 65 can spell bankruptcy for many California small business owners” [Mark Snyder, Sacramento Bee]
One Comment
“Time for a radical step: strip local government of its project-blocking powers”
These ideas are laughable. The author asks for two seemingly conflicting things simultaneously. He wants to give developers carte blanche to build whatever they want, subject only to statewide guidelines, no matter what the local community thinks is best (even though he keeps making the point that the country is a big place where different communities have different needs, apparently one set of rules is good enough for the entire state). At the same time, he wants to shrink federal infrastructure spending and rely on privately funded infrastructure.
So how would this work in practice? Let’s consider some of the lower density areas of San Francisco, where I live, like the Richmond or Sunset districts. The state swoops in, takes away all zoning authority from the city, and decides these areas can support four times the current density. Single family homeowners cash in on their land, which is now vastly more valuable, and the building boom commences. How is the infrastructure needed to support that growth managed? If local governments have no control over development, then surely they also can’t collect impact fees from developers to fund the necessary infrastructure like water treatment plants, streetlights, etc… (If you allowed local governments this kind of authority under your system, surely they would use it as a de facto form of control over development: “we want $80 billion if you build that high rise there, so don’t bother.”) Will the city’s public transit system, already vastly overtaxed, suddenly be able to carry hundreds of thousands of new passengers a day? Will parking lots for tens of thousands of new cars appear downtown? Will the roads connecting these denser neighborhoods and downtown suddenly get wider?