- “NEPA Reforms a Big Step toward Correcting Worst Abuses of Environmental Permitting Process” [CEI on White House Council on Environmental Quality release of proposed revamp of National Environmental Policy Act]
- Developer, relying on NYC’s own interpretation of zoning rules, puts up 668-foot tower. City: whoops, we’ve decided that wasn’t a good interpretation, here’s a new one. Judge: now lop off nearly half the building. What’s wrong here? [Rick Hills, City Journal] “Mom-and-pop shops ‘blindsided’ by de Blasio’s sign crackdown” [Melanie Gray, New York Post]
- Challenge to Ohio town’s zoning ordinance limiting number of unrelated persons who can live together [Cato Daily Podcast with Maurice A. Thompson]
- Tradeable rights for NIMBY objectors? [Peter Van Doren]
- “Why the ‘Used Housing’ Market Should Be Like the Used Car Market” [Scott Beyer last summer]
- “How California Environmental Law Makes It Easy For Labor Unions To Shake Down Developers” [Christian Britschgi, Reason] NIMBYs keep In-N-Out Burger out of Rancho Mirage [same]
Posts Tagged ‘real estate’
“L.A. leaders weigh a new idea to halt rent hikes: Force landlords to sell their buildings”
Los Angeles council members propose using eminent domain to seize apartment buildings to prevent rent hikes. The complex was built under a deal that required the developer/owner to hold rents below market levels for thirty years, and that period has now expired. [David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times; Christian Britschgi, Reason]
I think the scheme is premised in part on sponsors’ knowing that the city could proceed to make a low-ball offer premised on some combination of 1) uncertainty about whether judges would in fact award a fair market value sum that reflected actual market values, 2) the expected cost of litigation, and 3) other leverage the city might be able to bring to bear on the owners. Gideon Kanner, emeritus professor at Loyola L.A. Law and land use expert, has had a running feature for years at his blog called “Lowball Watch” with many examples of the low-ball offers routinely made in eminent domain proceedings.
Tougher regulation of homebuilding makes developers more powerful
“Making big developers ‘give back’ to the community by running a gauntlet of concessions and fees seems like it should weaken their clout. Here’s why it actually does the opposite.” [Daniel Herriges, Strong Towns via Arnold Kling]
Alas, “the number of veto points over new construction is increasing,” reports Tyler Cowen on a new NBER paper. From the abstract: “the housing bust [after 2006] …did not lead any major market that previously was highly regulated to reverse course and deregulate [building] to any significant extent. Moreover, regulation in most large coastal markets increased over time.” [Joseph Gyourko, Jonathan Hartley, Jacob Krimmel, National Bureau of Economics Research via Marginal Revolution]
ADA and disabled rights roundup
- Supreme Court declines review in Domino’s case, so no resolution is in sight of what and how much the ADA may require about web accessibility [Tucker Higgins, CNBC; Corbin Barthold, Law and Liberty; earlier]
- NYC co-ops, condos targeted: “These lawyers have one handicapped client, and they go with this person from building to building with commercial spaces.” [Marianne Schaefer, Habitat magazine] Related: John Egan, Seyfarth Shaw;
- “Airline’s Provision of Alternative Accessible Website Triggers Hefty Fine Under the Air Carrier Access Act” [Kristina M. Launey & Minh N. Vu, Seyfarth Shaw last winter]
- “A handy FAQ for service animals in the workplace” [Jon Hyman]
- “Thus far, these serial cases appear [more] designed to extract a quick settlement than rectify a real harm, as evidenced by the choice of plaintiff,” who couldn’t actually join credit union but sued anyway [Hollie Ferguson, Legal NewsLine] “Federal judge deals body blow to attorney at center of serial ADA lawsuits” [Casmira Harrison, Daytona Beach News-Journal; Minh Vu, Seyfarth Shaw]
- Law School Admissions Test will be doing away with its analytical reasoning portion, also known as logic problems, after a blind plaintiff sued saying it “it wasn’t fair for visually impaired people because the most common way to solve the problems was to draw diagrams and pictures.” [Cheyna Roth, Michigan Radio (NPR)]
Shutting out the sunlight
The effects of England’s 1696-1851 window tax can still be seen on its streets today [Dan Lewis, Now I Know]
July 31 roundup
- If you regard Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh as “very decent, very smart individuals,” are tired of party-line confirmation bloc votes, and don’t favor adding to the line-up of nine Justices, you have a co-thinker at the Supreme Court [John McCormack, National Review; Nina Totenberg/NPR interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg]
- “Manhattan federal judges are getting fed up with notorious copyright ‘troll’” [Alison Frankel, Reuters; ABA Journal; Mike Masnick, TechDirt; Richard Liebowitz]
- Idaho, though far from California, still falls under the Ninth Circuit’s distinctive body of law protecting homeless encampments against municipal authority [Steve Malanga, City Journal, earlier here, here]
- “Liability for User-Generated Content Online Principles for Lawmakers” [53 individual and 28 institutional signers including many names and groups familiar in this space; TechFreedom] “Comments on Sen. Hawley’s ‘[Ending] Support for Internet Censorship Act'” [Eric Goldman] And the Missouri senator’s latest: “Josh Hawley Wants To Appoint Himself Product Manager For The Internet” [Mike Masnick, TechDirt]
- Jury convicts south Texas judge charged with bribery, conspiracy and other crimes [Lorenzo Zazueta-Castro, McAllen Monitor; Fred W. Heldenfels IV, Corpus Christi Caller-Times/Texans for Lawsuit Reform (“The fact that a judge under indictment for accepting bribes can run for higher office and win should be a major red flag for Texans.”)] Michigan Supreme Court removes Livingston County judge over long list of ethical violations, criminal charges also pending [Andy Olesko, Courthouse News]
- “Auction Winner Learns Why Property Was Such a Great Deal: It’s Only 12 Inches Wide” [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar]
Land use and zoning roundup
- NYC landmark decree will strangle famed Strand used bookstore, says owner [Nancy Bass Wyden, New York Daily News, Nick Gillespie, Reason, earlier] NIMBY resistance to Dupont Circle project behind Masonic Temple insists on preserving views that weren’t there until fairly recently [Nick Sementelli, Greater Greater Washington]
- “Barcelona city hall has finally issued a work permit for the unfinished church designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí, 137 years after construction started on the Sagrada Família basilica.” [AP/Guardian] At least they’re not in one of the American towns and cities that would make them tear down work outside the scope of permit before proceeding;
- FHA lending tilts heavily toward detached single-family housing over condos, encouraging sprawl [Scott Beyer]
- “San Francisco’s Regulations Are the Cause of Its Housing Crisis” [Beyer]
- “What Should I Read to Understand Zoning?” [Nolan Gray, Market Urbanism]
- I think we can all guess which union was not cut into a share of the work in this Bay Area housing development [Jennifer Wadsworth, San Jose Inside (Laborers union files CEQA suit), Christian Britschgi, Reason]
Dodgy deeds in Philadelphia, cont’d
Last July we noted (“How To Steal a House In Philadelphia”) some remarkable journalism by Craig R. McCoy for the Philadelphia Daily News about the theft of real estate through forgery and other skullduggery. Now he’s back with more amazement: “In at least seven deals involving [the protagonist] or his associates, there’s a simple reason to be sure that the deeds were forged. In each case, the ‘signers’ were dead at the time. At the most extreme, someone forged the name of a woman who had died 36 years before.” [Craig R. McCoy, Philadelphia Daily News]
Related: “Man Charged After Allegedly Stealing 6 Philadelphia Homes From ‘Poor, Elderly, And Deceased,’ DA Says” [CBS Philadelphia]
How Hudson Yards connects to Harlem
This map, made using records obtained through FOIA, shows Hudson Yards qualifies as a distressed urban area under the EB-5 program by connecting the luxury development to public housing in Harlem. https://t.co/WuqtrUKSGH (?: @markbyrnes525) pic.twitter.com/s4uSrSkt0t
— CityLab (@CityLab) April 12, 2019
What an amazing story: “Manhattan’s new luxury mega-project [Hudson Yards] was partially bankrolled by an investor visa program called EB-5, which was meant to help poverty-stricken areas.” The far West Side of lower Manhattan, not far from Tribeca, the Village, and Chelsea, is hardly known for its poverty, but creative subsidy seekers carved out an “area” that connected the Hudson Yards site, gerrymander style, through midtown and Central Park to public housing projects in Harlem. And presto: access to benefits meant to revive high-unemployment urban areas. [Kriston Capps, CityLab]
Reader David Link writes:
It’s only bad if you think the point of the Poverty/Industrial Complex is designed to alleviate poverty, rather than just being a set of white collar jobs programs. This gerrymander is a visual example of the usual, multiple links between poverty/social justice/community improvement rhetoric and the people who ultimately benefit. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like a good step for New York, and the only excess cost is to those who aren’t skeptical enough to accept the rhetoric.
Buying a home? Feds want to know your identity
Another valued little piece of financial privacy being lost: in the name of enforcing money laundering and know your customer regulations, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has expanded a program the effect of which is to require disclosure of your identity if you buy a home in some parts of country [Kathleen Pender, San Francisco Chronicle]
Related: British financial regulators adopt new approach of “shifting the burden of proof onto foreign investors; they must now prove their wealth is legitimate.” [Jeffrey Miron, Cato]