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Housing blog
A thought experiment where the grocery store gets rent control too A labelled satire applies rent control's rules to a supermarket, then matches each joke to a documented effect of the real policy. Detroit Bulldozed Poletown for a Car Plant and Michigan Took 23 Years to Repent In 1981 Michigan's high court let Detroit condemn Poletown for General Motors, and in 2004 the same court overruled itself, setting the stage for Kelo. When the City Wants Your Home for a Developer, the Steps to Fight Back Since Kelo many states limited eminent domain, but blight findings still put homes at risk, and an owner who acts early has real options. When a Health Agency Decided It Could Freeze Every Eviction in America The CDC stretched a 1944 quarantine statute to freeze evictions nationwide, and the Supreme Court rulings that followed show where agency power stops. The 2008 housing crash began with Washington's push for easy mortgages Wall Street bet badly, but federal policy set the table. The CRA, the GSE housing goals, cheap money and the 2008 conservatorship, with every cause weighed. Houston has almost no zoning, and its houses cost less to prove it Houston is the biggest American city without conventional zoning, and it builds. How it works, three votes against zoning, and the flooding objection answered. Rent control's record from Stockholm to San Francisco is the same story Economists of every stripe say rent control shrinks housing supply. Stockholm, New York, San Francisco and St. Paul show how, with the arithmetic. Levittown Built a Nation of Homeowners, and Ownership Built Citizens Levittown turned renters into owners with assembly-line homes and GI Bill loans. Its exclusion of Black buyers was wrong, and the case for ownership stands. A 94-Year-Old Lost Her Condo Over a Tax Debt and the Court Said Enough In Tyler v. Hennepin County a unanimous Supreme Court held that a county cannot keep a seized home's value beyond the tax debt, a plain property-rights win. Property Rights Are Human Rights Because People Hold Property, Not Things A property right is a person's claim to keep what his work produced, so the slogan setting human rights against property rights falls apart. Your ZIP Code Picks Your Child's School, the Case for Open Enrollment Attendance zones let housing prices ration good schools, and open enrollment opens the door to families who cannot afford the house. Seven Myths About Owning a Home That Cost First-Time Buyers Real Money Seven beliefs that sound like common sense and quietly drain first-time buyers, each tested against plain arithmetic and the record, with a verdict. Buy or Rent? One Family, One City and a Five-Year Worked Example Owning wins for families who stay and costs dearly for those who move in three years. A hypothetical family, worked year by year, with the break-even shown. The Takings Clause Explained, From Public Use to Just Compensation The Fifth Amendment protects property in two phrases, public use and just compensation, and courts have stretched the first while shrinking the second. Madison Wrote That Government Exists to Protect Property of Every Sort Madison's 1792 essay held that a man owns his opinions, conscience and labor as well as his land, and that only a government protecting all of it is just. Knick v. Scott Township Reopened the Federal Courthouse to Landowners For 34 years a rule locked landowners out of federal court on takings claims. Knick ended it in 2019, 5 to 4, and the Fifth Amendment is stronger for it.