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Matt's core point is that developers' incentive to invest in amenities like beautiful design, quality public space, and gathering places like coffee shops & bars is increasing in the share of the neighborhood that the developer owns. /2

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Chris Elmendorf

@CSElmendorf

May 7

The new Mission Rock development in S.F. is a great illustration. Exceptional parks, great architecture. Why? Likely because the entire 28-acre site was controlled by a single developer. Value of parks & architecture gets internalized as higher office & apartment rents. /3

Matt argues that cities w/ struggling downtowns and commercial strips should welcome developers' efforts to consolidate control over big swaths of the neighborhood. /4

Chris Elmendorf

@CSElmendorf

May 7

(Alas, in S.F., when someone tries to consolidate ownership along a street, we freak out & throw up barriers. Witness

@AaronPeskin

's Upper Fillmore Special Use District, passed unanimously to combat a VC's land-assembly project. sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/0) /5

Yglesias's point applies equally beyond the urban core. Why are efforts to build new, dense, mixed use communities so rare? In part because it's really hard for anyone to acquire enough contiguous land to internalize the benefits. /6

's East Solano Plan may be the rare exception. Their land-assembly project depended on exceptionally connected investors + extreme secrecy + arm twisting thru antitrust(!) litigation. /7 governing.com/management-and

Some people complain that

@CAForever

is trying to build a new city rather than revitalizing the cores of Fairfield, Vacaville, Dixon, etc. But that's b/c its virtually impossible to piece together all the lots in an existing neighborhood. (To say nothing of the additional... /8

interest groups & veto wielders the investors would have had to deal with if they were trying to redevelop an existing city.) /9

One thing

omits from his piece is that there's actually a ton of stuff that governments can do -- short of eminent domain -- to facilitate urban land assembly & internalization of good-urbanism amenities. /10

E.g., there's the

"land assembly district" proposal, which would authorize forced sales by supermajority vote of the owners in a district. (Happily this qualifies as a "Post Neoliberal Housing Policy" too, per

& Serkin.) /11

More modestly, cities can pass zoning overlays that allow greater heights, reduced setbacks, and the like on larger / consolidated parcels -- what the late, great Donald Shoup called "graduated density zoning." /12

Graduated Density Zoning - Donald Shoup, 2008

From journals.sagepub.com

And business- or block-improvement districts, financed with parcel taxes, can be used to finance local amenities like parks, street trees, and the like. (The district's tax should also encourage people doing nothing with their property to sell it, facilitating assembly.) /13

Finally, states should consider authorizing developers who assemble a sufficiently large, valuable parcel of land to negotiate directly w/ state for a one-stop development permit, bypassing city & county. Like Massachusetts' comprehensive-... x.com/CSElmendorf/st /14

Quote

Chris Elmendorf

@CSElmendorf

Nov 27, 2024

on new MA clean-energy law. tl;dr: "comprehensive permit" is great; so too, new substantive standards in place of open-ended enviro reviews. But failure to address incentives for litigation may prove to be the Achilles' heel. 1/23 canarymedia.com/articles/polic

permit regimes for certain affordable housing and clean energy projects. California's procedure for expediting environmental reviews of Governor-designated priority projects is also a useful precedent. lci.ca.gov/ceqa/judicial- /15

To be sure, there are significant downside risks from over-concentration of land ownership. Research by

@leqonomics

suggests that falling housing-supply elasticities post-Great Recession are due in part to concentration in homebuilder industry

. /16

Homebuilder monopolies create housing crunch

The sweet spot is for the government to facilitate localized concentrations of land ownership within metro regions, while blocking the owner of an actual or potential neighborhood from acquiring a bunch of other actual/potential neighborhoods in same region. /end

unroll

Matt discovers ... planning, but the only version of it he can imagine is planning by a private developer.

Something to be said for facilitating it!

Dan Gilbert model and Detroit

Vance Ginn

@VanceGinn

I’ve just returned from a full and energizing week on the road, with stops in South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Check out my latest work to let people prosper through more freedom across the country! vanceginn.substack.com/p/on-the-road-

How do you reckon this with failed mega developments like the 78 and Lincoln Yards in Chicago? City made deals to turn huge swaths of land over and nothing has been built

Everything say sounds reasonable but I am confused. The least-appealing kind of development in modern American construction, I think, is the planned subdivision, which I think of as maximizing developer control.

In downtown St. Paul a single landlord is basically striking the final blow to downtown because they've stopped maintaining all the buildings they own, lol.

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Alec Stapp

@AlecStapp

21h

This should be a wake up call for US policymakers:

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Christopher Koopman

@ckoopman

May 7

It’s time to delete NEPA. My latest with @smithtjosh for @commonplc. commonplace.org/2025/05/07/tea

EZRA KLEIN: high speed rail can only happen if we remove the procedural fetish that traps big Democrat projects MARIE GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: I like that I don’t have trash pick up. It’s more real

10 years after release, much of LA’s “Livable Boulevard” renderings remain nothing burgers:

Behold, the ~7 real cities of the USA in terms of transit use. NYC is an island unto itself. SF, DC, and Boston, America's wealthiest three cities, in tier 2. And in tier 3, you have Chicago, Philly, and Seattle.

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