District Elections & Housing Starts
2022-01-25 20:37:49.546569+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
There's a trend in California, driven by an enterprising SoCal lawyer who's making hay offf of the California Voting Rights Act, to drive cities to district elections. Petaluma is making such a switch. This suggests that our housing situation won't get any better...
W. E. Upjohn Institute: Warding Of Development Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs
My results suggest that towns reduce the number of housing units permitted by 21 percent afer switching to ward voting. The effect is larger (38 percent) for multifamily units and in towns with higher owner-occupancy rates. It appears that more localized control has a large negative effect on housing production. This suggests that reforms restricting the influence of local levels of government or small groups of people on land-use regulation and housing approval could indeed increase housing supply. However, note that while switches to ward voting provide a natural experiment for this question, I do not consider all the effects of ward representation or claim that it is worse overall than at-large systems