Yes, Seattle as well. The key issue in Nashville was that there was a simple state HOA law, and lenders treat homes in an HOA like any other single-family homes, so subdivision became redundant.
Right, you can use HOAs, condos, or co-ops to sell the units or interests in the units separately, but the land will remain in some form of common interest ownership.
Yikes. The menu at McDonalds is mostly beef, chicken, cheese, and potatoes (fried, but still). The Happy Meal is meat, fruit, starch, and dairy. They don't serve frosted cereals, pretzels, Starburst, Fritos, or gummy bears. Where's the junk food?
On the other hand, the walking distance requirement (no more than a "block"?) would seem to encourage denser developments. The USPS is doing better accounting of infrastructure liabilities than local governments?
Yes, allowing more units per lot and making it easy for them to be sold separately works just about as well! Nashville never even touched its lot sizes.
There are a few cities that have recently enacted reforms similar to Houston's, but few as far-reaching and none that have been in effect long enough to build up a track record. For now, Houston stands alone.
This is an interesting point. Does this effectively require some sort of HOA, or does the developer deed the land where the mailbox sits to the USPS? A cluster box is an apartment building in miniature.
Seems administratively simpler than racheting fines that are capped at the value of the book, so that librarians have more time for other tasks, and aren't having to hound people for minor charges.
That's the system where I am in CT. Fines were discontinued a few years ago, but there are still renewals, and if a book isn't returned after a few renewals (now automatic) the book is marked lost, a bill is added to the account, and your account is locked.
Excellent, I'll give you a ring.
Ribicoff's administration seems to have been a real turning point for CT, doubling down on highways, abolishing counties, and sanctioning exclusionary zoning through enhanced home rule.
Penny wise and pound foolish. The decisions end up in the hands of paid professionals anyways, but with judges and judicial staff rather than planners and engineers, and the cost is measured as much in time as in taxes.
Despite all those updates to the regulations, the only significant changes in 70 years seem to be 1) the circle was downzoned from 1 to 3 acre zoning; 2) the area outside the circle was downzoned from 2 to 4 acres, and 3) the TOD zone around the RR station was downzoned from no minimum to 1 acre.
Big credit to Roxbury, though, for uploading all of their historical zoning documents. Not many towns have been brave enough to do this: www.roxburyct.com/530/Historic...
It's at least in part the lack of capacity that explains why, in 1954, someone took out a drawing compass at their desk and inscribed a crude circle around Roxbury's center, and penciled in a wedge in the southwest, and that 70 years later, there had been no urge or ability to update it.
In the rest of the country, you would typically have a professional planning board that is advisory to the city council. Connecticut suggests that the "zoning legislature," a volunteer commission, also serve as the professional planning board.
And Connecticut is the only state (quite literally, the only one of all 50) that prohibits zoning by town/city council and by state statute requires a separate "zoning legislature" for all towns with 5,000 or more residents (CGS Sec. 8-1).
Before cities began requiring car parking, some of the proto-zoning cases involved municipalities prohibiting livery stables, the forerunner of parking garages, on a nuisance-related basis. We went from bans straight to mandates!
To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced zoning is indistinguishable from Tokyo."
Great piece. "New Town" is also a wonderfully unselfconscious name. It also may be one of the last examples of a street-alley system before its revival at the end of the century. They tended to disappear as soon as the grid went wobbly -- but not here!
Spain (central and east) and Greece (east) have the driest and hottest climates in Europe, and it seems (?) Spain makes it quite difficult to either build a new septic system or drill a private well due in part to groundwater issues. I wonder if Sicily would look similar.
Amazing! I'd wondered if it were still in existence. Thanks for locating it. This unit (the homes appear to be held as a condominium) sold for $585k last year, according to Zillow.
Why yes, I would like it, in fact, I might even like to live in one of those "conditions" myself!
It's those states which so often, and going back many decades, have opposed new homes on the ground that they do not pay sufficient tax to cover the burden the children expected to inhabit them will impose on the local educational system. To be continued...
The foregone revenues are probably understated, as the housing shortage is particularly acute in states more reliant on local property tax to fund municipal operations, and which have higher relative and nominal average tax bills.
And beyond that, with another 20 million homes, residential prices could stabilize or decline, and tax assessments would shift back toward non-residential uses, further easing the property tax burden.
In practical terms, though, with an additional 20m homes, municipal budgets -- heavily contractual and non-discretionary -- would be spread across a larger set of improved properties, and we might expect per-home tax to fall more than budgets would rise.
If the average property tax bill on a residential dwelling in the United States is around $4,200, as one estimate puts it, and we use Kevin's range, that would suggest a shortfall of between $63 billion and $84 billion in tax revenue. In 2025, total US property tax revenue was $797 billion.
Interesting thoughts from @kevinerdmann.bsky.social in this post, but I want to highlight one point that someone raised at a recent forum: if Kevin is right that the US is short 15-20 million homes, what does that mean for *property tax revenue*? kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/quick-note...
Brokering Bad?
