Comment on Harvey Jacobs' “Social conflict over property rights: the end,a new beginning,or a continuing debate?”

Jacobs draws on history, law, politics, and policy to examine the development and response of the private property movement and the social conflict over property rights and public planning. This comment suggests that the debate be broadened beyond the advocates of property rights and planning to include the interests of other members of the community, including minority and low-income households who are often affected by the outcomes. Otherwise, property will continue to be used to exclude people from democracy, rather than include them.     

Comment on Robert E. Lang,Katrin B. Anacker,and Steven Hornburg's “the new politics of affordable housing”

Abstract

In his thoughtful analysis, Joseph realistically points to what a mixed‐income housing development can and cannot offer its low‐income residents. Observed benefits include greater informal social controls over the development, likely proximal modeling opportunities for youth, and participation in a political‐economic subgroup that can demand more responsive public services. Yet without offering more comprehensive, structured supports to its residents, no form of housing alone can be an antidote to poverty.

However, if we expand Joseph's analysis to include the impact of large‐scale developments on distressed urban neighborhoods, we can see mixed‐income housing catalyzing other benefits for low‐income residents. These benefits include a reduced housing cost burden; more structured supportive services; dramatically improved surroundings; high‐quality housing and community design; faster‐paced complementary investments in public systems and amenities; and strategically restored market functioning that offers more choices, lower prices, new jobs, and additional tax revenues to support service delivery.     

Comment on “Does the Likely Demographics of Affordable Housing Justify NIMBYism?”

Abstract

Automated underwriting (AU) systems have become the tool of choice in mortgage lending decisions. While these systems provide significant benefits to mortgage originators and investors, questions have been raised about their impact on underserved populations. The questions focus on the relative accuracy of AU compared with manual underwriting and whether AU has increased the flow of mortgage credit to underserved consumers.

Using information from Freddie Mac's Loan Prospector AU service, we provide statistics useful in examining these issues. The data strongly support our view that AU provides substantial benefits to consumers, particularly those at the margin of the underwriting decision. We find evidence that AU systems more accurately predict default than manual underwriters do. We also find evidence that this increased accuracy results in higher borrower approval rates, especially for underserved applicants.     

Comment on David Listokin,Barbara Listokin,and Michael Lahr's “The contributions of historic preservation to housing and economic development”

Abstract

Listokin, Listokin, and Lahr laud the economic benefits of historic preservation but fail to delve deeply enough into the negative impacts and how they might be mitigated. Preservation projects tend to displace lower‐income households and small businesses, and the jobs they generate tend to be low paying. In areas with high potential for displacement, local government and civic leaders should act cautiously and not intervene in ways that overheat these markets. We are unlikely to see new federal policies that substantially mitigate displacement. Nonetheless, the historic rehabilitation tax credit could be revised to encourage more modest and affordable preservation projects.

The extra costs associated with historic rehabilitation standards can be more burdensome than the authors describe. To reduce these costs, the administration of the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation could be made more consistent and cost‐sensitive.     

Comment on Andrew S. Carron and R. Dan Brumbaugh,Jr.’s “The viability of the thrift industry”

Abstract

Krueckeberg summarizes Hernando de Soto's premise on property rights and offers a critical interpretation of de Soto's work, arguing that it emphasizes efficiency over equity and, ultimately, that enhanced property rights alone are unlikely to significantly improve housing stability or access to capital for households living in informal arrangements. I clarify several of Krueckeberg's discussions of de Soto's ideas from the perspective of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD).

The ILD perspective, informed by de Soto's writings, contrasts with Krueckeberg's in the following five areas: access to utilities and services in squatter settlements, the criminal nature of these communities, the ability of the poor to fulfill the responsibilities of formal ownership, their ability to borrow against formally owned property, and the impact of formalizing property on rental housing. I close by considering how the ILD perspective on formalization might be brought to bear in the United States.     

Comment on Shishir Mathur's “do impact fees raise the price of existing housing?”

Abstract

Impact fees raise the price of new homes, which pay the fee directly, and existing homes, which serve as substitutes for new homes. I argue that such fees are excessive because the net economic benefit of additional homes is not included in the calculation and because more efficient financing tools exist. An impact fee actually pushes prices higher than the fee because it is paid when construction begins but collected at the time of sale. Costs are increased by construction period interest and other costs determined as a percentage of the sale price.

Local governments calculate impact fees incorrectly by not including the indirect and positive impacts from construction and occupancy. If these added net benefits were also considered, the fiscal impact would be less and little or no fee would be required. Moreover, other methods for financing infrastructure are available in most states, so impact fees are unnecessary.     

Comment on Tollison’s contributions to economic history and the history of economic thought

Abstract Robert Tollison has furthered our understanding of mercantilism and other pivotal episodes in economic history considerably and also has applied the methods of positive economics to study the development of economic thought more generally. This article traces Tollison’s intellectual interest in those topics to his liberal arts education as an undergraduate at Wofford College and supplies commentary on Ekelund and Hébert’s valuable survey of his contributions to those areas of the literature.     

Comment on Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel's “Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Housing Policy and the Resurgence of Gentrification”

Abstract

Gentrification ought to be examined, for policy purposes, as part of a general restructuring of the space of cities resulting from broader changes in the nature, location, control, and effects of economic processes. However, even if it is narrowly seen as simply residential change, as in the article by Wyly and Hammel, the displacement of poor households by an upper‐income gentry ought not be confused with the effort to mix moderate with low incomes in public housing through the best of HOPE VI.

Despite this confusion, Wyly and Hammel provide some interesting data showing the extent to which investment in inner‐city areas has accelerated in recent years, paralleling changes in financial arrangements and contradicting any notion that degentrification is a continuous, long‐term process. Their data, although short on demographic detail, also implicitly highlight the role of government in pushing the market to respond rationally to economic demand and the continuing danger that gentrification will displace African‐American families.     

Comment on Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel's “Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Housing Policy and the Resurgence of Gentrication”

Abstract

Wyly and Hammel raise a number of important issues regarding the role of low‐income housing assistance in the more recent resurgence of inner‐city capital investment. However, their methodologies are found to be limited, and their results only weakly support a number of the strong conclusions they draw. Despite these limitations, Wyly and Hammel do present some interesting findings, such as greater loan denial rates for higher‐income applicants in the inner cities than in the suburbs, and raise the possibility of a changing income mix of urban gentrifiers. Building on the article's main theme, the comment suggests strategies to improve low‐income housing policy outcomes and highlights the gentrification conundrum.     

Mature suburbs,property values,and decline in the midwest? The case of Cuyahoga county

Abstract

For most U.S. homeowners, a home represents the biggest investment they will ever make, and until recently, most expected the value of their property to rise. If the mature suburbs in which many of these homeowners live have problems or are in decline, property values could decrease and investment value will be lost.

We define mature suburbs for Cuyahoga County, OH (the Cleveland area), and analyze the property values of single‐family homes there. We examine how property values have behaved in mature suburbs compared with the central city and developing suburbs and analyze specific factors that have influenced the property value of single‐family homes in these three submarkets from 1985 to 2000. Our analyses show that there is no overall decline in nominal property values. Housing space, nearness to workplaces and transportation networks, and tax rates are important variables in the model, affecting mature suburbs and developing suburbs differently.     

Neither the T Index nor the D2 Score Measure “Two-Partyness”: A Comment on Gaines and Taagepera

This comment critiques the paper by Gaines and Taagepera (2013 Gaines, Brian J. &; Taagepera, Rein (2013) How to operationalize “two partyness”, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. Digital online version, available at <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2013.770398> (accessed 23 March 2013). [Google Scholar]) outlining two new measures that compare how far election outcomes diverge from a particular ideal of “perfect two-partyness” (one in which all votes are divided equally between the top two parties). Their first proposed T index is an unstable amalgam of two different measures, one linear and the other not. Applied to analysing sets of election outcomes, it systematically mis-signals “two-partyness” in its accepted meaning, producing perverse results. Their second index, D₂, has a varying minimum size level depending on the size of the largest party (P₁) and the number of observable parties competing. In many circumstances D₂ scores bifurcate – the same scores are produced by both very low and very high P₁ levels. Applied to distributions, the D₂ score artefactually homogenizes very dissimilar distributions, again misreads even two-party configurations, and always overstates “two-partyness” in multi-party systems. I conclude that neither the T nor D₂ indices are fit for purpose. They should not be further used in electoral analysis.     

“The Mother of Reason and Revelation”: Benjamin on the Metaphysics of Language

This paper is a reconstruction of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language, especially as it expressed in 1916's “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. I read Benjamin's theory as a contribution to what Charles Taylor has called the “expressivist” tradition that includes eighteenth century thinkers like J.G. Herder and J.G. Hamann. Hamann's work and his interpretation of the theological concept of condescension are of particular importance. Although Benjamin's views are often regarded as impenetrable or mystical, they are relevant to and, in part, motivated by concerns of more mainstream twentieth century philosophy of language, in particular Russell's paradox. His “metaphysics of language” understands reference or designation, central to analytic theories of meaning, as derived from a more fundamental, aesthetic meaning.