A company backed by Silicon Valley’s most powerful investors, including the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, assembled a land empire outside San Francisco and announced a bold vision to build a brand-new city — and was immediately castigated by the world’s urbanists. Critics describe the effort by ...

The overregulation of American housing markets began in the nation's coastal, educated, productive enclaves. Over time, however, barriers to building have spread. Tony suburbs of Phoenix and Austin, which once left their builders free to construct plentiful affordable housing, have now become almost as restrictive as the Boston area. The ...

The median Los Angeles home sold for $849,000 last year, according to the National Assn. of Realtors. Meanwhile, one of California’s signature zoning reforms of the past few years, Senate Bill 9, appears to be having at best a desultory effect on new housing supply, the shortage of which is driving prices upward. Los Angeles and other ...

A Gallo-Roman poet compiled this list of Western Civ’s hottest destinations. With clockwork regularity, magazines and websites churn out "best cities" lists. U.S. News & World Report has a "best places to live in the U.S." list (and many others). Travel + Leisure will tell you the best cities to visit in the U.S. and the world. Time Out advises ...

Subsidizing demand in America’s constrained housing markets will further increase rents. Last week, the House Committee on Financial Services began hearings on a plan to create a new federal voucher program aimed at paying the rent of every lower-income American. Such a program could represent an extra $100 billion subsidy to housing ...

The key to post-Covid recovery is lifting restraints to new business creation. Covid-19 has destroyed jobs as well as lives. More than 100,000 restaurants and bars closed in 2020, for example, despite the almost $1 trillion federal Paycheck Protection Program. The shift to online retail and the rise of telecommuting due to the pandemic ...

If a state wants funds for infrastructure, it should meet strict conditions about housing construction. President Biden's American Jobs infrastructure plan hopes to shake this country free of wasteful barriers to affordable housing — especially in booming areas. An "innovative" competitive grant program will act to eliminate these harmful ...

End insider privileges by renewing the freedoms to build, to work, to sell, and to learn. A February 2019 Harris poll found that roughly half of younger Americans would "prefer living in a socialist country." Millennials may not fully grasp the consequences of the government owning the means of production, but they certainly don't like ...

Urban flourishing requires overcoming perennial threats, from pandemics to economic barriers to public disorder. The Plague of Athens ended the golden age of the West’s first great city in 430 BC—not only because of the disease but also because, as Thucydides wrote, “Athens owed to this plague the beginnings of a great state of ...

World War II engendered a shared middle-class culture that permeated America and reduced the distance between rich and poor. David Stebenne’s “Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America, 1929-1968” invites us to remember those decades in which both the middle class and the Democratic Party were ascendant. Mr. Stebenne, ...

Contagious disease has always been the enemy of urban life; we should persevere and bolster our defenses against future outbreaks. The Covid-19 pandemic creates such uncertainty because it strikes at the heart of our urban world. Over the past five centuries, humanity has become connected with ever closer ties across continents and within ...

Service employees need aid during the lockdowns, but long-term cash transfers would leave them worse off. Desperate times need extreme measures—and only in the face of the new coronavirus does it make sense for the federal government to send money directly to every American. Cash payments are the most direct way to reduce the economic harm ...

For generations, younger Americans found Communists just as scary as Count Dracula, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Darth Vader. Socialism, so strongly associated with Marx and Lenin, never caught on in the United States. To modern millennials, however, fear of socialism seems as ancient as a rotary phone. In March 2019, Axios released ...

It’s odd that President Barack Obama didn’t mention housing in his second inaugural address. After all, he spent his first term in the shadow of a housing meltdown, and remaking federal housing policy remains a central piece of unfinished business.

Let’s hope that Obama tells us in his State of the Union speech what his plans are for Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), and Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (FMCC) The Federal Housing Administration seems headed for a ...