Excellent article, the focus is urban economics. Best sentence: "…he notes that cars per capita in 1990 is among the best indicators of how well a city has fared over the past 15 years."
From the same NYT magazine issue, here is Levitt and Dubner on the poverty and decline of real estate agents. See also Alex’s previous post, Real Estate Rent-Seeking.
I read some of Glaeser’s work posted at Professor DeLong’s blog.
Based on this, I would have guessed Glaeser to be around 50-60 years of age.
The three-piece suit is interesting.
Is Glaeser an expensive kid?
Or did he pay for the 6 acres and grad school with genius, overcoming adversity, work ethic and luck?
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm
Yeah, some real estate agents are for real.
-They can sell a property for a higher price than otherwise
-They know of properties that buyers would not otherwise know about
-can keep both sides happier through experienced management
through all the BS, the article can reduced to one incitefull and damning quote
“There appears to be a reasonable correlation between liberal enclaves, zoning regulations and high housing prices.”
so great post
Thanks
I agree with the comment above that the link between liberals and high housing costs is the most important point of the whole article.
I wrote about this topic quite a bit, see for example my post entitled Blue state, red state, and housing. I told you so.
Half Sigma, you have it all wrong — Sailer has conclusively proved that people would rather live where Democrats are than where Republicans are. That remarkable correlation coefficient speaks for itself.
Or, you could say that Democrats want to live near rich people.
Indeed, there are a lot of ways to look at the interplay of real estate and voting. My article on the Dirt Gap — red state metropolises are typically surrounded by 360 degrees of dirt for suburbs to expand into, while blue state metropolises are typically bounded by oceans or Great Lakes, restricting the supply of potential dirt to be converted into suburban housing, thus limiting supply and increasing land prices, can be found at
http://www.isteve.com/2005_Dirt_Gap.htm
My summary of my research into housing prices, marriage rates, fertility, and voting — how “affordable family formation” makes people more inclined to vote Republican — is at http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2005/05/08/affordable-family-formation-the-neglected-key-to-gops-future/
Nonsense, Half Sigma. While Vermont certainly has “liberal” problems regarding development, it is rather facile to lump its housing market with the housing market in, say, New York City. I will take your point that restrictions on housing will artifically drive up prices, that much is obvious. But as a New Yorker, I don’t see this as an essentially liberal vs. conservative problem — homeowners in the New York area tend to prefer that their properties increase in value, no matter whether they voted for Bush or Kerry. Moreover, buying an apartment in New York is ridiculously more expensive than buying an apartment anywhere else in the country, and there really isn’t a range of government actions or inactions that will change that. Ignoring these rather other points and pinning changes in housing values mainly on “liberalism” is a little silly, kind of like claiming that liberals are better at making money than conservatives (compare the median income for a family of four in a state to the national median — it matches the 2004 election map almost exactly! OMG! I told you so!)
“homeowners in the New York area tend to prefer that their properties increase in value, no matter whether they voted for Bush or Kerry.”
This is true all over the country. But statistical anlaysis shows an extremely strong correlation between the percent of the state that voted for Bush and the state’s increase in housing prices. The natural free market inclination of conservatives keeps housing prices low where they live.
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