Omar Wasow | @[email protected]

One thing I believe firmly is that the YIMBY/NIMBY problems we have today are directly equivalent to the land fragmentation problems – and related political economy issues – that essentially all societies faced in their agrarian past. To begin with, homeownership is literally landownership in nearly all cases other than a few mass leaseholder locations like Singapore, Hong Kong, Britain before 1960, and Canberra, Australia. Second, it is 'splintered' or 'fragmented' into many different plots. In an important sense, the crazy cadastral maps of, say, Galicia in Northwestern Spain, look like the standard property lot maps in most countries today. Third, there are an enormous number of customary rules and rights governing how the land can be used. Farm life has always been partly communal, varying by crop, location, population density, and so on. To insure against bad years wiping them out, farmers owned (or had lease/copyholds on) strips across many fields. Strips were cultivated individually but rotations were coordinated collectively. Ox teams were shared. This is inevitable. So too today do we have land use rules that are designed to express the interest of the broader community, ranging from rules preventing me from extracting oil, tanning leather, or blasting music at all hours, to rules preventing me from knocking my property down to replace it with a giant block, shading all my neighbours, from housing dozens of extra people on my property, or even in some places just against making my house ugly enough to bother people. As @mattyglesias, @ProfSchleich, @nicholas_bagley, Bill Fischel, @CSElmendorf, @LawHeller, @RickHills2 & others have written, we need simpler, arguably more American property rights, the kinds of property rights that most European countries attained only after centuries of difficult reform. And I think we should look to those centuries of reform as a guide to what might be possible.

Where in America can new homes get permitted and built fastest? And are we getting faster or slower over time? In a new paper with @leonardo_damico and Audrey Wang, we show cities like Raleigh typically *finish* construction before cities like San Francisco even approve it.