P.J. O’Rourke has written a piece about the Transportation funding bill that passed the House last week. It’s called "Mass Transit Hysteria" and it humorously calls into question whether anyone bothers to do cost/benefit analysis anymore. I know, long-term consequences – but come on. Maybe life is now too complicated to balance resources against priorities – or to even set priorities.
Realty Times Covers Reason Report on Inclusionary
Broderick Perkins of DeadlineNews.com has written a story about the Reason Institute’s critique of inclusionary zoning. It appears on the Realty Times website and can be found here.
Weintraub Column Questions Inclusionary Zoning
Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub has written a column questioning inclusionary zoning policies after reading the Reason Institute’s study on the topic. That column can be found here.
Two quotes:
“The study, by San Jose State University professors Benjamin Powell and Edward Stringham, concludes that inclusionary zoning drives up the cost of housing, deprives government of tax revenue and might actually be making worse the problem it is intended to solve.”
“Even if you believe that inclusionary zoning comes at no cost to either the housing market or the treasury, it still appears that the policies are producing very little new housing.
Viewed under the best possible light, using inclusionary zoning to provide low-income housing is like fighting a forest fire with a garden hose. Under the harsh light this study shines on the policy, that hose might be spraying fuel, rather than water, on the fire.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Why Inclusionary Zoning Doesn’t Work
Last week the Reason Public Policy Institute released a new study by two economic professors at San Jose State University entitled “Housing Supply and Affordability: Do Affordable Housing Mandates Work?”
The report looks at the real effects of inclusionary zoning in the San Francisco Bay Area – where over 50 jurisdictions have adopted the policy in various forms with extremely poor results.
6-page PDF summary of the report
I encourage any policymaker who is thinking about adopting inclusionary zoning to read this report first.
Steve Rubel Starts Interesting PR Blog
One of the useful things about using Newsgator as your RSS reader in Outlook is the ability to follow certain blogs and see where they go, what they point to. Here’s a new one – found through reading Marc Orchant’s blog – that I think could be interesting…
Micro Media is Changing the PR Practice
The proliferation of Weblogs and RSS news feeds has changed the practice of public relations forever. Despite all of the hype about media consolidation, we are no longer living in a mass media world dominated by conglomerates.Today we’re just as likely to be influenced by something we read on a blog like Scobleizer as we are by an article in the Wall Street Journal or a segment on Good Morning America.