As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about infill housing and overall urban densities, let’s look at some basic math. The City of Toronto has an estimated population of 3,025,647 (as of June 2023) and a land area of 630 square meters. That means that its… Read More
Here is a study by three researchers out of California that asked Americans to predict the impact of a supply shock on various things, such as durable goods, commodities, labor, trade, and yes, housing. For basically all of these items, people tended to answer correctly.… Read More
“People get income for doing stuff, and they get income for owning stuff. Increasingly the latter. And the ownership share of income goes to a small slice of households that own almost all the stuff.” This is a quote from a recent article by Steve… Read More
This is a fascinating study by Issi Romem about the characteristics of cross-metropolitan migration in the United States. The key findings are that in-migrants to expensive coastal cities tend to have higher incomes and more education than the out-migrants, and that the opposite is true… Read More
I just got off a flight where I spent an hour listening to this podcast: What Are the Secrets of the German Economy — and Should We Steal Them? One of the key themes is that Germany has a “stakeholder economy”, rather than a “shareholder… Read More
Ever notice how whenever you’re taking an Uber the driver usually gets another fare just before he (Uber drivers are overwhelmingly male) is about to drop you off? That’s on purpose. Earlier this month the New York Times published an interactive feature describing how Uber… Read More
This morning, I am looking at the following chart of average home prices in the Greater Toronto Area: It’s from this Globe and Mail article. These are staggering numbers. The average price of a detached home in the suburbs (905 area code) increased 21% year-over-year.… Read More
Jeffrey Lin, who is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, recently published the following chart: I found it in this Washington Post article. And it’s packed full of fascinating information. The chart compares the socioeconomic status in US cities (y-axis) against “distance… Read More
One of the things you’ll often hear people deride at cocktail parties is the trend toward smaller urban dwellings. They get called “shoeboxes” and “cubby holes in the sky.” So let’s unpack that a bit today and try and better understand the economics behind it all.… Read More
Whenever I’m not sure what to write about, I just read. That’s one of the big benefits of daily blogging – it forces me to do that. This morning I stumbled upon the blog of Jed Kolko. Jed is an economist and, up until 2015,… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 