Commentary

Free Market Housing Book Released

The Independent Institute in Oakland, California has teamed up with Transaction Publishers to release Housing America: Building Out of a Crisis, a comprehensive free-market approach to the current housing crisis as well as land use, planning, affordability, and finance issues.

This volume should be on any urbanist’s bookshelf and includes many academic and policy heavy weights, including Randall G. Holcombe (Florida State), Bejamin Powell (Suffolk University), Robert Nelson (University of Maryland), Lawrence White (New York University), Randal O’Toole (Cato Institute), Ed Stringham (Trinity College), and, of course, yours truly (writing on growth controls and housing affordability).

All the chapters are highly relevant to current times and many directly address the mortgage meltdown and what we need to do get out of the housing depression.

Here is the table of contents:

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction: Is there a Housing Crisis?
    Randall G. Holcombe and Benjamin Powell
  2. Urban Planning, Housing Affordability, and Land Use
    Samuel R. Staley
  3. The Benefits of Nonzoning
    Bernard H. Siegan
  4. Building Codes, Housing Prices, and the Poor
    William Tucker
  5. Smart Growth and Housing
    Randal O’Toole
  6. Inclusionary Zoning
    Benjamin Powell and Edward Stringham
  7. A Brief Survey of Rent Control in America: Past Mistakes and Future Directions
    Matthew Brown
  8. The Economics of Government Housing Assistance for the Poor
    Joshua C. Hall and Matt Ryan
  9. Eminent Domain
    Randall G. Holcombe
  10. Arresting Development: Impact Fees in Theory and Practice
    Jack Estill, Benjamin Powell, and Edward Stringham
  11. The Economics of Housing Bubbles
    Mark Thornton
  12. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Housing: Good Intentions Gone Awry
    Lawrence J. White
  13. Anatomy of a Train Wreck: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown
    Stan J. Liebowitz
  14. Urban Planning: The Government or the Market
    Fred E. Foldvary
  15. Private Neighborhood Governance: Trends and New Options in Collective Housing Ownership
    Robert H. Nelson