David Schleicher

Also this …https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/1337415503086751744 …

Adding housing in midtown is decidedly a worse idea than adding housing elsewhere, but may be a better idea than not adding housing anywhere

In general, it is most socially and economically valuable to have offices where transit is (i.e. midtown), but the broader restriction of NYC has meant that offices have been less valuable than housing in many places for some time

There's a hidden story in here about the leverage office buildings have-there is going to be a drop in property tax revenue as building owners seek revaluations. You have to establish lost revenue to show decreased value, and almost a year into the pandemic, they will be able to

That's on top of lots off other problems with the OZ program!! But it is the most generalizable of its problems!

Proponents of federal place-based policies need to do more than justify them in theory. They need to realize that Congress will predictably and regularly distort them to spread them across too many places and in ways that are unlikely to benefit the most in need

Rather predictably, they decided to do in ways that would raise the most investment, which were not the place in the most need. Spreading out targets for OZ investment predictably led to designations of places like downtown L.A.

The 2017 OZ program is a perfect example of why this is a problem. Rather than target it at a few distressed places, it spread its benefits out across every state and gave every state the ability to pick targets for OZ investment.

But those proponents never wrestle with the insight of the political scientists skeptical about Congressional design of infrastructure, which is a claim about the ability of a districted entity to direct spending wisely in targeted ways.

There's a long-running debate about whether place-based policies like OZs are good in theory (I'm on the "no" side of this debate, but the "yes" side has many able and smart proponents.)

A long-running political science finding is that Congress is bad at authorizing infrastructure projects because the state-and-district based nature of representation leads to spreading the money out to much, to giving something to everyone.