David DayenMar 17, 2025
But my book deal.... www.nber.org/papers/w3357...
Supply Constraints do not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

NBER
Show threadBenjamin RossMar 17, 2025
@ddayen.bsky.social
This proves nothing. Yimbys want to legalize apartments. "House price" in this article is the sale price of single-family houses only.
In big sprawling cities with 1-famly zoning, legalizing conversions from 1-family to apts reduces supply of 1-family houses while increasing total housing supply. It will lower price of apts. Whether price of 1-family houses goes up or down depends on a bunch of hard-to-measure demand curves & cross-elasticities.
Show threadSean Aubin
@BenRossTransit I'm currently speed reading the paper. Which specific text makes you think they're only considering single-family homes?
Mar 19, 2025 at 11:59amWeb
Show threadBenjamin RossMar 19, 2025
@neuropunk I don't want to use up my second free download for the year, but it's very explicitly stated in the section on data sources. They use two indexes of single-familiy house prices. I didn't go to the websites of these indexes to find out whether they include townhouses (the census definition of 1-family includes them) or only detached houses.