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Jon Gertner profiles Ed Glaeser
Excellent article, the focus is urban economics. Best sentence: "...he notes that cars per capita in 1990 is among the best indicators of how well a city has fared over the past 15 years."
From the same NYT magazine issue, here is Levitt and Dubner on the poverty and decline of real estate agents. See also Alex's previous post, Real Estate Rent-Seeking.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 5, 2006 at 09:05 AM in Economics | Permalink
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Comments
I read some of Glaeser's work posted at Professor DeLong's blog.
Based on this, I would have guessed Glaeser to be around 50-60 years of age.
The three-piece suit is interesting.
Posted by: anon at Mar 5, 2006 9:40:24 AM
But then he goes on to praise NY for its economic growth. That seems inconsistent with his "more cars" criterion.
Posted by: Raw Data at Mar 5, 2006 2:15:03 PM
Is Glaeser an expensive kid?
Or did he pay for the 6 acres and grad school with genius, overcoming adversity, work ethic and luck?
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm
Posted by: anon at Mar 5, 2006 2:26:52 PM
I'm skeptical of Levitt's real estate analysis. There are a lot of part-time real estate agents, who might be really happy to sell 1 or 2 houses a year while teaching school, raising kids, supplementing alimony, or just convincing friends to buy second homes in the same vacation spot. (I know agents who exemplify each of these patterns). At the same time, there are megaproducers who advertise heavily and may dominate sales in particular neighborhoods. In a situation like this with a skewed distribution of income, median income may not tell you very much about the income of the full-time, fully-committed agents.
I bet the megaproducers gained income during the boom, and that the cost of entry is much higher for the megaproducers than for an entry-level agent. In my state, Georgia, this pattern is enforced by law; every agent has to be supervised by a broker, who must meet much more stringent regulatory requirements, and who usually provides the capital, the office space, and the recognizable brand name. The resulting situation is a bit like the way Levitt describes drug dealing in Freakonomics: lots of small-time and part-time players not making enough to support themselves fully, with a small number of high income bosses.
Posted by: DK at Mar 5, 2006 7:19:51 PM
Yeah, some real estate agents are for real.
-They can sell a property for a higher price than otherwise
-They know of properties that buyers would not otherwise know about
-can keep both sides happier through experienced management
Posted by: anon at Mar 5, 2006 8:10:39 PM
I'd like to see Glaeser moving somewhat in Levitt's direction - studying the 'soft-infrastructure" of cities. By which I mean the set of government & social services and that determine how life is actually lived.
I have a feeling that 'skills' cities got that way by attracting people who could focus on a high-status downtown and exurbs, not-needing or skipping over the abysmal schools, police and social service, and dysfunctional neighborhoods in between - or monoplizing the few 'magnet school' slots available.
Posted by: Jos Bleau at Mar 5, 2006 8:59:56 PM
through all the BS, the article can reduced to one incitefull and damning quote
"There appears to be a reasonable correlation between liberal enclaves, zoning regulations and high housing prices."
Posted by: Ramzi at Mar 5, 2006 9:17:28 PM
Ramzi,
Why "inciteful and damning?"
Housing prices are set by the buyer as well as the seller. People VALUE living in certain places and the prices they pay are merely an indicator.
Posted by: Raw Data at Mar 5, 2006 9:29:19 PM
so great post
Thanks
Posted by: skirt at Mar 6, 2006 4:28:13 AM
Does Ramzi perhaps mean "insightful?"
Housing prices are set by the buyer as well as the seller. People VALUE living in certain places and the prices they pay are merely an indicator.
Yes, but, Raw Data, it is definitely true that governmental restrictions like zoning and environmental restrictions artificially restrict supply and raise housing prices. It's evident that Professor Glaeser is referring to that in the article.
Posted by: John Thacker at Mar 6, 2006 10:12:49 AM
I agree with the comment above that the link between liberals and high housing costs is the most important point of the whole article.
I wrote about this topic quite a bit, see for example my post entitled Blue state, red state, and housing. I told you so.
Posted by: Half Sigma at Mar 6, 2006 11:49:22 AM
I don't know if Glaeser touches on this, but it seems that the selection effect can be driven by many factors in addition to strict zoning regulations. For instance, historical buidings may attract a certain type of people, those who are into architecture, history, art, or generally those who are highly educated. This selection effect probably overlaps with Glaeser's income selection effect to some extent, as education is correlated with higher educational attainment, but that is a correlation over time. The 20-45 crowd will still be attracted to expensive cities if they are sutdents with expectations of high earnings in the future. So, Boston's wait staff will be filled with students, and Jacob's diversity requirement is fulfilled when one considers other dimensions in addition to current income.
Posted by: will mcbride at Mar 6, 2006 2:16:46 PM
Half Sigma, you have it all wrong -- Sailer has conclusively proved that people would rather live where Democrats are than where Republicans are. That remarkable correlation coefficient speaks for itself.
Posted by: Barbar at Mar 6, 2006 2:50:27 PM
Anyone who's been reading Tom Sowell for twenty years already knows most of what was in the article. The anecdote about putting everyone and their single family house in Texas for instance, is in, iirc, 'Knowledge and Decisions'.
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan at Mar 6, 2006 3:26:26 PM
Or, you could say that Democrats want to live near rich people.
Indeed, there are a lot of ways to look at the interplay of real estate and voting. My article on the Dirt Gap -- red state metropolises are typically surrounded by 360 degrees of dirt for suburbs to expand into, while blue state metropolises are typically bounded by oceans or Great Lakes, restricting the supply of potential dirt to be converted into suburban housing, thus limiting supply and increasing land prices, can be found at
http://www.isteve.com/2005_Dirt_Gap.htm
My summary of my research into housing prices, marriage rates, fertility, and voting -- how "affordable family formation" makes people more inclined to vote Republican -- is at http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2005/05/08/affordable-family-formation-the-neglected-key-to-gops-future/
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 6, 2006 3:26:42 PM
Washington DC is surrounded bye 360 degrees of dirt, yet it has has high housing appreciation because of all the liberals.
Vermont has no major cities at all, but has also had high housing appreciation because the liberals won't allow new houses to be built.
It is clear that liberals cause high housing prices, not the other way around.
Posted by: Half Sigma at Mar 6, 2006 5:20:31 PM
Nonsense, Half Sigma. While Vermont certainly has "liberal" problems regarding development, it is rather facile to lump its housing market with the housing market in, say, New York City. I will take your point that restrictions on housing will artifically drive up prices, that much is obvious. But as a New Yorker, I don't see this as an essentially liberal vs. conservative problem -- homeowners in the New York area tend to prefer that their properties increase in value, no matter whether they voted for Bush or Kerry. Moreover, buying an apartment in New York is ridiculously more expensive than buying an apartment anywhere else in the country, and there really isn't a range of government actions or inactions that will change that. Ignoring these rather other points and pinning changes in housing values mainly on "liberalism" is a little silly, kind of like claiming that liberals are better at making money than conservatives (compare the median income for a family of four in a state to the national median -- it matches the 2004 election map almost exactly! OMG! I told you so!)
Posted by: Barbar at Mar 6, 2006 9:44:18 PM
A thousand apologies! I misspelled insightfull. I didn't intend to incite anything. I intended to point out that NYTimes glossed over a point which I consider very important. It maybe that the Times glossed over it because the good professor glossed over it. The high correlation is striking.
Posted by: Ramzi at Mar 7, 2006 12:39:28 AM
"homeowners in the New York area tend to prefer that their properties increase in value, no matter whether they voted for Bush or Kerry."
This is true all over the country. But statistical anlaysis shows an extremely strong correlation between the percent of the state that voted for Bush and the state's increase in housing prices. The natural free market inclination of conservatives keeps housing prices low where they live.
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