What do garage bands and tech startups have in common?
Russell Brown’s Public Address article on the impending closure and redevelopment of the King’s Arms music venue got me thinking. Russell highlighted the importance of certain types of physical spaces for a music scene’s ongoing vitality:
What the King’s Arms and the Powerstation have in common is that they are reasonably large rectangular boxes, which makes them ideal rock ‘n’ roll venues.…
18 Comments Should we spend more on infrastructure… or less?
The Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP) report, which was released last week, identified the need to spend more money on transport infrastructure in Auckland. ATAP estimates that we need to spend $24 billion on new transport infrastructure over the next decade, around $4 billion of which would not be funded by current transport budgets.…
Zoning reform: Is the Unitary Plan any good? (2 of n)
This is the second post in an ongoing series on the politics and economic of zoning reform. The first part looked at the costs, benefits, and distributional impacts of reforming urban planning rules to enable more development. This part takes a more specific look at the most recent reform to Auckland’s planning system: the Unitary Plan.…
Zoning reform: Costs, benefits, and distributional impacts (1 of n)
This is the first part in an open-ended series on the economics and politics of zoning reform. The Unitary Plan decision means that Auckland’s urban planning framework is set for the short to medium term – albeit with inevitable appeals and changes.…
Congestion in large Australasian cities
Is Auckland abnormally congested?
I occasionally hear people bemoaning that Auckland is one of the most congested cities in the world, or at least one of the most congested cities for its size.
I’ve previously taken a look at this from a few angles – looking at trends in traffic delay in Auckland and average commuting time in large cities around the world.…
Slicing the housing cake: Developer profits versus capital gains
Who benefits from enabling housing development? And who bears the costs of restricting it?
One common refrain is that reducing regulations to enable housing will deliver higher profits to developers, while disadvantaging existing homeowners, who must contend with more people living in the neighbourhood. …
What are the preconditions for congestion pricing in Auckland?
The inclusion of congestion pricing in the recent Auckland Transport Alignment Project interim report has (helpfully) reignited the public debate on the topic. Transportblog’s authors have been pretty enthusiastic about the idea – see e.g. Stu Donovan’s posts on the topic.…
Remember the last time house prices crashed 40%?
More commentary on this later on, but for now I’m just going to drop in some data.
Former Reserve Bank chair Arthur Grimes commented last week in The Spinoff:
In March 2016, the REINZ Auckland median house price reached $820,000. Four years previously, it was $495,000 – that’s a 66% increase in 4 years.…
The alternative route
Congestion pricing has once again hit the political radar, with the news that the Auckland Transport Alignment Project has recommended it as an option to more efficiently manage the transport network. They find that variable road tolls – highest during peak periods on busy roads and low (or even zero) at off-peak times – are the single most effective intervention to improve traffic flow.…
City size, variety, and consumer surplus
In the 1990s, in the early years of the information technology revolution, economist Robert Solow famously commented that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Two decades on, that still rings true. Social life has been profoundly transformed by new technology: It has altered the way we communicate with friends and family, how we entertain ourselves, and even how we date.…
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