Month: April 2026

This guy seems interesting

Marion is one of those ambiguous names that makes you wonder at first contact. And this Marion only heightens the effect, pulling you into a swirl of curiosity about his land analysis. From: Appreciation: Marion Clawson’s Long View of the Land (Resource).

Clawson was among the first generation of RFF(Resources for the Future) research fellows, joining the staff in 1955, just a few years after the first Ford Foundation grant to the organization. He set a standard—and perhaps a record—for the study of agriculture, park and forest use, outdoor recreation, and land development that spanned seventy years. His interest in the land seems only natural, considering that he was born in Nevada in 1905 and raised on ranches and in small towns in that state.

Over his long career, Clawson was able to observe how we Americans have sparred and shifted in our emphasis and influence over the nature and purpose of national forests, national parks, and wildlife refuges. Methods he developed to measure the demand for and value of outdoor recreation have formed the basis of several hundred studies throughout the world. A doer as well as a thinker, he directed studies of irrigation development out West for the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics in the 1930s and ’40s and then ran the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management in the late 1940s and early ’50s before coming to RFF.

Abraham Lincoln State Park, Bismarck, North Dakota

Architectural weaknesses make buildings fall down

The post at Marginal Revolution by Sure, who appears to be a surgeon, denotes architectural flaws in the health care system that hinder the most productive delivery of services. I asked Claude to compare the complaints listed there with the complaints about the state-level governance system, which led to an exorbitant amount of fraud in Minnesota. The post about fraud, When Everyone Had the Power to Act, No One Did, is at the end.

CLAUDE: Excellent connection! Both pieces describe the same fundamental phenomenon: systemic dysfunction created not by incompetence, but by rational actors optimizing for their immediate incentive structures rather than system integrity. Let me draw out the key parallels:

The Core Parallel: Legibility Over Efficiency

The surgeon’s most devastating line mirrors your Minnesota fraud analysis perfectly:

“Separate, disjointed, billing through bureaucratic negotiation is legible. It is legible to the courts, to regulators, and to malpractice insurers.”

Just as Minnesota’s fraud prevention failed because every actor optimized for social legibility (being seen as empathetic, progressive, inclusive) rather than institutional integrity, healthcare pricing is deliberately complex because it optimizes for regulatory and legal legibility rather than economic efficiency or patient welfare.

Multiple Loci of Discretion, All Pointing the Wrong Way

In Minnesota:

  • Politicians could have pulled contracts → didn’t (social cost)
  • Bureaucrats could have slow-walked applications → didn’t (ideological pressure)
  • Prosecutors could have investigated → didn’t (pendulum had swung)
  • Reporters could have investigated → didn’t (narrative concerns)
  • Community leaders could have raised alarms → didn’t (social networks)

In Healthcare:

  • Hospitals could negotiate bundled prices → can’t (inducement laws)
  • Surgeons could arrange volume discounts with labs → can’t (kickback regulations)
  • Providers could simplify billing → can’t (fraud prevention requirements)
  • Cash-only practices could expand → can’t (post-ACA restrictions)

In both cases, the locus of discretion at every level is constrained—not by incompetence, but by meta-level incentives that make the dysfunction rational.

The Fear Factor: What Drives the Perverse Incentives?

Minnesota (your piece): Fear of being seen as unsympathetic, backward, or out of step with progressive consensus

Healthcare (surgeon’s comment): Fear of being charged with a crime, accused of kickbacks, or sued for malpractice

Both systems are optimized to avoid attribution of specific harms (one death that regulation could prevent, one person denied compassionate treatment) even if it creates massive unattributable harms (2x costs and 100 deaths, $250M in fraud).

The Legibility Trap

The surgeon explains why healthcare resists market solutions:

“People are terrified of physician abuse. Most folks, even other physicians, have a very hard time knowing if their physician is taking them for a ride. So they turn to something powerful to regulate physicians.”

This is the exact dynamic in Minnesota—people were terrified of racial bias or lack of empathy in fraud prevention, so they turned to powerful social and institutional norms to regulate that concern. But those norms, like healthcare regulations, can’t distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate activity, so they end up regulating the wrong things.

The “If Only” Fantasy

Your conclusion about Minnesota:

“The Minnesota fraud case reveals what happens when that balance is lost, when the locus of discretion at every level points in the same direction: away from the uncomfortable work of saying no.”

The surgeon’s conclusion about healthcare:

“But there is an evergreen fantasy that … if only … then we could reduce prices. You can’t.”

Both pieces critique the same magical thinking: that we can achieve better outcomes without accepting tradeoffs or empowering someone to make hard discretionary judgments.

The Principal-Agent Problem Squared

The surgeon identifies the core issue:

“The patient has a wildly different incentive structure than the collective payer (insurance or government) and American healthcare is insanely deferential to the patient compared to alternatives.”

In Minnesota, the fraudsters had wildly different incentives than taxpayers, and Minnesota’s system was insanely deferential to “community voices” and “empathy” compared to alternatives.

Both systems suffer from principal-agent problems where the people with knowledge and proximity to the problem (surgeons, bureaucrats) can’t act on it because distant principals (regulators, social consensus) have tied their hands with rules designed to prevent the last war’s abuses.

The Synthesis: State Capacity Through Impossible Constraints

Both pieces reveal that modern American institutions increasingly suffer from state capacity constrained by its own complexity. We’ve created systems where:

  1. Accountability is distributed to the point of invisibility (no one person decides anything meaningful)
  2. Legibility requirements prevent efficient action (everything must be documented, justified, defended)
  3. Fear of specific attributable harms creates massive unattributable ones
  4. Social/regulatory consensus makes dissent professionally dangerous
  5. The “locus of discretion” at every level has been optimized away

The surgeon can’t bundle his billing. The Minnesota bureaucrat can’t ask hard questions. Both have been robbed of discretion in the name of preventing abuse, and the result is systemic abuse that no one can be held accountable for.

This is the dark side of the “rules versus discretion” debate—when we eliminate discretion through process, we don’t eliminate bad outcomes. We just make them unattributable, systemic, and unfixable.

When Everyone Had the Power to Act, No One Did

Victoria Wilson
August 11, 2025

US Attorney General Joe Thompson’s recent assessment of Minnesota’s fraud crisis cuts to the heart of a systemic failure. As he told the Star Tribune: “This fraud crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the result of widespread failure across nearly every level of leadership in Minnesota: Politicians who turned a blind eye. Agencies that failed to act. Prosecutors and law enforcement who didn’t push hard enough. Reporters who ignored the story. Community leaders who stayed silent. And a public that wanted to believe it couldn’t happen here.”

Thompson is describing something profound: the collapse of state capacity through a thousand small abdications of responsibility.

The Architecture of Inaction

At every decision point—what scholars call the “locus of discretion”—someone could have acted. The architecture of prevention was already in place; what failed was the will to use it.

Politicians possessed both influence and institutional knowledge. Any number could have quietly removed a questionable contractor from consideration or flagged suspicious applications. Career bureaucrats, masters of administrative friction, could have deployed their expertise differently—slowing suspicious applications rather than legitimate ones, demanding additional documentation, or simply doing their jobs by visiting the nonprofit distribution sites that journalists later discovered were empty storefronts.

But the machinery of oversight had been recalibrated around different priorities.

The Pendulum’s Swing

Law enforcement and prosecutors had internalized a new philosophy. Years of concern about overcharging and mass incarceration had created an institutional bias toward restraint. The progressive approach—emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment, empathy over enforcement—had become orthodoxy. This wasn’t necessarily wrong in principle, but it created blind spots in practice.

When the prevailing wisdom holds that harsh enforcement causes more harm than good, the institutional reflexes that might catch sophisticated fraud schemes atrophy. The very skills and instincts that prosecutors once relied upon were now viewed with suspicion, even by the prosecutors themselves.

The Fourth Estate’s Absence

Perhaps most puzzling was the media’s delayed response. Major fraud schemes leave trails—suspicious contracts, questionable nonprofits, patterns of payments that don’t match claimed activities. These stories don’t require deep investigative resources so much as basic skepticism and persistence.

Yet for years, the story went untold. What accounts for this collective editorial blind spot? The same social and ideological currents that affected other institutions likely influenced newsrooms as well. When the dominant narrative emphasizes compassion over skepticism, reporters may unconsciously avoid stories that complicate that narrative.

Social Proof and Professional Risk

The community leaders Thompson mentions—board members, nonprofit executives, civic figures—faced their own constraints. In professional networks where certain viewpoints signal virtue and sophistication, dissent carries social costs. The cocktail party circuit that shapes elite opinion had settled on particular truths about criminal justice, social services, and community empowerment.

Raising uncomfortable questions about fraud prevention or accountability could mark someone as unsympathetic, backward, or worse. When career advancement and social standing depend on maintaining good relationships within ideologically coherent networks, the incentives point toward conformity rather than vigilance.

The Paradox of Distributed Responsibility

This case illustrates a peculiar modern phenomenon: system-wide failure despite individual competence. None of these actors were incompetent or malicious. Politicians understood governance, bureaucrats knew their procedures, prosecutors understood the law, reporters could investigate, and community leaders cared about their communities.

The failure occurred because everyone was optimizing for their immediate institutional and social environment rather than the system’s overall integrity. Each actor made rational decisions given their constraints, yet the collective result was irrational—a massive fraud that continued for years despite numerous opportunities for intervention.

The Cost of Consensus

Thompson’s critique suggests something uncomfortable: that the very social and ideological consensus meant to create a more just society may have created new vulnerabilities. When preventing harm becomes conflated with avoiding enforcement, when empathy becomes synonymous with credulity, the institutions meant to protect public resources become unable to protect them.

This doesn’t argue for a return to punitive excess, but rather for institutional cultures capable of holding multiple values in tension—compassion and accountability, reform and vigilance, trust and verification.

The Minnesota fraud case reveals what happens when that balance is lost, when the locus of discretion at every level points in the same direction: away from the uncomfortable work of saying no.

Dedicated to the Dogs

You’ll soon be able to visit a scenic new park in Afton thanks to a pair of yellow Labs.

Millie, who died in late 2022, and Mike, who died in early 2024, loved frolicking in a meadow on a bluff overlooking the St. Croix River, part of a 39-acre piece of land owned by Susan Herreid.

When it came time to sell the property, Herreid said she started talking to developers who wanted to build houses on the land. An offer was made, and Herreid had to make a decision.

“When I was trying to decide what to do with this property, I went up and walked around the land with them and just was kind of thinking, ‘What should I do? I’ve got this offer,’ ” she said. “But I knew the Minnesota Land Trust was interested, so I was up there with the dogs and kind of made the decision that, you know, I was going to take a risk and just turn down the offer. It was just a very lovely place where I spent time with them. I wanted to do something to honor their memory.”

Reports the Pioneer Press.

The land of Chiapas

Those who first gave a name to this land held it in their mouths as their own. It was the taste of corn weighing down the stalks. It was the thick white honey of the chirimoya, and the moon-pulp of the custard-apple, and the oily seed of the sapodilla, and the slow oozing of juice from the lacerated palm. But it was also the cloudy vapor rising betimes to lay on the leaves the footprint of its passing. It was the warm panting of the domesticated animal and the furtive breath of the prowler. And the rhythmic absorption of air by the moors at night. It was a symbol too: of one who traces the pheasant in high flight, and leaves the snake in the sand.

The Nine Guardians, by Rosario Castellanos

Data for Today

This chart is one of four pages from the Metropolitan Council, as part of a production update to their Housing Policy Plan 2040.

Note that the population of all the cities on this page, excluding the core city, is virtually the same as that of Minneapolis. Yet the expectation is that this central location accomodate 72% more of the housing support.

Who made that rule?

Outlets on kitchen islands are no longer to code.

When we delegate our individual choices to a committee—whether regulators, bureaucrats, or public officials—does it always work the way it should?

To be sure, there are clear benefits. Standards, building codes, and public health inspectors exist for good reason: they help ensure restaurants don’t serve rancid meat, buildings don’t collapse, and basic safety thresholds are met. Most of us welcome that baseline protection.

But here’s the harder question: what is the built-in mechanism to prevent excessively restrictive rules that the vast majority of consumers would gladly reject? And how do we know when an old, outdated regulation has outlived its usefulness and should finally be retired?

In the competitive marketplace, the profit motive supplies a ruthless but reliable feedback loop. If a business imposes unnecessary costs or restrictions that customers don’t value, consumers simply say “no more” with their wallets. Sales dry up, the business adapts or fails, and the inefficiency is corrected.

In the “preserve and protect” world of regulation, however, that natural release valve is missing. The incentives point toward accumulating more rules, not pruning them. Once a restriction is in place, it tends to stay—long after the original threat has vanished—because the system rewards caution, not obsolescence. So the real challenge is this: without the discipline of profit and loss, what forces outdated or overly burdensome rules to disappear?

Weren’t realtors to be replaced?

Appears not, as the real estate intermediary position continues to exist virtually all over the world.

Short answer: Real estate agents or similar intermediaries operate in over 200 countries worldwide.

🌍 What this means

The global real estate agency and brokerage sector is active essentially everywhere property is bought, sold, or rented. According to industry market data, real estate agencies and brokerages have a presence in more than 200 countries, reflecting the sector’s global reach and the widespread use of agents, brokers, or equivalent roles in property transactions.

🧩 Why the number isn’t exact

Several factors make it hard to give a precise count:

  • Different licensing laws: Many countries do not regulate real estate agents formally, so the profession exists but isn’t tracked.
  • Varied job titles: Some countries use “estate agents,” “property consultants,” “brokers,” or unlicensed intermediaries.
  • Fragmented data: No global authority tracks agent employment across all nations.

📌 What we can say confidently

  • The profession exists in virtually all developed and developing markets.
  • The global industry employs millions of professionals—estimated between 4 to 6 million worldwide.
  • Real estate agencies operate in 200+ countries, confirming that the use of agents or similar roles is nearly universal.

So– why is that?

Vacant Buildings

This beautiful structure is apparently sitting vacant. A developer has a proposal in the works to convert it to a hotel. It is not the only flagship building on the block.

Originally, it was the Northwestern National Life building

Both downtowns have suffered significantly over the past several years. Remote work, corporate relocations, and shifting consumer habits have drained daytime activity, leaving once-vibrant urban cores quieter and less economically dynamic than before. Office towers sit partially empty, foot traffic has declined, and the ripple effects on retail, restaurants, and small businesses have been painful and persistent.

The consequences of political choices often unfold slowly, eroding trust and relationships over years before their full damage becomes obvious. Rebuilding that trust and those relationships takes even longer. Yet many assessments of urban policy overlook two critical factors that are essential to understanding the trades at play.

First, core cities remain deeply dependent on the broader metropolitan population that lives outside their municipal boundaries. Suburban and exurban residents fuel downtown economies through commuting, business activity, tourism, shopping, and entertainment. When city leadership pursues political ambitions that dismiss or alienate those outsiders—treating their preferences on taxes, safety, transit, or quality of life as irrelevant—it is profoundly shortsighted. You cannot sustain a vibrant urban core by writing off the very people who help pay for it and keep it alive.

Second, analyses frequently ignore the importance of time series—the delayed and cumulative nature of policy effects. Negative outcomes often take years to fully materialize, allowing leaders to claim success in the short term while quietly degrading the institutions, incentives, and social capital that once maintained balance. Crime trends, business flight, declining public services, and changing perceptions of safety do not show up immediately in headline statistics. By the time the damage is undeniable, the systems that supported downtown vitality have already been weakened.

Finally, the timeline and cost of recovery are routinely underestimated. Attracting businesses, retailers, and consumers back to these geographic fiefdoms will require far more than rhetoric or one-time subsidies. It demands consistent, credible improvements in safety, cleanliness, taxation, and overall experience—over many years. Reversing course is always harder and more expensive than preventing the initial erosion.

In short, downtown recovery cannot be engineered by ignoring suburban realities, wishing away time lags, or pretending that political decisions have no long-term economic consequences. Sustainable urban vitality requires policies that respect the interdependence of the entire metro area and a clear-eyed recognition that trust, once lost, is extraordinarily costly to restore.


The building features an 85 foot (26 m) portico that serves as the visual terminus for the Nicollet Mall.

Peddling in fear

Unfortunately, peddling fear is a strategy. Blockbusting was a blatant example that was rightly outlawed. Homeowners were pressured into selling quickly and cheaply out of fear that “undesirable” new neighbors would drive down property values. While that egregious tactic has largely faded, newer and more subtle forms of fear-mongering have taken its place.

One common version involves the home inspector who “saves” the buyer from a bad purchase. In reality, some inspectors (or the contractors they refer) exaggerate minor or easily solvable maintenance issues and code concerns. Buyers who are particularly sensitive to fear—those who would benefit most from a calm, logical walkthrough of the actual risks and costs—often panic and walk away from what was otherwise a very good home.

Regulators and enforcement types deploy fear differently. They emphasize the potential consequences of non-compliance, sometimes implying broader or more severe action than their actual authority allows. The goal is often to intimidate people into quick compliance or to discourage legitimate pushback.

In both cases, the use of fear in real estate creates unnecessary losses. Buyers miss out on solid opportunities they could have successfully navigated. Meanwhile, regulators breed resentment and evasion, as people avoid or obstruct them in anticipation of overreach and unpleasant interactions.

Does Home Staging Really Add 10%? Why This Research Doesn’t Add Up

A recent working paper making the rounds claims that home staging — furnishing a property for sale with items that won’t be included in the transaction — generates a price premium of roughly 10%. On a $300,000 home, that’s $30,000 of value supposedly created by renting some furniture for a few weeks at a cost of perhaps $2,000-$5,000. It’s a compelling story. It’s also almost certainly wrong, or at least dramatically overstated, for several reasons that anyone familiar with real estate markets should find intuitive.

The Arbitrage Problem

Let’s start with the most basic objection. If staging reliably produced a 10% premium, every rational seller and every competent real estate agent would stage every property, every time, without exception. The return on investment would be extraordinary — spending $3,000 to generate $30,000 is the kind of trade that doesn’t stay secret for long. And in fact the market has responded: the paper itself notes that roughly 70% of sellers already professionally stage their homes. But here’s the problem — if nearly everyone is doing it, you can’t generate a 10% premium by doing what everyone else does. Competition erodes excess returns. The equilibrium effect of universal staging should collapse toward something approximating its cost — which in percentage terms on the average home sale is closer to 1-2%. That’s not a behavioral bias. That’s just how markets work.

The paper’s authors are aware of this tension but don’t resolve it satisfactorily. They frame the persistence of staging as evidence of buyer irrationality — that buyers keep falling for visual cues despite having every incentive to discipline themselves. But a more parsimonious explanation is simply that the measured 10% isn’t a real staging effect at all. It’s a statistical artifact of who chooses to stage.

The Self-Selection Problem

This is the deeper issue. The decision to stage a home is not random. Sellers who stage are systematically different from sellers who don’t, in ways that directly affect sale price and have nothing to do with furniture. Staged sellers tend to be more motivated to maximize their sale price, better advised by experienced agents, more willing to invest time and money in the listing process broadly — better photography, more careful pricing, more patient negotiating. They are, in short, more sophisticated participants in the transaction. All of those characteristics independently predict higher sale prices and faster sales, and none of them are captured by a furniture dummy in a regression.

The paper’s most ambitious attempt to address this is a clever design: they look at properties that sold at least twice in their sample and compare the same house to itself — once staged and once unstaged. By including a property fixed effect, they control for any fixed characteristic of the house that might explain why it sells for more. This is a legitimate technique and it does rule out the story that staged homes are simply nicer homes.

But it doesn’t rule out the story that staged sellers are simply better sellers. A fixed effect controls for time-invariant house quality, not time-varying seller circumstances. If the same house sold in a distressed situation the first time — estate sale, divorce, job relocation, must-close-by-Friday — and was then thoughtfully prepared and patiently marketed the second time, the regression would attribute the entire price difference to the staging when it really reflects the seller’s situation and strategy. Distressed sellers systematically underprice and often skip staging. Patient, well-advised sellers stage and also do a dozen other things that push prices up. The furniture is the most visible signal of that bundle, but it’s probably not doing much of the work.

What Is Staging Actually Worth?

None of this means staging has no effect. Presentation clearly matters at the margin, and there is genuine psychological evidence that buyers respond to visual cues. A well-staged home probably does sell somewhat faster and at a modest premium over a comparable poorly-presented one. But the operative word is modest. A 1-2% premium — enough to justify the cost of staging but not enough to represent a large, exploitable behavioral bias — is far more consistent with what a reasonably efficient market with professional intermediaries would produce. The fact that the paper’s own experimental results show a 2-3% premium for furniture alone, rising to 6% only when decor is added under hypothetical conditions with no real financial stakes, suggests even the authors’ own controlled evidence points to a smaller number than their headline transaction-based finding.

A 10% staging premium would be one of the largest and most persistent mispricings ever documented in a major asset market. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The evidence here, while creative and carefully assembled, isn’t strong enough to support that conclusion.

Shifting from DT to the Edge

An Edge city is a large suburban area that has developed into a major hub of jobs, offices, retail, and entertainment—essentially functioning like a downtown outside the traditional central city. The term was popularized by journalist Joel Garreau in his 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, and it’s commonly used by urban planners, geographers, and economists to describe how economic activity has decentralized from historic city centers into the suburbs.

In the Twin Cities, Bloomington would qualify to be on the edge. It is the third-largest employer and frequently competes for firms that once occupied downtown office space. The Mall of America is located in Bloomington. Yet, it is also a leafy suburb, a home to plenty of parks and other popular city amenities.

Syncing Incentives

Just finished How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite by Chris Coyne and Abigail Hall (Independent Institute, 2024).

Presented as a satirical “leaked” insider handbook, the book outlines a practical playbook of tactics used by national security elites — from curating public narratives and managing media to commandeering economic resources and handling dissent. The satire is there, but the real strength is in the clear framework it provides for understanding persistent incentive problems.

What stands out is how the playbook’s structures apply far beyond defense. They highlight classic patterns:

  • Dispersed costs and concentrated benefits — taxpayers or policyholders bear small individual burdens while a few insiders gain significantly.
  • One-buyer dynamics (monopsony power), as seen in DOD procurement where slow bureaucratic bargaining and asymmetric information routinely drive costs higher.
  • Asymmetric information where agents (contractors, administrators, regulators) know far more than the principals funding the system.

These same dynamics appear in everyday arenas. Think of insurance roof replacements after storms: third-party payers, inflated claims, and higher settlements become the norm. Or regulatory frameworks meant to “protect” the public that end up giving rule-makers and insiders significant unmonitored leeway.

The book explicitly draws parallels to the COVID response — narrative coordination across government, media, and Big Tech to manage information flow, along with efforts to suppress alternative views. It shows how crisis tools and incentive structures migrate easily from foreign policy to domestic ones.

The broader takeaway is powerful: employing the analytical structures revealed in this playbook gives us useful methodologies for spotting and dissecting these incentive distortions across any policy domain — healthcare, finance, disaster response, regulation, and beyond. Once you see the pattern, it becomes much harder to miss.

Strongly recommend for anyone interested in public choice, incentives, and why good intentions so often produce predictable problems.

The WCCO Building

Key Historical Details

  • Original Site (1924–1938): WCCO Radio began broadcasting on October 2, 1924, from the Nicollet Hotel in Minneapolis, after the Washburn-Crosby Company (predecessor to General Mills) acquired the WLAG station.
  • Move to 625 2nd Ave S (1938): WCCO Radio relocated to the old Elks Club building at 625 2nd Avenue South in April 1938.
  • The “Radio Building”: Throughout the 1940s and 50s, this location became known as the WCCO Radio Building.
  • Broadcasting Milestone: The station is famous for its 1965 live tornado coverage from its studio, which saved lives and established it as a trusted source.
  • FBI Presence: The FBI’s Minneapolis Division briefly operated from the 4th and 5th floors of the WCCO Building in 1955 before moving in 1961.

Categories of Crime

This is from Crime Measures and Housing Prices: an Analysis Using Quantile Regression and Spatial Autocorrelation. Jarl Kallberg & Yoshiki Shimizu.

Another econometric issue is the precise definition of crime rate.Footnote12 The empirical studies address various categories of crime. A number analyze total crime rates,Footnote13 which thus equates murder with minor crimes such as graffiti. Others rely solely on property crimes,Footnote14 burglaries etc. In general the results vary significantly by crime type, but not in a systematic manner. For example, Gibbons (2004) determines that vandalism, but not burglary crimes, negatively influences housing prices; Ihlanfeldt and Mayock (2010b) finds that only violent crime has a negative influence on housing values; Ihlanfeldt and Mayock (2010a) documents that only robbery and aggravated assault have a significant negative impact on property values; Braakmann (2012) observes that anti-social behavior and violent crime depress housing prices, but drug crimes do not; Ceccato and Wilhelmsson (2020) finds that vandalism rates have the greatest impact on housing prices. One can easily hypothesize that vandalism has a strong impact because of its visibility. In addition, the “broken windows” literature in criminology posits that enforcing petty crime (the reverse of current policy in Seattle and many other major US cities) can lead to reduction in major crimes.Footnote15

Amenities in Concert

I love the insight of this paper: The Grass Isn’t Always Greener: How Crime Influences
Property Values Near Urban Greenlines by Jason De Freitas, Fatemeh Kamkar, Mark Sunderman,Velma Zahirovic‑Herbert.

Instead of the simple reasoning that green spaces are always good and crime is always bad (which I guess it is), that combination of two neighborhood amenities in close proximity exacerbates the negative effects of crime rather than neutralizing them.

Features of neighborhoods don’t exist in isolation but reflect or meld with other components. Thus, a meaningful analysis is achieved through matrices.

Midtown Greenway

Sorting by Intention

Yesterday’s post gave a list of ways municipalities can get involved in housing assistance programs. But what are the intentions that drive such activity?

Tried-and-true programs like Section 8 provide subsidies that travel. In this case, the intention is to provide supplemental housing assistance to a low-income parent while giving them the choice of which neighborhood amenities suit them best. By contrast, down payment assistance is an effort to help renters become homeowners. And the new Bring it Home program allows the city to direct funds to those in need within its boundaries.

If you look at the aid in terms of who is helped, you realize there are gaps in the programs. The dual-income service worker family would not be able to afford to live in a western suburb without aid. This is confirmation of the missing middle problem. Nearly every tool either requires income too low to qualify this household or produces units priced above what they can afford. The only tools that reach them at all do so partially and conditionally.

Depending on a city’s objectives, it may be fruitful to look at intentions amongst subgroups within the population.

The Municipal Housing Toolkit: Where the Money Comes From and What It Does

Cities and counties working on affordable housing don’t write checks directly to struggling families and call it a day. The reality of municipal housing assistance is considerably more complex — and more interesting. Local governments operate simultaneously on two fronts: the demand side, helping individual households afford housing that already exists, and the supply side, creating or preserving the affordable units those households need in the first place. Understanding the distinction between these two fronts, and the specific tools deployed on each, is essential for any honest evaluation of whether a city’s housing strategy is actually working.

What follows is a plain-language guide to the most common tools in the municipal housing toolkit, organized by function, with an explanation of what each tool does and where the money originates.

Demand-Side Tools

These tools help households afford housing by subsidizing the cost of renting or owning, rather than directly creating new units.

HCV — Housing Choice Voucher Program Commonly called Section 8, this is the largest federal rental assistance program in the country. An eligible low-income household receives a voucher that covers the difference between 30% of their income and the fair market rent for their area. The household finds a private landlord willing to accept the voucher, and the local housing authority pays the landlord the subsidy directly. The program is funded entirely by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and administered locally by a public housing authority — in Plymouth’s case, the HRA. The city’s role is administration; the money originates in Washington. The primary constraint is not eligibility but supply: waiting lists of hundreds or thousands of applicants are common because the number of vouchers is fixed by congressional appropriation.

DPA — Down Payment Assistance Homeownership is out of reach for many moderate-income households not because they cannot afford a monthly mortgage payment but because they cannot accumulate the lump sum needed for a down payment and closing costs in a high-price market. Down payment assistance programs provide grants or deferred loans — often forgiven after a period of occupancy — to bridge that gap. Funding typically comes from CDBG allocations, state housing finance agency programs, or local HRA levies. Plymouth’s program currently offers up to $35,000, which against a median sale price of $616,000 covers roughly 5.7% — meaningful but increasingly strained by price appreciation.

LAHA — Local Affordable Housing Aid A relatively new Minnesota-specific tool, LAHA is an annual appropriation distributed to eligible cities and counties from a regional sales tax collected across the seven-county Twin Cities metro area. Payments began in 2024. Unlike federal programs, LAHA dollars come with relatively flexible use rules — eligible activities include construction, acquisition, rehabilitation, rent assistance, interest rate reduction, and gap financing. The funds must be committed within three years and expended within four. Plymouth had received approximately $1.3 million through early 2026. Because LAHA is locally controlled and flexible, it is one of the more strategically useful tools in Plymouth’s current toolkit.

BITH — Bring it Home A Minnesota Housing Finance Agency rental assistance program that allocates vouchers to local housing authorities for distribution to income-qualified households within a specific geography — meaning, unlike portable HCV vouchers, these cannot be used outside the city. Plymouth received 36 vouchers through this program, expected to be operational by spring 2026 at a cost of approximately $535,000 annually. Funding originates with the state of Minnesota through Minnesota Housing. The geographic restriction is both a limitation and a feature: it keeps assisted households in the community rather than allowing the subsidy to follow them elsewhere.

Supply-Side Tools

These tools create, preserve, or rehabilitate affordable housing units — addressing the stock itself rather than individual households’ ability to pay.

TIF — Tax Increment Financing TIF is the workhorse of municipal development finance and the tool Plymouth has used most aggressively for affordable housing. When a city creates a TIF district around a development site, it freezes the assessed value of that property at its pre-development baseline. As the development increases the property’s value and generates higher tax revenues, the incremental increase — the difference between the old and new tax bill — is captured and redirected to finance the project rather than flowing to the general tax base. This increment can pay off bonds that funded upfront infrastructure or gap financing for the project. TIF money is not an appropriation from a budget — it is a pledge of future tax revenue. For affordable housing, TIF is typically used to cover the financing gap that makes a project financially viable when rents must be kept below market rate. Plymouth has used TIF to generate over $6.5 million in affordable housing financing across multiple projects. Up to 35% of increments from redevelopment districts can be pooled and used for projects beyond the original district boundaries when applied to qualifying housing.

LIHTC — Low Income Housing Tax Credit Pronounced “lie-tech,” this is the primary federal tool for financing the construction of affordable rental housing and is responsible for the majority of affordable units built in the United States since its creation in 1986. The federal government allocates tax credits to state housing finance agencies — in Minnesota, that is Minnesota Housing — which then award credits competitively to developers. A developer who receives a LIHTC award sells the credits to investors (typically banks and corporations seeking to reduce their federal tax liability) in exchange for equity capital. That equity reduces the amount the developer needs to borrow, which in turn allows rents to be set below market rate while the project remains financially viable. Units financed with LIHTC must remain affordable — typically at 60% AMI or below — for at least 30 years. The money does not flow from government to developer directly; it flows from the federal treasury to investors through reduced tax liability, and from investors to developers as equity. Plymouth has multiple LIHTC-financed projects in its affordable housing inventory including Element, Cranberry Ridge, and West View Estates.

HRB — Housing Revenue Bonds Cities and counties can issue tax-exempt bonds to finance residential rental housing. Because the interest earned on these bonds is exempt from federal income tax, investors accept a lower interest rate, which translates into lower borrowing costs for the developer. The savings on debt service allow rents to be set below what a market-rate project financed with conventional taxable debt would require. The city is not on the hook financially — these are conduit bonds, meaning the city serves as the issuing vehicle but the developer is responsible for repayment. In exchange for the tax-exempt status, developers are typically required to set aside a portion of units at affordable rents. Plymouth has used housing revenue bonds extensively, with 846 rental units across city properties financed this way. The money originates with private bond investors; the federal subsidy is the tax exemption.

CDBG — Community Development Block Grant CDBG is a federal block grant program administered by HUD that flows to cities and counties for a wide range of community development activities, with housing rehabilitation being one of the most common uses. Unlike categorical grants with narrow use restrictions, CDBG gives localities considerable flexibility in how funds are deployed, subject to the requirement that activities primarily benefit low- and moderate-income persons. Plymouth uses CDBG for its First-Time Homebuyer Program, its Owner-Occupied Housing Rehabilitation Program, its Emergency Repair Grant program for seniors, and funding for social service agencies. The money originates entirely with the federal government. Plymouth receives approximately $250,000 annually plus program income from loan repayments. Importantly, CDBG administration requires significant staff capacity and reporting, which is why Plymouth is considering whether to transfer administration to Hennepin County — freeing staff time but losing some local control over how the funds are directed.

HIA — Housing Improvement Area An HIA is a Minnesota-specific statutory tool that allows a city to finance common-area improvements to townhome or condominium developments by levying the cost against the individual property owners in the affected association, collectible through property tax statements over time. It functions like a special assessment but for private common property rather than public infrastructure. The tool is particularly useful for older attached housing developments where the homeowners association lacks the reserves or borrowing capacity to fund major capital repairs — roof replacements, siding, windows, elevators — that if deferred would accelerate deterioration and reduce the affordability and habitability of the units. Plymouth adopted an HIA policy in early 2026. No public money is permanently expended — the city essentially extends its credit and taxing authority to enable a private association to finance improvements, recovering the cost through the levy. This makes it a powerful preservation tool with relatively low fiscal risk.

4d — Local 4d Affordable Housing Incentive Program The name comes from Minnesota Statute 273.128, which establishes a reduced property tax classification rate for rental housing where at least 20% of units are income and rent restricted at or below 60% of AMI. The reduced rate — from 1.25% to 0.75% of assessed value — lowers the property tax bill for qualifying landlords, improving the project’s operating economics and making it more feasible to maintain affordable rents. A city or HRA triggers eligibility by providing nominal financial assistance and entering a development agreement with the property owner that records the rent restrictions against the deed. Plymouth adopted a local 4d incentive program in early 2026. The money for the tax reduction does not come from the city budget directly — it comes from the tax base, meaning other taxpayers effectively subsidize the reduced rate for qualifying properties. The tool is most valuable for preserving NOAH properties that are already charging affordable rents but might escalate without an incentive to maintain restrictions.

IHP — Inclusionary Housing Policy An inclusionary housing policy requires or incentivizes developers of new market-rate housing to include a percentage of units affordable to lower-income households as a condition of receiving city financial assistance or land use approvals. The mechanism varies — some policies mandate inclusion, others offer density bonuses or fee waivers in exchange for voluntary compliance. Plymouth adopted an IHP in 2024 that applies to projects receiving city financial assistance, requiring developers to choose a level of affordability appropriate to their project. Affordable units produced under an IHP are financed by the market-rate portion of the development — in effect, market-rate tenants cross-subsidize affordable tenants through the blended economics of the project. No direct public dollars fund the affordable units, though the city’s financial assistance (often TIF) is what triggers the requirement. The tool only works in markets where development is actively occurring and margins are sufficient to absorb the cross-subsidy.

HTF — Housing Trust Fund A housing trust fund is a dedicated pool of public money that can be deployed flexibly to fill financing gaps in affordable housing projects that cannot be fully financed through other sources. Unlike categorical programs with rigid use restrictions, an HTF can provide grants, loans, or equity contributions depending on what a specific project needs. Funding can come from a variety of sources — developer fees, bond proceeds, general fund appropriations, fines and penalties, or dedicated tax revenues. Plymouth established its Housing Trust Fund in 2025 with an initial HRA allocation of $100,000 — a meaningful first step but a very small pool relative to the financing gaps in typical affordable housing projects, which commonly run into the millions. The value of an HTF grows over time as loan repayments recycle back into the fund and as additional revenue sources are dedicated to it. Cities with mature housing trust funds — Minneapolis being the clearest regional example — use them as the primary local matching tool for LIHTC applications and other competitive state and federal programs.

NOAH Preservation Programs — Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing Preservation NOAH properties are privately owned rental buildings that charge rents affordable to lower-income households not because of any subsidy or restriction but because they are older, smaller, or less amenity-rich than newer buildings. They represent the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing in most cities and are also the most fragile — when they sell, rents typically increase to market rate and the affordability is permanently lost. NOAH preservation programs use a combination of acquisition financing, rehabilitation loans, and affordability covenants to intercept these properties before or at sale and lock in affordability for an extended period. Funding comes from a patchwork of sources: LAHA, pooled TIF, HTF, state programs through Minnesota Housing, and federal programs including the HOME Investment Partnerships Program. Plymouth’s 4d program, HIA policy, and LAHA funds are all oriented in part toward NOAH preservation, though a dedicated acquisition fund does not yet exist.

Land Assembly and Disposition Cities and HRAs can use their powers of eminent domain or negotiated purchase to acquire strategic parcels — often underutilized commercial sites, former motels, or obsolete retail — and either hold them for future affordable development or sell them at below-market prices to affordable housing developers. The land write-down reduces the developer’s total project cost, which in turn reduces the financing gap and the level of subsidy needed from other sources. Plymouth has used this tool at the Four Seasons Mall site and the former Red Roof Inn on Annapolis Lane. Funding for acquisition comes from HRA levy dollars, LAHA, or pooled TIF. The tool requires patience — assembling land, conducting environmental review, and finding the right developer and financing package can take years — but in high-land-cost markets like Plymouth it is one of the most powerful levers for enabling deeply affordable development that the market would never produce on its own.

These tools are rarely used in isolation. A typical affordable housing project in Plymouth might combine LIHTC equity, a city TIF note, an HRB for conduit financing, LAHA gap funding, and an IHP covenant — each piece filling a specific layer of the financing stack. Understanding what each tool does, where the money comes from, and which household archetypes it ultimately serves is the prerequisite for evaluating whether a city’s housing strategy is coherent, targeted, and producing results commensurate with the public investment behind it.

Happy Easter

Treasure trove of images to be found at Metmuseum

Although painted in the seventeenth century, Ter Brugghen’s scene of Christ’s crucifixion draws on the dramatic, emotional appeal of earlier religious art to inspire the private prayers of a Catholic viewer. The Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist, who flank the cross, provide surrogates for the viewer’s agonized beholding of the crucifixion. The rigorous symmetry of the composition; the flat, star-studded sky; and Christ’s contorted body, with blood streaming from his wounds, intentionally refer to the work of early-sixteenth-century German artists, who were coveted by collectors in Ter Brugghen’s day.

Crime 101– Movie Review

Parts of this movie you’ve undoubtedly seen before. But the lead actors, Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry, and Mark Ruffalo, are certainly worth watching. It’s the ending that makes this film interesting. There are trades involved, and each of these players ends in the green.

There is one incredulous part. Halle Berry is told by her boss that she is a little past her prime and tired-looking. What?

Did you know? China property titling

China’s property titling system is unique due to the country’s socialist land ownership model. There is no private freehold ownership of land—all land belongs either to the state (urban areas) or to rural collectives (rural/suburban areas).25

Key Features

  • Land Use Rights (LURs): Individuals and companies can only acquire long-term rights to use the land, not own it outright. These rights are granted by the government for fixed terms:
    • Residential: typically 70 years.
    • Commercial: 40 years.
    • Industrial/office: 50 years.
    • Residential renewals are generally automatic under the Civil Code, though details can vary.16
  • Buildings/Homes: Owners can hold full ownership of the structures (e.g., apartments or houses built on the land). In apartment buildings, individuals own their specific units, while common areas are shared.
  • Registration System: Title is proven through official government registration (a Torrens-like system). Once registered, the buyer is protected as a good-faith purchaser. The system was unified nationwide starting in 2015 under the Property Law (2007) and Civil Code, with a single real property registry replacing earlier separate land and housing registrations (though some local variations persist).6

How It Works in Practice

  • Buyers purchase apartments or buildings along with the attached land use rights.
  • Transfers, mortgages, and changes must be registered with local authorities to take legal effect.
  • The certificate (often combining land use and building ownership) serves as strong evidence of rights.

This setup fueled China’s massive urban property boom but has contributed to issues like the recent real estate crisis, as developers rely on selling land use rights and buildings. Rural land remains more restricted, with ongoing (but limited) reforms for contracting and transfer rights among collectives.

In short: You “own” your home/building, but you’re essentially leasing the land from the state or collective for a long (renewable) period.

**Pointer to Hamish who attended my Land in Literature salon today. You meet interesting people at Interintellect! Stop in on a Zoom call sometime.**

Victoria Harbor a few years ago

Reorienting the housing help convo

Let’s shift the fundamental unit of analysis — from the unit to the household, and from price to fit.

Most municipal housing analysis is organized around a single question: how many units exist or need to exist at each price point? The AMI bands are the answer categories. Goals are set in those terms, progress is measured in those terms, and funding tools are designed around them. It is a tidy, internally consistent system with one significant flaw: it was designed for federal program administration, not local housing strategy. HUD needed a standardized eligibility threshold applicable uniformly across hundreds of cities. Most city councils inherited that threshold as their primary analytical lens — but a city council is not HUD. It governs a specific place with specific people, a specific labor market, specific geography, and a specific housing stock. None of that specificity survives the translation into AMI bands.

The better question is: which households need what kind of unit, in what location, and where do those matches currently fail?

When analysis is organized around households rather than units, several things change simultaneously.

The policy target becomes a person, not a number. A statement like “we need X units at 50% AMI” is a production target. A statement like “the people staffing our hospitals, schools, and restaurants cannot afford to live in the community they serve, and nothing in our housing pipeline reaches them” is a policy problem. One is easier to deprioritize. The other is harder to look away from.

Location becomes a first-order variable rather than an afterthought. The AMI framework treats a qualifying unit anywhere in a city as equivalent to a qualifying unit near transit, employment, schools, and childcare. They are not equivalent. For a household without reliable transportation, the location difference is the difference between a functional housing situation and one that fails on every practical dimension despite meeting the price threshold. When analysis starts with the household, proximity to what that household actually needs becomes part of the definition of adequacy — not a secondary consideration.

The gaps become visible in a way aggregate counts conceal. A jurisdiction can technically meet regional allocation targets while systematically failing specific household types, specific neighborhoods, or specific life circumstances. The households most likely to fall through are those who sit between program thresholds — earning too much for subsidized programs, too little to compete in the market. They are invisible not because the data doesn’t exist to find them but because the analytical framework isn’t organized to look for them.

The definition of success changes. Under the unit-and-price framework, success is production — units built at the right price point. Under a household-and-fit framework, success is matching — households that were previously unserved finding housing that works for their actual situation in a location that supports their actual life. That is a harder standard and a harder outcome to measure. It is also closer to what housing policy is actually meant to accomplish.

This reorientation has a practical consequence for how limited policy tools get deployed. If the question is “how many units at X% AMI do we have,” the answer drives toward production targets and subsidy programs. If the question is “which household types are unmatched and why,” the answer might point toward zoning reform, transit investment, bridge programs for transitional need, or data infrastructure that makes the mismatch visible enough to act on. The tool should follow the diagnosis. In most council chambers today, the tools are derived from a federal eligibility framework being applied to a local problem that framework was never designed to diagnose.

The AMI number is not the goal. It is one input among several that together determine whether a real household can live in a community. Keeping that distinction clear is the beginning of more honest — and more effective — local housing policy.