Category: Web-Only

The Federal Government Cannot Solve the Housing Crisis

Source: Independent Institute
by Christopher J Calton

“With the median sale price of a single-family home exceeding $400,000 since the pandemic, federal politicians have been champing at the bit to show voters they are working to lower housing costs. The recently passed bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is Congress’s attempt to expand the housing supply. It awaits the president’s signature. The problem is that there is little the federal government can do to solve a crisis that is primarily the byproduct of local regulations. The local nature of the housing shortage is apparent when comparing housing costs in San Francisco, where the median single-family home price has reached a staggering $2 million, and Houston, where the median home sells for only $371,000.” (06/30/26)

https://www.independent.org/article/2026/06/30/the-federal-government-cannot-solve-the-housing-crisis/

Thomas L. Knapp

How housing regulation holds back innovation and what HUD gets right about fixing it

Source: Niskanen Center
by Kimberly Burnett

“HUD recently issued a set of best practices for state and local governments to improve affordability by reducing the overall costs of construction, increasing land available for construction, and reducing the development timeline. By identifying specific regulatory and administrative barriers, HUD has taken a step toward a federal framework for encouraging housing production.” (06/30/26)

https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-housing-regulation-holds-back-innovation-and-what-hud-gets-right-about-fixing-it/

Thomas L. Knapp

How to Save The (Third) World

Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman

“I recently spent a week in Chile as a guest of the Centro de Estudios Libertarios, interacting mostly with Chilean libertarians. Chile is the most free market country in Latin America and the richest but lately has been becoming a little less of both, so one topic of conversation was how to reverse that, more generally how to make Chile more libertarian (most Chileans would say more liberal). I then spent another week in Argentina, which is becoming more libertarian, again associating mostly with libertarians, so the same topic came up there in the context of how to keep it doing so. I have thought a good deal about the question in the American context. At a broad level the answer is the same.” (06/30/26)

https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/how-to-save-the-third-world

Thomas L. Knapp

Reading Is Dead. And We Killed It.

Source: Persuasion
by Leonora Barclay

“Earlier this year, publishing house Hachette pulped the upcoming horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, following allegations that Ballard relied on artificial intelligence to write the book. Meanwhile, half of novelists in the UK fear they will be completely replaced by AI. As artificial intelligence continues to replace creative activities previously considered uniquely human, there’s a fear that fiction will grow ever more distant from the human experience, with predictable plots and simplistic dialogue and characters. Literature will start to function as synthetic junk food for the brain. Unfortunately, we didn’t need AI to do this. Literature has been functionally artificial for a number of years now, since long before ChatGPT came on the scene. It wasn’t computers that did this, it was us—publishers, agents, writers, and readers.” (06/30/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-readers-killed-reading

Thomas L. Knapp