Announcement: Essay Contest Winners

And our schedule for posting the essays

We are excited to finally announce the winners of our Essay Contest. Choosing the winners was no small task: we had a grand total of 39 essays submitted to us, and ultimately, far fewer awards to give than exceptional submissions. (Many thanks to those who submitted; the median essay quality was quite good.) Thus in addition to the top three essays we elected to award 8 additional honorariums.

Over the remaining ~2 weeks of our housing sprint, we will be revealing and highlighting the 11 total essays we selected, each of which represent their own creative solution to the housing crisis.

The following will be our posting schedule:

Third place — 12/17

Coming in at bronze was Mike Fellman’s essay, which understood chronic underbuilding and high rents in desirable markets as being constrained by capital markets: projects only pencil when expected rents and appreciation clear investors’ hurdle rates and risk premia. Mike’s proposals seek to shift focus from pure zoning debates to the cost and structure of capital.

Second place — 12/20

The runner-up essay, authored by The Calipers, was a crime-pilled approach to housing and laid out an empirically grounded agenda that plausibly unfreezes high-crime neighborhoods while making pro-housing coalitions easier to assemble. Cally’s core proposal is “contact tracing for crime”.

First place — 12/23

Our top essay was written by Nathan Smith, a PhD economist, on the “Coase-ification” of zoning laws. That is, transparent and tradable land rights for housing abundance — including digitizing zoning and other relevant constraints, adopting Homeowners’ Bills of Rights, and piloting tradable externality rights so current vetoes become explicit, negotiable claims rather than informal political power.

Honorariums — 12/27

Below is a list of our honorarium winners, whose essays we will be posting in the form of an anthology (with links to the full-essay pdfs):

• Sol Hando | How Cities Can Solve Housing Affordability for Young People — Tenement Housing, SROs, and the legalization of ultra-dense development

• Jeff Fong | How Municipal Land Leasing Spurs Housing Production — Cutting Through the Gordian Knot of Local Land Use

• Lars Doucet | Universal Building Exemption — Unlocking housing supply with property tax reform judo

• J.K. Lundblad | The Three Point Turn — A three-step process for solving the housing crisis

• Kitten | It’s time to build — Housing, and prisons

• Alex Boston | The Hidden Demand: Why the Housing Crisis is a Crisis of Care

• Anton Frattaroli | How Mortgage Finance Moves Housing Prices

• Annoying Peasant | The NIMBY Tax: A Madisonian Approach