2026-04-28 19:37:13
Here is the link, with explanation.
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2026-04-28 19:18:14
HUD: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to real estate professionals clarifying they are not violating the Fair Housing Act when they share information with prospective homebuyers about neighborhood crime rates and school quality data.
“Buying a home is one on the most significant decisions a family will ever make,” said Secretary Scott Turner. “Americans should not be left in the dark about vital facts like neighborhood safety or school quality. HUD is making clear that real estate professionals can openly and lawfully provide this information in an equal and consistent manner to American families.”
The background is that The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin (and via later amendments) familial status, and disability. Discrimination included “steering” buyers toward or away from neighborhoods based on protected characteristics. The Biden administration ramped this up with a directive and Executive Order that essentially said the Fair Housing Act must be interpreted not just to prohibit discrimination but to redress and undo past discrimination:
This is not only a mandate to refrain from discrimination but a mandate to take actions that undo historic patterns of segregation and other types of discrimination and that afford access to long-denied opportunities.
…the [HUD] Secretary shall take any necessary steps,…to implement the Fair Housing Act’s requirements that HUD administer its programs in a manner that affirmatively furthers fair housing and HUD’s overall duty to administer the Act (42 U.S.C. 3608(a)) including by preventing practices with an unjustified discriminatory effect.
The “discriminatory effect” language reinforced that so-called disparate impact, not just intentional discrimination counted as discriminatory—and it contributed to a legal and reputational environment in which platforms and agents had strong incentives to avoid anything that could be characterized as steering. As a result, by the end of the year, Realtor.com had removed its crime map from all search results, as did Trulia, Redfin announced it would not add crime data to its platform and since Zillow already didn’t include such data, by early 2022 all the major portals had dropped crime information. Similarly, the National Association of Realtors published material instructing agents not to directly answer client questions about neighborhood safety. One article in “The Safety Series” was titled “‘Is This a Safe Neighborhood?’ Don’t Answer That” and by “Safety Series” they meant safety for the realtor not the client.
So without explicitly making such information illegal, the government created a legal and reputational climate that chilled its provision. Portals removed crime maps and realtors became reluctant to answer ordinary buyer questions about neighborhood safety and school quality. That is a degradation of service, not a civil-rights victory. The pretext was that crime information might not be accurate but the real fear was that it would accurately suggest neighborhoods with high percentages of black residents had more crime. Withholding information about crime and schools, however, does not change the facts; it just shifts the informational advantage toward buyers who are wealthy, well-connected, or sophisticated enough to find the data themselves. Moreover, it should go without saying that black homebuyers also want information about neighborhood crime rates–don’t these buyers count? Suppressing truthful information is rarely a good way to improve outcomes. As with Ban the Box, blocking direct access to relevant information encourages worse proxy-based decision-making.
Trump’s HUD is correct: fair housing law should prohibit discrimination, not prevent realtors from telling the truth.
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2026-04-28 14:51:19
You do not hear this point made too often, yet it is true:
Very interesting new study finding that *even in large European cities*, in most places it is easier to access opportunities by car than by public transport arxiv.org/pdf/2604.01019 The exceptions are Paris, Zurich and the innermost parts of Milan and Barcelona
That is from Giulio Mattioli, citing the paper by Bruno Campenelli, et.al. In turn via Joy Buchanan.
The post EU fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-28 13:01:29
What determines whether and how regulations are reformed? We use a newly constructed data set of 3,590 successful and failed regulatory reforms in 189 countries, between 2005 and 2022, to address this question. We document that regulations have become more business friendly in some regulatory domains but not others. We also show that regulations are more business friendly in richer than in poorer countries, and that holding initial regulatory levels constant, richer countries also reform more. We present a model in which the successful passage of reforms is shaped by the number of veto points in the approval process, the social returns to reform, and the cost of compensating losers from reform, and then test it using our new data set. We find that richer countries have both higher reform attempt and success rates, but less impact of individual reforms on regulation than poorer countries. These findings are consistent with the model if richer countries are better at reform, perhaps because they can compensate losers more efficiently. Across the world, reform attempt rates are strongly correlated with reform success rates but not with reform impact levels. Within countries, a higher share of technological reform attempts is successful, compared to administrative or legal reforms, consistent with the importance of veto points.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
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2026-04-28 02:03:26
Like many journalists, I have a bunch of unpublished fiction lying about, so I tried Claude on the first chapter of a romance novel that I started almost 20 years ago, during the hysterical, mawkish phase of a particularly bad breakup. “Megan McArdle,” said Opus 4.7, after a few seconds of thought. Fascinated, I kept feeding it smaller and smaller passages to see how little prose it needed for identification. The answer, apparently, was 1,441 words…
Would Claude do better or worse with something more modern? I fed Claude a different opening chapter from an unpublished science fiction novel I started right before the pandemic — I contain multitudes — and this time Claude needed only 1,132 words. The eulogy I gave for my mother, lightly edited to remove some too-specific biographical details, was even faster: Depending on the passage, Claude was able to peg me as the author in as few as 124 words.
Here is more from Megan McArdle.
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2026-04-28 00:35:01
1. Does monopsony power induce firms to stay small?
2. Currentzis conducting the War Requiem.
4. Did three different groups settle South America?
5. The China-shocked towns are coming back? (NYT)
8. PC on Arab novels. And a response from Hussein Mansour.
9. What is Progress Engineering?
10. Milei’s popularity is falling. I am a fan and he has done many great and good things, but the victory march has been premature for some while now. Quite simply it is hard to overcome a bad political culture.
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