The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
derekthompson.org
The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
1–10 of 817 posts
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#2The bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy.
Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#3The bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy. Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.
Asking why they don't build affordable housing is like asking why don't they build used cars
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#4The bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy. Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.
Toronto's housing market has a similar problem, except they also mostly built one bedroom shoeboxes for investors. Will be interesting to see how this unwinds[1].
[1] https://financialpost.com/news/toronto-condo-market-falls-of...
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#5So much of the journalism we read is heavily processed and barely-reported and it's startling to see how much of a superpower simple shoe-leather reporting actually is. Derek Thompson's an incredibly sharp writer, but not really a subject matter expert on housing economics; all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed.
We're often so down on journalism on HN, and I believe a big part of that is we tend to read so much opinion and analysis and so little basic reporting.
I've been loving Thompson's substack (which is mostly not about housing policy so far).
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#6The bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy. Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.
Affordable housing is NIMBY whitewashing of reducing supply through rationining. (Note the supporters of affordable housing programmes count the largest landowning families in San Francisco and New York among their ranks.)
There is an article on the front page, right now, about Denver moderating its rents through construction [1]. We've also seen this in Montana [2].
[1] https://denverite.com/2025/07/25/denver-rent-prices-drop-q2/
[2] https://montanafreepress.org/2024/09/09/can-bozeman-find-rel...
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#7The bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy. Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.
Asking why they don't build affordable housing is like asking why don't they build used cars
The problem is that you don't generally destroy the used car in order to build a new one. So increasing the new cars on the road eventually also increases the number of used cars on the road.
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#8The bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy. Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.
Asking why they don't build affordable housing is like asking why don't they build used cars
Why don't they build $10,000 Ford Rangers anymore?
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#9Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#10The bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy. Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.
Asking why they don't build affordable housing is like asking why don't they build used cars
The project to build
https://www.libraryplaceithaca.com/
was almost a decade late, like a nuclear reactor, and they realized only after it was built that there is no market in our town for "luxury senior housing" because seniors with money go to Florida or Arizona. If they could fill the places you might say that it's better business to build expensive rather than cheap apartments but when these places are vacant you start to wonder if they are farming tax writeoffs or something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wfblqh9icQ
What you expect first is they are going to tell the local town they can't pay the property taxes, in a few years they'll tell the bank they can't afford the loans they took out to build it.
Other "luxury apartment" projects outside of Collegetown usually have some segment of subsidized "affordable" units, one of these has at least two police calls to it a day and in the last few weeks these have included murder and arson.