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The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

derekthompson.org

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Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#41

Post by supertrope »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30
lambda wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfectly succinct way to put it. New housing is simply more expensive; so it's marketed as "luxury", and it's sold at a premium to the higher end of the housing market. This reduces demand for the older, more affordable existing housing stock, and with depreciation and wear and tear, the new housing will become more affordable as time goes on. If you're in a market with a shortage of housing, those with mo…

> New housing is simply more expensive There is no natural reason for this to be the case. If anything, learning curves and economies of scale should result in new units costing less, not more, than ones built by artisans.

Baumol’s Cost Disease means construction labor cost rises faster than productivity. We’re allergic to prefab construction - banks and insurance companies block it. A lot of construction workers left the industry after 2007. Baby Boomers are retiring and told their kids to not get a blue collar job. New housing has to be ADA compliant. People expect to give each kid their own bedroom and have two car garage instead of one car or no garage at all. Recent immigration crackdowns and trade wars are the icing on the cake.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#42

Post by pydry »

GuardianCaveman wrote: post #38
pydry wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You can be aligned with a group who benefits from the same position without being associated with that group or lobbying FOR that group i.e. the KKK members probably want cheaper electricity and I want cheaper electricity but that doesn't mean when I lobby for it, I'm lobbying for the KKK.

[flagged]

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#43

Post by kfajdsl »

elliotec wrote: post #18
Ericson2314 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking why they don't build affordable housing is like asking why don't they build used cars

No… it’s like asking why they don’t build cheap cars. Which they do.

Do they? Are there any production cars under 20k? Plenty of used ones for that.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#44

Post by pydry »

encomiast wrote: post #39
pydry wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm curious how we can distinguish between someone lobbying hard for the homebuilding industry and someone lobbying hard for people who need homes?

On this thread you can tell if somebody is lobbying hard for people who need homes because they bring up realpage or public housing and get BURIED in downvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750927

The only solution that will make a difference, apparently, is relieving the private sector of onerous regulations which impact their profit margins shrug.

I thought neoliberalism was going out of fashion but apparently not.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#45

Post by tptacek »

pydry wrote: post #36
lambda wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfectly succinct way to put it. New housing is simply more expensive; so it's marketed as "luxury", and it's sold at a premium to the higher end of the housing market. This reduces demand for the older, more affordable existing housing stock, and with depreciation and wear and tear, the new housing will become more affordable as time goes on. If you're in a market with a shortage of housing, those with mo…

With cars you can build a high margin luxury and a low margin affordable model if there are two buyers and collect profit from both. With an apartment if there's one plot available, you build the high margin apartment. Land constraints matter. A 100% land value tax would help solve this problem and would make buying apartments more like buying a car.

When you build the high-margin apartment, people vacate other housing units to move into it, reducing demand on the older units, which reduces prices in the area. This is just the law of supply and demand, but you don't have to derive it axiomatically: it's empirically what happens when we increase supply at market rates.

I'd like a land value tax too, but it's not going to happen, and an LVT would guarantee market-rate development.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#46

Post by tptacek »

pydry wrote: post #42
GuardianCaveman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be aligned with a group who benefits from the same position without being associated with that group or lobbying FOR that group i.e. the KKK members probably want cheaper electricity and I want cheaper electricity but that doesn't mean when I lobby for it, I'm lobbying for the KKK.

[flagged]

Please stop commenting like this here. Rebut the substance of the piece or don't, but whatever weird grievance you have with its author belongs somewhere other than HN.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#47

Post by thegrim33 »

davidw wrote: post #32
evil-olive wrote: post #14

> The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business. ctrl-F "RealPage" - nothing. hmm. ctrl-F "rent" - also nothing. really? from about a year ago: Justice Department Sues RealPage for Algorithmic Pricing Scheme that Harms Millions…

I wish everyone who cares about the price of housing could go to a hearing like this one. Sadly, they happen in every community so if you're curious, you ought to go: https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing... That is your housing shortage right there. Now, Real page probably jacks up prices a bit. A bit multiplied by a lot of renters means real harm and it was probably worth taking them to court…

You're claiming that your idea of 'X' is true, and for evidence of this, you're linking to a site that was created by people whose mission is to advocate for the idea of X.

Am I likely to be getting an impartial view of the situation from a source which solely exists to push X-related messaging?

Is such a group/site really going to give a fair shake to other theories Y and Z, or to conflicting data?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#48

Post by evil-olive »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #17
evil-olive wrote: post #14

> The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business. ctrl-F "RealPage" - nothing. hmm. ctrl-F "rent" - also nothing. really? from about a year ago: Justice Department Sues RealPage for Algorithmic Pricing Scheme that Harms Millions…

Thompson is responding to a specific paper. 'One of the most detailed articles in this space is an analysis of the Dallas, Texas, housing market by the lawyer and writer Basel Musharbash. In “Messing With Texas: How Big Homebuilders and Private Equity Made American Cities Unaffordable”' Musharbash doesn't mention RealPage either, so go blame him, since he doesn't think RealPage contributes to Dallas's problems.

> Thompson is responding to a specific paper.

yes, he's responding to [0] which was written by Musharbash and published in Matt Stoller's newsletter.

and as I said, he's being selective about what criticism he's responding to and what he's ignoring. because Stoller has also published, in the same newsletter, articles about RealPage price fixing [1, 2].

Thompson says:

> The antitrust left, however, claims...

if he's going to say "here's what the antitrust left believes" and then proceed to debunk it, I think it's reasonable to point out that his response is cherry-picking only part of what that "antitrust left" believes.

of course, if he wants to publish a follow-up article defending RealPage, I'd love to read it.

0: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...

1: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-r...

2: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#49

Post by hnuser123456 »

pydry wrote: post #31
tptacek wrote: post #5

So 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 j…

[flagged]

And you obviously already got your big expensive house and just want number to go up...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#50

Post by delusional »

tptacek wrote: post #5

So 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 j…

I sometimes think back to a passage in "dialectic of enlighenment" where the authors write what amounts to "input without analysis is meaningless, but analysis without new input is madness as the analysis eventually becomes only analysis of other analysis".

I think that generally a true problem nowadays. Popular culture does a lot of "analysis", but not a lot of reality seeking.

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