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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

#51

Post by tptacek »

evil-olive wrote: post #48
freddie_mercury wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

It's not on him to rebut every single argument Stoller has ever made. Several arguments Stoller made were refuted by the authorities Stoller himself cited, which is both interesting to read and also telling.

Stoller is free to find similarly decisive refutations of arguments Thompson had made (they're unlikely to be forthcoming).

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#52

Post by steveBK123 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #3
donatj wrote: post #2

The 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

Exactly

Plus housing you are mostly paying for the land. The land is expensive because it is finite and because zoning constrains how much housing you can build on it.

In many places the land is 2/3 the cost of the housing. The cost difference in building what left nimbys deride luxury and what would be considered affordable is really marginal. It’s like $100k in finishes in a $1.5M condo type difference.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#53

Post by tptacek »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #49
pydry wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

Just flag comments that violate the guidelines, don't retaliate with your own violations.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#54

Post by delusional »

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?

It doesn't have to be a competition. If you're having trouble deciphering which is which, their interests might just be aligned.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#55

Post by 111111IIIIIII »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #3
donatj wrote: post #2

The 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

[dead]

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#56

Post by simpaticoder »

What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage? Even if supply is eased, the wealthy (those who have enough capital to earn passive income) will buy the extra supply and rent to the poor. The Piketty effect takes over, they invest their profit in more housing, wealth inequality continues to get worse, and while more housing exists, it owned by an increasingly small cohort.

Personally I'd like to see legal constraints on investment in primary, single-family homes, and fewer legal constraints on building them.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#57

Post by JumpCrisscross »

supertrope wrote: post #41
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Baumol’s Cost Disease means construction labor cost rises faster than productivity

Baumol’s applies to jobs that “experienced little or no increase in labor productivity.” I’m arguing there may be extraneous causes for construction’s productivity stasis.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#58

Post by chubot »

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…

Yes, and I found Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein to be very credible on Lex Fridman:

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPSeeKokdo

I like when the right and left can actually talk to each other -- solutions are more likely to emerge that way.

They had a meta-discussion of the fact that Fridman has been "coded" by the left (Thompson and Klein firmly representing the left).

I get that, because Fridman can be so uncritical that it can rise to the level of shilling.

But I also find it curious that many on the left won't sit for 3 hours with him. In contrast, Thompson and Klein sat for 3 hours, which shows me that they have something to say which stands up to scrutiny.

They have something to say that doesn't have to be carefully boxed into 30 or 60 minutes of talking points.

---

Related: even though Fridman can be annoyingly uncritical, I think this also serves the purpose of journalism. Because he gets the primary sources to talk freely.

For example, IMO this part an interview with Demis Hassabis is revealing. He asks if they're worried they will run out of high quality training data:

https://youtu.be/-HzgcbRXUK8?t=3931

From my perspective, Hassabis gives a mealy-mouthed answer about generating synthetic data of the right distribution, and then they change the subject. I would bet there's a lot more to it than that. If they had a good angle of attack, I feel like he'd be more excited to talk about it, and say something more substantive.

I guess you can argue that he's being cagey to not reveal anything to competition, but it seems like a real point of concern to me.

The rest of the interview is talking about AGI time frames and similar sales talk. Whereas my takeaway is that there's significant worry that LLMs are limited by training data, because they interpolate from it (rather than extrapolating), and are inefficient at using it.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#59

Post by burnt-resistor »

simpaticoder wrote: post #56

What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage? Even if supply is eased, the wealthy (those who have enough capital to earn passive income) will buy the extra supply and rent to the poor. The Piketty effect takes over, they invest their profit in more housing, wealth inequality continues to get worse, and while more housing exists, it owned by an increasingly small cohort. Personally I'd like to s…

[flagged]

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#60

Post by tptacek »

chubot wrote: post #58
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…

Yes, and I found Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein to be very credible on Lex Fridman: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPSeeKokdo I like when the right and left can actually talk to each other -- solutions are more likely to emerge that way. They had a meta-discussion of the fact that Fridman has been "coded" by the left (Thompson and Klein firmly repres…

Fridman is on the other end of the spectrum I'm describing.
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