The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

I’m not arguing they’re keeping it vacant, that’s someone else in the thread.

I reject the notion that the units are not making money, and the notion that they are competing on price. We know corporate landlords engage in cartel behavior using price setting algorithms, and there is a deep well of tax-incentives for real estate (eg 1031s) that make it a more complex math problem than you are making it out to be.

Rental stress is a bigger problem than price appreciation, though. Investors cannot cause rents to increase by buying stock.

> I know why people blame the internet, the drop in rewards for journalism, the pressures to churn out text, that has led to. But I'd also emphasise that it's a vocational skill that not everyone is built for, or trained to do.

As someone both built for and trained to do it, I can tell you I'd be making at least US$150k/year less if I was still doing it. I wager I'd be short about $1.25M in career earnings through just salary in the time since I moved from the copy desk to tech.

That's factoring in how, through the first third of my tech career I was still making just $35-60k/year. And I was ecstatic, because $35k was a five-figure raise over running the front section of a daily newspaper.

Every person in the first two newsrooms I worked in is either dead or has left the journalism field completely, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the entire team of editors, artists, and photographers who worked on the winning story. Most are now in PR, consulting, or (as a symptom of being near the Gulf Coast) in some arm of the fossil-fuels industry. One of the last whose career I keep track of just took up mail-order baking.

It's a financially unsustainable field in any market. At 5 years' experience at the head of the editing wheel, I was living paycheck-to-paycheck paying just $400/month in rent, living with two roommates in a single-wide trailer in the middle of a sugar cane field.

The vast majority of those City Desk-style journalism jobs made primary-school teaching salaries look attractive _25 years ago_, much less now. By the time I left, all of those jobs that I knew of had either moved to contract gigs or stringers (freelancers paid by column inches of text) unless you were in a big-city market or working for a regional/national paper.

The myth of building up a journalism career at an institution from the bottom of the org through shoe-leather reporting alone, without already knowing or being related to someone who could move you ahead of the rest, was already far past dead in most of the US.

If I could find a journalism job that paid half what I make now, made me travel constantly, had shit benefits, got me put on watchlists, made me deal with some of the slimiest people on the planet in the forms of career local politicians and court lawyers on the daily, and put me in precarious situations... I'd still probably take it, because I miss it every day. But that job flat-out does not exist in any form that I'd get a callback for unless I married into a publisher's extended family, and hasn't for decades.

This "Abundance" nonsense is simply liberal repackaging of Reagan's trickle down economics and deregulation. That's all it is. Reagan's policies were designed to transfer wealth from the young and the poor to the old and the wealthy. Abundance will do (more of) exactly the same.

The very best case fo housing deregulation as per this Abundance nonsense is Houston. And that's only if you have essentially unlimited land.

Private industry simply will not lower house prices long term. We need to stop with this nonsense of looking for market-based solutions and public-private partnerships.

The only solution to housing is for the government to maintain a sufficient stock of quality housing such that the private sector simply cannot corner the market to drive up prices.

The example I always come back to is Vienna where ~60% of the housing stock is owned by the government. Residents essentially have permanent leases. It's affordable and accessible. Vienna has some of the lowest rents in a European city.

The purpose of the modern Democratic Party in the US is support American imperialism and to not upset their corporate donors. "Abundance" only exists so Ezra Klein can get invited to all the cool parties, get speaking engagements and generally curry the favor of the billionaire class and the Democratic establishment. It's just a liberal face on Reaganism.

Yeah, Neither you nor the parent have worked the forces out to describe what's happening now.

What's happening now is the wealth and the middle are buying houses and apartments not for rental income but for appreciation. This motive is what stands in the way of new home building in any given area. This is why rents rise beyond an area can sustain at all - rents are set to maintain the ostensible value of a property - selling an empty property is fine, even encouraged.

The situation is visible everywhere.