The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

My gut feeling is that wealthy people buying up the housing stock to rent out is not actually as common just supply restrictions not meeting the demands of individuals.

I used to live in Vancouver, and on my street almost all occupants were owners. But guess what, the number of houses on that street has not changes in 100 years, and the number of people who want to live in Vancouver has probably increased tenfold.

The issue wasnt that all the housing stock was bought up, the issue is that housing stock did not increase to satisfy demands.

Additionally, a place like Vancouver is really a global real estate destination. People with money who are not from Canada come to Vancouver and drop a few mil on a single family home and outprice all the locals. If you are buying a house in Vancouver you are competing with wealthy people local, but also the top wealth from across the globe.

BC did pass legislation to make all single family homes qualified for quadplexes, but I think it is too little too late.

Anything short of taxing every residence which is not a primary residence AND banning foreign ownership AND reducing permitting toil AND raising interest rates, is going to fall short.

I gave up a few years ago and moved somewhere else. Vancouver is no longer for Canadians.

How about for fun, instead of rhetorical devices and snarky projection, just look at the facts. The data on effects of zoning reform in places like Minneapolis and others, about where housing is cheaper wherever it's easier to build, about rent dropping ( https://denverite.com/2025/07/25/denver-rent-prices-drop-q2/) when you build way more units, etc.

> 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 think a large part of it is that major news organizations too often don't do this kind of reporting, and often just seem to chase the same hot button topics as the rest of the crowd over and over again. And even then, few really dive into the details.

You're larger point is entirely correct, that there's a ton to be learned from old school journalism, and there are people out there doing it. But it's unsettling how much of it only gets covered by citizen journalists doing this in their free time, not by professionals who are supposed to be doing this for a living.

For example, the D.C. Attorney's Office had been simply dropping 2/3's of the criminal cases that came to them. No one noticed this until a anonymous internet account, DCCrimeFacts, went through the records and realized that this had been happening for years. Once that account wrote about it and it gained traction, major papers like the Washington Post started reporting on the story, it eventually ended up being an issue in Congressional hearings, and lead to changes in the way the U.S. Attorney's Office operates.

The account spent a lot of time digging through records and reporting on issues with the criminal justice system you wouldn't find elsewhere. But it was someone's side project, and there haven't been posts in a year.

Another example is the FAA scandal, when the best information has come from a single blog post by a law student who happened to go through the legal paperwork and was surprised that this hadn't been reported on.

The professional news media outlets do have some good reporters, and sometimes there are important deep dives there as well. But they feel few and far between, usually opting to chase infotainment (or sometimes the pet projects of a particular journalist).

It's amazing how many big stories we only get if some random citizen happens to spend their free time doing a personal journalism project, and if that project happens to get enough traction that people actually read it.

This is a great point and well made.

I would take it a step further and argue that it's not so much a topic as facts. Like objectively measurable things about the real world.

There's always going to be some limit to what we can actually measure and how much time we have to do it, but there's no reason not to try to get close to what we we're capable of doing.

I would argue that there are very few people who are actually authorities on a subject worth uncritically transcribing for 3 hours on a subject. Elon Musk is an easy target, the only thing he's an expert on is being Elon Musk, which isn't a very interesting topic.

What he has to say on any given subject does sometimes matter, because some people believe what he says, so it's useful for me to know some of it, but it's more useful to know what the actual facts are.

I don't want reporters who write an article that says "well I talked to one side and they said it's raining and I talked to the other side and they said it was hailing", I want a reporter who goes out and checks what the weather actually is.

NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.