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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

#251

Post by Animats »

lanfeust6 wrote: post #190
api wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars. Would people pay for real journalism?

I think about this from time to time. Personally I would pay per article if it's convenient. I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks. The papers wouldn't go for it, but these days I can subscribe to individual writers I like on Substack rather than paying for a newspaper subscription and subsidizing content…

> I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks.

The Economist is one of the few news sources worth paying for.

Every week, there's a tour of the world's major events, by region. There will also be an in-depth article on one country (how's Rwanda getting along?), an in-depth article on one industry (what's the situation with bauxite supply?) and maybe a section on some technology (water desalination, who's doing it?) Over a year, most of the world and most of the industries are covered. Read the Economist for a year and you get a sense of how the world works.

The target audience is the movers and shakers of the world. Look at the employment ads.

There's a general pro-capitalism bias, but it's British-European, not US-oriented.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#252

Post by insane_dreamer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #233
Onavo wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clic…

> NYT is an exception > The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. How is the NYT an exception?

a large paid subscription base

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#253

Post by Workaccount2 »

whatever1 wrote: post #179

Housing crisis is just a result of increasing income inequality and the resulting real estate investment craze. The population of America (real demand) did not suddenly double at any state/city. Rich have become so much richer that can afford bidding wars at unattainable prices. They can buy investment homes and be cashflow negative for decades in anticipation of the increased market bidding prices. Of course they op…

A lot of the time it's not rich people bidding over a home, it's people in a game of chicken to see who will put themselves in the worse financial position.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#254

Post by lanfeust6 »

woooooo wrote: post #197
tptacek wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive muni (almost certainly in the top 5 nationally), and my primary political project is zoning reform, and I assure you that left-NIMBYism is a thing, and that the "we should make blue state governments perform better and increase supply of things people want" thesis of "Abundance" (Thompson and Klein's book) is a bête noire among those leftists. The argument isn't t…

> Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. This is the crux of the opposition. It's not that leftists necessarily have a problem with zoning reform, I don't at least, its fine. It's that the "abundance" project is a play for control of the party by the same losers who gave us Biden and Kamala. People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems tha…

> People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face.

Housing is that.

This just sounds like you want populist things and the outcome doesn't matter. Like price controls and tariffs.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#255

Post by whatever1 »

Schiendelman wrote: post #232
whatever1 wrote: post #179

Housing crisis is just a result of increasing income inequality and the resulting real estate investment craze. The population of America (real demand) did not suddenly double at any state/city. Rich have become so much richer that can afford bidding wars at unattainable prices. They can buy investment homes and be cashflow negative for decades in anticipation of the increased market bidding prices. Of course they op…

What if the housing crisis is what's causing wealth inequality? Piketty's data pointed to this.

Definitely is a negative feedback loop. So I expect the trend to accelerate as long as foreign investment keeps flowing into the US in the same rates

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#256

Post by ordinaryradical »

ch4s3 wrote: post #126
bgwalter wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They leave it empty (that actually happens a lot, especially with foreign investors) or convert it to their 100th AirBnB.

Empty properties barely exist as a percentage of total housing supply in high cost of living areas in the US. You’re looking at no more than a few tenths of of a percentage point of NYC’s more than 4 million units.

Examining empty ownership as a percentage of overall housing in America, which has tens of millions of units, is not a very helpful way of categorizing a highly localized and locally felt phenomenon.

The real effect of this type of ownership is that it distorts the high end of the market and the effects ripple downstream. They force cash to move elsewhere in search of housing, which inflates those markets, so then those who could afford those markets move elsewhere, etc.

Despite all of the data that gets lobbed around on this topic, we don’t seem to have a very good mental model for how small changes in one segment of the market explode into the others and cascade dramatically.

It’s just not very meaningful to examine this as a percentage of units.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#257

Post by regularization »

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…

> 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.

Matthew Stoller called the people Derek Thompson called, and some said Derek had misrepresented their opinions. So shoe leather caused the narrative of this so-called reputation to collapse as well.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#258

Post by lanfeust6 »

Animats wrote: post #251
lanfeust6 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about this from time to time. Personally I would pay per article if it's convenient. I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks. The papers wouldn't go for it, but these days I can subscribe to individual writers I like on Substack rather than paying for a newspaper subscription and subsidizing content…

> I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks. The Economist is one of the few news sources worth paying for. Every week, there's a tour of the world's major events, by region. There will also be an in-depth article on one country (how's Rwanda getting along?), an in-depth article on one industry (what's the sit…

Yeah, it's good. I just find it expensive to pay for regularly.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#259

Post by gopher_space »

Schiendelman wrote: post #225
gopher_space wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collusion using online management services to fix prices across a region. I think Washington State is working on legislation around rental services due to this already being a problem in the Seattle area. “Extra supply” is added to the portfolio containing housing they’ve already purchased. They own part of “existing supply” too.

I live in Seattle, and this is a scapegoat. it's another way to point a finger at anything but massive restrictions on supply. The easiest solution to collusion to keep prices high is to let lots of other people build and compete down price. In Washington, most new construction happens on a very small number of parcels, because that's the only place we allow it.

Nobody concerned about rent price fixing thinks that we don't also need to build more housing here. This is just another part of the problem. Are you defending the practice?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#260

Post by s1artibartfast »

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.

Where is this city with 20% occupancy?
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