Pretty much any criticism of a current housing market can't happen without mentioning the quality of said housing. I have just come back from one of the apartments I was looking at to see an abysmally small shoebox with some sort of doors and windows installed in there. I live in a house with 9-foot ceilings and I feel like a king. But this is insane. Recently I've visited a rental property to find shallow, not sound…
The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
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Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#282Pretty much any criticism of a current housing market can't happen without mentioning the quality of said housing. I have just come back from one of the apartments I was looking at to see an abysmally small shoebox with some sort of doors and windows installed in there. I live in a house with 9-foot ceilings and I feel like a king. But this is insane. Recently I've visited a rental property to find shallow, not sound…
Not only that, but the walls/floors were paper thin. We could hear the floor creak when our upstairs neighbors so much as shifted their weight.
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
The population of a place doesn't have to double, or even change at all, for prices to go up. All that is necessary is for more people to want to live in a place. Those with the $ to satisfy that desire will outbid those who don't and you can easily double/triple/10x prices with no change in population.
How come more people want to live in the entire US if the population is relatively flat? Prices are up everywhere. The only answer is that the increased observed demand is a result of the increased investment demand (rather than native demand)
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like fewer restrictions would mean more garbage getting built.
Fewer regulatory roadblocks like zoning would lead to more supply, which would lead to more competition, which would lead to better quality and cheaper rents.
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Restating something I said upthread, but I think the right way to think about Thompson's rhetorical adversary here is "people on the political left who believe that antitrust is the high-order bit on housing affordability and that zoning reform shouldn't occur until after antitrust issues are addressed". He's arguing with people who are pushing back on legalizing housing density. He is not arguing broadly against the…
Paraphrasing: along with a dozen other pressing issues, anti-trust was out of scope for this book. > He is not arguing broadly against the political left... Yes and: NIMBY vs YIMBY is (mostly) olds vs youngs, rather than partisanship. Witness the coalition behind the Montana Miracle (recent pro-housing legislation). So far. As you know, most positions eventually get coded as left or right, as needed, to defend the co…
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#286There is an incredibly large lobby group who is fully invested in house prices rising or at least not falling, namely homeowners. and since most politicians at a high level usually own one or more houses, they are fully invested in it as well.
> and since most politicians at a high level usually own one or more houses, That's a factor, but the bigger deal is that eligible homeowners ar 50% more likely to vote than eligible renters, and that doesn't even count that many renters are not event eligible to vote! https://nlihc.org/resource/new-census-data-reveal-voter-turn...
Even if the data seems to indicate that's true, I do see this statement thrown around a lot without much granularity into the groups counted.
In your link, it's broken down into a few different groups, but in terms of renters vs owners I'm kind of less interested in proportion of people eligible to vote who fit into each broad category, and more interested in normalized categories. How many more people who didn't vote and are renters share a rental unit with someone they're not tied to long-term, or rent alone, compared to people who own alone or own in a long-term committed relationship where both people would be owners and likely to physically vote together, for example.
As in, is there as significant of difference between households of the same structure, income level, age bracket, in terms of voter turnout (a couple sharing the status of renting or sharing the status of owning). I feel like you'd be much more likely to vote if your spouse that you split expenses and responsibilities with also votes, whereas your roommate might not give a damn and it has nothing much to do with you.
Likewise if you own a 1 bedroom condo alone, does that show up as different than someone who rents a 1 bedroom condo alone?
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#287The issue, is that for me, the reader, it framed the piece as the author seemingly positioning themselves as the "the other side", the one that knows best and isn't those "antitrust left". It felt like it was creating a strawman and was engaging in tribal signaling.
And when you consider the rest of the piece was them claiming they called the sources, and that the sources said that the "antitrust left" had misquoted them and misrepresented their findings, but the author somehow is this unbiased truth, and definitely really for real called the the sources and didn't at all misconstrue or anything, no they wouldn't do that, unlike the "antitrust left".
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Many leftists have a problem with zoning deregulation. Housing supply is the biggest economic problem that regular people face. Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson did not bring us Joe Biden, Ezra became one of the most critical mainstream journalists of Biden. Their politics are meaningfully different.
I've been in leftist housing advocacy circles. I studied urban planning.
1) Every leftist I know who cares about housing hates euclidean zoning
2) Every leftist I know who cares about housing hates down-zoning
3) Every urban planning class I took said that euclidean zoning is bad
Euclidean zoning is the principle land use regulation in the United States because it is supported by powerful people, landowners and yes property developers (who are also almost always land speculators.)
Thompson and Klein misrepresent euclidean zoning as a leftist project and then set it up as a wicker man to stuff with all the environmental and labor protections they want to torch.
Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#289Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers. They relied on advertisements, just like the websites that killed them.