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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

#291

Post by tptacek »

cocaclub wrote: post #235
tptacek wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm asking: how does a small number of landlords continue to "control the supply" of an ever-increasing supply of housing when each of their holdings is non-remunerative (and, in fact, incurs tax and maintenance costs). This seems like a pretty simple math problem, a bet that you would not take if it was laid out in front of you, but I'm waiting for someone to explain how that might not be the case. Keep in mind: as…

How did Uber et al. offer services below cost until they'd driven out all competition? The property holdings are not these landlords' only source of income. Why would milk producers deliberately dump millions of gallons of milk (representing a commensurate amount of labor to both produce and then dispose of)? Because they've created an oversupply that threatens to destabilize the price. The math works, it's just hein…

I never understand why people think Uber is some kind of mic drop. I don't like Uber as a company, but Uber is vastly better than the system it replaced. It this a generational thing? Are the people casting Uber as archvillains just too young to remember not being able to get a cab at 9PM, or having their cabs kick them out halfway to their destination because they decided to go on a break?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#292

Post by mulmen »

wredcoll wrote: post #198
mulmen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism is about presenting a topic , not about presenting a person . I don’t care about Elon Musk as a person. I don’t care about his opinions on lawn care or cooking eggs. But in a story about self driving car technology I want to hear his input and the input of Ford and GM and Waymo and Uber and suppliers and academics and regulators and users. Compiling all those sources and presenting a narrative on the topic…

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 actu…

Yes, absolutely. Journalism is fundamentally a fact or truth seeking exercise. I do still think there is room for presenting factually incorrect opinions so they can then be challenged and disproved. So I will meet you in the middle and say that journalism is the factual presentation of a topic. One of those facts could be that an influential person believes or says things that are incorrect.

Wikipedia's definition seems excellent to me:

> Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy.

That "some degree" is an important concession. Nobody will be right all the time but the objective of journalism is to discover and present the truth of a topic.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#293

Post by evil-olive »

tptacek wrote: post #51
evil-olive wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

> It's not on him to rebut every single argument Stoller has ever made.

yeah, I never said it was.

Thompson himself says:

> Still, I wanted to spend more time engaging with the arguments of the antitrust housing folks.

he says he wanted to engage with the arguments made by the antitrust left.

which means he chose which of those arguments he was going to engage with.

and he chose to make this a 2-part post about why he thinks the antitrust left is wrong about homebuilding monopolies:

> Thanks for reading. Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of my analysis, where I’ll explain what really happened in Dallas and why I think unaffordability became a national phenomenon if the cause isn’t oligopolies.

now, if there's a part 3 where he talks about RealPage and antitrust as it applies to rentals rather than single-family homebuilding, I'll gladly eat crow.

but until that happens, I'm going to call Thompson intellectually dishonest, because there's a cute little sleight-of-hand trick he's doing here. his opening paragraph:

> The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business.

he's saying some of the best criticisms of his book come from the antitrust left.

and that he's evaluated some of the arguments made by the antitrust left and thinks they're wrong.

if you miss the sleight-of-hand, you might come away thinking that he's responding to the best arguments made about housing by the antitrust left.

but he's pretty clearly not doing that. because the "antitrust left" argument against RealPage doing algorithmic rent-fixing (detailed in a 115-page federal lawsuit [0]) is much stronger than the "antitrust left" argument about homebuilding monopolies in Dallas (detailed in a Substack post by some guy)

0: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1364976/dl?inline

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#294

Post by abdullahkhalids »

Schiendelman wrote: post #223
IFC_LLC wrote: post #221

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…

That's right, and that's caused by restrictions on supply. Almost every problem we have with housing comes down to us restricting how much can be built so much that extremely low quality units are competitive. If you allowed 10 times as much construction, those units wouldn't be able to compete, because other builders would offer better units for the same price.

Apparel markets are much more free and competitive than housing markets, and have basically no restrictions on supply. Yet, the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen. And we get incredibly cheap incredibly low-quality garbage.

These things are much more complex than simplistic single-variable models.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#295

Post by didibus »

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…

> all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed

Did it collapse, or he simply created another dubious narrative to replace the previous one?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#296

Post by tptacek »

jordanb wrote: post #288
Hammershaft wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Many leftists have a problem with zoning deregulation. 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…

I live and am politically active in a front-line municipality for these issues (Oak Park, IL --- the actual redlining bastion of the western suburbs, a 4.5 square mile gravity well for Cook County school funding so egregious it was one of the first examples in Johnny Harris's NYT "Blue States, You're The Problem video) and I'm telling you, straight out, leftist defenses of existing zoning rules are a very real thing. In fact, where I live, they are the entire defense of those zoning rules: progressives have a supermajority of the board.

Leftists are not solely or distinctively responsible for exclusionary zoning and housing restriction in the US. Nationally, they're not even the biggest problem. But in many jurisdictions, places that should be the vanguards and test cases for housing reform, they are the controlling factor.

Which is why Derek Thompson addresses them so directly. What would be the point of aiming these criticisms at Republican-controlled municipalities? They don't share these values to begin with! They're not listening!

Right now, we have two parties actively propping up home values and the interests of the upper middle class. Klein and Thompson propose: what if on this issue we had two parties?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#297

Post by energy123 »

Here's the political solution: Do both public housing and zoning reform.

Unlike zero-sum political disputes where there is a winner and loser, this is a rare issue where both camps can win without impacting the other camp.

What we should not do is give the left their worst ideas, like rent control or stopping AirBNB. Give them their best idea, which is public housing.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#298

Post by jordanb »

tptacek wrote: post #163
lawlessone wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No. Republicans believe in full privatization of schools, Social Security, and Medicare, in flat taxation, the abolition of the regulatory state, the replacement of government-provided services with cash vouchers, and policymaking devolved out to the states. Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs. I've gone out of my way here not to make value judgements; Republicans have coherent arguments for why all th…

> Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs.

Liberals fucking love charter schools, 401ks, they voted against the Illinois progressive income tax (Biden won Illinois big when that got defeated). I could go on. You're so far off the scent.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#299

Post by btreecat »

chubot wrote: post #70
tptacek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You said heavily processed and barely-reported If you want to say Fridman's content is "barely-reported", i.e. he barely does journalism, then I won't really argue. But the interviews are NOT heavily processed, and that's precisely why some on the left won't sit with him. (But not Thompson and Klein, because they actually have something to say.) So ironically, it kinda balances out. Being credulous attracts guests wh…

> ...and that's precisely why some on the left won't sit with him. (But not Thompson and Klein, because they actually have something to say.)

Im sorry but what evidence do you have to support such a claim?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#300

Post by TJSomething »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #123
jerlam wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a much bigger group than homeowners. Banks don't want housing prices to fall, since then homeowners start foreclosing and then banks lose interest payments and own undesired property. Cities don't want housing prices to fall, since they were counting on money from developers and property taxes.

Property taxes are relatively independent from the absolute value of the property. Only the relative value of a property to other properties in municipality determines property taxes.

In Nevada, it's a percentage (approximately 0.5%, varying from city to city and with other conditions, like commercial usage) of its assessed value, which is 35% of taxable value. Taxable value is the market value of the bare land plus the replacement cost for all improvements on the land, less depreciation.
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