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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

#331

Post by tptacek »

jordanb wrote: post #306
tptacek wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016 (probably calling Bernie a sexist) and voted for Biden and against progressive income tax in 2020. They are not leftists. You seem to be having some trouble understanding the difference between democrats, liberals, and leftists. T&K are fundamentally dishonest about the role of euclidean zoning in american cities, who supports it a…

You couldn't be more wrong; this is absolutely Bernie country. In the primaries, it made Washtenaw County MI look like Maricopa County. No, I think I understand just fine what I'm talking about.

Again: this is one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the country.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#332

Post by pj_mukh »

jordanb wrote: post #306
tptacek wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016 (probably calling Bernie a sexist) and voted for Biden and against progressive income tax in 2020. They are not leftists. You seem to be having some trouble understanding the difference between democrats, liberals, and leftists. T&K are fundamentally dishonest about the role of euclidean zoning in american cities, who supports it a…

"I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016"

Its both. That's the problem. In my neighborhood, the construction of any market rate housing will be blocked by Hillary voting land-owners and single family home owners and card-carrying Bernie Bros mad that a private developer even gets to set foot in the city.

It's this alliance that has basically blocked housing in most metro cities.

When it comes to 100% affordable housing, yes the Hillary voters are on their own, but those are like 1-2 headline causing projects. For every affordable housing project there are 10 market rate housing projects that never even see the light of day.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#334

Post by bugglebeetle »

Schiendelman wrote: post #267
gopher_space wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it simply doesn't matter. The only reason it could have any impact at all is in an incredibly constrained market. Unconstrain the market and they just won't be able to; it wouldn't work. Also - I don't think it actually affects prices. It's just that they've gotten good at seeking price equilibrium.

“Yes” would’ve been a sufficient answer.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#335

Post by matthavener »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #84

i hope the next part of his article covers the zoning issues. because I'm certainly not seeing the zoning issues making the homes be on bigger lots or requiring things like 3 car garages? If anything the lots in new tract developments in dallas fort worth are smaller and have less land using features like they don't have alleys. and then in Dallas city limits any small slice of land that can possibly be used for new…

It's absolutely a zoning issue. The Texas legislature is literally overriding large cities to force them to allow smaller lot sizes. Most of Dallas, for example, is R-7.5, which drives up cost because land is expensive and it requires you to dedicate a lot of it to your yard (max 45% coverage). Only a few areas, like some PDs in old east Dallas, have been rezoned to allow the smaller lots, though you seem to believe its all of Dallas city limits.

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/01/texas-legislature-sm... https://developmentweb.dallascityhall.com/publiczoningweb/#d... https://dallascityhall.com/departments/sustainabledevelopmen...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#336

Post by Mtinie »

Onavo wrote: post #200
hamhock666 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't people already pay for things like the NYT? I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.

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…

I’m reasonably sure that most of the national-level news media companies have been owned by millionaires (and now billionaires) for the last century. William Randolph Hearst, E.W. Scripps, the Ochs-Sulzberger family, Raoul H. Fleischmann, Cyrus H. K. Curtis are a few of the prominent wealthy owners of nationally-distributed news outlets and publications in 1925. Back farther to the Civil War you find more “independent” publications but it’s a challenge to determine which of them were privately owned by individuals of considerable wealth vs. those owned by their publishers who may or may not have been wealthy.

For a current breakdown, see: Index of News Media Ownership: https://futureofmedia.hsites.harvard.edu/index-us-mainstream...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#337

Post by cyberlurker »

didibus wrote: post #312

Most interesting proposal I heard on this topic, is that the solution to housing prices is to ban renting altogether. It's so radical that it's almost impossible to predict if it would be better or worse. But at least it had the moral ground that rent is one of the last remnant of pre-capitalist lords and barons economies. The idea being it would commoditize housing. Millions of units would now be for sale, prices wo…

Prices would drop where homes are commonly rented. I suppose rent could turn into lease to own in the interim period. It’s an interesting idea, I wonder if any economists have played it out.

What about those people that have homes but rent out a room? Or a townhouse that has 3 units, but the landlord lives in one?

I guess they could sell the units or move to a smaller place, but I think there may be an adverse effect of potential housing staying locked up because there isn’t a legal way to preserve options of ownership. It may decrease housing in some instances. Which force is more powerful though, I am not sure.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#338

Post by imgabe »

simpaticoder wrote: post #56

What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage? Even if supply is eased, the wealthy (those who have enough capital to earn passive income) will buy the extra supply and rent to the poor. The Piketty effect takes over, they invest their profit in more housing, wealth inequality continues to get worse, and while more housing exists, it owned by an increasingly small cohort. Personally I'd like to s…

Higher supply still means lower prices. Even if "the wealthy" buy it all and rent it, they are still competing with all the other wealthy who are doing the same thing and that will limit how much they can charge for rent, and will make it a less profitable investment than other things the wealthy could invest in.

Housing is not really a great investment. It's great for small investors because it's the only place where they can invest with leverage via a mortgage. If you have billions there's much better things you can invest in.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#339

Post by setopt »

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…

I love their writing, but I hate their subscriptions. The only way to cancel is to talk to customer service via chat or phone, who will keep begging and insisting that you not cancel and offering discounts to try to stop you. When I finally did manage to cancel, it required at least half an hour of insisting to some salesman.

I originally planned to just take a break, but after that distasteful cancellation procedure, I didn’t feel like resubscribing.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#340

Post by tptacek »

tptacek wrote: post #304
regularization wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lea…

Link? I'd love to read countervailing reporting.

I want to say something about Stoller bringing a knife to a gunfight but really this fight only required Thompson to have a telephone.

https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1951083395146231957

What did Stoller think was going to happen? Calling people up on the phone is Thompson's entire schtick at this point.

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