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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

#341

Post by tomrod »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #319
TJSomething wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, but if real estate prices half the city can just double the tax from 0.5% to 1%? Correct?

Yes, but every elected official will lose their job at that millage rate increase and you'll have riots.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#342

Post by majormajor »

cocaclub wrote: post #213
crooked-v wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.

Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon. The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.

> Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.

This willfully ignores evidence that community after community has actively passed laws to stop that industry from building more.

Chesterton's Fence: why do those laws exist? Because people thought they were necessary to stop housing construction (especially, but hardly exclusively, densification).

It's not a partisan thing - red states are full of NIMBYs and littered with HOAs too - but the largest cities in red states have happened to not be hit quite as hard yet because they are generally newer cities, with plenty of room to sprawl horizontally still, starting from a lower baseline.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#343

Post by davidw »

crooked-v wrote: post #148
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…

Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.

I have been doing YIMBY stuff for around 8 years now, and it does not map nicely onto any kind of left-right narrative.

There was one conservative dude who ran for city council here who was all about 'private property' and 'get rid of government regulations', who also ran against the idea of liberalizing zoning.

I've met left wing people who I agree with on many issues who will do the most spectacular, Olympic level mental gymnastics to avoid the notion that 'supply and demand' apply to housing.

There are moderate Democrats who are big backers of various reforms. And some on the far left who get that if you want Vienna style social housing, you also need Vienna style zoning and building regulations.

A former mayor here is a moderate Republican - he totally got what we were about and said some really nice things about welcoming new neighbors in one speech a few weeks after he met up with our YIMBY group.

It's just not an issue that - so far - has been slotted into the trench warfare that other issues have been.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#344

Post by munchler »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #35

There 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.

There's also a large lobby group that is fully invested in building new houses, namely real estate developers, and since most politicians at a high level usually need large campaign contributions, they are fully invested in it as well.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#345

Post by eddythompson80 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #290
insane_dreamer wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a large paid subscription base

That's no different from the other papers and magazines. Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers. They relied on advertisements, just like the websites that killed them.

That's not entirely true for NYT as OP mentioned. NYT is 170 years old. They have been through many phases and models.

Luckily NYT is a public company and you can look up their revenue split on the SEC website going back to 1994. In 1994 they had 35% revenue from circulation vs 65% from ads. In 2021 it was 24% ads and 68% subscribers and 8% "Other"

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#346

Post by athrun »

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…

Sounds like you're just applying somewhat arbitrary purity rules to what falls into the "leftist" bucket or not.

I believe that for most people "leftists" means "on the left side of the political spectrum", and so, in the US, it would be a strict superset of democrats & Liberals. But for you, it sounds like it's only subset of these, based on some criteria you haven't made explicit.

Fair enough, but that's a somewhat non-standard definition.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#347

Post by kacesensitive »

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.

I mean by that logic wouldn't the cheap house just cost even less? What about housing prevents it from being a race to the bottom like every other product?

Like yes a nice pair of boots costs more and you do get more value out of them compared to Amazon basics boots.. but far more people end up buying the cheap option because it's cheap and available.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#348

Post by asta123 »

In Australia most of the narrative on the housing affordability crisis is around lack of supply and nimbyism. In the meantime Melbourne has dropped to 4th most expensive city in the country and becoming more affordable. Most likely reason - land tax change in that state which is turning off accumulating multiple properties through investment and investors turning to other states where prices are still going up. So, while supply is relevant, I would say it is investor demand that is driving prices up.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#349

Post by brokencode »

munchler wrote: post #344
ThinkBeat wrote: post #35

There 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.

There's also a large lobby group that is fully invested in building new houses, namely real estate developers, and since most politicians at a high level usually need large campaign contributions, they are fully invested in it as well.

Are you suggesting that the problem with housing is that we are producing too much of it?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#350

Post by bobthepanda »

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…

Also NYT has spent a lot of time and energy into diversifying into things that are not news.

There is a subset of its customers that is only really paying for the games like the crossword. There is a subset only really paying for Cooking. etc.

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