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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

#361

Post by ch4s3 »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #256
ch4s3 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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.

That’s why I specified NYC. There’s actually very good economic work on how the housing market is segmented and how demand and supply spill over. There’s some good studies from the NYU’s Furman Center on the topic.

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

Warehoused condos make up a small fraction of high cost housing in NYC and exist almost solely in a handful of blocks in Manhattan. They have virtually no effect on the broader luxury market, and take up very little land as they are mostly crammed into a small number of buildings.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#362

Post by jrflowers »

This is one of the funniest articles I’ve read in a a long time. I’m not sure what is better, the “I quite literally set out to find support for my narrative and find exactly one (1) guy that’s both willing to call himself an expert and give me my desired answer for each of my individual points” thing or the lazy neocon virtue signaling

> The antitrust left

I love this phrasing. Derek Thompson has done some Serious Journalism and has discovered that if you support competition between homebuilders you are a Leftist.

Also there isn’t a concentration of homebuilders (in Dallas) but even if there was it doesn’t affect prices (in Dallas). Well there may be a concentration of homebuilders nationally, but Thomson spoke to a guy that doesn’t care about that. Anyway, wasn’t the takeaway from the Great Recession that monopolies are good?

But then I’m not sure he knows what a monopoly is

> If a homebuilding monopoly purposefully made crappy new homes, they’d be out-competed quickly

Or what is a good outcome or a bad outcome

> Can big companies hurt subcontractors by forcing them to accept lower prices?

> “Maybe, but if big homebuilders can offer trades longer guaranteed contracts”

Hmm… they can force subcontractors to accept lower rates, but that’s not that big of a deal because they can force them to accept lower rates for a longer period of time. Like for example it would suck to have your paycheck cut in half but knowing that there’s no chance of it going back up for several years would take the sting out of it. This is the reasoning of somebody that took a Hat Man dose of Benadryl

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#363

Post by tptacek »

wodenokoto wrote: post #351
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…

What does it mean that “so much of what we read is […] barely reported”?

That the people writing it do very little of their own reporting. "Reporting" isn't writing or thinking; it's the act of collecting external facts. Calling a primary source on the phone is reporting; traveling to a location and observing events is reporting. Synthesizing existing facts and reporting is not reporting. It's still journalism! Reporting is a specific practice within journalism.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#364

Post by frollogaston »

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.

That's fine. On one hand the other saying "no" too much will stagnate the local economy, on the other a city doesn't need to accommodate an infinite number of people moving there. Either extreme will hurt property values in the long run, so there's a balance. I've seen places sell themselves out, I've also seen suburban sprawls where naive homeowners feel good about holding a house 20 years only to make 30% gain.

Nobody else should decide the balance but the residents who have semi-permanently set up their lives there. People considering where to move have no skin in the game, they can pick somewhere else if they don't like what they see or can't afford it. Developers at least have something to lose once they've set up shop, but they're still not raising families there. And by "should" I mean, I wouldn't buy a home in a place where homeowners don't have the most say. Those places do exist, and I'd only rent there temporarily.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#365

Post by lokar »

typewithrhythm wrote: post #272
kettlecorn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a more realistic (but depressing) goal is modest loss to inflation (so prices go up by 1-2% less then inflation). If you read between the lines that seems to be what Canada's approach to house affordability is going to be. Their leaders are promising housing will be more "affordable" but that the goal isn't to decrease home prices.

They are going down the same path of making a lower quality product available, then using deceptive averages. I have not seen anything that would create a supply of equally desirable properties (compared with detached dwellings).

Most families being able to afford a detached SFH was a historical anomaly that came with massive costs, and won’t be sustainable long term.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#366

Post by ch4s3 »

vel0city wrote: post #265
ch4s3 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vacancy doesn’t mean units held empty as either a parking place for cash or held off the market. Vacancy happens when you’re painting and repairing between rentals. Vacancy happens when there’s a renovation. Things like that are normal and not nefarious. Have 1.4% vacancy rate means there is essentially no usable housing for rent. I was talking about the myth that there are tons of apartments held by rich people who…

Do you have any actual data on the rate of unoccupied properties that are not recently or soon to be available to rent in any major US markets? It seems like kind of hard data to find from my brief perusing around. I'm very interested in seeing some reliable data on this. I had thought such units would have been included in the housing vacancy statistics, but apparently they are not.

I haven’t spent much time looking at any place other than New York. But there’s census data, tax data, and a lot of public records. The number of empty units is small. The total is probably close to 40k, but that’s a fuzzy number and moving target. That includes regular vacant units.

https://gothamist.com/news/how-many-nyc-apartments-are-vacan...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#367

Post by jdkoeck »

munchler wrote: post #353
brokencode wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, I'm suggesting that one problem with housing is wealthy real estate developers who have undue political influence.

I wish they had more influence, then they’d be able to build more and prices would go down.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#368

Post by frollogaston »

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.

Yep. A town can become desirable after its residents carefully built its character and reputation, then suddenly apartment/condo developers want in.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#369

Post by athrun »

yen223 wrote: post #237
energy123 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mamdani - rent control. Dean Preston - NIMBY. UK Greens Party - NIMBY. Australian Greens Party - NIMBY. Explain?

In the last election, Australia's Green Party was the only party whose housing plan involves actually building homes. The major parties went with throwing more money at the problem.

Aside from the fact that the few policies they made explicit in their platform would actually be counter-productive to getting more supply (such as National-level rent freezes), they also don't have a good track record at the local level when it comes to housing.

I've been very involved in council-level politics where repeatedly the Greens members were aligning themselves with the right-wing members ("ratepayers rights"-type groups) when it came to delaying/blocking development permits, enforcing parking requirements, preventing/delaying rezoning, etc. They fundamentally don't understand the issue at all. All talk, no substance.

And that's before we get to the CFMEU matter, which I think was the final blow for them during the last election.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#370

Post by tptacek »

majormajor wrote: post #342
cocaclub wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

I mean, in my local case, the Chesterton's Fence answer is pretty clearly and directly racism.
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