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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

#391

Post by imgabe »

moneycantbuy wrote: post #385

Gary's Economics claims wealth inequality is at the root of housing unaffordability. Basically as wealth concentration grows, the ultra-rich bid up the assets. See the price of gold doubling in the past few years. Government stimulus is also captured by the richest. It's also a global phenomenon, i.e., every major city is now unaffordable for most people. https://youtu.be/BTlUyS-T-_4?si=P0mdHxtq1F7DV4jo

This doesn't make sense. Each wealthy family can only live in one house at a time. Yes, they might have multiple homes, but a billionaire having a luxury vacation home in Lake Tahoe or a penthouse in Manhattan are not the reason housing is unaffordable. The type of home a billionaire would buy would never be affordable anyway.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#392

Post by munchler »

jdkoeck wrote: post #389
munchler wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for building more housing, as long as it comes with the necessary infrastructure - schools, roads, parking, public transportation, etc. Where I live, developers seem to get government approval to build in locations where they can rake in a lot of money at high prices without having to worry about such things. (In fact, my local government is actually closing roads near new housing because "f#ck cars" is appar…

Your own example seems to show that the culprit lies with local governance, not developers, wouldn’t you agree?

No. Let's not pretend that it's OK for developers to try to obtain undue influence over government officials.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#393

Post by firecall »

api wrote: post #175
Animats wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else. The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, c…

The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars. Would people pay for real journalism?

Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media.

You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf...

Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boost circulation. In fact, they still do.

You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#394

Post by freetime2 »

setopt wrote: post #339
Animats wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The Economist regularly goes on sale at discountmags.com. For years it was $1/week, but recently the price increased to $75/yr. It's not on sale at the moment, but for anyone interested, I recommend setting up a deal alert at slick deals [1] to get notified the next time it's on sale - probably around Black Friday / Christmas.

I have been subscribing to the Economist through DiscountMags for over a decade now, and consider DiscountMags to be a totally legitimate business. DiscountMags does automatically enroll you for their "DiscountLock" auto-renewal when you place an order, but you can turn it off at any time through their website without talking to anyone (and I would recommend turning off DiscountLock as it no longer locks in the original price like it used to... so better to just re-up during a sale period).

[1] https://slickdeals.net/f/18290980-the-economist-magazine-1-y...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#395

Post by moneycantbuy »

imgabe wrote: post #391
moneycantbuy wrote: post #385

Gary's Economics claims wealth inequality is at the root of housing unaffordability. Basically as wealth concentration grows, the ultra-rich bid up the assets. See the price of gold doubling in the past few years. Government stimulus is also captured by the richest. It's also a global phenomenon, i.e., every major city is now unaffordable for most people. https://youtu.be/BTlUyS-T-_4?si=P0mdHxtq1F7DV4jo

This doesn't make sense. Each wealthy family can only live in one house at a time. Yes, they might have multiple homes, but a billionaire having a luxury vacation home in Lake Tahoe or a penthouse in Manhattan are not the reason housing is unaffordable. The type of home a billionaire would buy would never be affordable anyway.

Bill Gates owns 275,000 acres in the USA. I doubt he's even gazed upon half of it. The billionaires aren't buying homes to live in like us proles, they're buying lots of finite land and water rights and such.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#396

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#397

Post by jdminhbg »

tptacek wrote: post #340
tptacek wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#399

Post by herf »

Correlation isn't causation - the post here says smaller homebuilders can't get financing right now, and so a supply shortage is correlated with larger actors who can, but it isn't caused by concentration directly. The question is if government can have remedies for broken markets other than breaking up companies, because here it sounds like "fixing builder financing" would help:

https://x.com/NewsLambert/status/1951100530341847343

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#400

Post by thaumasiotes »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #345
thaumasiotes wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

The Washington Post is also a public company (before 2013). In their 2009 filing, they state that the newspaper's revenue (in 2008) was 51% ads, with the other 49% not attributed.

At that time operating expenses exceeded revenues by 25 million dollars, though this was not an immediate problem for them because they owned several other more profitable companies.

By contrast, in that same year the New York Times announced that they had managed to stave off insolvency by securing a large personal loan from Carlos Slim, who went on to become their biggest shareholder.

How are we distinguishing between these two newspapers? What's supposed to be "exceptional" about the New York Times?

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