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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

#421

Post by aianus »

Tade0 wrote: post #415
spicyusername wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage? Keep building. Eventually there are more houses than people who want to be in them, regardless of whether or not they're being rented or owned. When that happens you'll see the prices fall. After all, if nobody wants to rent your house, you'll either rent it for lower or sell it. If nobody wants to buy it, you'll lower the price. Ad nauseum.

China did that on a large scale, at one point using more concrete in three years than the US in the entire 20th century. There's reportedly enough housing stock to house the population twice over, yet prices still only increased. Where there's sufficient inequality, the country will run out of eligible land before the wealthy run out of money.

Rents in China are dirt cheap and hardly increase if you’re rational about your housing instead of chasing status and face.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#422

Post by dlcarrier »

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

Every metal, and really every commodity, has has recent price hikes above the official BLS CPI numbers.

That says far more about official inflation numbers than it does commodity markets.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#423

Post by eddythompson80 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #418
eddythompson80 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you looking at 2009? Is it because you think it fits your narrative? What happened in 2008 I wonder that may cause companies to be struggling? NYT is a profitable company with majority of their income coming from paid subscriptions. Does that answer your question about how they are different or do you wanna check their revenue split and financials in 1928 too? A business secured a loan from a billionaire afte…

I'm looking at 2009 because the claim above was that newspapers other than the New York Times, but not the New York Times, are subsidized by billionaires, and 2009 is the year that the New York Times had to beg for a subsidy from a billionaire. Was that not clear from my comment?

How is taking a loan a subsidy? do you understand how loans work?

It's no different -> Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers -> well, they were struggling in 2009 -> they took a loan that one time -> ...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#424

Post by cheriot »

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.

Many of the home owners would win in a freer market because their land would be worth more.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#426

Post by tsimionescu »

spicyusername wrote: post #228
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…

What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage? Keep building. Eventually there are more houses than people who want to be in them, regardless of whether or not they're being rented or owned. When that happens you'll see the prices fall. After all, if nobody wants to rent your house, you'll either rent it for lower or sell it. If nobody wants to buy it, you'll lower the price. Ad nauseum.

This only works if all those houses are on the market. Nothing is stopping today's rich people from buying up all new housing, and only letting a handful be on the market so as to not flood the market and not let prices go down.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#427

Post by crooked-v »

gopher_space wrote: post #259
Schiendelman wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Seattle, and this is a scapegoat. it's another way to point a finger at anything but massive restrictions on supply. The easiest solution to collusion to keep prices high is to let lots of other people build and compete down price. In Washington, most new construction happens on a very small number of parcels, because that's the only place we allow it.

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?

And yet action gets taken about the rent price fixing, but not about actually encouraging more building.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#428

Post by ZeroGravitas »

> The Builder’s Daily sounds like an anti-monopoly shop. But in our conversation, McManus sounded like a straight-up YIMBY.

This is a false dichotomy. His opponents are clearly claiming that oligopolies restrict supply. Therefore they are intending to be YIMBY even if they might be wrong about the cause of the restriction.

So this is a weird rhetorical attack that undermines the claims in the rest of the piece.

And now I think about it, it applies to the title too.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#429

Post by jurip »

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…

For what it’s worth, they offer subs via IAP in the iOS App Store. If you subscribe that way, unsubscribing is just a couple of taps.

That €349 per year is pretty steep, though.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#430

Post by meowface »

tptacek wrote: post #291
cocaclub wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it's largely revulsion that Uber ignored regulations, with the revulsion mostly coming from the types of people outraged by things like Newsom's recent CEQA reform.

They support these sorts of stifling rules and believe that skirting or changing those rules is a right-wing ultra-capitalist attack on the public good, despite the situation actually being the exact opposite.

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