The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

Post by nikanj » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 6:39 AM UTC

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #192

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…

My gut feeling is that wealthy people buying up the housing stock to rent out is not actually as common just supply restrictions not meeting the demands of individuals. I used to live in Vancouver, and on my street almost all occupants were owners. But guess what, the number of houses on that street has not changes in 100 years, and the number of people who want to live in Vancouver has probably increased tenfold. Th…

Post by nikanj » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 6:41 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #426

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.

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.

Post by bboygravity » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 6:42 AM UTC

hamhock666 wrote: post #186

api wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Post by mejutoco » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 6:43 AM UTC

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…

Post by eddythompson80 » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 6:50 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #444

eddythompson80 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -> ...

If the NYT could sell those shares at the market price, they'd have been able to sell them to public markets. The only reason they'd possibly have to transacting with an individual is if there was something about the deal that exceeded the debt or equity financing available publicly.