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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

#491

Post by olddustytrail »

meowface wrote: post #434
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

I know very little about economics so I can only parrot what I've heard from others but the consensus from everyone I've personally heard talk about Gary - not just Abundists - is that he's a crank when it comes to economics.

Really? I've never heard that. He seems reasonable to me. Can you provide a link where someone dismisses him as a "crank"?

I'd be interested to see whose opinion this is.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#492

Post by piva00 »

bobsmooth wrote: post #386
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?

>Would people pay for real journalism? See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.

The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable.

All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue.

Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#493

Post by whoknowsidont »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #470
whoknowsidont wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notably, he never included the full conversation. It's almost like the question asked to the economic professors and their responses are completely different from the way the questions are presented in the article. Claims and questions the target article never mentions or implies. I think there's like, I don't know, a few fallacies named for such practices. But hey, don't take my word for it. Here's Musharbash very p…

Disagree with him if you want but calling Thompson a grifter makes it hard for me to take anything Musharbash seriously or want to dive deeper into whatever he's written.

"If you point out that someone I like is doing something bad, that's too uncomfortable and I'll just stop listening" - You

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#494

Post by 0xB31B1B »

grafmax wrote: post #480
dlcarrier wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market rate housing doesn't need to trickle down. Most NIMBY regulations focus on the prevention of building low-value housing. Let developers flood the market with small, high density units, and they'll be cheap right away.

Developers are incentivized to build whatever units are most profitable, not what lowest income people need. More expensive units make more money. Besides that, land and construction are both limited resources that constrain developers ability to “flood the market with small, high density units.” For example in high-land-value urban areas, developers need to build expensive units to be able to make a profit.

there are a ton of build code issues in the US that raise the cost of construction without substantionally improving benefits. As an example, I am in Europe right now, most apartment buildings here have single stair entry and smaller elevators, both of which are prevented by US building regs for bad reasons. Fixing these regs would expand the market for new construction at the low end (lower costs for marginal opportunities) and the high end (makes 4 unit condos feasable).

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#495

Post by __turbobrew__ »

antisthenes wrote: post #407
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property taxes are relatively independent from the absolute value of the property. Only the relative value of a property to other properties in municipality determines property taxes.

> Property taxes are relatively independent from the absolute value of the property. In most places they are not. What would even compel you to write something like this? Property values are regularly re-assessed according to recent sales and a % of the property value is then levied as tax.

Ok, where does the percentage come from? It is an arbitrary number set by the municipality to collect enough money from the property owners. Basically, if the city needs $100 million/year to operate it is just going to tweak the tax rate to hit that income number.

For example, in Vancouver the residential tax rate is around 0.15% and homes average around $2 million. Where I live which is a few hundred kilometres away the residential tax rate is around 0.5% and homes average around $600k. If you do the math, for both places the average place has $3000/year in taxes due — which is totally independent of house costs.

What does make the difference is if your house is more expensive than the average house. If you have a $2million dollar house in the place with 0.5% tax rate you are paying $10000/year in taxes despite your counterpart in Vancouver with a $2million dollar house is paying $3000/year.

I get this can be different across the world, but that is generally how it works in Canada.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#496

Post by hdgvhicv »

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…

If there’s 1 million people and 2 million houses then the wealthy aren’t going to be. Using up to rent out as the return on investment will trend to zero.

If there’s 1 million people and 500k houses they will buy them up because everyone needs somewhere to live and will keep paying more and more to avoid the overcrowded slums that someone has to live in.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#497

Post by 0xB31B1B »

podgorniy wrote: post #477
999900000999 wrote: post #352

Excessive regulation is 90% of it. Here's how a rational market works. If I build an apartment complex, eventually those apartments will get older and more affordable. And even before that upper middle class folks will move in, freeing up their previous homes. But that's not how many in local governments see it. So you have affordable housing quotas on new developments. You have developers building units for the home…

> Excessive regulation is 90% of it. Housing crisis is observed in almost all what is called "first world" (europe, japan, usa). I believe that 90% of the issue is more global than a regulation.

where is the housing crises in japan?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#498

Post by [deleted] »

antisthenes wrote: post #407
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property taxes are relatively independent from the absolute value of the property. Only the relative value of a property to other properties in municipality determines property taxes.

> Property taxes are relatively independent from the absolute value of the property. In most places they are not. What would even compel you to write something like this? Property values are regularly re-assessed according to recent sales and a % of the property value is then levied as tax.

[deleted]

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#499

Post by hdgvhicv »

627467 wrote: post #379
dandanua wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will not work if there is an exponential wealth inequality in a society, which is where everything is heading.

Can you explain "exponential wealth inequality"? Sounds a bit like "problem A is unsolvable because - look at here! - no one is solving problem C!"

40 years ago you could buy a share in American companies for an hours work.

Today you have to work 25 hours to buy the same share

In 40 years time you’ll have to work 4 months to buy what in 1985 would cost 1 hour.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#500

Post by 0xB31B1B »

didibus wrote: post #287

I just couldn't keep reading with the constant "antitrust left" being refered to on every sentence. The issue, is that for me, the reader, it framed the piece as the author seemingly positioning themselves as the "the other side", the one that knows best and isn't those "antitrust left". It felt like it was creating a strawman and was engaging in tribal signaling. And when you consider the rest of the piece was them…

There is a specific group of people, matt stoller being the primary leader in the media, who are the "anti trust left". There is another specific group of people who are "abundance liberals" (dereck thompson and ezra klein being main media leaders) and there is an active competition inside the democratic/left of center politico-academic-policy-legal-media blob over prioritization of laypeoples attention and allegiance/belief which is in fact a finite resource and relatively zero sum between the two camps.
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