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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

#511

Post by actionfromafar »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #357
gsf_emergency_2 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to derail this thread on journalistic merit.. I just thought that this other thread on housing microeconomics is worth pointing out, to anyone who might be excited about the prospects of enlightened tax policy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961 > This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.

The Rust evangelists don't want you know this, but a land value tax would fix data races

Haha it feels like it makes sense!

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#512

Post by imgabe »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #508
imgabe wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting it still increases the housing supply, someone can live there. I doubt there is any significant amount of housing that is just bought and left vacant. Why would you do that? It’s a stupid and expensive place to park money. You have to pay taxes, possibly condo/co-op/HOA fees, pay someone to do maintenance and keep out squatters, pay transaction costs both buying and selling, it can’t be sold quickly. Why woul…

Banks will not loan you money to put it into the S&P. The wealthy generate money by generating credit in part.

Why would you borrow money and use it to buy a house and leave it vacant? Now you're paying interest on top of everything else. Do you think wealthy people just light money on fire for no reason?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#513

Post by camgunz »

The housing crisis is a cultural problem. We don't want to build density, and we don't want to build transportation, because this all lowers housing values, and besides the millions of homeowners you'll piss off, you'll destabilize an economy primarily built on the mortgage. Not a good reelection plan.

The places you're seeing growth are places where we could buy the land for cheap: suburbs and exurbs. We build huge ass subdivisions and then we run highways to them. This fucks no one's housing value, it bails out struggling/dying land owners, the auto industry loves it, the energy industry loves it, people love their faux-castles with lawn moats, it's a full employment plan to developers, and it's essentially all middle/upper-middle class housing so it's thoroughly unobjectionable to the voting majority.

The reason cities in Texas are out building blue cities is that they just do the suburb/exurb thing. Blue cities don't: where are the workable SF or NYC exurbs? Abundance gets so close, it more or less blames bureaucrats and the Jane Jacobs veto points built into the liberal building process. But these things arise out of the culture on the left, and whether we admit it or not, we like the walled gardens we built. We like our multi-million dollar castles we've got something like $80k in. We like people not driving/riding trams/buses through our neighborhoods, and we vote accordingly.

I personally think this is intractable. I think SF/NYC/etc have reached the ceiling and if we're gonna fix the housing crisis we need to build density elsewhere. I think we should lean heavily into remote work, lighten the infra grid costs with off-grid tech like solar, lighten the construction costs with low-car built environments (few if any parking requirements, rail instead of huge highways for shipping/transit, etc), invest heavily in the schools, and subsidize people moving to these areas--like with cash, not tax rebates. This is essentially "build the exurbs", but the progressive version of it that better meets health and climate goals, while also building communities we know are better for human flourishing (less isolation, more eyes on the street, etc). Focusing on permitting reform or democratic veto points is way, way too small a vision here.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#514

Post by bluecalm »

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.

And excessive regulation is the norm in all of those (at least US and EU, no idea about Japan).

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#515

Post by Tade0 »

aianus wrote: post #421
Tade0 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rents - yes. Real estate - no. One huge sign of the housing market being out of control is the decoupling of renting from real estate prices. There's hardly a stronger indicator of it being irrelevant whether someone lives there or not.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#516

Post by ramchip »

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.

Japan doesn't have a housing crisis. I'm in a great location in Tokyo, the rent is under $750/month, and it's been the same for the decade+ I've been in this specific place.

If there's a problem, it's too many empty homes in aging rural areas. Cities are doing just fine, even with a growing population in Tokyo.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#517

Post by actionfromafar »

tptacek wrote: post #152
nathan_compton wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is a bit definitional, but I do not think of "very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive" people as typically leftist. I think of them as liberal and only in the American brain is that associated with leftism, so much so that we usually distinguish between "leftists" and "liberals" rhetorically. With, say, Hillary Clinton, being a classic American liberal and Bernie Sanders being more like a leftist. If y…

Again, if you try to collapse this down to "leftists" vs "Derek Thompson", you're totally missing the point. Thompson's rhetorical adversary here are "people who believe we shouldn't do the zoning and envelope reforms required to increase the supply of housing", a subset of whom are on the political left and thus in his target audience: his term for them --- fairly applied! --- is "the antitrust left", but you could…

Right-YIMBYs are a tiny minority, but have you seen one in person? Truly a majestic, noble creature. You know they will fiercely stand their own ground but at the same time also go to extreme lengths to avoid putting their noses where they don’t belong.

Long thought extinct, sightings have been reported.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#518

Post by dragonwriter »

athrun wrote: post #433
dragonwriter wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not what “leftist" generally means, it means adherence to any of a broad grouping of anti-capitalist ideologies (the more widely recognizable being the various forms of socialism and communism). It overlaps a little bit with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the US, but beyond that is mostly outside of the US major party system. The only people who use “leftist" to describe a superset of the…

I think you're injecting your personal views into the definition, which don't align with the common meaning of the word. Here's the definition of the word taken from macOS's built-in dictionary (New Oxford American Dictionary): > leftist, noun: a person who has left-wing political views or supports left-wing policies. > left-wing, noun: the section of a political party or system that advocates for greater social and…

> I think you're injecting your personal views into the definition,

I think I'm injecting what I know from getting a degree in political science and a two and half subsequent decades of experience paying attention to how political terminology is used by scholarly, journalistic, popular, and activist sources across the political spectrum into the definition.

> Here's the definition of the word taken from macOS's built-in dictionary

And that's a tolerably decent definition for a relatively compact general dictionary, but it misses a lot of nuance; outside of activist sources using it as a slur for their opponents, it is not used in nearly the local-politics-relevant way that left/right (especially qualified with a national label, like "American left") is.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#519

Post by gwd »

shazbotter wrote: post #501
gwd wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why even bother calling it "left" at this point? Just say they're anti-monopoly. Is there really nobody on the right who are also anti-monopoly?

Presumably because anti monopoly right is much less common? Or because the anti monopoly right is concerned with different aspects of monopoly? If someone said they were anti monopoly, that the government should do something to prevent businesses from operating like that, I'd never expect them to be from the right to be honest.

> If someone said they were anti monopoly, that the government should do something to prevent businesses from operating like that, I'd never expect them to be from the right to be honest.

So consider several perspectives:

a. The government should be in charge of, or at least heavily involved in, planning and organizing most resources in a country.

b. The market is a good way of solving most problems, and it works best if you just leave it alone, enforcing only very minimal rules (like property ownership, contracts, and such).

c. The market can be a good way of solving many problems, if it's regulated so that it has the properties you want.

Now consider other questions: Should abortion or pornography be legal / easily available? Should we invest in a large military? Should the government actively support "diversity" programs? Should gay marriage be allowed? How should the government relate to transgender people?

There are LOTS of people who believe in c as a principle, but have very non-"lefty" opinions on the other questions. Loads of people who consider themselves "on the right" think that everyone "on the left" actually believes a, not c; and loads of people who consider themselves "on the left" think that everyone "on the right" actually believes b, not c.

My sense is actually that the reason he talks that way is to make sure that people who consider themselves "on the left" don't mistake him for being someone "on the right" (and therefore in camp b), and immediately dismiss his claims.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#520

Post by username332211 »

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.

The global issue is that elected representatives are becoming weaker.

The idea that a city hall would need to organize some sort of public meeting before approving a construction project is a fairly new one. The city council is elected to represent the people. If they need "community input" why are they even here? (Nevermind the obvious problem with such participatory process - sane and normal people can't participate in every local government decision unless it's their job. Hence why we have representative democracy.)

If you told someone in the 1980s that the British parliament couldn't impose its will on QUANGOs and local governments to build a rail line, they'd look at you as if you were insane. Parliament's power is supposed to be absolute. Yet that's what's happening with HS2.

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