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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

#551

Post by sampo »

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.

> Housing crisis is observed in almost all what is called "first world" (europe, japan, usa).

You mentioning Japan gives out that you maybe don't know what you are talking about.

> I believe that 90% of the issue is more global than a regulation.

Or maybe the case it, that also globally most urban areas tend to develop a version of excessive regulation.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#552

Post by thrance »

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…

It all makes sense when you take "abundance liberalism" for what it actually is: a rebranding of neoliberalism in support of establishment democrats. Its main goal is not to provide the democratic party with a new direction, but to defend the status quo against the populist left, incarnated by the likes of AOC and Mamdani.

It makes sense then, that they'd spend more time attacking the left than the right, as they realize where the existential threat to the current democratic party lies. Personally, I think it's good that they're afraid.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#553

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cocaclub wrote: post #213
crooked-v wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.

Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon. The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.

> Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon.

The business model of construction companies is to buy a piece of property, develop it and then sell it for something more than the cost of buying it plus the cost of developing it. Constraining supply increases the cost of property which they then have to pay in order to acquire properties to develop. It isn't really in their interest to increase their own costs.

The most significant way it could be is if they were buying lower density units and replacing them with higher density units, so they'd be selling more units than they're buying and therefore benefit from the price per unit increasing. But in order to benefit from that they'd need to be increasing rather than decreasing the supply, which is contrary to the premise of them doing the opposite.

> The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.

Suppose that it would be profitable to buy a single family home and replace it 10 condo units, except that there is a law prohibiting you from doing that. Then it would be more profitable not to build those units, since doing so is illegal. But who is to blame for this?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#554

Post by joenot443 »

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…

It's a shame to let two words color your opinion on an entire piece like that; I found it to be really compelling.

Your last paragraph is a bit confusing; is it your position that Derek's lying? Which quote did you think was inaccurate? Or are you specifically concerned with his rhetoric?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#555

Post by TylerE »

Applejinx wrote: post #532
eddythompson80 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

That's creepy when you consider how much subscription to ALL newspapers has collapsed between 1994 and 2021.

Tells you how hard advertising collapsed in the same time period. I was at a small chain of local papers from about '09-'13. I saw it first hand.

Classifieds used to be a cash cow... not EASY money nessesairly, it's made $20 or so at the time, but it was a lot of money. Things like apartments for rent or cars for sale.

Then craigslist came a long and killed that.

Similarly ads went from large purchases, often for very large placements (we'd do things like sell rights to entire sections for flat fees), went to Pay Per Impression models paying hundreths of a cent, with no guarantees or minimums.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#556

Post by thrance »

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.

And who will build homes if there's no one to buy them?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#557

Post by bearl »

gwd wrote: post #540
mft_ wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the underlying beliefs of a 'left' anti-monopolist and a 'right' anti-monopolist are likely very different, and similarly their proposed solutions and view of an ideal society will also diverge significantly? --- Also, it should be noted that we lack sufficiently concise but specific terms to use instead, and because alternative terms that are used are relative, and open to interpretation. e.g.: Many politica…

> Because the underlying beliefs of a 'left' anti-monopolist and a 'right' anti-monopolist are likely very different, and similarly their proposed solutions...? Just curious, how "left" and "right" anti-monopolist solutions might be different? I mean, naturally some "left anti-monopolist" people might be in favor of governments taking over industries, but presumably that's not what most of the people in question are…

Right anti-monopolistic policy: tariffs

Left anti-monopolistic policy: destroy Musk via the press/court system.

It can just be an empirical question, right?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#558

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

energy123 wrote: post #182
nathan_compton wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is good, but the phrase "antitrust left" really turned me off. I am probably some kind of a leftist (I want higher taxes on rich people and a society much more welfare oriented with a substantial degree of labor and resource allocation performed democratically instead of by markets) but I don't know a single leftist who actually cares about this housing shit except to think that houses should be cheaper…

Mamdani - rent control. Dean Preston - NIMBY. UK Greens Party - NIMBY. Australian Greens Party - NIMBY. Explain?

UK Greens aren't NIMBYs. They're against doing more of what's being done across UK cities already - which is building generic boxy blocks of cheap housing that look like they fell out of Minecraft, and selling them for unreasonable prices.

Many of the flats end up in the hands of landlords, who charge even more unreasonable rents.

There is no sense in which that's a workable long-term solution to the housing problem.

The Green pitch is "That's clearly not working, let's not do more of it." Which has nothing in common with "We don't want anyone to build anything anywhere."

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#559

Post by oftenwrong »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #294
Schiendelman wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right, and that's caused by restrictions on supply. Almost every problem we have with housing comes down to us restricting how much can be built so much that extremely low quality units are competitive. If you allowed 10 times as much construction, those units wouldn't be able to compete, because other builders would offer better units for the same price.

Apparel markets are much more free and competitive than housing markets, and have basically no restrictions on supply. Yet, the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen. And we get incredibly cheap incredibly low-quality garbage. These things are much more complex than simplistic single-variable models.

I don't think clothing quality has fallen. Quite the opposite. We are able to buy high quality clothing at a very low price. More advanced materials, more consistent construction, better construction, greater selection, etc.

Much of what you can buy today did not even exist 30 years ago. For example, trail running shoes more or less did not exist. Perhaps you could have had a pair custom made, at a high price, with the worse materials available at the time, but today you can them "off the shelf".

Even the many shirts I've received for free are very high quality and have endured years of abuse.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#560

Post by spicyusername »

thrance wrote: post #556
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.

And who will build homes if there's no one to buy them?

Having more homes than people want to buy would be an amazing problem to have.
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