Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

derekthompson.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 817 posts

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#581

Post by CPLX »

grafmax wrote: post #467
tptacek wrote: post #5

So much of the journalism we read is heavily processed and barely-reported and it's startling to see how much of a superpower simple shoe-leather reporting actually is. Derek Thompson's an incredibly sharp writer, but not really a subject matter expert on housing economics; all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed. We're often so down on j…

Abundance YIMBYism has many shortcomings. It doesn't address the risk of gentrification and displacement, the slow and unproven trickle-down effect of market-rate housing, or the critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities. Journalistic ideologues deserve little praise for dismantling the weakest counterarguments of their opponents while ignoring core criticisms.

What it doesn’t address is the role of finance and the financial sector in explaining why things are the way they are.

It’s not just a missing detail it’s fatal to their entire argument.

Which isn’t an accident, since the goal of the “abundance movement” is to stop the actual progressive movements that want to take on concentrated financial power.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#582

Post by chii »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #541
ramchip wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It didn't. But it's entering one now. New apartment prices in Tokyo are double what they were a few years ago. [1] The reason is foreign investors buying up loads of properties and sitting on them or turning them into AirBNBs. Locals can't afford them because wages aren't increasing. The concept of buying a property to resell it also isn't a thing amongst locals, so it's clueless rich people and corporations buying u…

> it's clueless rich people and corporations buying up properties and thinking they can flip them

so the original owner got a nice priced deal out of the sale. Then, when said clueless rich person decides to sell in the future due to being unable to hold on to it any more, they make a loss (which is a gain for that future buyer, whoever they are).

> after a few years of squeezing, locals may have no choice but to pay their entire paycheck to foreign investors

why the squeeze? If the airBNB is being occupied, then it simply means the price for the rental was correct, and it was artificially low before (due to the demand not being met for short term stays).

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#583

Post by solatic »

camgunz wrote: post #513

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…

SF is surrounded by water on three sides. Palo Alto was the suburb. San Jose was the exurb. You could build 50 story towers all over San Francisco and it wouldn't suddenly make it feasible to build on water.

New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.

The US simply needs to build new cities, and link them with high-speed rail. You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries) and directing it to places that would fit according to a high-speed-rail master plan. Opportunity Zones have shown a lot of promise at helping to direct capital to under-developed regions, but the lack of a larger master plan in helping link these regions with better transportation links and job creation has prevented them from reaching their full potential.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#584

Post by Telemakhos »

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.

Nobody pays for news from the NYT. NYT is a game developer that also provides news on the side. Their games are their main draw; my gf subscribes and never reads the news.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media...

The legacy media were advertising companies who also happened to provide news. People aren't willing to subscribe for advertising, but they will for games.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#585

Post by carlosjobim »

piva00 wrote: post #492
bobsmooth wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 newsp…

> 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.

Yet people love their monthly subscriptions to listen to a song or an album (Spotify), or to watch a movie (Netflix). It's clear to me that the future of written content, especially news, is mass syndication (like you mention). Where you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a wast library of content from different sources.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#586

Post by energy123 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #558
energy123 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Dehydrated man, after drinking one glass of water, rejects more water, reasoning that he's still thirsty.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#587

Post by wilkommen »

Monopolistic activity and corporate consolidation are driving up prices in many industries in the United States. Why wouldn't corporate consolidation be a major factor in driving up housing prices, like it is in so many other sectors? I am suspicious of journalists like Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein because their solutions seem to punch down on municipal governments and homeowners instead of punching up at our nation's corporate masters and elite class, who would be much more threatened by effective antitrust action against homebuilders than they would by a movement to deregulate zoning in cities. I am open to the idea that excessively restrictive zoning could be a part of the problem, maybe even a big part. But I am skeptical of anyone who wants to act like excessive regulation is the sole driver of skyrocketing housing prices. It doesn't hold water to me.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#588

Post by ImHereToVote »

imgabe wrote: post #512
ImHereToVote wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You rent out or naturally. If most buildings in a given area are rented out. Then the owners have leverage on the renters.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#589

Post by camgunz »

solatic wrote: post #583
camgunz wrote: post #513

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…

SF is surrounded by water on three sides. Palo Alto was the suburb. San Jose was the exurb. You could build 50 story towers all over San Francisco and it wouldn't suddenly make it feasible to build on water. New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs. The US simply needs to build new cities, and link them with high-spee…

> SF is surrounded by water on three sides. Palo Alto was the suburb. San Jose was the exurb. You could build 50 story towers all over San Francisco and it wouldn't suddenly make it feasible to build on water.

> New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.

All kinds of places overcome these things. Pittsburgh, Hong Kong, etc. etc. Bridges and tunnels. NYC was doing this, but mysteriously stopped. SF and NYC don't even come close to densities in many Asian cities. You can think two things about this: we reject that kind of density, or we reject moving a city's center of commerce to a more geographically scalable area. For some reason, we put a low ceiling on density and refused to move where the jobs were, and I'm saying that reason was liberals culturally resisting it. We simply liked the status quo.

> The US simply needs to build new cities...

Extreme, full agree. Even if I disagree w/ you as to the causes of building woes in blue cities, I think we agree it's not worth it to fix. Let's try some new things.

> You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries)

Something that's different now than the last time we did this is that those large industries aren't gonna be (well, at least shouldn't be) places like auto plants or steel mills. I think the "large industries" part of your prescription should be some level of new tech.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#590

Post by germinalphrase »

tptacek wrote: post #324
starkparker wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know why people blame the internet, the drop in rewards for journalism, the pressures to churn out text, that has led to. But I'd also emphasise that it's a vocational skill that not everyone is built for, or trained to do. As someone both built for and trained to do it, I can tell you I'd be making at least US$150k/year less if I was still doing it. I wager I'd be short about $1.25M in career earnings through ju…

Urban primary school teachers get a pretty attractive comp package these days!

This is very region dependent. When I left education for consulting after 10 years as a HS teacher, I was making 55k. I started at 38k.
Post reply on HN