The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong • Hacker News Board

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#621

Post by dv_dt » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

shazbotter wrote: post #439

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…

I'm about as far left as you can be, as a syndicalist anarchist, and I definitely perceived a bit of what you described. But I'm not super worried about it because he didn't say "the left", but rather a specific lefty position. But also, the left isn't uniform on housing policy. Some folks want anti trust and limited capital ownership. Some folks want to de commodify housing. Some folks want all housing to be governm…

The people the article quoted as "left" like Stoller are really not left, and the whole anti-left felt more like a unnecessary strawman label and definite turn off for me reading it. I would characterize Stoller as an independent anti-monopolist - not really on the right or left spectrum at all politically. Unless the right is now pro-monopoly.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#622

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #519

shazbotter wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bes…

[deleted]

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#623

Post by woooooo » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

lanfeust6 wrote: post #604

woooooo wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its about the message. Centering the message on something that has indirect, timelagged effects and isnt even actionable at the federal level is terrible messaging strategy for the national party. "The dairy industry ran ads saying milk was good for you for 20 years and sales went down. Then they tried 'got milk' and sales went up" https://youtu.be/keCwRdbwNQY?si=kc14Ms7ECxglNgbl

"Build more" is direct and actionable. Regulatory reform is only one dimension. Up north, Carney ran on a platform of building 500k homes annually, approx double the rate of housing starts. That's direct and done at the federal level, with billions in financing. It's impossible to be less timelagged than that by way of policy. So-called "affordable housing" qua government funding development (price controls after the…

> "Build more" is direct and actionable. Regulatory reform is only one dimension.

I could get behind "build more" much more easily than "abundance". You're onto something there IMO.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#624

Post by NiloCK » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

The antitrust pushback against regulatory efforts to increase housing development is approaching a reversal of that New Yorker cartoon.

[ set in an urban tent city ]

"Sure, we destroyed the expectation of dignified living standards, but the glorious fact remains that we've capped returns to certain shareholders."

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#625

Post by potato3732842 » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

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…

>Just curious, how "left" and "right" anti-monopolist solutions might be different?

Regulating monopolies out of existence vs deregulating them out of existence.

Both approaches have obvious situations they fail in that their peddlers are careful to frame the discussion to avoid.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#626

Post by tvier » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

talkingtab wrote: post #611

Fish Tank Thinking is where your thinking is so constrained by some artificial walls that you cannot actually ... well actually think. It is the wages stupid. Let me repeat that. It is the wages stupid. What happens when a society is so brain washed that it cannot even consider that if you don't pay people they can't afford housing. Or cars. Or medical care. Or food. If you actually have some desire to consider the p…

While I 100% agree that there are wage issues, the question with housing is why it's growing faster than general inflation.

House prices seem to be increasing fastest in places with high incomes. This leads me to believe increasing incomes wouldn't solve this particular problem.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#627

Post by margalabargala » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #553

cocaclub wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inc…

> 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.

Let's say for a moment that this is close but not quite actually the business model.

Let's say that the construction companies have spent a long time buying up vacant lots, faster than they are developing them, such that they now have a large inventory of land and would not have costs go up to continue operating if they did what you say.

What would you expect would happen in that case?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#628

Post by grafmax » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #534

grafmax wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more than just extra fixtures and interior walls but bathrooms, kitchens, plumbing, and HVAC - some of the most expensive parts of a build. For example if a developer has 4,000 square foot of land, and it costs $1.6 million to build 4 units selling at $2.4 million total - vs costing $1.2 million to build a luxury unit selling at $2.2 million, they will build the single luxury unit. The overall price for the cons…

> It’s more than just extra fixtures and interior walls but bathrooms, kitchens, plumbing, and HVAC - some of the most expensive parts of a build. That isn't necessarily saving anything. A 4000 square foot unit could very plausibly have four baths and HVAC zones, especially if it's a luxury unit. Meanwhile not doing that is exactly the sort of thing the existing rules nefariously prohibit. Suppose you want to turn th…

A developer in our example would still profit by offering a luxury unit with 3 bathrooms instead of 4. But you’re right that there will often be multiple baths and HVAC systems in a luxury unit - although electrical, plumbing, and fire suppression systems still scale up with the number of units.

And kitchens remain a problem. Your dorm-style kitchen layout is creative, but the problem with this idea is that there is very little demand for dorm-style housing. Developers are able to charge higher prices for more conventional layouts - where the demand is - which is what they will build even in the absence of regulation.

Markets can handle some things well but the inability to provide merit goods (like housing) is one of their shortcomings. Unfortunately we need policies with more scope and ambition than YIMBYism if we want to tackle society’s larger problems.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#629

Post by cwmma » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

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…

Yeah this article treats it like an either/or situation where monopoly's somehow make it so regulations aren't the issue instead of what most of the monopoly takes say which is that monopoly builders make the situation worse and combine with the other problems.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#630

Post by LargeWu » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC

grafmax wrote: post #485

tptacek wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive muni (almost certainly in the top 5 nationally), and my primary political project is zoning reform, and I assure you that left-NIMBYism is a thing, and that the "we should make blue state governments perform better and increase supply of things people want" thesis of "Abundance" (Thompson and Klein's book) is a bête noire among those leftists. The argument isn't t…

> Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. “Abundance” appeals to the financial backers of the Democratic Party because deregulation doesn’t threaten them. But our problems are much graver that what YIMBYism can address: authoritarianism, climate change, austerity, warmongering toward China. It’s because the wealthy block left-wing populism that so many people have turned to right-w…

"Abundance" directly addresses climate change in the book. The scenario it describes is that we need to electrify at a pace far beyond what we're doing today in order to find off climate change, but large scale clean energy projects are often stymied by red tape and legal challenges. Also lack of government investment in scientific research.