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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

#681

Post by jajko »

potato3732842 wrote: post #652
derbOac wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In California you can literally just claim a new highrise will block your sunlight and make you sad. That's enough to delay a construction So what's the problem? Land use should be regulated imho, just like air pollution and other commons phenomena. I don't care what kind of towel you buy to dry yourself off with, but I do care if a developer affects the environment and housing around it.

>So what's the problem? That is not a sufficient justification to infringe upon property rights. While I'm sympathetic to the whining about "well they're a big business interest they oughta be able to work around the constraints" we are at least nominally all equal under the law where those things trickle down and at the end of the day that type of garbage winds up most applying to the little guy who can't afford law…

But you are infringing on others property rights just because you consider your rights higher and better than others and your cause holier than theirs. May be true or not, not something I nor you can judge objectively. Your rights end where others' begin and so on.

If by property rights you mean your right to have house/apartment where you like it, otherwise no idea what you mean.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#682

Post by arl79 »

adamc wrote: post #670
firecall wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media. You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf... Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boos…

"You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight." I have literally never seen this. In the US?

In Europe for instance

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#683

Post by bullfightonmars »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #483
bullfightonmars wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason housing isn't being built, it was regulated out of existence.

It's simplistic to say that the US car market is "regulated out of existence". Consider how huge trucks that mow down children because they can't even be seen over the hood are unregulated, even incentivised. (1) Wrong regulation, maybe. But not merely "too much regulation". 1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480122 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar... https://www.vox.com/future-perf…

You are right of course. I was being flip. There are multiple reasons it is no longer profitable for car companies to make small trucks. CAFE regs are part of that.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#684

Post by podgorniy »

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.

UPD I'm wrong about Japan. Thanks for pointing out.

Add UK, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands to the list of countries with housing crisis.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#685

Post by CWuestefeld »

carlosjobim wrote: post #585
piva00 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One big difference there is that for the vast majority of people, they can get the vast majority of their music or video content from that single service (or at worst a small number of them).

But for reading news articles, there's a LOT of diversification. It's nowhere near one-stop shopping. In fact, a responsible reader ought to want to diversify points of view to avoid bubbles.

Of course, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of an industry consortium allowing a reader to pay into a single pool and read content from many sources, with payment distributed in some equitable manner.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#686

Post by davidw »

tptacek wrote: post #340
tptacek wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link? I'd love to read countervailing reporting.

I want to say something about Stoller bringing a knife to a gunfight but really this fight only required Thompson to have a telephone. https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1951083395146231957 What did Stoller think was going to happen? Calling people up on the phone is Thompson's entire schtick at this point.

BTW, you can use 'xcancel' (or even post the Blue Sky links) if you don't want to give traffic to the guy reposting what's in the screenshot:

https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3lv6ul7x...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#687

Post by CWuestefeld »

firecall wrote: post #393
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?

Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media. You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf... Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boos…

You're really just observing that the marginal cost of reading is tiny. That doesn't mean that the fixed cost of producing an article or edition isn't very large, and needs to be paid for somehow.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#688

Post by davidw »

grafmax wrote: post #593
niam wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't address the risk of gentrification and displacement This is a puzzling critique because it seems very much in the wheelhouse of "abundance YIMBYism" to advocate for cheaper housing--an argued byproduct of which is that fewer people are displaced. It probably changes the problem statement of gentrification since, if housing is abundant and displacement is low, there's not much to distinguish "gentrificati…

This “abundance” ideology which aims to influence Democratic policy promotes YIMBYism to address housing shortages by deregulating construction. It’s this claimed benefit I’m criticizing. Public housing does address this issue, which is why I bring it up. Similarly, gentrification is enabled by this narrow focus on YIMBYism. Upzoning increases land value. Developers build profitable market rate houses there. This inc…

> Public housing

You can't have Vienna style public housing without having Vienna style zoning codes and building codes.

Most of the housing in Vienna would be illegal to build in like 99% of American cities.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#689

Post by CPLX »

graeme wrote: post #326
didibus wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume I'm somewhat impartial, I don't know this author, it's the first time I hear of the "antitrust left" or of the argument that big monopoly builder purposely keep the market scarce to increase prices. And it's not an issue that I hold a strong opinion about. The way the piece reads to me is a "He said, She Said". And I have to choose whose word I trust. Two articles, both claim to have spoken to expert sources…

Hold on. Take the first claim. Derek Thompson called the author of the paper who effectively said "no my paper does not support the claims made". So either: 1. Derek Thompson is flat out lying 2. The author is wrong and confused, or 3. The critics are wrong The critics haven't claimed to speak from the author to confirm their interpretation is correct. So to think the critics are right you have to think the convo is…

> 1. Derek Thompson is flat out lying

It's this one. The person he called made a lengthy follow up post. It's clear Thompson purposely misrepresented the conversation.

It's helpful to understand why the "abundance" movement exists. Its only purpose is to stop the Democratic Party from addressing concentrated economic power. It's funded by the concentrated economic power.

This isn't an academic debate, it's an attempt to maintain power by a discredited group of people who recently presided over the collapse of the Democratic Party and are desperately casting around for a narrative where that's not what happened.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#690

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

firecall wrote: post #393
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?

Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media. You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf... Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boos…

The beginning of the end was Gannett and USA today...
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