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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

#701

Post by dlcarrier »

IFC_LLC wrote: post #578
dlcarrier wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rest assured, the quality has gone up, just not in ways that you, or most anyone, cares about. You'll be satisfied knowing that every house in the country is built with outlets every 12 feet, with independent circuits for the for every few hundred watts of lighting, able to withstand Arizona heat, California earthquakes, Florida hurricanes, Louisiana humidity, Minnesota cold, and everything else you may or more likel…

Oh man, how much I agree on a building code. The last hurricane I survived, I had to spend time in my office building. It is made of concrete and real brick and mortar. There is no need whatsoever to “hurricane-proof it", save for the special shatterproof windows. Big, 4 by 6 shatterproof windows. The shoebox I live in currently features the same shatterproof windows. 2x1 feet, small windows. I had to re-install all…

My parents bought a house in the mid 80's, that another family member currently lives in. It still has the original air conditioner, which is a heat pump, so it's run for 40+ summers and 40+ winters with minimal repairs and effectively zero maintenance.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#702

Post by scoofy »

dv_dt wrote: post #621
shazbotter wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He’s specifically talking about Zephyr Teachout. Her work is specifically in anti-monopoly stuff.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#703

Post by zkelvin »

LargeWu wrote: post #644
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…

You seem to be guilty of Fish Tank Thinking here yourself. Housing costs are not divorced from the laws of supply and demand. Raising wages creates increased demand for housing, but you still need the supply! Raising wages without increasing housing supply will just make housing more expensive.

Exactly! This video goes into this phenomenon more in-depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_GLfxaYTYI&t=2s

This has actually been a known issue for over a century with Winston Churchill even commenting on it.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#704

Post by MisterBastahrd »

dlcarrier wrote: post #475
Animats wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else. The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, c…

Legacy journalism has changed from a low-barrier-to-entry working man's occupation, with entry level reporting leading to high-paying punditry, into a high-barrier-to-entry ivy league occupation with new entrants to the field expecting prestigious positions from the start.

There are still hundreds of thousands of journalists around the country who don't have ivy league educations and are getting paid a pittance to work in their fields. I once worked for a publisher which hired reporters making $12 an hour who easily worked over 60 hours a week. Big city reporters might push out a few stories a week. The small town people are cranking them out by the dozen, with about 3/4ths of their bylines being "" Staff so that people remain unaware of how understaffed these papers are.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#705

Post by Tiktaalik »

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…

> Jane Jacobs veto

As an aside, puts on Jane Jacobs defender hat I just want to point out that Jane Jacobs was on the record with the assertion that an ideal urban fabric was effectively small apartment buildings at densities well beyond what your typical North American city and suburb currently has.

It's deeply sad that Boomers took her ideas and distorted her message to preserve an ultra low density single family detached housing status quo.

https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2012/06/01/jane-jacobs-style-d...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#706

Post by LargeWu »

CPLX wrote: post #696
LargeWu wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a purely ad-hominem attack.

Ad-hominem is a great way to understand a group of people that are obviously full of shit and engaged in self-serving advocacy. Unless you think this guy is actually interested in building more housing: https://fortune.com/2022/08/13/atherton-california-housing-m...

Maybe I'm missing context but this would be the exact opposite of the Abundance agenda.

If your point is that Andreesen advocates for abundance policies, but then also opposes them in classic NIMBY fashion when it affects him, well, that's an indictment of Marc Andreesen, not Abundance mentality. In fact, your point inadvertently seems to say "Marc Andreesen is not Abundance enough!" since he is engaged in anti-Abundance activity in lobbying against multi-family housing.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#707

Post by CPLX »

LargeWu wrote: post #706
CPLX wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad-hominem is a great way to understand a group of people that are obviously full of shit and engaged in self-serving advocacy. Unless you think this guy is actually interested in building more housing: https://fortune.com/2022/08/13/atherton-california-housing-m...

Maybe I'm missing context but this would be the exact opposite of the Abundance agenda. If your point is that Andreesen advocates for abundance policies, but then also opposes them in classic NIMBY fashion when it affects him, well, that's an indictment of Marc Andreesen, not Abundance mentality. In fact, your point inadvertently seems to say "Marc Andreesen is not Abundance enough!" since he is engaged in anti-Abund…

It’s Andreesens all the way down.

The abundance movement is not a grassroots group of people, it’s a lab creation of billionaire/donor types. Andreesen is one of them, that’s the context for the link. Reid Hoffman is another.

These people want to find a way to distract from the appeal of progressive policies of the kind put forward by Lina Khan and others who actually attempt to directly take on the concentrated economic power that’s strangling normal people in this country. They’re the ones doing the strangling.

It’s propaganda, a PR project by oligarchs. It’s fundamentally done in bad faith and there’s absolutely nothing obligating me to take them at face value.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#708

Post by IFC_LLC »

dlcarrier wrote: post #701
IFC_LLC wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, how much I agree on a building code. The last hurricane I survived, I had to spend time in my office building. It is made of concrete and real brick and mortar. There is no need whatsoever to “hurricane-proof it", save for the special shatterproof windows. Big, 4 by 6 shatterproof windows. The shoebox I live in currently features the same shatterproof windows. 2x1 feet, small windows. I had to re-install all…

My parents bought a house in the mid 80's, that another family member currently lives in. It still has the original air conditioner, which is a heat pump, so it's run for 40+ summers and 40+ winters with minimal repairs and effectively zero maintenance.

Exactly. Qualiflation. We have substituted the inflation with the inflation of quality. Yes, the AC in 80x used to cost $2k, and thank pete, in the current market it costs only $2.5k. But if you compare the quality, you will get the idea that that old AC is about $15k right now, cause it was so damn good and unbreakable.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#709

Post by animal_spirits »

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 watched an interview with both the authors. They read as both left leaning but self critical of the regulations the left has put in place. It seemed like this leftist identity is part of the story so maybe that is why it is mentioned so much.

https://youtu.be/D9wga7S3nAw?si=mZT3yhUG_z2DKref

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#710

Post by aggie »

thrance wrote: post #552
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 rea…

Why do I see so many critiques of the abundance movement based on factional motives and ad hominem, and so little critique of the arguments they make?

If progressives want to expand government, government needs to be effective. Abundance liberalism is about learning from the mistakes of the past and making government better able to achieve to goals both liberals and progressives want.

If we're talking about factional infighting, leftists are "afraid" the neoliberals will offer a compelling path forward instead of pivoting to socialism, so they resist arguments that would otherwise be beneficial to their political goals.

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