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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

#711

Post by 999900000999 »

Sloowms wrote: post #536
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…

Throw out a made up percentage and proceed to start talking about rational markets as if they exist in the real world. I immediately know this analysis is going to be great. Older houses are obviously cheaper for some reason even though housing prices in city centers keep increasing. Poor people are the real problem for needing a place to live. With the conclusion that there is nothing that can be done and people jus…

>With the conclusion that there is nothing that can be done and people just have to take it. That's abundance (jazz hands)

The conclusion is you should go to where affordable housing exist.

The other option is to get on that 11 year waiting list.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#712

Post by Symmetry »

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.

Traditionally it was ads that contributed most of the money a newspaper took in, but the fact that people were paying for the paper re-assured the people buying the ads that the papers were actually being read.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#713

Post by LargeWu »

CPLX wrote: post #707
LargeWu wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 econ…

Nothing in your assertion addresses the actual merits of the abundance mindset as described in Klein and Thompson's book.

If you want to argue that Andreesen is co-opting or manipulating those ideas for his own ends, that's something else.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#714

Post by loeg »

whatever1 wrote: post #659
loeg wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your factual statements are wrong. The US population isn't flat over time, and housing (supply) decays over time. Prices aren't up everywhere, just the places people actually want to live.

Let’s see some data: https://jabberwocking.com/we-dont-have-a-housing-shortage/ Housing construction exceeds the population growth for the past 20 years. But housing prices are skyrocketing especially the last 10 years.

Your figure doesn't contradict my claim. We have spare housing capacity in undesirable places people don't want to live (rural towns, small midwest cities). We have shortages in the (especially coastal) cities, where the jobs are. This is obvious from prices, which are set by supply and demand.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gw_BQYXbUAEicud?format=jpg&name=...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#715

Post by socalgal2 »

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.

> gentrification displacement is not a thing

Studies show the same percent of people move out of neighborhoods regardless of whether or not the neighborhood is gentrified. They also show that those low-income people who stay in a gentrified neighborhood see their incomes rise. Those low-income people who are in a neighborhood that is not gentrified see their income go down.

Your intuitions are wrong following them is making the problems worse.

https://www.youtube.com/@justine-underhill

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#716

Post by CPLX »

LargeWu wrote: post #713
CPLX wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 econ…

Nothing in your assertion addresses the actual merits of the abundance mindset as described in Klein and Thompson's book. If you want to argue that Andreesen is co-opting or manipulating those ideas for his own ends, that's something else.

The abundance mindset as described in Klein and Thompson's book fails to address the actual problem that prevents abundance, as defined by them.

The problem that they've identified is real and obvious: people can't afford housing, things are increasingly precarious for the middle class, and so on.

The actual solution is that concentrations of market power have to be broken up, we are being strangled by monopolies and cartels, and the way we run the macro economy is in favor of the financial sector. We prioritize returns on large scale capital over absolutely everything else.

There's no way to address the actual problems without doing things differently. In order for regular people to win, some powerful people will have to lose, at least a little.

Those powerful people don't want this, so they're happy to fund Klein and Thompson and a slew of other think tanks and politicians to advance the narrative that there's some other way to do things. Mostly the usual tactic of "blame it on the hippies" that has been so effective for them since the 1990's and the Clinton administration.

Given all this context, there aren't really any merits to the argument of the book. It's the equivalent of someone arguing with you that better diet and exercise is the way to fix an open stab wound. Also they're the person that stabbed you.

Like diet and exercise are good ideas. But if I'm like hey what the fuck you're a murderer and you come back with something about how that's an ad-hominem, and also why are you disagreeing with the ideas that diet and exercise are good, I don't really need to engage with you on the merits of those arguments right this second.

What we need to do first is take the knife away.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#717

Post by whoknowsidont »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #594
whoknowsidont wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not surprising at all to hear that Matt Stoller got the economics of an antitrust issue wrong. I mean he didn't. The article is legitimately straw-manning. All of his claims are not present in the source article. It's a disgusting, sleazy piece of journalism. So no, you didn't hear he got it wrong. You were lied to by the author.

I have a PhD in economics with a specialization in antitrust policy. Fact: “Matt stoller gets big, important issues wrong in antitrust all the time and his analysis shouldn’t be taken seriously.” Source: me You are welcome to cite that.

But he doesn't get them wrong. Your opinion on this is like a doctor saying the COVID vaccines don't work.

Sure you _might_ be a doctor, but your position is objectively deficient on this topic.

ALSO WEIRDLY, it's noticeable you didn't have anything to say about the fact that he's strawmanning.

You don't need a hyper focus in any field to see that's exactly what the author did. Or the fact that you don't seem to care about it.

Want to explain that one buddy?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#718

Post by lovich »

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…

The abundance vs anti abundance schism is internal on the left wing side of politics.

The author of this article was also one of the authors of the titular Abundance book which named the movement, so he’s not positioning himself as the other side of the “anti trust left”, he quite literally is the other side that that group is fighting with

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#719

Post by munchler »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #472
munchler wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to let rich outsiders make decisions about what happens to a community instead of the people who live there, because... town hearings are undemocratic. All those annoying old people are just going to die anyway, so it's really best to ignore them. I think I've heard everything now.

All these old people are going to die now so their incentives don’t really align with people from other demographics. This is factually true, same with how people that have more wealth generally have different incentives than poor people.

The casual ageism in this thread is disappointing. I hope you live long enough to see it from the other side.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#720

Post by munchler »

CalRobert wrote: post #466
munchler wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for building more housing, as long as it comes with the necessary infrastructure - schools, roads, parking, public transportation, etc. Where I live, developers seem to get government approval to build in locations where they can rake in a lot of money at high prices without having to worry about such things. (In fact, my local government is actually closing roads near new housing because "f#ck cars" is appar…

It's been hip since drivers started showing up and killing people. The less parking the better.

Right. Let's just go back to agrarian times when people rode horses to get around.
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