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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

#731

Post by underlipton »

Ekaros wrote: post #458
tsimionescu wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only works if all those houses are on the market. Nothing is stopping today's rich people from buying up all new housing, and only letting a handful be on the market so as to not flood the market and not let prices go down.

They do not have enough capital to do that. Housing is such as large market that eventually anyone but the state would run out of capital. And it is not actually even that profitable... There is much better investments.

You don't have to buy out the whole market. You buy the houses that are likely to turn over, and then you make sure that they don't until you want them to. Housing and rent is set at the margins. If the average price in your area over the last year for comparable housing was $300k, and the last three comps sold for $400k, your asking is $400k.

It's exactly the situation you'd expect with record high prices and low sales volume, which is where we're at.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#732

Post by [deleted] »

JohnPrine wrote: post #614
sensanaty wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall an article on HN quite a while ago about one of those property management companies/websites in the Bay Area. The article was detailing that, while the majority of people looking to rent out their properties were individuals and not the ultra wealthy, the app "encouraged" price-fixing, including things such as keeping a certain % of lots vacant on purpose in order to drive up prices artificially. I put encou…

Seems like this article had a large impact on your understanding of the housing system. Could you post it so that others can read it too?

[deleted]

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#733

Post by frmersdog »

JohnPrine wrote: post #614
sensanaty wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall an article on HN quite a while ago about one of those property management companies/websites in the Bay Area. The article was detailing that, while the majority of people looking to rent out their properties were individuals and not the ultra wealthy, the app "encouraged" price-fixing, including things such as keeping a certain % of lots vacant on purpose in order to drive up prices artificially. I put encou…

Seems like this article had a large impact on your understanding of the housing system. Could you post it so that others can read it too?

It's likely something related to this:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

There are multiple lawsuits, and settlements are already in with some property managers. Yieldstar/RealPage are not the only culprits, either: https://imgur.com/a/EmJQryv

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#734

Post by dv_dt »

scoofy wrote: post #702
dv_dt wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm confused, that name does not seem to occur in the article. Are you talking about some other context

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#735

Post by pitaj »

asta123 wrote: post #348

In Australia most of the narrative on the housing affordability crisis is around lack of supply and nimbyism. In the meantime Melbourne has dropped to 4th most expensive city in the country and becoming more affordable. Most likely reason - land tax change in that state which is turning off accumulating multiple properties through investment and investors turning to other states where prices are still going up. So, w…

This reverses causation. Investors are involved because prices are going up, not the other way around.

"Investors buying up housing" is a common explanation alongside "short term rentals taking over" but neither make up a large enough portion of the demand to explain prices.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#736

Post by adammarples »

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.…

Uk greens are unfortunately nimbys. They even shut down solar farms and things you would think they would be in favour of.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#737

Post by adammarples »

wilkommen wrote: post #587

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…

From the article: a) there is not really monopolistic activity going on, and b) homes have a fierce second hand market which pushes down on this

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#738

Post by carlosjobim »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #685
carlosjobim wrote: post #585

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. 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 th…

That's what I'm suggesting. If music streaming services can offer both gangster rap, classical music, heavy metal and pop, then surely a news/article syndicator should be able to offer access to papers from vastly different perspectives. I want both extreme right and extreme left, and everything in between in the same subscription.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#739

Post by danans »

tptacek wrote: post #65
simpaticoder wrote: post #56

What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage? Even if supply is eased, the wealthy (those who have enough capital to earn passive income) will buy the extra supply and rent to the poor. The Piketty effect takes over, they invest their profit in more housing, wealth inequality continues to get worse, and while more housing exists, it owned by an increasingly small cohort. Personally I'd like to s…

You haven't actually worked this example out. Try it. The wealthy buy the extra supply; they now compete with all the existing supply for tenants. What happens next?

A lot of the supply will become second or third homes for the affluent, or short term rentals, not residentially leased property.

That's already the case with a lot of properties in highly desirable locales whether high demand cities or holiday destinations.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#740

Post by salynchnew »

This article appears to be focused mostly on the line of argument that there is some cabal of builders that keep housing prices high. This also mostly seems to use Dallas as a case study, which is weird, b/c you can't test a lot of other argument about the effects of building/permitting requirements.

It should probably instead be titled something like "This one anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

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