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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

#741

Post by jordanb »

pj_mukh wrote: post #332
jordanb wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016 (probably calling Bernie a sexist) and voted for Biden and against progressive income tax in 2020. They are not leftists. You seem to be having some trouble understanding the difference between democrats, liberals, and leftists. T&K are fundamentally dishonest about the role of euclidean zoning in american cities, who supports it a…

"I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016" Its both. That's the problem. In my neighborhood, the construction of any market rate housing will be blocked by Hillary voting land-owners and single family home owners and card-carrying Bernie Bros mad that a private developer even gets to set foot in the city. It's this alliance that has basically blocked housing in most metro…

As an example when I was active in housing in Chicago one of the organizations that was with us on the left was a developer of affordable housing: https://www.bickerdike.org/

Several of the activist actually worked for this developer.

Real leftist housing rights supporters are not against developers. They are against for-profit, private equity, land banking speculators, and yeah nimby homeowners. In general we hated the Oak Park type nimby liberal more than we hated the right to be honest.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#742

Post by grafmax »

Aunche wrote: post #649
grafmax wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are ironically the weakest counterarguments to abundance housing. Rich people don't move to a city because of their love of 5 over 1 buildings. Otherwise, developers could just build them in rural Kansas and everyone would be happy. They move the jobs and culture, which doesn't change regardless of any new housing built. Making it easier to build privately owned housing also makes it easier to build publicly ow…

Jobs and culture are indeed reasons for people to move to the city, but it’s odd to claim that housing types don’t factor into consumer demand. Because housing types do, developers are incentivized to build housing that is the most profitable (such as less dense and luxury housing) not housing that best serves the needs of low income people (as more expensive units make more money). At best we can only expect minor effects from deregulatory mechanisms.

Which brings us to public housing. The main obstacle to public housing is funding these projects. Reasonable deregulation of public housing projects makes sense, sure, even though that is not the main blocker.

But public housing deregulation is not the argument of abundance, it’s YIMBY deregulation. Its proponents claim that it’s market based supply/demand effects that need to be unleashed by deregulation to provide adequate housing. Because “abundance” holds that YIMBY deregulation is the solution - not public housing - it misdirects efforts to address housing issues faced by low income people.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#743

Post by didibus »

Ekaros wrote: post #465
didibus wrote: post #312

Most interesting proposal I heard on this topic, is that the solution to housing prices is to ban renting altogether. It's so radical that it's almost impossible to predict if it would be better or worse. But at least it had the moral ground that rent is one of the last remnant of pre-capitalist lords and barons economies. The idea being it would commoditize housing. Millions of units would now be for sale, prices wo…

What would happen to those who can't afford to buy? Say student just turned 18? Continue to live at home and gather some money for down payment? Who would keep these assets and maintain them until next buyer comes around? What if there is no buyer and they make loss? There is nothing inherently wrong with renting. The landlords provide capital that renter lacks for time being. But due to supply constraints prices hav…

> What would happen to those who can't afford to buy?

That's what I find fascinating in the thought experiment, it forces you to think outside the box in these areas as well.

What happens to people today who can't afford to rent?

If prices were lower due to this, maybe mortgages would let you take a loan at 0% down-payment.

If you think of cars... What happens to people who can't afford a car? Generally there is public transit, maybe we'd have public housing.

You can still own multiple properties, you just can't rent it out. So the owner would have to lower its price probably, or find another buyer.

Or like another commenter said, maybe you could have lease to own purchase plans instead.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#744

Post by theincredulousk »

> Small companies can have downsides, and big companies can have benefits. A virtue of scale is that it can provide resilience in an age of crisis.

Nassim Taleb would argue the polar opposite of this.

I like the article. Starting to make assertions about benefits seems premature.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#745

Post by mactrey »

teamonkey wrote: post #728
imgabe wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting it still increases the housing supply, someone can live there. I doubt there is any significant amount of housing that is just bought and left vacant. Why would you do that? It’s a stupid and expensive place to park money. You have to pay taxes, possibly condo/co-op/HOA fees, pay someone to do maintenance and keep out squatters, pay transaction costs both buying and selling, it can’t be sold quickly. Why woul…

> I doubt there is any significant amount of housing that is just bought and left vacant. Why would you do that? In high-demand areas property value often increases in value over time. You can literally “buy and hold” property, keeping it empty, doing nothing with it and expecting to sell it for a profit at some point in the future. It’s relatively safe and the rate of return can be significantly greater than inflati…

And zoning restrictions are part of the reason why housing prices "always go up." Constrained supply is exactly and precisely what makes housing a profitable investment.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#746

Post by didibus »

LargeWu wrote: post #669
didibus wrote: post #312

Most interesting proposal I heard on this topic, is that the solution to housing prices is to ban renting altogether. It's so radical that it's almost impossible to predict if it would be better or worse. But at least it had the moral ground that rent is one of the last remnant of pre-capitalist lords and barons economies. The idea being it would commoditize housing. Millions of units would now be for sale, prices wo…

Unfortunately this is the type of magical thinking that gets passed off as serious policy analysis based on nothing but anti-capitalist dogma. There is no evidence to support these conclusions, and in fact plenty of evidence that it would worsen the housing crisis.

> on nothing but anti-capitalist dogma

What I remember from the proposal of it, it was making a pro-capitalist argument.

Based on a quick AI chat it seems that: "Some argue this form of passive income generation through rent-seeking is actually parasitic on productive capitalism rather than being truly capitalistic itself, since it doesn't create new value or contribute to economic productivity"

I think this is what I remember from the article. They claim landlords are anti-capitalistic, and one of the last holdout of pre-capitalism in our economy. They argued banning this rent-seeking behavior was needed to turn the housing market into a capitalist one.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#747

Post by didibus »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #354
didibus wrote: post #312

Most interesting proposal I heard on this topic, is that the solution to housing prices is to ban renting altogether. It's so radical that it's almost impossible to predict if it would be better or worse. But at least it had the moral ground that rent is one of the last remnant of pre-capitalist lords and barons economies. The idea being it would commoditize housing. Millions of units would now be for sale, prices wo…

It wouldn't work. Good luck trying to enact that. Also, the amount of leftism in this thread is like a pure-sugar-diet for Marxists. When houses have no value, people don't value them. Look at what happens when you give large amounts of people free housing, what do they do with it?

I don't know about the left/right. But like I said, when I read this idea, it was presented as an argument that the housing market was not capitalist enough, and that was the issue. In order to properly make it capitalist, so it can act like our other markets, you need to ban rent-seeking and landlordism which are pre-capitalism models that date from the old days.

It would not allow for example the government to hand out "cheap to rent housing either".

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#748

Post by mactrey »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #294
Schiendelman wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right, and that's caused by restrictions on supply. Almost every problem we have with housing comes down to us restricting how much can be built so much that extremely low quality units are competitive. If you allowed 10 times as much construction, those units wouldn't be able to compete, because other builders would offer better units for the same price.

Apparel markets are much more free and competitive than housing markets, and have basically no restrictions on supply. Yet, the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen. And we get incredibly cheap incredibly low-quality garbage. These things are much more complex than simplistic single-variable models.

> the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen

Do you have a source for this? Anecdotes along the lines of "they don't make 'em like they used to" are incredibly common but often fail to stand up to scrutiny.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#749

Post by pj_mukh »

jordanb wrote: post #741
pj_mukh wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016" Its both. That's the problem. In my neighborhood, the construction of any market rate housing will be blocked by Hillary voting land-owners and single family home owners and card-carrying Bernie Bros mad that a private developer even gets to set foot in the city. It's this alliance that has basically blocked housing in most metro…

As an example when I was active in housing in Chicago one of the organizations that was with us on the left was a developer of affordable housing: https://www.bickerdike.org/ Several of the activist actually worked for this developer. Real leftist housing rights supporters are not against developers. They are against for-profit, private equity, land banking speculators, and yeah nimby homeowners. In general we hated…

“leftist housing rights supporters are not against developers.”

They certainly are in my neighborhood.

https://www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com/48-hills-cost-of-growt...

The “private developer risk” the article derides is an enforceable approval timeline that lets private developers have bounded risk. Apparently that’s a bridge too far.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#750

Post by didibus »

joenot443 wrote: post #554
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's a shame to let two words color your opinion on an entire piece like that; I found it to be really compelling. Your last paragraph is a bit confusing; is it your position that Derek's lying? Which quote did you think was inaccurate? Or are you specifically concerned with his rhetoric?

Yes, that's why I commented, as a kind of feedback, the piece could be so much better with a very small tweak. Replace "antitrust-left" with the name of the exact handful of people whose book/article/stance you are refuting.
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