Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

derekthompson.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 817 posts

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#771

Post by scoofy »

dv_dt wrote: post #734
scoofy wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, Teachout is one of the most prominent anti-monopoly advocates (along with Tim Wu). She wrote one of the first critical reviews of Abundance. She was then invited onto Klein's show to discuss the topic candidly with critics. Her positions are not "her's" but of a large section of the left who wants to blame the housing crisis on corporations rather than on cartel-like supply effects pushed by homeowner groups.

Her review: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/03/23/an-abundance-of-amb...

Discussion with Teachout: https://youtu.be/Ib1wzwbL7Is

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#772

Post by thrance »

lovich wrote: post #724
thrance wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truthfully, I don't. IMHO, abundance liberalism has a blind spot when it comes to the power of money in modern politics. We didn't stumble into a situation where buying a house requires an entire lifetime of work out of sheer bad luck. Some private interests greatly benefit from this situation and have enough power to keep things from changing. Until we address this, and the abundance crowd doesn't want to, all of th…

Have you read the book? A large portion of it is dedicated to how we got here. Nimbyism and people’s desire to keep their property value high is part of it. The levers that have been used to make those values high include a ton of regulation that makes it impossible to build start ups homes even if you were a perfectly moral actor seeking to generate exactly 0 profit. > until we address all of this Address what? I wa…

> people’s desire to keep their property value high is part of it.

Yes, exactly, and what are Klein and Thompson proposing to fix this? Fuck all. They only write about curing the symptoms of this crisis while telling us to ignore the root cause of it all: housing is now a very popular investment vehicle, used by many powerful private interests who absolutely wouldn't want to see their portfolios halve in values.

How are we to believe that the Democratic establishment, lead by the same old people, backed by the same old wealthy donors, will now be able to make a stand against the very people that put us in this situation in the first place, and are now funding the politicians and "thinkers" behind this movement?

Abundance liberalism is nothing but a rebranding of neoliberalism in a desperate attempt to astroturf a renewed interest in the failing democratic party. It is running away from any reform that would be critical to capital, hence why they dispense so much vitriol on the progressives and almost none on the right.

tldr: abundance does not address money in politics because it is birthed from it, and will therefore never be able to fix the housing crisis because its existence is convenient to capital.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#773

Post by teamonkey »

mactrey wrote: post #745
teamonkey wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

One of many reasons. Supply is also constrained because people are buying it as an investment. It’s a feedback loop.

If I were extremely rich and had a lot of properties to rent in California, I’d look at relaxed zoning laws as an opportunity to buy even more properties.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#774

Post by VintageCool »

dv_dt wrote: post #734
scoofy wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Zephyr Teachout wrote an early article critiquing Abundance, the book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. She appeared on Ezra's podcast and (IMHO) did not appear to have thought very deeply about the problem of housing affordability; instead defaulting to "monopoly in housing construction" as the problem. Stoller and Musharbash are re-iterating the position that had been staked out by Zephyr Teachout in March.

> Let’s assume that reforming rules on setbacks, parking, single-family zoning, and local input would achieve what they desire (the evidence is not straightforward; cities that have these reforms have lower costs, but they are rising at the same rate as in other cities). It would still seem relatively small-bore as a novel solution: Half of the 10 biggest cities in America—many in Texas—already have a zoning and procedural regime fairly close to what Klein and Thompson want. Are they simply arguing that Dems embracing Texas zoning approaches would transform national politics? That can’t be it.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/03/23/an-abundance-of-amb...

Much of the criticism of Abundance from prominent pundits on The Left (including Teachout and Nathan Robinson) has been along the lines of "the actual problem is corporate monopoly" rather than zoning. (Or maybe: "zoning is an easy problem to fix and a distraction from the real problem of corporate monopoly".)

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#775

Post by AnthonyMouse »

margalabargala wrote: post #770
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point you've ceased to describe construction companies and are now describing real estate speculators while calling them construction companies. Moreover, notice how little sense that business model makes. To do that you would be sinking capital into vacant lots that you're neither developing nor receiving rents from while paying both property taxes and opportunity costs. You're paying interest on the loan or…

You must be drawing from experience in a specific locality in the US, probably a rural one, because what I described is how land sales in the largest cities in the US has worked for half a century. Doing what I described in New York City is exactly how Donald Trump made an initial fortune back in the 80s. It's happening right now in Seattle. The business model not making sense, is due to the incorrect assumptions you…

> Doing what I described in New York City is exactly how Donald Trump made an initial fortune back in the 80s.

The total value of NYC real estate is approximately $2.8T. Trump has a net worth of something like $5B. Even if all of that was invested only in NYC real estate (which it isn't), it would be less than 0.2% of the NYC real estate market, which is hardly enough to have market power.

> The business model not making sense, is due to the incorrect assumptions you make. For one, that land or buildings in cities appreciate less quickly than the stock market.

That doesn't appear to be accurate. Metro housing prices have increased by more than wages but not by more than e.g. the S&P 500.

> I'm not sure what you think the difference is in practice. There may exist some construction companies that don't engage in real estate speculation, they just aren't the big or most profitable ones.

You're just pointing out that real estate speculation has been more profitable than construction, which is exactly the problem -- we make construction too expensive, on purpose, which is what increases the profitability of speculation. That some companies do both is a poor excuse to blame the construction companies for what the speculators are doing.

> The fact that the most valuable land is owned by other construction companies who have more money because of the real estate speculation.

Nobody even owns most of the land in any major US city, much less all of it. The properties that could derive the largest increase in housing units would be to replace single family homes with multi-unit complexes and the majority of existing single-family homes are owner-occupied.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#776

Post by Tiktaalik »

camgunz wrote: post #756
Tiktaalik wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

Hey I think she was basically right (I think her ideas on local control are applicable way beyond building neighborhoods). But we have to admit the ability to get up at some board meeting and veto stuff was her idea. It wasn't perverted by people who came after. Jacob's herself used these veto points in her time in Toronto. I'm not saying she was wrong to oppose the stuff she opposed, but the ability to obstruct in t…

yeah that is true.

It's a challenging thing to come down on in a clear cut simple way because there were a lot of things that that generation did fight against with grass roots neighbourhood democratic protest that are agreeable, such as fighting against razing neighbourhoods for freeway expansion.

The problem is that along the way somehow local citizens having a voice in how their city changes became a veto over development, and that veto became one dominated by those that had the most time to participate and dominate discussion, which were older, established wealthy, landowning residents. We didn't and still haven't developed systems for genuine real equitable participatory city making though I would like to think in recent years we are slowly making progress.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#777

Post by whoknowsidont »

mactrey wrote: post #757
whoknowsidont wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>spends entire article cherry picking evidence in an attempt to discredit one article specifically to advance a competing narrative. Worse than that. He's lying about what the article claims. Straw-man is too generous of a term, he's blatantly just making shit up.

Do you have an example?

Yeah. I wrote a pretty lengthy comment on it in this very thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44751520

You could also just read the sourced article and it's pretty flipping obvious.

It's absurdly blatant.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#778

Post by imgabe »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #588
imgabe wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you borrow money and use it to buy a house and leave it vacant? Now you're paying interest on top of everything else. Do you think wealthy people just light money on fire for no reason?

You rent out or naturally. If most buildings in a given area are rented out. Then the owners have leverage on the renters.

If there are more buildings than people who want to live in them, then the owners have no leverage. They have to compete for renters. You make that happen by building more housing.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#779

Post by didibus »

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…

I think it's possible that Derek Thompson is just doing the same thing he is calling out.

4. Derek Thompson interpreted a short conversation with the author the way he wanted to hear it.

The author might have said a bunch of "nuanced details" in that conversation, and he took it as: "I knew it, author thinks their claims are bogus."

If I recall, I don't remember seeing any part of their conversation quoted word for word, or even the name of the author he contacted in the article. (though I might have just missed it)

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#780

Post by tptacek »

germinalphrase wrote: post #590
tptacek wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urban primary school teachers get a pretty attractive comp package these days!

This is very region dependent. When I left education for consulting after 10 years as a HS teacher, I was making 55k. I started at 38k.

In Chicagoland, it's one of the better benefits packages you can get in a widely-available job. Defined-benefit pension, great health, huge amounts of vacation.
Post reply on HN