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Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

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Re: Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

#11

Post by shay_ker »

tptacek wrote: post #8
hingler36 wrote: post #5

This is interesting analysis, but I don't think it necessarily counteracts what the book is saying. To build state-affiliated housing also involved "clearing the pipes" as the article put it. Additionally, the Vienna housing that this article touched on is a way deeper rabbit hole that is absolutely worth looking into. They have a completely different housing paradigm than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

(For the uninitiated, the government [and sponsored co-ops] owns almost half the housing in Vienna, and eligibility for social housing, which is seen as desirable, extends deep into the middle class.)

There's no free lunch. Housing costs are effectively carried by immigrants and transplants: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Setting-the-r...

In general, the Vienna model is very difficult to copy without being in extreme conditions: https://www.threads.com/@__smiz/post/Cxpz28CIkT6

Re: Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

#12

Post by JuniperMesos »

tptacek wrote: post #9
Avshalom wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course one of the reasons social housing won't get built is the faircloth limit from 20 years ago.

That's like 4-5 principal components back from the first principal component, which is that the places that need housing market vitality the most could not reasonably afford to acquire the housing to support it. The best school systems in Chicagoland are in the inner-ring suburbs, locked up for SFZ residents. Even if their municipal governments wanted to go all-out to fix that, they couldn't conceivably acquire the l…

> The best school systems in Chicagoland are in the inner-ring suburbs, locked up for SFZ residents. Even if their municipal governments wanted to go all-out to fix that, they couldn't conceivably acquire the land and arrange the development.

Also, if municipal governments "fixed that" by making it possible for more housing to be built and more people to move into neighborhoods served by those currently-good school districts, the odds are good that the influx of new students would make the school district worse. And the people currently living in single-family zoned residences know this - one motivation for NIMBYism is that it helps maintain the high quality of the local school district where your kids currently attend school.

I'm personally in favor of abolishing public school districts, precisely so that the location of a house is no longer a major deciding factor in where any children in that household attend school. This reduces the incentive for people who live in a house in a good public school district to resist building any more houses in that school district, lest the inhabitants of that house make the school district less good.

Re: Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

#13

Post by Plasmoid »

shay_ker wrote: post #11
tptacek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(For the uninitiated, the government [and sponsored co-ops] owns almost half the housing in Vienna, and eligibility for social housing, which is seen as desirable, extends deep into the middle class.)

There's no free lunch. Housing costs are effectively carried by immigrants and transplants: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Setting-the-r... In general, the Vienna model is very difficult to copy without being in extreme conditions: https://www.threads.com/@__smiz/post/Cxpz28CIkT6

Many people also don't know that Vienna was isolated and divided for nearly 50 years during the cold war. A significant amount of the available housing is due to Vienna having a bad economy for almost a century.

Re: Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

#15

Post by nozzlegear »

tptacek wrote: post #6
theluketaylor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hugely in favour of adding non-market housing anywhere it can be added, but the author declaring it a different fix to the housing crisis from zoning is naive at best. Non-market housing is subject to the exact same complex local regulations as market housing, plus all the complexity of government projects, a patchwork of subsidies, grants, and loans to get funding, and even more intense public scrutiny. Trying t…

Worth mentioning here that appeals to social housing have over the last 20 years been absolutely classic NIMBY arguments. People raise it because they know significant amounts of social housing won't get built, but if you fix the gating factors for the market, it will. But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So t…

> But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist".

To be slightly glib: the left has no greater enemy than someone who agrees with them 95% of the time.

Re: Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

#16

Post by roenxi »

People can write what they like on their blog, but this article seems to be missing key details - we don't find out what the model is or the coefficients he's using and the model apparently immediately produces unrealistic results. Hopefully it is made clear in the book, but unless someone has read Abundance it is hard to follow.

If the model is just a rough rule of thumb then spot checking 4 cities in completely different legal frameworks, cultures and economic situations doesn't give us a lot of data. Economies are very complicated and any effect can be overruled by something unrelated but more impactful happening.

Re: Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

#17

Post by darkwizard42 »

tptacek wrote: post #8
hingler36 wrote: post #5

This is interesting analysis, but I don't think it necessarily counteracts what the book is saying. To build state-affiliated housing also involved "clearing the pipes" as the article put it. Additionally, the Vienna housing that this article touched on is a way deeper rabbit hole that is absolutely worth looking into. They have a completely different housing paradigm than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

(For the uninitiated, the government [and sponsored co-ops] owns almost half the housing in Vienna, and eligibility for social housing, which is seen as desirable, extends deep into the middle class.)

Is this similar to Singapore where much of the housing stock is government housing?

Re: Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

#19

Post by Terr_ »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #17
tptacek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(For the uninitiated, the government [and sponsored co-ops] owns almost half the housing in Vienna, and eligibility for social housing, which is seen as desirable, extends deep into the middle class.)

Is this similar to Singapore where much of the housing stock is government housing?

I am also reminded of (former-?) rival Hong Kong, where the government either runs or subsidizes at least half the housing. (This in turn relies on other idiosyncrasies, like the government owning all the land, a massive sovereign-wealth fund, etc.)

Re: Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

#20

Post by tomjakubowski »

Plasmoid wrote: post #13
shay_ker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no free lunch. Housing costs are effectively carried by immigrants and transplants: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Setting-the-r... In general, the Vienna model is very difficult to copy without being in extreme conditions: https://www.threads.com/@__smiz/post/Cxpz28CIkT6

Many people also don't know that Vienna was isolated and divided for nearly 50 years during the cold war. A significant amount of the available housing is due to Vienna having a bad economy for almost a century.

Huh? I thought that Vienna's partition period following WWII lasted more like ten years than sixty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria

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