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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

#111

Post by immibis »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #91
esseph wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trickle down was a Reagan thing. I'm very confused by your statements. I mean it was the Big Beautiful Bill that just added 3-5 trillion in debt and reduced taxes on the very wealthy. I don't think those impotent Dems had any sway in this.

Then you're too focused on political concerns. Neoliberalism doesn't recognize political parties, it recognizes money. As Gore Vidal would say, the Property party.

To avoid confusion: neoliberalism has not much to do with the liberals (Democrats). It's closer to libertarianism, but only about money.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#112

Post by echelon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25
echelon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% "Supply and Demand" is a law of nature. If you build infinite luxury apartments, in the limit their value is zero. Build more luxury housing and the inventory increases. If you've met the city's housing demands (which you probably won't since nearly every city is behind on meeting demand), then it follows that typically less desirable inventory experiences less demand and will subsequently experience a price dro…

> "Supply and Demand" is a law of nature It's a law of human nature. Value is inherently subjective, which makes deriving it from natural laws conditional upon a physical explanation for humanity.

A lot of other models closely resemble economics:

- Computational systems, distributed systems, and operating system theory model resources and demand. They often attribute a cost to units of space, time, or compute based on availability.

- Ecological systems very closely model economics with respect to predator-prey dynamics.

- There are so many systems in biology that resemble economics. Evolutionary systems often increase gene dosage over generations in order to meet demand for gene products: polyploidity in plants, gene duplication, promoter amplification, etc. There are then also suppressive measures taken when deleterious effects arise. The balance of telomerase, etc. Within a living organism, there are the dynamics of apoptosis and proliferation pathways to follow the developmental program, to avoid disease states, etc. And then there are the biochemical flux of metabolites, etc.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#113

Post by NoahZuniga »

thegrim33 wrote: post #47
davidw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish everyone who cares about the price of housing could go to a hearing like this one. Sadly, they happen in every community so if you're curious, you ought to go: https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing... That is your housing shortage right there. Now, Real page probably jacks up prices a bit. A bit multiplied by a lot of renters means real harm and it was probably worth taking them to court…

You're claiming that your idea of 'X' is true, and for evidence of this, you're linking to a site that was created by people whose mission is to advocate for the idea of X. Am I likely to be getting an impartial view of the situation from a source which solely exists to push X-related messaging? Is such a group/site really going to give a fair shake to other theories Y and Z, or to conflicting data?

"You're claiming X is true, and providing me with a source you believe has good arguments for X being true. Very suspicious."

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#114

Post by lokar »

echelon wrote: post #20
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affordable housing is NIMBY whitewashing of reducing supply through rationining. (Note the supporters of affordable housing programmes count the largest landowning families in San Francisco and New York among their ranks.) There is an article on the front page, right now, about Denver moderating its rents through construction [1]. We've also seen this in Montana [2]. [1] https://denverite.com/2025/07/25/denver-rent-p…

100% "Supply and Demand" is a law of nature. If you build infinite luxury apartments, in the limit their value is zero. Build more luxury housing and the inventory increases. If you've met the city's housing demands (which you probably won't since nearly every city is behind on meeting demand), then it follows that typically less desirable inventory experiences less demand and will subsequently experience a price dro…

And housing is a substitutable good.

The people moving into the new luxury units are moving out of older less desirable units, which (with enough of this movement) see their prices decline

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#115

Post by whoknowsidont »

tptacek wrote: post #102
whoknowsidont wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Several arguments Stoller made were refuted by the authorities Stoller himself cited That's not true. At all. That's what Thompson _claims_. Look at what was actually written. It's incredibly sleazy writing. It's so one-sided it might as well be a celebrity gossip magazine piece.

I feel like not a lot of celebrity gossip consists of calls with economics professors who wrote cited papers discussing those citations, but we might just read different rags.

Notably, he never included the full conversation. It's almost like the question asked to the economic professors and their responses are completely different from the way the questions are presented in the article. Claims and questions the target article never mentions or implies.

I think there's like, I don't know, a few fallacies named for such practices.

But hey, don't take my word for it. Here's Musharbash very patiently dealing with this himself: https://x.com/musharbash_b/status/1950938130447479281

Also just some general life advice, if reading Thompson's article didn't didn't set off any red flags for you (regardless of what you did or did not know going into this conversation) I would employ a little bit more skepticism and spend a little more time reading the source material in the future.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#116

Post by Gigachad »

nielsbot wrote: post #81
Gigachad wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luxury is just a realestate buzzword that means newly built and has stone countertops. Nothing that actually meaningfully impacts the pricing.

No matter, it comes down to what people will pay for. At the very least they're selling/renting to people with more wealth.

Yes, new builds are targeting wealthier people. Those wealthy people then move out of their previous housing and that becomes the affordable housing. Like another commenter pointed out, you can't get affordable used cars without producing new cars.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#117

Post by johndhi »

I know this isn't how our political system works, but if I were king of America I'd try to solve the problem of expensive housing like this:

-Confirm housing is too expensive (for whom, where)

-Ask people why they think housing is too expensive and read some books on the topic

-Come up with a list of a few reasonable reasons from said reading

-try addressing those reasons with experiments in different locations to see what works (or check if someone has already done this)

-apply learnings broadly.

Instead our system is more like: -try to get elected and win points by criticizing others' ideas

-do nothing or spend a trillion dollars trying to solve it based on an idea a lobbying group told me is the reason housing is expensive

-be replaced by someone who disagree with me completely in 2 or 4 years

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#118

Post by bee_rider »

jeromegv wrote: post #99
burnt-resistor wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally wrong strawman missing the bigger point. It's still a vague, misguided utopian ideology focused on helping the rich supposedly "overproduce" while doing nothing for everyone else. That's trickle-down economics 101.

Supply and demand is not an ideology, it’s the most fundamental way that pricing works in a capitalist society. Has been studied for centuries. To think that supply and demand would not apply to housing and instead be trickle down economics is a hell of a statement.

The Supply and Demand model makes some assumptions that are not always true (perfect competition, for example).

The model isn’t an ideology, it is just a model. But there are a lot of ideological beliefs around this stuff. Some people seem to think that all markets have perfect competition, or that the resulting efficient pricing is inherently always good.

Housing seems pretty far from perfect competition to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#119

Post by Avicebron »

tptacek wrote: post #100
nielsbot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the wealthy buy up existing limited housing supply and there are many tenants looking for housing, then they can continue to raise rents, no?

The premise here is investors that just continually buy up all the supply, even as supply continues to increase, in the hopes that some day housing, the single largest asset class in the United States, will reach the limit of all possible supply? You don't feel like this is "spherical cow" calculating? The amount of investor-owned housing in most metro markets is a rounding error, and the amount of vacant investor-ow…

Yeah except it almost always gravitates to a cartel, almost always, because that is how people work, even when piloting corporate machines.

I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing you haven't been month to month rent in a while..

EDIT: you seemed to have tried to redirect the question to this "always buy up more land as an appreciating asset", when both can be true. "Buying that land is an appreciating asset (we haven't made much more I'm aware)" and that "forming an asymmetrical power relationship with the renters improves owners life" are mutually beneficial activities

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#120

Post by [deleted] »

chubot wrote: post #72
tptacek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not making a value judgement. There are analysts and opinion writers I enjoy reading and get a lot of value from. But hosting a podcast interview with someone is basically the opposite of shoe-leather reporting. I guess if you did "stitch incoming" every couple minutes and cut to Fridman calling someone else to have conversations with other sources about whatever claim his primary guest just made, you'd be gettin…

I think there's journalistic value to showing a raw conversation on a podcast. It's closer to the primary source than calling them on the phone and writing down parts of the conversation. If the interviewer is a bit credulous, then we can take that into account. I don't need other opinions to be inserted in the same show, because it's not the only show I watch. I get different viewpoints from others. (And Klein's sho…

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