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Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

laxmena.com

21–30 of 57 posts

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

#21
post #6

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".

I think a lot of these activists were originally fighting gentrification. Then, over time, the gentrifiers won anyway, and now most housing in hcol areas is occupied by wealthy professionals. But the activists never updated their politics (people have a hard time admitting—or, sometimes, realizing—that they lost), and now they advocate policies that shut out the people they originally set out to protect.

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

#22
post #6

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…

> Nathan J. Robinson actually said the quiet part out loud a couple years ago, when he wrote in Current Affairs (a relatively high-profile American leftist periodical) a long defense of suburban NIMBYism.

If we’re thinking about the same essay it’s a criticism of capitalist YIMBYs who are only interested in building McMansions and the like. It is both anti-NIMBY and anti-some-YIMBYs, which seems reasonable to me.

EDIT: Historically, some YIMBYs have not opposed—I guess we’ll call it instead—unaffordable housing. So-called “capitalist” or “libertarian” YIMBYs in particular. Robinson’s article describes this. Leftists are skeptical of “all housing construction makes housing more affordable” arguments, and there’s evidence presented in the article to that effect.

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

#23

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.

Berlin was divided.

Like Berlin, Vienna had occupation zones, but there was never a wall between them.

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

#24
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> 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.

Setting aside the inevitable transportation issues this is an excellent policy that I would love to see implemented, but I think too many suburbs built their identity around “having the (property tax base necessary to create the) good school district.”

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

#25
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

School districts per se isn’t the problem so long as you have enrolment catchments. Australia doesn’t have school districts for their public schools but there are definitely more and less attractive state schools and people definitely pay more to live in the catchment zones of good schools. https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/12bgjnt/victoria... https://web.archive.org/web/20260202110638/https://www.theag...

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

#26

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.

The reason "many people dont know" about that is that it didnt happen.

You just made it up.

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

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Vienna was under occupation for 10 years but was never partitioned. There was mostly free movement of people and goods between the zones.

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

#28
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nathan J. Robinson actually said the quiet part out loud a couple years ago, when he wrote in Current Affairs (a relatively high-profile American leftist periodical) a long defense of suburban NIMBYism. If we’re thinking about the same essay it’s a criticism of capitalist YIMBYs who are only interested in building McMansions and the like. It is both anti-NIMBY and anti-some-YIMBYs, which seems reasonable to me. EDI…

Capitalist YIMBYs oppose McMansions. They're like the central thing we oppose. The whole point of the movement is replacing large-lot-coverage single-family-homes with multifamily. The whole point of YIMBYism is multifamily housing.

Understand: there isn't regulation against large single family homes. You can build a McMansion anywhere you want already. Your analysis makes no sense: nobody needs to organize anything to allow McMansions; they're the regulatory default. But suburban progressives genuinely believe stuff like this! It's a real problem.

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

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> 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. Setting aside the inevitable transportation issues this is an excellent policy that I would love to see implemented, but I think too many suburbs built their identity around “having the (property tax base necessary to cre…

Oh, it's a far worse problem than having the property tax base to create the district, but avoiding the students that would need extra support, and might disrupt the classroom because they aren't getting it. Those students are incredibly expensive to handle mainly via the school district alone. The amount of money to provide sufficient support without parental involvement is beyond what even the wealthiest districts can afford. The shortcut to avoid said students isn't to have immense funding then, but to make sure parents that aren't rather wealthy don't even get into live in the district a all.

That's the real dirty problem of the suburb + school district marriage: You turn parents just thinking of the school district of their children into raging NIMBYs that end up wanting just rich people that speak perfect english nearby.

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

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> 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. Setting aside the inevitable transportation issues this is an excellent policy that I would love to see implemented, but I think too many suburbs built their identity around “having the (property tax base necessary to cre…

I’m from a country with such a system. You end up with your children all going to different schools, attending parent teacher meetings all over the country and spending lots of time dropping of the children at multiple schools.
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