The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong • Hacker News Board

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#381

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:39 AM UTC

athrun wrote: post #346

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…

Sounds like you're just applying somewhat arbitrary purity rules to what falls into the "leftist" bucket or not. I believe that for most people "leftists" means "on the left side of the political spectrum", and so, in the US, it would be a strict superset of democrats & Liberals. But for you, it sounds like it's only subset of these, based on some criteria you haven't made explicit. Fair enough, but that's a somewhat…

No, that's not what “leftist" generally means, it means adherence to any of a broad grouping of anti-capitalist ideologies (the more widely recognizable being the various forms of socialism and communism). It overlaps a little bit with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the US, but beyond that is mostly outside of the US major party system. The only people who use “leftist" to describe a superset of the Democratic Party also use “socialist” and “communist” in the same way.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#382

Post by crtified » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:41 AM UTC

nathan_compton wrote: post #131

tptacek wrote: post #5

So much of the journalism we read is heavily processed and barely-reported and it's startling to see how much of a superpower simple shoe-leather reporting actually is. Derek Thompson's an incredibly sharp writer, but not really a subject matter expert on housing economics; all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed. We're often so down on j…

This article is good, but the phrase "antitrust left" really turned me off. I am probably some kind of a leftist (I want higher taxes on rich people and a society much more welfare oriented with a substantial degree of labor and resource allocation performed democratically instead of by markets) but I don't know a single leftist who actually cares about this housing shit except to think that houses should be cheaper…

It's a disturbing trend that extremely complex issues are framed as a 'symptom' of broad political leanings. At the very least, it's a distraction and disservice to their own good argument, when an otherwise-intelligent narrative constantly reverts back to the polarisation "it's mostly those Others, from the Other Side".

Just let arguments stand on their own merits. The minute an article includes the term "lefties" or "righties", it's gone wrong imo.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#383

Post by bluGill » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:43 AM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #301

bluGill wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meaning of liberal and conservative has shifted so much over time that the term is now useless. The original meaning of liberal was about not killing you neighbor if they were a different religion - from which we get freedom of religion. That slowly expanded to things like freedom for slaves and women voting.

This is Phil Ochs describing liberals in 1966 In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. They haven't changed.

1966 is still modern. The liberals I'm describing go back much farther. The decleration of independence is perhaps their most famiuos work though even then things were changing

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#384

Post by Gigachad » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:45 AM UTC

frollogaston wrote: post #364

ThinkBeat wrote: post #35

There is an incredibly large lobby group who is fully invested in house prices rising or at least not falling, namely homeowners. and since most politicians at a high level usually own one or more houses, they are fully invested in it as well.

That's fine. On one hand the other saying "no" too much will stagnate the local economy, on the other a city doesn't need to accommodate an infinite number of people moving there. Either extreme will hurt property values in the long run, so there's a balance. I've seen places sell themselves out, I've also seen suburban sprawls where naive homeowners feel good about holding a house 20 years only to make 30% gain. Nob…

This has just lead to Boomers getting a death grip on every city. Young people are forced to pay out the nose to rent the scraps of housing left, and then also get taxed to pay out the pensions of the same boomers because they moved all of their cash out of the bank and stocks to put in to a 5 bedroom house in Sydney so now they qualify for welfare.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#385

Post by moneycantbuy » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:46 AM UTC

Gary's Economics claims wealth inequality is at the root of housing unaffordability. Basically as wealth concentration grows, the ultra-rich bid up the assets. See the price of gold doubling in the past few years. Government stimulus is also captured by the richest. It's also a global phenomenon, i.e., every major city is now unaffordable for most people.

https://youtu.be/BTlUyS-T-_4?si=P0mdHxtq1F7DV4jo

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#386

Post by bobsmooth » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:46 AM UTC

api wrote: post #175

Animats wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else. The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, c…

The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars. Would people pay for real journalism?

>Would people pay for real journalism?

See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#387

Post by typewithrhythm » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:49 AM UTC

lokar wrote: post #365

typewithrhythm wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are going down the same path of making a lower quality product available, then using deceptive averages. I have not seen anything that would create a supply of equally desirable properties (compared with detached dwellings).

Most families being able to afford a detached SFH was a historical anomaly that came with massive costs, and won’t be sustainable long term.

The "anomaly" happened when we were less productive overall. What change made it possible, and why can't we go back?

Western societies are naturally below replacement rate, getting back to sfh as the norm seems like the inevitable outcome without the significant efforts at the national policy level.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#388

Post by frollogaston » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:51 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #384

frollogaston wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine. On one hand the other saying "no" too much will stagnate the local economy, on the other a city doesn't need to accommodate an infinite number of people moving there. Either extreme will hurt property values in the long run, so there's a balance. I've seen places sell themselves out, I've also seen suburban sprawls where naive homeowners feel good about holding a house 20 years only to make 30% gain. Nob…

This has just lead to Boomers getting a death grip on every city. Young people are forced to pay out the nose to rent the scraps of housing left, and then also get taxed to pay out the pensions of the same boomers because they moved all of their cash out of the bank and stocks to put in to a 5 bedroom house in Sydney so now they qualify for welfare.

What do you propose instead to allow younger people to buy homes, and if it were implemented, why would young people still want to buy a home under those rules?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#389

Post by jdkoeck » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:51 AM UTC

munchler wrote: post #376

jdkoeck wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they had more influence, then they’d be able to build more and prices would go down.

I'm all for building more housing, as long as it comes with the necessary infrastructure - schools, roads, parking, public transportation, etc. Where I live, developers seem to get government approval to build in locations where they can rake in a lot of money at high prices without having to worry about such things. (In fact, my local government is actually closing roads near new housing because "f#ck cars" is appar…

Your own example seems to show that the culprit lies with local governance, not developers, wouldn’t you agree?

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#390

Post by crtified » Fri, Aug 01, 2025, 4:52 AM UTC

mjvmroz wrote: post #377

imgabe wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For years in Washington DC there was one single crank who went to every community engagement meeting and prevented hundreds of units of housing from getting built.

I’ll be so interested to see what happens to this kind of thing. I feel like we saw the absurd version of it over the past decade, where society at large had acted as though highly online reactionaries are quality signals of an underlying current. It seems as though market share in that model is failing. I predict the pendulum will swing the other way across the board, and loud minorities in in-person forums will be…

Perhaps they have not been given the credence that you assume. It is typically not the NIMBY complainers who have the capacity to hire powerful experts to argue their cases in Councils and courtrooms ad nauseam. That is heavily weighted towards the developer side. I say that having worked for such developers, to further their cases in great detail.

Factors like failing or under-capacity infrastructure are coming to the fore a lot more in recent years. I've been in land development for about 25 years, and an increasingly common theme in my region is that a landowner wants a new suburb, but is not willing to upgrade all the necessary pipes and roads in order to not overwhelm existing upstream/downstream systems, and conversely the public are literally not able to subsidise that for them - public money is almost always stretched very thin already.