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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

#641

Post by aprilthird2021 »

lokar wrote: post #106
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.

I never see the NIMBY movement really engage with what falling prices would mean in practice. It just seems impossible to be allowed for any really duration over a large area. I think a more realistic (but depressing) goal is modest loss to inflation (so prices go up by 1-2% less then inflation).

> I never see the NIMBY movement really engage with what falling prices would mean in practice

It means the landed gentry lose, and the working class win. Unlike the status quo of the past few decades where the landed gentry make fistfuls of cash by doing 0 actual work.

Obviously housing prices going down will make some people's assets mixes worth less. That's why they fight to stop building housing. But that's true for lots of commodities and businesses too. Just because many people are invested in diamonds doesn't mean we have to ban lab grown to save diamond prices

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#642

Post by bb86754 »

tghccxs wrote: post #580
thrance wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all makes sense when you take "abundance liberalism" for what it actually is: a rebranding of neoliberalism in support of establishment democrats. Its main goal is not to provide the democratic party with a new direction, but to defend the status quo against the populist left, incarnated by the likes of AOC and Mamdani. It makes sense then, that they'd spend more time attacking the left than the right, as they rea…

Do you think this specific criticism of the “populist left” by the “abundance liberals” is valid though?

No, this guy (the writer of the article) has no idea what he’s talking about. I say this as someone isn’t even on the left.

He sets a false dichotomy to protect himself from criticism. Zoning/building codes being too strict and monopolies existing in that market aren’t incompatible.

It’s worth noting that there’s a lot of money behind this abundance movement or whatever, so that’s something to take into account when reading this stuff.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#643

Post by thrance »

tghccxs wrote: post #580
thrance wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all makes sense when you take "abundance liberalism" for what it actually is: a rebranding of neoliberalism in support of establishment democrats. Its main goal is not to provide the democratic party with a new direction, but to defend the status quo against the populist left, incarnated by the likes of AOC and Mamdani. It makes sense then, that they'd spend more time attacking the left than the right, as they rea…

Do you think this specific criticism of the “populist left” by the “abundance liberals” is valid though?

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 this is pointless bickering.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#644

Post by LargeWu »

talkingtab wrote: post #611

Fish Tank Thinking is where your thinking is so constrained by some artificial walls that you cannot actually ... well actually think. It is the wages stupid. Let me repeat that. It is the wages stupid. What happens when a society is so brain washed that it cannot even consider that if you don't pay people they can't afford housing. Or cars. Or medical care. Or food. If you actually have some desire to consider the p…

You seem to be guilty of Fish Tank Thinking here yourself.

Housing costs are not divorced from the laws of supply and demand. Raising wages creates increased demand for housing, but you still need the supply! Raising wages without increasing housing supply will just make housing more expensive.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#645

Post by dgb23 »

energy123 wrote: post #182
nathan_compton wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mamdani - rent control. Dean Preston - NIMBY. UK Greens Party - NIMBY. Australian Greens Party - NIMBY. Explain?

> Mamdani - rent control

Mamdani wants to freeze rents of housing that is already under rent stabilization. He is also an advocate for reform and deregulation, and working backwards from outcomes. He has been talking to people from the construction industry and one of their main concerns is predictable time scales. He seems very pragmatic.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#646

Post by amosslade »

As someone whose built houses as a contractor and subcontractor for 20+ years, I’d say these article has it mostly right, but misses two major factors in increased costs.

And that is permitting time/costs and the costs of complying with ever more stringent codes.

If we could build homes to the codes of 1990 and the permitting process was the same as it was in 1990, you’d immediately knock 20-30% off of the cost of construction.

What leftists and bureaucrats (and most people in general) never understand is the time value of money. Every extra day added to the construction of a $500K project is a few hundred dollars of interest costs, risk costs, and lost opportunity costs. Those numbers add up quickly. And nowadays, projects take much longer from idea to completion than they used to.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#647

Post by lanfeust6 »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #474
crooked-v wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.

,"having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money." Can you show me an example of someone pushing this?

keep reading along in the comments, I've come across an example already

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#648

Post by abvdasker »

It's always pretty suspect when you first hear about the opposition to something in its rebuttal. I've heard lots of critiques of the abundance movement and this is my first time hearing anything about housing cartels. Maybe someone had this critique but it isn't the dominant strain of criticism of the abundance people. It feels like Thompson picked the weakest argument to debunk rather than one of the many stronger ones.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#649

Post by Aunche »

grafmax wrote: post #467
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…

Abundance YIMBYism has many shortcomings. It doesn't address the risk of gentrification and displacement, the slow and unproven trickle-down effect of market-rate housing, or the critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities. Journalistic ideologues deserve little praise for dismantling the weakest counterarguments of their opponents while ignoring core criticisms.

These are ironically the weakest counterarguments to abundance housing. Rich people don't move to a city because of their love of 5 over 1 buildings. Otherwise, developers could just build them in rural Kansas and everyone would be happy. They move the jobs and culture, which doesn't change regardless of any new housing built. Making it easier to build privately owned housing also makes it easier to build publicly owned housing. Public housing projects are also delayed by permitting and environmental reviews and have to pay for inflated land prices and parking spaces.

Re: The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

#650

Post by CPLX »

LargeWu wrote: post #617
CPLX wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it doesn’t address is the role of finance and the financial sector in explaining why things are the way they are. It’s not just a missing detail it’s fatal to their entire argument. Which isn’t an accident, since the goal of the “abundance movement” is to stop the actual progressive movements that want to take on concentrated financial power.

This is a bad-faith description of the abundance movement. The central thesis of the abundance movement is this: Every time we make a regulation, we are making a tradeoff. In the case of housing, an example would be "zoning only for single family housing". It's trading off affordability for quieter neighborhoods. Another might be "public housing contracts must favor minority-owned contractors". It trades off affordab…

The abundance movement IS a bad faith movement. It’s entirely the creation of the donor/billionaire set and its rollout is designed to stop the Democratic Party from taking the obvious next step of tackling concentrated economic power, following the utter and abject failure of corporate centrism.

There’s literally no ambiguity here, the abundance summits feature obvious had faith actors like Andreesen.

This kind of thing has been going on for decades. It’s the same playbook as Third Way and New Dems and so on.

These people’s ideas led to the current political situation we’re in today. They don’t want to be held accountable for that.

So we get this Calvinball style collection of principles that change weekly but never seem to ever even consider doing something that Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and their friends don’t like.

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