an article about housing that totally ignores the fact that most homes are bought with mortgages. the whole part about a $1M dollar house falling in value being totally fine because other houses fall in value too ignores that when house prices go down mortgage holders can't sell for a price high enough to even buy the now-cheaper price

this is a shitty article with no understanding of reality

A tortured analogy. `NIMBY === house as investment` is a very common strawman. Believe it or not, most people care about their homes and communities for their intrinsic value, which is where most NIMBYism comes from.

Increasing housing supply does not decrease home values, because high density housing benefits from network effects/economies of agglomeration. NIMBYs don't object because they think their house will be worth less, they object because they believe their quality of life will go down (based on what is important to them).

Higher density brings both good and bad:

upside: - high paying, specialized jobs - specialized, high quality services - stores open late - better dating (more fish in the sea)

downside: - more traffic - more noise - more pollution - more anonymity, crime (people in small towns leave their doors unlocked and say hi on the sidewalk)

The people who benefit most from higher density tend to be young professionals, which tend to not currently live in the neighborhood and will move in if density goes up.

> If all this sounds like wishful thinking, consider the polar case where housing deregulation drives the price of housing to zero. Yes, this wipes out the value of whatever housing you already own. But it also means that you can move to a palace anywhere on Earth for free. Indeed, it means that you could own a palace in every location you desire for free. Lose the value of your home, gain access to every home of your dreams. It’s not just a fair trade. It’s the deal of a lifetime.

Umm, what? If you start with "If this all sounds like wishful thinking", maybe departing into even more unhinged fantasy isn't the next step that helps you? The supposition that _deregulation_ could cause the price to go to zero is crazy; houses are built with labor using materials, on land. In the absence of regulation they shouldn't cost significantly _more_ than their labor+materials+land value, but they shouldn't cost _zero_. If you wanted the world where you don't pay for housing, I think you need a _lot_ of regulation -- after all building millions of Stalin blocks took a lot of intervention.

Throughout the piece, Caplan seems to assume that the only impact of regulation worth discussing is on prices, which seems suspect. But assuming that the only source of prices is regulation is worse.

If you think that NIMBY policies are ultimately harmful, maybe the only thing rougher than talking to NIMBYs is seeing a supposed expert try to argue against them but do it really really badly.