We're often so down on journalism on HN, and I believe a big part of that is we tend to read so much opinion and analysis and so little basic reporting.
I've been loving Thompson's substack (which is mostly not about housing policy so far).
I think that generally a true problem nowadays. Popular culture does a lot of "analysis", but not a lot of reality seeking.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPSeeKokdo
I like when the right and left can actually talk to each other -- solutions are more likely to emerge that way.
They had a meta-discussion of the fact that Fridman has been "coded" by the left (Thompson and Klein firmly representing the left).
I get that, because Fridman can be so uncritical that it can rise to the level of shilling.
But I also find it curious that many on the left won't sit for 3 hours with him. In contrast, Thompson and Klein sat for 3 hours, which shows me that they have something to say which stands up to scrutiny.
They have something to say that doesn't have to be carefully boxed into 30 or 60 minutes of talking points.
---
Related: even though Fridman can be annoyingly uncritical, I think this also serves the purpose of journalism. Because he gets the primary sources to talk freely.
For example, IMO this part an interview with Demis Hassabis is revealing. He asks if they're worried they will run out of high quality training data:
https://youtu.be/-HzgcbRXUK8?t=3931
From my perspective, Hassabis gives a mealy-mouthed answer about generating synthetic data of the right distribution, and then they change the subject. I would bet there's a lot more to it than that. If they had a good angle of attack, I feel like he'd be more excited to talk about it, and say something more substantive.
I guess you can argue that he's being cagey to not reveal anything to competition, but it seems like a real point of concern to me.
The rest of the interview is talking about AGI time frames and similar sales talk. Whereas my takeaway is that there's significant worry that LLMs are limited by training data, because they interpolate from it (rather than extrapolating), and are inefficient at using it.
If you want to say Fridman's content is "barely-reported", i.e. he barely does journalism, then I won't really argue.
But the interviews are NOT heavily processed, and that's precisely why some on the left won't sit with him. (But not Thompson and Klein, because they actually have something to say.)
So ironically, it kinda balances out. Being credulous attracts guests who talk almost as if they are off the record
My point is: some of the prevailing take on HN about journalism probably comes from the fact that we tend to pay much more attention to the Fridmans and much less to shoe-leather reporters.
That's all!
Much later: a funny thing I could point out here is that the same thing I'm saying about Fridman also applies to Ezra Klein, Thompson's "Abundance" co-author --- I like Klein a lot!
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 show happens to be a primary example of that)
Giving one person an uncritical platform for three hours isn’t journalism. For that to resemble journalism you would have to squint so hard your eyes would be shut.
I would take it a step further and argue that it's not so much a topic as facts. Like objectively measurable things about the real world.
There's always going to be some limit to what we can actually measure and how much time we have to do it, but there's no reason not to try to get close to what we we're capable of doing.
I would argue that there are very few people who are actually authorities on a subject worth uncritically transcribing for 3 hours on a subject. Elon Musk is an easy target, the only thing he's an expert on is being Elon Musk, which isn't a very interesting topic.
What he has to say on any given subject does sometimes matter, because some people believe what he says, so it's useful for me to know some of it, but it's more useful to know what the actual facts are.
I don't want reporters who write an article that says "well I talked to one side and they said it's raining and I talked to the other side and they said it was hailing", I want a reporter who goes out and checks what the weather actually is.
Wikipedia's definition seems excellent to me:
> Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy.
That "some degree" is an important concession. Nobody will be right all the time but the objective of journalism is to discover and present the truth of a topic.
I think the issue is the number of authorities. One isn’t enough.
Someone actually looking for facts about reality would be far more useful and valuable to society. Not that we reward that sort of thing.
Im sorry but what evidence do you have to support such a claim?
I know why people blame the internet, the drop in rewards for journalism, the pressures to churn out text, that has led to. But I'd also emphasise that it's a vocational skill that not everyone is built for, or trained to do. But it's as Thomas says, that scarcity means that it's still as valuable (and recognisable) as it always was.
[1] Or emailing -- but emailing, and emailing, and emailing, then calling, and emailing again until you get an answer.
Somewhat-related to another front-page item today about, how lots of jobs sound kind of crazy if you really detail them out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44710651
As someone both built for and trained to do it, I can tell you I'd be making at least US$150k/year less if I was still doing it. I wager I'd be short about $1.25M in career earnings through just salary in the time since I moved from the copy desk to tech.
That's factoring in how, through the first third of my tech career I was still making just $35-60k/year. And I was ecstatic, because $35k was a five-figure raise over running the front section of a daily newspaper.
Every person in the first two newsrooms I worked in is either dead or has left the journalism field completely, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the entire team of editors, artists, and photographers who worked on the winning story. Most are now in PR, consulting, or (as a symptom of being near the Gulf Coast) in some arm of the fossil-fuels industry. One of the last whose career I keep track of just took up mail-order baking.
It's a financially unsustainable field in any market. At 5 years' experience at the head of the editing wheel, I was living paycheck-to-paycheck paying just $400/month in rent, living with two roommates in a single-wide trailer in the middle of a sugar cane field.
The vast majority of those City Desk-style journalism jobs made primary-school teaching salaries look attractive _25 years ago_, much less now. By the time I left, all of those jobs that I knew of had either moved to contract gigs or stringers (freelancers paid by column inches of text) unless you were in a big-city market or working for a regional/national paper.
The myth of building up a journalism career at an institution from the bottom of the org through shoe-leather reporting alone, without already knowing or being related to someone who could move you ahead of the rest, was already far past dead in most of the US.
If I could find a journalism job that paid half what I make now, made me travel constantly, had shit benefits, got me put on watchlists, made me deal with some of the slimiest people on the planet in the forms of career local politicians and court lawyers on the daily, and put me in precarious situations... I'd still probably take it, because I miss it every day. But that job flat-out does not exist in any form that I'd get a callback for unless I married into a publisher's extended family, and hasn't for decades.
I'm curious what's your take on news agencies like Reuters and AP? Do they pay better? Do they have resources to do real journalism?
My first programming gig doubled my income and nearly halved my hours. The stress lowering alone would have been worth it. I haven't had anyone try to physically fight me as a dev. I think the same applies today; teachers are underpaid.
We need that again. As I point out occasionally, read news, and ask yourself which stories started out as a press release. For the City News Bureau, nothing started as a press release. They had people pounding the streets of Chicago for a century. Today, the pundit to reporter ratio is far too high.
There's a great book about the Bureau, called "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite". (by Dornfield, not the one by Sears, which is something else entirely.)[1]
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/1990/06/20/if-city-news-burea...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hello-Sweetheart-Get-Me-Rewrite/dp/08...
Would people pay for real journalism?
I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.
> The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests.
How is the NYT an exception?
Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers. They relied on advertisements, just like the websites that killed them.
Luckily NYT is a public company and you can look up their revenue split on the SEC website going back to 1994. In 1994 they had 35% revenue from circulation vs 65% from ads. In 2021 it was 24% ads and 68% subscribers and 8% "Other"
At that time operating expenses exceeded revenues by 25 million dollars, though this was not an immediate problem for them because they owned several other more profitable companies.
By contrast, in that same year the New York Times announced that they had managed to stave off insolvency by securing a large personal loan from Carlos Slim, who went on to become their biggest shareholder.
How are we distinguishing between these two newspapers? What's supposed to be "exceptional" about the New York Times?
A business secured a loan from a billionaire after the GFC and paid it off in 6 years. The billionaire also acquired a significant position in the business that he has mostly exited with a significant profit generated from the business subscription model. More on this crazy story as it unfolds at 11
It's no different -> Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers -> well, they were struggling in 2009 -> ...
It's no different -> Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers -> well, they were struggling in 2009 -> they took a loan that one time -> ...
> Slim's investments in the company included large purchases of Class A shares in 2011, when he increased his stake in the company to 8.1% of Class A shares,[43] and again in 2015, when he exercised stock options -- acquired as part of a repayment plan on the 2009 loan -- to purchase 15.9 million Class A shares, making him the largest shareholder.
[my emphasis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Company ]
NYT has dual class shares. It’s run by the Sulzberger family despite Slim’s stake.
They are rich, but not billionaires.
Classifieds used to be a cash cow... not EASY money nessesairly, it's made $20 or so at the time, but it was a lot of money. Things like apartments for rent or cars for sale.
Then craigslist came a long and killed that.
Similarly ads went from large purchases, often for very large placements (we'd do things like sell rights to entire sections for flat fees), went to Pay Per Impression models paying hundreths of a cent, with no guarantees or minimums.
For a current breakdown, see: Index of News Media Ownership: https://futureofmedia.hsites.harvard.edu/index-us-mainstream...
There is a subset of its customers that is only really paying for the games like the crossword. There is a subset only really paying for Cooking. etc.
NYT is really just making the old newspaper model work in the new age, albeit with higher reliance on subscription revenue and less an ad revenue.
User "api" said "nobody", so that is enough to refute their point. Some people would might pay for it, it seems.
I get that the state-sponsored "news" in many EU countries is heavily politically coloured, but why would something like NYT be if they have paying subscribers? I never did the research, but I'm guessing they must have huge additional streams of income besides payments from readers?
What alternative revenue incentive do you see that could support independent journalism?
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media...
The legacy media were advertising companies who also happened to provide news. People aren't willing to subscribe for advertising, but they will for games.
The papers wouldn't go for it, but these days I can subscribe to individual writers I like on Substack rather than paying for a newspaper subscription and subsidizing content I don't care about. More bang for buck. People have to be met halfway.
The Economist is one of the few news sources worth paying for.
Every week, there's a tour of the world's major events, by region. There will also be an in-depth article on one country (how's Rwanda getting along?), an in-depth article on one industry (what's the situation with bauxite supply?) and maybe a section on some technology (water desalination, who's doing it?) Over a year, most of the world and most of the industries are covered. Read the Economist for a year and you get a sense of how the world works.
The target audience is the movers and shakers of the world. Look at the employment ads.
There's a general pro-capitalism bias, but it's British-European, not US-oriented.
I originally planned to just take a break, but after that distasteful cancellation procedure, I didn’t feel like resubscribing.
I have been subscribing to the Economist through DiscountMags for over a decade now, and consider DiscountMags to be a totally legitimate business. DiscountMags does automatically enroll you for their "DiscountLock" auto-renewal when you place an order, but you can turn it off at any time through their website without talking to anyone (and I would recommend turning off DiscountLock as it no longer locks in the original price like it used to... so better to just re-up during a sale period).
[1] https://slickdeals.net/f/18290980-the-economist-magazine-1-y...
That €349 per year is pretty steep, though.
See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.
All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue.
Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.
Yet people love their monthly subscriptions to listen to a song or an album (Spotify), or to watch a movie (Netflix). It's clear to me that the future of written content, especially news, is mass syndication (like you mention). Where you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a wast library of content from different sources.
But for reading news articles, there's a LOT of diversification. It's nowhere near one-stop shopping. In fact, a responsible reader ought to want to diversify points of view to avoid bubbles.
Of course, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of an industry consortium allowing a reader to pay into a single pool and read content from many sources, with payment distributed in some equitable manner.
You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf...
Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boost circulation. In fact, they still do.
You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight.
I have literally never seen this. In the US?
Independent news should be completely free from capitalist interests.
and that is a problem because? These are funded by tax dollars collected. It's impossible for people to stop paying for them whether they make sense or not.
I just thought that this other thread on housing microeconomics is worth pointing out, to anyone who might be excited about the prospects of enlightened tax policy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750961
>This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.
https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/02/07/the-dangers-...
For example we can see here that this news article is lifting directly from the police press release. https://bsky.app/profile/kwardvancouver.bsky.social/post/3lu...
Maybe it wasn't even an overworked city reporter that did this but simply an automated AI creating news articles straight from the police press releases.
There may be some environmentalists who have housing as a pet peeve or something, and there are lots of yuppies who want to defend their housing prices who might be liberal but I don't associate this position with leftism in any way.
The argument isn't that the left broadly construed opposes housing legalization! Just that there's a prominent faction of them that do. Right-NIMBYs are a much bigger problem across the US.
Thompson recently recorded a podcast episode with Zephyr Teachout, taking the "we shouldn't do anything before we address antitrust" side of the argument; you can listen to it if you think "the antitrust left" isn't a real thing. Understand: the issue isn't antitrust; it's a totalizing worldview based purely on antitrust. Antitrust is probably super important! But where I live, zoning reform is much more important.
Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats. They're not talking to the Republicans. Not in the sense they're talking to Democrats, at least. I don't think they could make that much clearer than they have.
Leftists tend to feel very little solidarity with wealthy progressives and don't really vibe with their political interests, in general. It seems really weird that the specific label of "leftist" is being thrown around in this context. Especially in the context of organizing the Democrats where there is a meaningful and material difference between liberal and leftist.
Most leftists gag over current anti-housing laws (I wish that were true of the right, but right-YIMBYs make up a tiny minority of the political right).
Long thought extinct, sightings have been reported.
The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.
This willfully ignores evidence that community after community has actively passed laws to stop that industry from building more.
Chesterton's Fence: why do those laws exist? Because people thought they were necessary to stop housing construction (especially, but hardly exclusively, densification).
It's not a partisan thing - red states are full of NIMBYs and littered with HOAs too - but the largest cities in red states have happened to not be hit quite as hard yet because they are generally newer cities, with plenty of room to sprawl horizontally still, starting from a lower baseline.
The business model of construction companies is to buy a piece of property, develop it and then sell it for something more than the cost of buying it plus the cost of developing it. Constraining supply increases the cost of property which they then have to pay in order to acquire properties to develop. It isn't really in their interest to increase their own costs.
The most significant way it could be is if they were buying lower density units and replacing them with higher density units, so they'd be selling more units than they're buying and therefore benefit from the price per unit increasing. But in order to benefit from that they'd need to be increasing rather than decreasing the supply, which is contrary to the premise of them doing the opposite.
> The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.
Suppose that it would be profitable to buy a single family home and replace it 10 condo units, except that there is a law prohibiting you from doing that. Then it would be more profitable not to build those units, since doing so is illegal. But who is to blame for this?
Let's say for a moment that this is close but not quite actually the business model.
Let's say that the construction companies have spent a long time buying up vacant lots, faster than they are developing them, such that they now have a large inventory of land and would not have costs go up to continue operating if they did what you say.
What would you expect would happen in that case?
There was one conservative dude who ran for city council here who was all about 'private property' and 'get rid of government regulations', who also ran against the idea of liberalizing zoning.
I've met left wing people who I agree with on many issues who will do the most spectacular, Olympic level mental gymnastics to avoid the notion that 'supply and demand' apply to housing.
There are moderate Democrats who are big backers of various reforms. And some on the far left who get that if you want Vienna style social housing, you also need Vienna style zoning and building regulations.
A former mayor here is a moderate Republican - he totally got what we were about and said some really nice things about welcoming new neighbors in one speech a few weeks after he met up with our YIMBY group.
It's just not an issue that - so far - has been slotted into the trench warfare that other issues have been.
It really does not map onto left-right.
Basically, all the arguments I've seen against Abundance tend either towards the ideological, or irrelevant. I tend to see very little empirical arguments.
Housing, though, could definitely use a better market with less constraints like zoning.
Can you show me an example of someone pushing this?
This is the crux of the opposition. It's not that leftists necessarily have a problem with zoning reform, I don't at least, its fine. It's that the "abundance" project is a play for control of the party by the same losers who gave us Biden and Kamala.
People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face. "Think of the millionaire land developers" is a losing message even if it does indirectly help regular people 10 years later. It's not even actionable at the federal level.
Housing is that.
This just sounds like you want populist things and the outcome doesn't matter. Like price controls and tariffs.
"The dairy industry ran ads saying milk was good for you for 20 years and sales went down. Then they tried 'got milk' and sales went up" https://youtu.be/keCwRdbwNQY?si=kc14Ms7ECxglNgbl
Up north, Carney ran on a platform of building 500k homes annually, approx double the rate of housing starts. That's direct and done at the federal level, with billions in financing. It's impossible to be less timelagged than that by way of policy. So-called "affordable housing" qua government funding development (price controls after the fact notwithstanding) still entails hoop jumping and waiting for approvals, they don't spring up the next day.
The effects of zoning reform where they're implemented are reflected quickly as well. See: Minneapolis.
The general trend I see is that the left attacks the "Abundance agenda" without having read about it. Either that or the fact that it isn't just about market solutions is deliberately ignored.
I could get behind "build more" much more easily than "abundance". You're onto something there IMO.
Housing supply is the biggest economic problem that regular people face.
Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson did not bring us Joe Biden, Ezra became one of the most critical mainstream journalists of Biden. Their politics are meaningfully different.
I've been in leftist housing advocacy circles. I studied urban planning.
1) Every leftist I know who cares about housing hates euclidean zoning
2) Every leftist I know who cares about housing hates down-zoning
3) Every urban planning class I took said that euclidean zoning is bad
Euclidean zoning is the principle land use regulation in the United States because it is supported by powerful people, landowners and yes property developers (who are also almost always land speculators.)
Thompson and Klein misrepresent euclidean zoning as a leftist project and then set it up as a wicker man to stuff with all the environmental and labor protections they want to torch.
Leftists are not solely or distinctively responsible for exclusionary zoning and housing restriction in the US. Nationally, they're not even the biggest problem. But in many jurisdictions, places that should be the vanguards and test cases for housing reform, they are the controlling factor.
Which is why Derek Thompson addresses them so directly. What would be the point of aiming these criticisms at Republican-controlled municipalities? They don't share these values to begin with! They're not listening!
Right now, we have two parties actively propping up home values and the interests of the upper middle class. Klein and Thompson propose: what if on this issue we had two parties?
T&K are fundamentally dishonest about the role of euclidean zoning in american cities, who supports it and why it's so powerful. Their basic project is to strip environmental and labor protections by tying them to euclidean zoning and saying "it's all the same."
And by the way, they may get their way (Newsom is already forcing repeals of environmental protections in California while toasting Klein) but at the end of the day euclidean zoning will still be around, because it is supported by people who are way too powerful.
Another by the way: I remember fighting the big Chicago rezoning in 2004. They had us chasing our tails by trying to double the parking requirements and letting us fight to get them back down to where they were in the old code, feeling like we won a big victory.
Again: this is one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the country.
Its both. That's the problem. In my neighborhood, the construction of any market rate housing will be blocked by Hillary voting land-owners and single family home owners and card-carrying Bernie Bros mad that a private developer even gets to set foot in the city.
It's this alliance that has basically blocked housing in most metro cities.
When it comes to 100% affordable housing, yes the Hillary voters are on their own, but those are like 1-2 headline causing projects. For every affordable housing project there are 10 market rate housing projects that never even see the light of day.
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 non-standard definition.
I'm not even very far left and I identify with the term because party leadership are all 80yo and out of touch.
Voters feel ripped off by the establishment. Running on "we're the establishment and we're here to help" is a loser, and letting Trump be the rebel is malpractice.
Here's the definition of the word taken from macOS's built-in dictionary (New Oxford American Dictionary):
> leftist, noun: a person who has left-wing political views or supports left-wing policies.
> left-wing, noun: the section of a political party or system that advocates for greater social and economic equality, and typically favors socially liberal ideas; the liberal or progressive group or section
Anti-capitalist thought represents a subset, but is certainly not the sole marker of left-wing political thought.
Now, my _personal_ take on this is that western left-wing thinking and liberalism (in the moral philosophical sense) are deeply intertwined (given the Enlightenment and its values), but anti-capitalist thought is deeply illiberal in nature. It is this fundamental contradiction that leads to permanent infighting within the left-wing spectrum.
I think I'm injecting what I know from getting a degree in political science and a two and half subsequent decades of experience paying attention to how political terminology is used by scholarly, journalistic, popular, and activist sources across the political spectrum into the definition.
> Here's the definition of the word taken from macOS's built-in dictionary
And that's a tolerably decent definition for a relatively compact general dictionary, but it misses a lot of nuance; outside of activist sources using it as a slur for their opponents, it is not used in nearly the local-politics-relevant way that left/right (especially qualified with a national label, like "American left") is.
The parties are asymmetric. "Red state" implies very much on the right and is much more radicalized then democrats. But democrats themselves are centrists and unlike the republicans, tend to push away more radical parts.
“Abundance” appeals to the financial backers of the Democratic Party because deregulation doesn’t threaten them. But our problems are much graver that what YIMBYism can address: authoritarianism, climate change, austerity, warmongering toward China.
It’s because the wealthy block left-wing populism that so many people have turned to right-wing populism. Which is only making our problems worse.
At this rate, it’s only a matter of time before society cracks. There’s a good chance it doesn’t end well for the financial backers of “abundance.”
People tend to call the Democrats the left, as they're at least somewhat leftward of the Republicans. It's at least easier for discussion purposes than speaking of the right and the other right.
I've gone out of my way here not to make value judgements; Republicans have coherent arguments for why all these policies are better. "Republicans who don't hate minorities" is not a good way to describe liberals, who make up the majority of the Democratic party, the "other" American party that opposes the Republicans.
Liberals fucking love charter schools, 401ks, they voted against the Illinois progressive income tax (Biden won Illinois big when that got defeated). I could go on. You're so far off the scent.
Also, in fairness, there are a lot of republicans who aren't into cruelty too. Its just that the jerks are an important part of the current right coalition.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism
That's basically the position Klein has in the book Abundance, but everywhere I go online the left automatically comes out hostile to it or anything that embraces market solutions. Your anecdote might be true but beyond your small sample size it doesn't seem representative. Broadly, they want populist solutions. This is why Sanders and Warren gave a lukewarm criticism of tariffs, and why they like price controls for grocery stores despite their having small margins, and risk of food shortages it could bring.
Explain?
The major parties went with throwing more money at the problem.
I've been very involved in council-level politics where repeatedly the Greens members were aligning themselves with the right-wing members ("ratepayers rights"-type groups) when it came to delaying/blocking development permits, enforcing parking requirements, preventing/delaying rezoning, etc. They fundamentally don't understand the issue at all. All talk, no substance.
And that's before we get to the CFMEU matter, which I think was the final blow for them during the last election.
Many of the flats end up in the hands of landlords, who charge even more unreasonable rents.
There is no sense in which that's a workable long-term solution to the housing problem.
The Green pitch is "That's clearly not working, let's not do more of it." Which has nothing in common with "We don't want anyone to build anything anywhere."
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.
This pitched debate may very well simply represent an attempt to forestall action by bogging efforts down in debate over what's effective or correct, of course. It's worked for any number of groups looking to forestall what seems like an obvious and inevitable solution: reducing lead exposure by banning its use in consumer products, reducing tobacco-related illness by making it difficult and more uncomfortable to partake, and, in our case, making housing affordable by letting prices fall.
Just let arguments stand on their own merits. The minute an article includes the term "lefties" or "righties", it's gone wrong imo.
Do with that information what you please.
The economy is too complex to be planned in details and such attempts at control have failed again and again.
I think some people also miss that, crucially, the market is not an external force, it is just the aggregate of each individual's need, decision, and desires. SO in a way a working market is as free and democratic as can be.
You can add regulations or limitations that incentivize the market one way or another to achieve social goals, but these distortions add up. And when there are too many distortions in the market, it stops acting how you want it to act, and starts acting how it will. And usually, that means negative unintended consequences.
Local boards in blue cities (California in particular) have blocked new housing for decades using every tool at their disposal. Places that lean left have anomalous rent growth. Places that lean left approve fewer new houses. Places that lean left have anomalously high building costs. This is a matter of written record. Embarrassingly, the only US city to buck this trend is Austin, a city in red-Texas known for a recent influx of radicalized right wingers.
> yuppies who want to defend their housing prices
Yuppies, but definition, are young professionals. They don't own houses, they rent. They are the ones paying the high rental costs as neighborhoods gentrify. They want more housing. The 35+ home owning population is the one that blocks new housing.
> I don't associate this position with leftism in any way
The leftist - YIMBY conflict shows up on 3 fronts.
First, Leftists have issues with the free-market. They reject market-housing solutions as a way to create new housing.
Second, Leftists like Govts and regulation. YIMBY wants less regulation, so they can maximize for space and price. Regulated Govt built housing is both more expensive and worse than what free markets already provide.
Third, and the most important, is a subtle accusation: "Leftists act just as selfish as everyone else, once they are the ones in power". Having come from an ex-socialist country, I have a deeply rooted belief in this accusation. Not that leftists are worse people, but that people are people, and systems should work around their imperfections rather than having expectations of ideological virtue.
The anti-trust left is a nice way to point a sub-section of the left which uses regulation, social outrage and critiques of free-market as a way to get personally beneficial outcomes, at the expense of the wider population. I understand - #NotAllLeftists. YIMBY & abundance advocates themselves have left-sympathies. But the anti-trust left is a non-trivial number and the conversation must start from acknowledging that they exist.
I think a large part of it is that major news organizations too often don't do this kind of reporting, and often just seem to chase the same hot button topics as the rest of the crowd over and over again. And even then, few really dive into the details.
You're larger point is entirely correct, that there's a ton to be learned from old school journalism, and there are people out there doing it. But it's unsettling how much of it only gets covered by citizen journalists doing this in their free time, not by professionals who are supposed to be doing this for a living.
For example, the D.C. Attorney's Office had been simply dropping 2/3's of the criminal cases that came to them. No one noticed this until a anonymous internet account, DCCrimeFacts, went through the records and realized that this had been happening for years. Once that account wrote about it and it gained traction, major papers like the Washington Post started reporting on the story, it eventually ended up being an issue in Congressional hearings, and lead to changes in the way the U.S. Attorney's Office operates.
The account spent a lot of time digging through records and reporting on issues with the criminal justice system you wouldn't find elsewhere. But it was someone's side project, and there haven't been posts in a year.
Another example is the FAA scandal, when the best information has come from a single blog post by a law student who happened to go through the legal paperwork and was surprised that this hadn't been reported on.
The professional news media outlets do have some good reporters, and sometimes there are important deep dives there as well. But they feel few and far between, usually opting to chase infotainment (or sometimes the pet projects of a particular journalist).
It's amazing how many big stories we only get if some random citizen happens to spend their free time doing a personal journalism project, and if that project happens to get enough traction that people actually read it.
[0] https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/
[1] https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
The point of most media is to drive agendas, not uncover the truth. Doing proper reporting would create a problem and get in the way of what you want people to do.
Matthew Stoller called the people Derek Thompson called, and some said Derek had misrepresented their opinions. So shoe leather caused the narrative of this so-called reputation to collapse as well.
https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1951083395146231957
What did Stoller think was going to happen? Calling people up on the phone is Thompson's entire schtick at this point.
In any event, my argument was also that three other factors — particularly financial policy changes starting in the 1980s that deprived small builders of bank capital, helped Wall Street to exert control over large builders and impose production discipline on them...
He tries to twist Lambert's words to say he's only saying there's no evidence of builders throttling at a national scale, thereby leaving room for his argument that it's happening in particular markets (https://x.com/musharbash_b/status/1951133245342404888). The only problem? Lambert clearly isn't specifying a national scale when he says "US," because he then continues by providing an explanation for the local weakening seen in some metros.
Musharbash seems smart enough to understand that, which leaves intentional misrepresentation. He's doing damage control, and hoping to wave his hands hard enough that it isn't noticed.
https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3lv6ul7x...
Because he did? Or because once the entire cumulative picture got painted they looked bad and needed to walk their opinions back?
Did it collapse, or he simply created another dubious narrative to replace the previous one?
The way the piece reads to me is a "He said, She Said". And I have to choose whose word I trust.
Two articles, both claim to have spoken to expert sources, both claim the expert have told them X and Y. One says the expert told them things that corroborates the idea of the "antitrust left", and the other claims the sources actually disagreed with it.
So my personal take is that both appear untrustworthy and biased, pushing their own distorted narrative.
In the "he said, she said".
So either:
1. Derek Thompson is flat out lying
2. The author is wrong and confused, or
3. The critics are wrong
The critics haven't claimed to speak from the author to confirm their interpretation is correct. So to think the critics are right you have to think the convo is a lie or the author is muddled and confused.
It's this one. The person he called made a lengthy follow up post. It's clear Thompson purposely misrepresented the conversation.
It's helpful to understand why the "abundance" movement exists. Its only purpose is to stop the Democratic Party from addressing concentrated economic power. It's funded by the concentrated economic power.
This isn't an academic debate, it's an attempt to maintain power by a discredited group of people who recently presided over the collapse of the Democratic Party and are desperately casting around for a narrative where that's not what happened.
Or, to the extent that it is construction companies, it's still regulatory capture rather than market collusion, but in their case it's capture of occupational licensing to artificially restrict people from entering into the trade labor market.
Still, probably more expensive that having ai write something, and it's not politically on point. Agendas aren't well-served by attempts to describe the truth!
The average article posted to HN is actually of far higher quality than the average newspaper article. Sit down and read many of the “big names” cover to cover. You’ll cry. Contrast them with the same newspaper twenty years ago and you’ll lose hope entirely.
I have a hypothesis. In the 2000s it became more common to Google things instead of asking people. For years, this worked out well, but today the quality of Google (and websites!) is terrible. Today we have an entire generation of journalists that know to do their research with the internet, and surprise, when your inputs are garbage, so are the outputs. The inputs are also homogenized content slop, so there aren’t any real different perspectives. Take any topic, say road construction or a controversial bill or new technology, and read articles about it twenty years ago and now. Twenty years ago you might see some really off the wall ideas - but now, all the articles will be the same. Left, right, whatever, nobody really has any new perspectives, they just have their specific bias projected onto the same universal set of 5 thoughts. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.
Back to this article, it seems well written and I have no bones to pick - but what the author did (pick up the phone and call people) would have been entirely unremarkable not long ago. The fact that we’re remarking on it now is an indication of how deeply fucked the profession is.
Besides that, land and construction are both limited resources that constrain developers ability to “flood the market with small, high density units.” For example in high-land-value urban areas, developers need to build expensive units to be able to make a profit.
That isn't necessarily saving anything. A 4000 square foot unit could very plausibly have four baths and HVAC zones, especially if it's a luxury unit.
Meanwhile not doing that is exactly the sort of thing the existing rules nefariously prohibit. Suppose you want to turn that 4000 square feet into eight studio units with a dorm-style shared kitchen and bathrooms. Now you've significantly lowered your construction costs while increasing the total you can sell for because you're offering eight units, so that becomes the most profitable thing as long as there are enough people who want lower rents more than space, except that hardly anywhere allows you to do it that way.
And kitchens remain a problem. Your dorm-style kitchen layout is creative, but the problem with this idea is that there is very little demand for dorm-style housing. Developers are able to charge higher prices for more conventional layouts - where the demand is - which is what they will build even in the absence of regulation.
Markets can handle some things well but the inability to provide merit goods (like housing) is one of their shortcomings. Unfortunately we need policies with more scope and ambition than YIMBYism if we want to tackle society’s larger problems.
People shit on the healthcare industry for being written into law and they shit on the credit processors for taking a cut of every transaction but the degree to which various flavors of paper pushing engineers are required by law to be given a cut of every single creation, alteration and major repair of a structure is mind boggling.
And this racket is a large part of what puts the squeeze on low end projects.
If it takes me $50k of engineering to be granted a $100 permit to do another $50k of tree clearing and dirt work on a lot then whatever I build needs to make up for that. If not for BS compliance those numbers would be something like $5k, $100, $20k
All of this expense, levied upon literally every single project everywhere, all to prevent the 1/100 or 1/1000 case where someone does something (that they likely knew was) stupid and causes a runoff problem or whatever, that could likely be mitigated by the same costs after the fact where and when it happens.
And this is before you start discussing all the areas where industry and company lobbyists have got their clients inserted into the IBC at the expense of the public.
We could equally levy pressure to improve quality.
In UK, house price inflation has well outstripped material and wage inflation, we should be getting exceptional housing that fits the need of the demos.
This is a puzzling critique because it seems very much in the wheelhouse of "abundance YIMBYism" to advocate for cheaper housing--an argued byproduct of which is that fewer people are displaced. It probably changes the problem statement of gentrification since, if housing is abundant and displacement is low, there's not much to distinguish "gentrification" from just "investing in the neighborhood".
>the critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities
This isn't a problem caused by YIMBYism, nor one whose solutions are obstructed by it. We could by that reason malign it for not solving heart palpitations or cancer too.
Similarly, gentrification is enabled by this narrow focus on YIMBYism. Upzoning increases land value. Developers build profitable market rate houses there. This increases prices in the neighborhood leading to gentrification. This in turn leads to displacement - a key phenomenon that this ideology purports to address.
My issue is not YIMBYism in particular but that it’s offered as a solution to these problems.
Unless you are upzoning ONLY in low-income neighborhoods, this doesn't add up. The assumption is that upzoning makes development more attractive. But this would apply to the entire city, and would therefore increase housing supply outside those low-income neighborhoods as well, which actually reduces the propensity for displacement.
When there's not enough housing for people to live in, people start competing on rent and bidding wars on purchases, this drives price very fast.
That's why you have to build more. To avoid the biggest issue which is a housing shortage.
Is that the ONLY solution? Of course not! Public housing is great. But the same things that prevent YIMBY policies is the same thing that prevents public housing to be built. When you advocate for more zoning to prevent new condos in your neighborhood, it's not just new condos at market price that will be prevented, it's a whole range of housing.
In the country I live in, our population is a shrinking. Quite literally. There would be fewer people today than last year, and will be fewer people next year than this year. Except...
You can't have Vienna style public housing without having Vienna style zoning codes and building codes.
Most of the housing in Vienna would be illegal to build in like 99% of American cities.
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.
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 affordability for the development of a disadvantaged constituency.
Over time, many of these such regulations accumulate. Environmental reviews. Impact studies. Public comment periods. And while every individual regulation might be well meaning, the totality of them creates market distortions that disincentivize or even utterly prevent the very thing we're trying to accomplish.
So, the abundance movement looks at these and says we need to think about these in terms of tradeoffs, and pare back the regulations that have bad tradeoffs. This is often derided by critics as deregulation which makes developers more profitable. While that might be a side effect, it's not the main reason. It's deregulation to remove market distortions that, in the case of housing, constrain supply and therefore drive up housing costs.
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.
Unless you think this guy is actually interested in building more housing:
https://fortune.com/2022/08/13/atherton-california-housing-m...
If your point is that Andreesen advocates for abundance policies, but then also opposes them in classic NIMBY fashion when it affects him, well, that's an indictment of Marc Andreesen, not Abundance mentality. In fact, your point inadvertently seems to say "Marc Andreesen is not Abundance enough!" since he is engaged in anti-Abundance activity in lobbying against multi-family housing.
The abundance movement is not a grassroots group of people, it’s a lab creation of billionaire/donor types. Andreesen is one of them, that’s the context for the link. Reid Hoffman is another.
These people want to find a way to distract from the appeal of progressive policies of the kind put forward by Lina Khan and others who actually attempt to directly take on the concentrated economic power that’s strangling normal people in this country. They’re the ones doing the strangling.
It’s propaganda, a PR project by oligarchs. It’s fundamentally done in bad faith and there’s absolutely nothing obligating me to take them at face value.
If you want to argue that Andreesen is co-opting or manipulating those ideas for his own ends, that's something else.
The problem that they've identified is real and obvious: people can't afford housing, things are increasingly precarious for the middle class, and so on.
The actual solution is that concentrations of market power have to be broken up, we are being strangled by monopolies and cartels, and the way we run the macro economy is in favor of the financial sector. We prioritize returns on large scale capital over absolutely everything else.
There's no way to address the actual problems without doing things differently. In order for regular people to win, some powerful people will have to lose, at least a little.
Those powerful people don't want this, so they're happy to fund Klein and Thompson and a slew of other think tanks and politicians to advance the narrative that there's some other way to do things. Mostly the usual tactic of "blame it on the hippies" that has been so effective for them since the 1990's and the Clinton administration.
Given all this context, there aren't really any merits to the argument of the book. It's the equivalent of someone arguing with you that better diet and exercise is the way to fix an open stab wound. Also they're the person that stabbed you.
Like diet and exercise are good ideas. But if I'm like hey what the fuck you're a murderer and you come back with something about how that's an ad-hominem, and also why are you disagreeing with the ideas that diet and exercise are good, I don't really need to engage with you on the merits of those arguments right this second.
What we need to do first is take the knife away.
Nothing in the Abundance agenda states that direct public housing is bad, per se. The argument is that what we need is more housing, and the only realistic way for that to happen is to make housing easier and cheaper to build, typically by easing zoning restrictions and other things like parking minimums that drive up costs.
Slow and unproven? Supply and demand is the most reliable law of economics. Cities like Austin that are building market rate housing are actively seeing affordability improve.
Furthermore, even if it wasn't sufficient, abundance YIMBYism would still be helpful and necessary.
Gentrification isn't actually a problem if it doesn't force lower income residents to leave. They wouldn't be forced to leave if their housing wasn't some of the only options for higher income people to inhabit
Your claims are unsubstantiated. I've only ever seen vague critiques by anti-abundance commentators. If you think YIMBY is wrong, then be specific in your criticisms. There is nothing special about direct public housing. It is housing built by the govt. The govt gets caught between regulations, is slower, wasteful & pays higher wages to workers. It's market rate housing but worse in every way. Chicago [1] is contemporary proof that Govt. can't build housing.
On the other hand, YIMBY Austin [2] has seen slower rent growth despite rapid migration over the last decade.
> gentrification and displacement
You realize this is a home ownership problem right ?
YIMBY doesn't cause gentrification. It is a balm to reduce the pain of inevitable gentrification. A neighborhood gentrifies because increased economic opportunity draws new transplants in. If housing supply is limited, then existing residents are going to get priced out one way or another. As a neighborhood starts to gentrify, YIMBY redevelopment projects roll in & existing landowners see large windfalls. It's great if you own. Gentrification is only bad if you rent. Even then, YIMBY redevelopment projects increase housing supply, giving locals an option to move to home ownership and reduce the magnitude of rent spikes. It curbs the supply crunch.
Anti-abundance people don't have a coherent alternative other than rent control. Rent control has an unbeaten track record of failure in the western world. Either, prices diverge [3] and create a rental class system between new tenants and old residents. Or, they turn dilapidated like America's famous inner-city 'projects'.
There are 2 ways to look at it: the empathetic lens vs the pragmatic lens.
We've looked through the empathetic lens for the existing residents. But, from a pragmatic lens, why do they deserve to live exactly where they want to ? Yes, A city should provide sufficient housing to earning families within its boundaries. But, why should a person deserve to live on a specific block over another ? The existing renter had a choice to lock a spot down by buying it, and they didn't. Now, the renter is owed no such right. The newcomer and the old renter both have a valid claim to reside on the land, and rent control takes an unequal stance by favoring the older renter over the newcomer. Even in its best rendition, rent control is discriminatory. And rent control's best rendition lives in the same realm as Santa Claus or True Communism, called 'things that never happen'. At least YIMBYism buys time and opportunity for the older renter to figure out their next move.(opportunity to buy new housing, time because rents creep up slower)
[1] https://citythatworks.substack.com/p/construction-costs-for-...
[2] https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-with-the-la...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/30/rents-...
> gentrification and displacement
These are not actual issues with regards to housing being too expensive. These are pet issues divorced from economics.
> the slow and unproven trickle-down effect of market-rate housing
This is absolutely proven in the data, and even a basic thought experiment using the pigeon hole principle will show that more houses means the prices drop of existing stock.
> critical need for direct public housing to serve low-income communities
Why is this a critical need? More housing being built could also mean more public housing, but removing zoning and land use regulations doesn't hurt this.
It seems you are more disappointed that your personal pet political issues are being ignored in favor of a market solution to house prices.
Studies show the same percent of people move out of neighborhoods regardless of whether or not the neighborhood is gentrified. They also show that those low-income people who stay in a gentrified neighborhood see their incomes rise. Those low-income people who are in a neighborhood that is not gentrified see their income go down.
Your intuitions are wrong following them is making the problems worse.
So it really is quite a monoculture. 20 years ago they all lived in UWS, now it's somewhere between Park Slope and North Brooklyn. Ever noticed how many local color stories used to be UWS focussed and are now Brooklyn? A lot of trends pieces are "stuff I noticed in my friends group" type of depth, and they all have the same friends groups. They literally don't know what they don't know.
ctrl-F "RealPage" - nothing. hmm.
ctrl-F "rent" - also nothing. really?
from about a year ago: Justice Department Sues RealPage for Algorithmic Pricing Scheme that Harms Millions of American Renters [0]
> The Justice Department, together with the Attorneys General of North Carolina, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington, filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today against RealPage Inc. for its unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments.
> ...
> Another landlord commented about RealPage’s product, “I always liked this product because your algorithm uses proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and term. That’s classic price fixing…”
if I hear about antitrust in the context of housing policy, RealPage making it easier for apartment buildings to collude on rent prices is the very first thing that leaps to mind.
it seems like Thompson is being awfully selective about which antitrust-related criticisms he's responding to here. he seems to be focusing exclusively on building single-family homes, and completely ignoring the concrete example of monopoly power being used for apartment rentals, and antitrust laws being used to address that.
0: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
'One of the most detailed articles in this space is an analysis of the Dallas, Texas, housing market by the lawyer and writer Basel Musharbash. In “Messing With Texas: How Big Homebuilders and Private Equity Made American Cities Unaffordable”'
Musharbash doesn't mention RealPage either, so go blame him, since he doesn't think RealPage contributes to Dallas's problems.
yes, he's responding to [0] which was written by Musharbash and published in Matt Stoller's newsletter.
and as I said, he's being selective about what criticism he's responding to and what he's ignoring. because Stoller has also published, in the same newsletter, articles about RealPage price fixing [1, 2].
Thompson says:
> The antitrust left, however, claims...
if he's going to say "here's what the antitrust left believes" and then proceed to debunk it, I think it's reasonable to point out that his response is cherry-picking only part of what that "antitrust left" believes.
of course, if he wants to publish a follow-up article defending RealPage, I'd love to read it.
0: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
1: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-r...
2: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/up-to-a-quarter-of-rental...
Stoller is free to find similarly decisive refutations of arguments Thompson had made (they're unlikely to be forthcoming).
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 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.
yeah, I never said it was.
Thompson himself says:
> Still, I wanted to spend more time engaging with the arguments of the antitrust housing folks.
he says he wanted to engage with the arguments made by the antitrust left.
which means he chose which of those arguments he was going to engage with.
and he chose to make this a 2-part post about why he thinks the antitrust left is wrong about homebuilding monopolies:
> Thanks for reading. Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of my analysis, where I’ll explain what really happened in Dallas and why I think unaffordability became a national phenomenon if the cause isn’t oligopolies.
now, if there's a part 3 where he talks about RealPage and antitrust as it applies to rentals rather than single-family homebuilding, I'll gladly eat crow.
but until that happens, I'm going to call Thompson intellectually dishonest, because there's a cute little sleight-of-hand trick he's doing here. his opening paragraph:
> The sharpest criticisms of the book Abundance have sometimes come from the antitrust movement. This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business.
he's saying some of the best criticisms of his book come from the antitrust left.
and that he's evaluated some of the arguments made by the antitrust left and thinks they're wrong.
if you miss the sleight-of-hand, you might come away thinking that he's responding to the best arguments made about housing by the antitrust left.
but he's pretty clearly not doing that. because the "antitrust left" argument against RealPage doing algorithmic rent-fixing (detailed in a 115-page federal lawsuit [0]) is much stronger than the "antitrust left" argument about homebuilding monopolies in Dallas (detailed in a Substack post by some guy)
0: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1364976/dl?inline
Spending effort on theoretical collusion which may or may not be happening is a diversion from the real problem, which is lack of housing supply.
He was responding to a specific critique of his book. So... yes. That's how that works.
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 over.
However, at the end of the day, RealPage is simply not enough to get Los Angeles rents out of Houston property. Supply and demand are still where it's at.
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?
If I were convinced the problem lay elsewhere, I would focus on that, because I don't have anything invested in the problem being a specific thing.
Why is the govt's job to control where people live? I thought individual freedom was a big part of the whole deal?
Are there any serious objections to that line of reasoning?
There are different kinds of homeowners. There are those who are flipping houses and directly betting that the values go up, which is the crowd that you're describing. But at least in my area of the world, the majority of the anti-housing crowd is just old and is more anti-change than anything else. Even if the value of their home skyrockets even more, they won't sell and move. Their complaints are more about noise, traffic, and "quality of life" than home values.
In most places they are not. What would even compel you to write something like this?
Property values are regularly re-assessed according to recent sales and a % of the property value is then levied as tax.
For example, in Vancouver the residential tax rate is around 0.15% and homes average around $2 million. Where I live which is a few hundred kilometres away the residential tax rate is around 0.5% and homes average around $600k. If you do the math, for both places the average place has $3000/year in taxes due — which is totally independent of house costs.
What does make the difference is if your house is more expensive than the average house. If you have a $2million dollar house in the place with 0.5% tax rate you are paying $10000/year in taxes despite your counterpart in Vancouver with a $2million dollar house is paying $3000/year.
I get this can be different across the world, but that is generally how it works in Canada.
That's a factor, but the bigger deal is that eligible homeowners ar 50% more likely to vote than eligible renters, and that doesn't even count that many renters are not event eligible to vote!
https://nlihc.org/resource/new-census-data-reveal-voter-turn...
Even if the data seems to indicate that's true, I do see this statement thrown around a lot without much granularity into the groups counted.
In your link, it's broken down into a few different groups, but in terms of renters vs owners I'm kind of less interested in proportion of people eligible to vote who fit into each broad category, and more interested in normalized categories. How many more people who didn't vote and are renters share a rental unit with someone they're not tied to long-term, or rent alone, compared to people who own alone or own in a long-term committed relationship where both people would be owners and likely to physically vote together, for example.
As in, is there as significant of difference between households of the same structure, income level, age bracket, in terms of voter turnout (a couple sharing the status of renting or sharing the status of owning). I feel like you'd be much more likely to vote if your spouse that you split expenses and responsibilities with also votes, whereas your roommate might not give a damn and it has nothing much to do with you.
Likewise if you own a 1 bedroom condo alone, does that show up as different than someone who rents a 1 bedroom condo alone?
I think a more realistic (but depressing) goal is modest loss to inflation (so prices go up by 1-2% less then inflation).
If you read between the lines that seems to be what Canada's approach to house affordability is going to be. Their leaders are promising housing will be more "affordable" but that the goal isn't to decrease home prices.
I have not seen anything that would create a supply of equally desirable properties (compared with detached dwellings).
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.
And people don’t seem to understand inflation. They expected to see real prices go down (deflation) and were upset when that did not happen.
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
(In fact, my local government is actually closing roads near new housing because "f#ck cars" is apparently a hip idea these days.)
I'm saying that developers are eager to build housing and sometimes are able to cut corners via undue influence over public officials. That leads to more housing (good), but it also erodes the quality of life for residents (bad).
It's really not that hard to understand.
I think I've heard everything now.
Nobody else should decide the balance but the residents who have semi-permanently set up their lives there. People considering where to move have no skin in the game, they can pick somewhere else if they don't like what they see or can't afford it. Developers at least have something to lose once they've set up shop, but they're still not raising families there. And by "should" I mean, I wouldn't buy a home in a place where homeowners don't have the most say. Those places do exist, and I'd only rent there temporarily.
At the state level, planning can be done for the benefit of the whole city. Entrenched groups of property owners holding inner city areas hostage won't be able to push young people to the outskirts where there is no PT, schools or facilities. Medium and high density buildings would be able to be built where they make the most sense, not just where there is the least political resistance.
Young people want to live near jobs, transport, and entertainment. But those areas are currently locked up by property owners preventing construction of appropriate housing.
So if you enabled them to buy the more desirable homes instead of merely renting, where in this are they actually benefiting from doing so?
The best solution in my perspective is to have stagnant housing prices so eventually general inflation will make housing cheaper.
I'm a homeowner and rising house prices are terrible for me. Property taxes have doubled, and the prospect of switching neighborhoods (as one might consider doing for work, school, or other reasons) feels off the table given the high costs involved in the transaction, since agent fees are a percentage of the sale.
But some homeowners are to blame, at the civic level, where those who are happy with the way things are reinforce the roadblocks against affordable housing. Minimum lot sizes and anti-apartment legislation dissuade the pesky low-income riff-raff from moving in.
Personally I'd like to see legal constraints on investment in primary, single-family homes, and fewer legal constraints on building them.
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...
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.
There are some wild political takes on the internet sometimes, and it can be hard to parse out exactly what the person is trying to say (especially if the reader failed their speed reading comprehension ;-) )
I just wish you'd dial back the combative tone of your comments on HN. You've been engaging in a lot of political/ideological battle recently, and it would be good if you could remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to use HN in the intended spirit.
We're trying for curious conversation here. Different perspectives about economics are very welcome. Slurs and swipes are not.
The logic you're using here depends on deliberate vacancy; as soon as you concede that investors let out properties, you force them to compete in the market for housing with all the other supply.
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
Or is the argument that merely building more houses isn't sufficient?
(Also presumably you could build an infinite amount of houses, but the land itself is somewhat of a fixed supply...)
Yes. The central thesis of the blog post is that increasing the housing supply solves the housing price issues.
And other people in this thread are going: "Uhh, well actually, have you considered that this is the fault of wealthy investors, and/or collusion or something"?
Anything to distract from the extremely simply and obvious idea that building more housing causes prices to fall.
Car loans have been a thing. And they attach to depreciating asset.
We'd revert to the state that applied for most of human history: 99% of humans will be serfs renting from 1% hereditary landlords. We'll have shown the American mid-century home-owning middle-class phenomena to be an historical anomoly. Average living standards will plummet and equity barons will never have lived so well. Any short-term rental rate drops will quickly be erased by a combination of growing population and well-known market manipulation, in particular further wealth consolidation.
Mere millionaires think they are safe; they are not. We live in a world that has a ~10 OOM wealth scale; being at level 7 does very little to protect you from 8s 9s and 10s, just as 2s are powerless to 4s and above. To a 10 a 7 may as well be a New Dehli beggar.
There is already price manipulation with rental properties. If a cartel is in control of enough of the supply they can set their prices as high as the market can afford. There is already a nationwide shortage of affordable housing in desirable places with jobs and the idea ITT is that it will only get worse as the investment class are the only people that can afford desirable property.
which is the correct price - because you dont need a cartel to set the price at as high as the market can afford; each individual landlord chooses to price their rental at the highest profit they can, with the lowest chance of a vacancy.
A cartel makes it possible to set the price _higher_ than the market can afford. Which is why a cartel is illegal.
I think land lords wont lease out at marker rate due to that would lower the book value of the house which would make the banks call in loans.
Like, bank and land lords have some sort of understanding which in practice is some sort of price fixing and market collusion via proxy.
Feb 2024 (last year there's data, I think) was a record low and it was 1.4% empty, according to NYC[1].
But I don't really know the methodology, and according to other nyc gov data it's surprising, since we still haven't recovered our population from COVID[2].
The first statistic (housing pressure) is based on population growth, but the NYC population statistics suggest still meaningful population loss since 2020.
I have seen articles in the past that suggest that apartment vacancy rates in NYC are self-reported and misleading at best, but I don't really understand how that would work and I can't find any sources on that now.
It's also my understanding that some classes of landlords can mark empty apartments as income losses, basically or partially making up for the loss of revenue in tax rebates. But that's also not something I understand well, just something I have seen asserted.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac... [2]: https://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/dcp/assets/files/pdf/data-t...
My point though was just that I've seen arguments that these numbers can be manipulated, and the city's own data doesn't make sense by itself: either the 1.4% number is wrong or the slowly recovering population estimate is wrong. Especially considering the 60,000 housing units (representing 2% growth) created.
> They leave it empty (that actually happens a lot, especially with foreign investors
Not talking about rental vacancy.
I was talking about the myth that there are tons of apartments held by rich people who don’t use them for anything.
I had thought such units would have been included in the housing vacancy statistics, but apparently they are not.
https://gothamist.com/news/how-many-nyc-apartments-are-vacan...
That's almost the exact opposite of your definition, but I agree that a 1.4% vacancy rate means there's almost nothing available for rent.
I'm having trouble finding an official definition from a source that reports them, but my definition matches things that I can find online, eg https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/vacancy-rate-what-does...
The real effect of this type of ownership is that it distorts the high end of the market and the effects ripple downstream. They force cash to move elsewhere in search of housing, which inflates those markets, so then those who could afford those markets move elsewhere, etc.
Despite all of the data that gets lobbed around on this topic, we don’t seem to have a very good mental model for how small changes in one segment of the market explode into the others and cascade dramatically.
It’s just not very meaningful to examine this as a percentage of units.
That’s why I specified NYC. There’s actually very good economic work on how the housing market is segmented and how demand and supply spill over. There’s some good studies from the NYU’s Furman Center on the topic.
> It’s just not very meaningful to examine this as a percentage of units.
Warehoused condos make up a small fraction of high cost housing in NYC and exist almost solely in a handful of blocks in Manhattan. They have virtually no effect on the broader luxury market, and take up very little land as they are mostly crammed into a small number of buildings.
Keep in mind: as soon as you concede that investor-owners are letting out properties, they are competing in the market: further supply of housing decreases their returns, because they compete with all other suppliers of housing, the high-order bit of which is existing owners. You have to make this math work with owners who deliberately keep their units vacant, or it doesn't even work as an idea.
I reject the notion that the units are not making money, and the notion that they are competing on price. We know corporate landlords engage in cartel behavior using price setting algorithms, and there is a deep well of tax-incentives for real estate (eg 1031s) that make it a more complex math problem than you are making it out to be.
The math works, it's just heinous.
They support these sorts of stifling rules and believe that skirting or changing those rules is a right-wing ultra-capitalist attack on the public good, despite the situation actually being the exact opposite.
That does seem to be a right-wing capitalist attack on the public good? Like, do we still believe in markets, or are we just cool with mega-corporations setting prices?
I think Washington State is working on legislation around rental services due to this already being a problem in the Seattle area.
“Extra supply” is added to the portfolio containing housing they’ve already purchased. They own part of “existing supply” too.
Also - I don't think it actually affects prices. It's just that they've gotten good at seeking price equilibrium.
Last year, Seattle built 20% more houses than the highest of any of the previous ten years. (~13k units) And this year we're 11% above last year, so far.
What about that is not "actually encouraging more building"? I'd say your data might need revising.
If supply can be built to meet demand, trying to corner the market to achieve monopoly rents will fail in the long run.
It ought to be, but that is not how America works
What's happening now is the wealth and the middle are buying houses and apartments not for rental income but for appreciation. This motive is what stands in the way of new home building in any given area. This is why rents rise beyond an area can sustain at all - rents are set to maintain the ostensible value of a property - selling an empty property is fine, even encouraged.
The situation is visible everywhere.
Even if the wealthy did buy up extra supply to rent out, that would only mean increased supply of rentals, which would lower rents.
It used to be that rental housing was either owner occupied, like a landlord living on one side of a duplex or it was a big commercial investment. The current trend of every idiot having their starter house from 20yr ago listed as an airBnB wasn't a thing back then.
So basically we "need" way more housing per capita now so that they can all have their stupid little side gigs.
The actual data does not agree with you at all. In places that have implemented zoning reform, housing gets cheaper. In areas where it's easier to build (red states), housing is cheaper. There is no reality at all where supply of housing jumps high but prices do also.
> Personally I'd like to see legal constraints on investment in primary, single-family homes, and fewer legal constraints on building them.
Where investors are concerned, these are purchased to flip, or with the expectation that prices would rise. Given that we had inelastic supply but perpetually growing demand, that was a good bet. So, if you build way more, an investor wouldn't be so confident about that price increase. Now compound that with the risk of borrowing at higher interest rates to buy those properties.
I used to live in Vancouver, and on my street almost all occupants were owners. But guess what, the number of houses on that street has not changes in 100 years, and the number of people who want to live in Vancouver has probably increased tenfold.
The issue wasnt that all the housing stock was bought up, the issue is that housing stock did not increase to satisfy demands.
Additionally, a place like Vancouver is really a global real estate destination. People with money who are not from Canada come to Vancouver and drop a few mil on a single family home and outprice all the locals. If you are buying a house in Vancouver you are competing with wealthy people local, but also the top wealth from across the globe.
BC did pass legislation to make all single family homes qualified for quadplexes, but I think it is too little too late.
Anything short of taxing every residence which is not a primary residence AND banning foreign ownership AND reducing permitting toil AND raising interest rates, is going to fall short.
I gave up a few years ago and moved somewhere else. Vancouver is no longer for Canadians.
There's many arguments against taxation of primary residents but the strongest is probably that it punishes and hinders the ability for people to make sideways movements from similar properties to other similar properties, so it hinders housing liquidity, labour movement etc.
You forgot eliminating favorable taxation for real estate as well.
But actually if you kept all of those factors and simply just increased supply, it would still lower prices. It's not that complicated. It doesn't matter how many incentives you place on top of real estate. If you build more and prices decrease by 20%, it doesn't make demand shoot up by 20%.
The vast majority of people will never purchase more than one home, and will also never leave the metro-area they grew up in.
I think Vancouver people imagine the demand of Chinese real estate investors interested in their city is endless. It is not. Vancouver is the city that has the highest percentage of Chinese-owned real estate outside of China (globally) and its still at only 30%.
And the vast vast majority of cities do not have this dynamic or anything close to it. And the Chinese population is massively declining over the next 40 years, not growing.
If Piketty was correct, then inflation adjusted housing cost per sqft floor would always go up everywhere all the time. But we see dramatic differences in different periods of history, between different cities and we see rents stabilize & decline after building booms. We see housing costs go up the most in the places that build the least and the least in places that build the most.
If Piketty was correct, rich people could do this with things other than housing - they could buy cars and rent them out and then reinvest the profits to buy more cars. Ofc this doesn't actually work because there is no scarcity of cars - for better or worse we have chosen to place almost no limits on the quantity and density of cars in any city, state or country, while placing extremely tight & arbitrary limits on the quantity & density of floorspace in every city. For every car a rich person buys up to rent out, a car company reinvests the profits to build 1 more and then some. There is no functional reason residential floorspace cannot be exactly like that.
Most importantly location matters. Space and buildings are not something that you can easily ship from one market to another to balance supply and demand. Space is inherently limited and replacing existing buildings with new more efficient ones is also problematic when you have people happily living in those old buildings, especially in high demand areas. Construction work takes time and in the meanwhile the displaced families will create even more demand.
There are practical limits on how densely you can pack floor space before it becomes prohibitively expensive, unsafe, or simply impractical. As you build higher the costs grow exponentially while the livable space per floor keeps decreasing due to the tapered shape of the building and need for larger structural core and more elevators. Above certain height you will be forced to target wealthier residents which means either offices or large luxury apartments that are anything but space efficient.
Construction is extremely capital intensive. A building takes a large upfront investment, and it takes a long time for it to pay off. With cars the cost of making more is marginal once you have an assembly line in place so it's significantly easier to re-invest profits into ramping up production.
Renting real estate makes more sense than renting automobiles because real estate is more expensive, less liquid, and better at holding its value over time. Owning a house is more difficult even when it would make financial sense to do so (not everyone can get a mortgage, or commit to living in the same city for an extended period of time).
> for better or worse we have chosen to place almost no limits on the quantity and density of cars
Even worse, most places have chosen to place a lower limit on the quantity and density of cars through parking mandates. It is absolutely insane that we are still wasting space on parking even in densely populated urban centers where it's impossible to accommodate everyone commuting by car.
The main reason old buildings with lots of people are replaced with somewhat taller new buildings, is because of bad laws that require new apartments to go only where old apartments already exist. IMO these are exactly the laws that need to be reformed and or abolished. It doesn’t mean that no one’s old apartment building will ever be demolished for a new one, but right now that’s effectively a requirement. If you want to add four space to a city, you are first required to demolish a large amount of apartment space, and evict everyone inside. If you could simply purchase a house that was already on the market, whose owners wanted to sell and didn’t want to live there anymore, and replace it with an apartment building he wouldn’t evict anyone. This transaction was once common place, but is now effectively illegal almost everywhere in North America because “house people” demand segregation from apartment people.
> There are practical limits on how densely you can pack floor space before it becomes prohibitively expensive, unsafe, or simply impractical. As you build higher the costs grow exponentially while the livable space per floor keeps decreasing due to the tapered shape of the building and need for larger structural core and more elevators. Above certain height you will be forced to target wealthier residents which means either offices or large luxury apartments that are anything but space efficient.
All true, but these limits are really only relevant or binding in Manhattan and perhaps one of two square miles worth of downtown cores in a few large cities. If someone wants to say that Manhattan will always be expensive for those reasons, that’s fine, but it’s no excuse for the other 99.99% of places people want to live in.
Reforming land use successfully IMO doesn’t require us to solve the problem of “how to make Manhattan (or places like Manhattan) even taller” but the much more economical goal of “it should be legal to build a 4 storey walk up with no parking, anywhere you can build a house.” That’s a tough political goal to be sure, but it doesn’t come close to having to deal with any sort of physical or efficiency limits regarding construction of very tall buildings.
What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage?
Eventually there are more houses than people who want to be in them, regardless of whether or not they're being rented or owned.
When that happens you'll see the prices fall. After all, if nobody wants to rent your house, you'll either rent it for lower or sell it.
If nobody wants to buy it, you'll lower the price.
Ad nauseum.
Sounds a bit like "problem A is unsolvable because - look at here! - no one is solving problem C!"
Today you have to work 25 hours to buy the same share
In 40 years time you’ll have to work 4 months to buy what in 1985 would cost 1 hour.
There's reportedly enough housing stock to house the population twice over, yet prices still only increased.
Where there's sufficient inequality, the country will run out of eligible land before the wealthy run out of money.
”The rich” aren’t that stupid, why would they take the losses to support someone else making a profit?
So despite it making no financial sense on an individual, house-by-house level, what happened in practice is that the market itself got strangled by this collusion and despite the existence of many empty houses available for either purchase or rent, you ended up with a non-negligible amount of these places not ending up in the market organically and as such driving up the costs for everyone. The property owners win big with this scheme of course, and the way things were setup you'd be a fool to go against the grain and try outcompete on cheaper housing, since you can't beat an entire market getting strangled.
So yes, "the rich" aren't that stupid, they just so happen to have systems that make these sort of moves profitable.
It's exactly the situation you'd expect with record high prices and low sales volume, which is where we're at.
The wealthy are generally monetarily shrewd, and building homes makes home ownership a worse investment. If there is a deluge of homes being built, the wealthy will take their money elsewhere. Being a landlord typically has ~10% annual return. Compared to just sticking money in the stock market, it's actually been worse as of late.
The goal of the wealthy isn't to make people suffer, it's to maximize their ROI.
Housing is not really a great investment. It's great for small investors because it's the only place where they can invest with leverage via a mortgage. If you have billions there's much better things you can invest in.
Why did the wealthy simple didn’t buy all of it to extort more rent?
If there’s 1 million people and 500k houses they will buy them up because everyone needs somewhere to live and will keep paying more and more to avoid the overcrowded slums that someone has to live in.
I think it’s a realistic goal for apartments/condos. Single family homes will always be constrained by land.
(Edit): I think you, and a lot of people who are anti-capitalist on housing, make the implicit assumption that all housing is a fixed good. There is only so much housing and our political goal is to allocate that fixed amount. In a lot of major US cities this is sort of true because we have regulated the construction of new housing to the point where even the government can’t build it. But the anti-regulation perspective is that if we get rid of the regulations preventing housing construction, then enough housing will be constructed that the allocation problem isn’t much of a problem. (Or something in between, ie it’s a lot easier to build/buy social housing to give away to people if housing is already made very abundant, and the fact that even governments like California have to spend truly ludicrous amounts of money just to get a few crappy studios built)
the only instance I can think of that I know of is there as a historical black neighborhood near love field airport where Dallas changed the zoning to make redevelopment less profitable by requiring the houses take up less of the lot. This way developers can't build huge houses to offset the fact that the land is expensive or they can't build duplexes big enough to make them worth selling either. In fact there were a few duplexes going in to replace detached SFH and the developers were left in the lurch. I think even had to tear them down? I never followed up on the story. This was basically a policy to prevent gentrification by making the land less valuable by policy. Unfortunately gentrification and yimbyism seem like they go hand in hand because if you can develop bigger or more dense the property value goes up and people scream.
Where I can see regulation getting in the way is in the new codes. You can't build a house like you could in the 50s-70s anymore The code today is insanely expensive. Now those 70s houses weren't great. But they aren't didn't cost $200-300+/sqft at the low end.
in my view new single family housing can never be affordable because the cost is just so high. in fact. generic home ownership is as unaffordable as ever due to inflation. call a plumber to fix a leaky faucet? That will be $300. A new fence? $10k. A new HVAC system? $20k. A roof? $12k. These are all real costs for "small" homes. At least in the rental scenario the costs are controlled because not every single thing is a one-off. There are efficiencies at scale. If it's a housing rental company your maintenance guy is on a route, if it's an apartment you have building maintenance, etc.. The roof repair is a contract worth a million bucks where every roof is only $8000 instead of $12000.
that 2500sqft house is still $200-250/sqft way out in the middle of nowhere where the land doesn't really even factor in much.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/01/texas-legislature-sm... https://developmentweb.dallascityhall.com/publiczoningweb/#d... https://dallascityhall.com/departments/sustainabledevelopmen...
Good rule of thumb is that if you see a home services company with billboards, or branded vehicles, they are going to be super expensive.
All while he ignored many parts of the text he allegedly was critiquing. I'm still shocked that this is getting upvoted.
The very first sentence in the article is this:
>This group, mostly on the left, insists that the biggest problems in America typically come from monopolies and the corruption of big business.
"Insists" is doing a lot of work here to support the rest of the article. But it's lies through omission.
>At a high level, I have never found these arguments persuasive
Irrelevant if it persuades you. This isn't a high school debate class, facts and metrics are what matters.
>One hallmark of a monopolistic market is rising profits.
Not even close to true in theory or practice. In theory, monopolies have ever way in order to set prices for whatever goal their after. They may also lower supply thereby lowering aggregate profits. Long term profits can justify anything now.
Anti competitive practices are mainstays of monopolies. Not whatever the author just made up.
>The Musharbash essay on Dallas—like too much of the antitrust left’s work on housing
Oh boy here we go! The boogeyman has been setup, the ominous "they" is out.. checks notes... make housing available for average people.
>is filled with out-of-context quotes, overconfident assertions lacking evidence, and generally misguided claims.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
The next 5 paragraphs are about him talking to Quintero. He starts by framing the issue saying Dallas is not a good fit for Quintero’s theoretical model or previous research, which Quintero agrees with. He then uses this agreement to act like he's right about everything else and even misquotes his "100%".
It was shocking to see how we just kind took one affirmative agreement for one thing and turned it into an agreement about another. Talk about hearing what you want!
But that's not the rub.
The rub is that the Musharbash's essay isn't referencing the John Hopkin's research paper (Quintero) to say DFW fits it's described model, it's that the use of a market intelligence broker has effectively made the firms act as single (or a few) unit(s), enough to make the DFW's conclusions relevant.
Here's the snippet from Musharbash:
>Over the past two decades, most — if not all — significant builders in DFW have converged on the same source of market intelligence to drive their decision-making: a consulting firm named Residential Strategies, Inc. (“RSI” for short). [0]
> [...] While RSI is reportedly careful not to share sensitive information or facilitate explicit collusion among builders, it does not have to do so to play a role in limiting competition. [1]
Moving back (unfortunately) to the Thompson article, here's his next little "misquote":
>Claim #2: Dallas housing experts say local homebuilders are monopolies who are “devouring” the market.
The article didn't even claim this. The quote the source articles quote DIRECTLY below the claim from Musharbash's article really highlights how far out of the way Thompson went to misquote it:
From Musharbash's article, whihch again Thompson also hilariously quotes:
>Indeed, “[t]he scale and sway of market leaders” — particularly D.R. Horton and Lennar — means they “often monopolize access to trades and vendor resources” in local markets, constraining the ability of smaller builders to build at all, according
Unless D.R. Horton is a "local", "Dallas" builder I'm not even sure Thompson misread this piece so badly. If he wasn't an established journalist I'd call into question his reading comprehension skills.
So I have to assume it's not stupidity, it's malice.
There's also a subtext claim here where he continues to talk with McManus about land use regulations. McManus says land use regulation is the primary and SINGULAR cause of the housing issue, but what Musharbash's article points out is that land use regulations and zoning laws really have changed while the issue continues to intensify:
> I discovered that pretty much the same dynamics afflicting blue states are also afflicting red ones — a fact that should have important implications for how we think about housing politics and policy in this country. [2]
> [...] not of land use regulations, which have remained relatively stable in recent decades, but of two critical segments of the housing supply chain: The homebuilding industry that builds new houses, and the resale market in which people buy and sell existing housing stock. Both have experienced dramatic changes over the past four decades [3]
This is exhausting, not going to lie. But let's continue.
>Claim #3: Industry experts have data proving that homebuilding oligopolies are holding back national housing construction [...] Did Lambert agree with the antitrust folks, who love to quote him so much, that the consolidation of big homebuilding companies was hurting housing supply?
No. Nope. No again. That's not what was written. Here's what was written:
>By facilitating high-priced home sales with these cut-rate mortgages, large homebuilders impose a double handicap on small builders while inflating property valuations in the region as a whole. [4]
> [...] The largest homebuilders benefit from this dynamic because they sit on large amounts of real estate whose valuations they want to maintain or raise, but it makes it that much more expensive for small builders to buy land to build on in the first place.[5]
>>By tying home sales and mortgages, Dominant homebuilders can sell their houses at higher prices with higher gross margins, while issuing bigger mortgages with bigger origination fees and bigger resale values on the securitization market. As their below-market mortgages get buyers to accept higher sticker prices, these inflated prices feed high-priced comps into local property databases — pushing land and home valuations up market-wide. The largest homebuilders benefit from this dynamic because they sit on large amounts of real estate whose valuations they want to maintain or raise, but it makes it that much more expensive for small builders to buy land to build on in the first place. [6]
The picture being painted here is not one of "no one is building houses" but people are building the wrong houses for the wrong reasons. And smaller, local builders aren't able to build the houses people WANT and NEED because the system is let's just say... self-fulfilling.
The big builder's aren't going to build you your affordable home. It's not just that they don't have to, but it benefits them not to. More homes at the appropriate market prices would cause their stranglehold to completely unravel.
Let me just tab back over to the article yet again and continue.
>Claim #4: “X companies account for Y percent of this industry” is a smart way to think about market concentration.
You know what, I'm actually done.
Terrible article. Terrible journalist. I would say he should feel ashamed but the fact that he's willing to be so dishonest on paper with his name stamped over it tells me he couldn't give a shit.
Full on Bullshit Asymmetry Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law) on display here.
Links:
[0]: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
[1]: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
[2]: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
[3]: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
[4]: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
[5] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...
-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
Sadly, many of the issues he called out remain in the final, approved version.
> He is not arguing broadly against the political left...
Yes and: NIMBY vs YIMBY is (mostly) olds vs youngs, rather than partisanship. Witness the coalition behind the Montana Miracle (recent pro-housing legislation).
So far. As you know, most positions eventually get coded as left or right, as needed, to defend the corptacracy.
So the profit in real terms more than doubled? At a constant percentage home building and gas pumping both become more profitable when unit prices increase faster than inflation.
The vapid arguments around this topic are tiring.
Rich have become so much richer that can afford bidding wars at unattainable prices. They can buy investment homes and be cashflow negative for decades in anticipation of the increased market bidding prices. Of course they oppose any sort of legislation that would increase competition.
The only answer is that the increased observed demand is a result of the increased investment demand (rather than native demand)
https://jabberwocking.com/we-dont-have-a-housing-shortage/
Housing construction exceeds the population growth for the past 20 years. But housing prices are skyrocketing especially the last 10 years.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gw_BQYXbUAEicud?format=jpg&name=...
If the housing supply actually matched demand, the housing market becomes unattractive for speculation.
If foreigners are buying houses just to park their money, building more housing to meet the demand helps to alleviate that. This situation feels like a case where regulations designed to prevent housing supply from sitting empty can make sense but I have no evidence or story on how would need to be implemented to achieve that goal without negative unintended consequences.
The population has literally doubled multiple times, and housing supply has not increased. There used to be significantly more units per capita.
The very best case fo housing deregulation as per this Abundance nonsense is Houston. And that's only if you have essentially unlimited land.
Private industry simply will not lower house prices long term. We need to stop with this nonsense of looking for market-based solutions and public-private partnerships.
The only solution to housing is for the government to maintain a sufficient stock of quality housing such that the private sector simply cannot corner the market to drive up prices.
The example I always come back to is Vienna where ~60% of the housing stock is owned by the government. Residents essentially have permanent leases. It's affordable and accessible. Vienna has some of the lowest rents in a European city.
The purpose of the modern Democratic Party in the US is support American imperialism and to not upset their corporate donors. "Abundance" only exists so Ezra Klein can get invited to all the cool parties, get speaking engagements and generally curry the favor of the billionaire class and the Democratic establishment. It's just a liberal face on Reaganism.
> I wanted to know how a careful monopoly-hunter like Roberts would answer the question: If six firms account for 90 percent of a local industry, is that automatic proof of a monopoly? “No, it’s not,” Roberts said. “The statistic isn’t totally vacuous, but there’s basically no useful information about market power in that statistic alone.”
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> the number of new single-family houses permitted per capita in the Dallas metro area rose steadily between 2010 and 2022. (This is illustrated in the graph below[1].) I mentioned to Quintero that steadily rising construction per capita in a fast-growing city seemed like a weird example of monopolistic abuse.
> First, he uses 2006 as his baseline. This was a highly atypical year in housing. Just before the housing crash that triggered the Great Recession, May 2006 was the peak of 21st century construction employment. That very month was construction's single highest share of total employment since the postwar era. Using a bubble year as a baseline could easily throw off the overall findings of any economic analysis.
[1] graph clearly shows long term downward trend, with growth from 2010 to 2022 being entirely recovery post 2008 crash and still being below late 90s levels.
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> The whole thing looks like a lawyer who arrived in Dallas with a conviction in hand and shaped the evidence to fit the indictment.
*spends entire article cherry picking evidence in an attempt to discredit one article specifically to advance a competing narrative.
Worse than that. He's lying about what the article claims. Straw-man is too generous of a term, he's blatantly just making shit up.
Yes, the largest index fund company that sells investment products that allow people to invest in indexes (entire markets) is going to defacto be a custodian on holdings across the entire economy, including homes. Operating the funds offered in your 401k doesn’t mean they own the companies that invest in residential real estate. It means you actually do.
If you have a 401k it’s actually you who is in this “secret evil cabal.”
The entire article is just blatantly lying about what the source article says lol.
"You have to force behaviors. At BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors." - Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock.
I mean he didn't. The article is legitimately straw-manning. All of his claims are not present in the source article.
It's a disgusting, sleazy piece of journalism.
So no, you didn't hear he got it wrong. You were lied to by the author.
Fact:
“Matt stoller gets big, important issues wrong in antitrust all the time and his analysis shouldn’t be taken seriously.”
Source: me
You are welcome to cite that.
Sure you _might_ be a doctor, but your position is objectively deficient on this topic.
ALSO WEIRDLY, it's noticeable you didn't have anything to say about the fact that he's strawmanning.
You don't need a hyper focus in any field to see that's exactly what the author did. Or the fact that you don't seem to care about it.
Want to explain that one buddy?
And quite predictably, once the poisoned fruits of their labors start to bloom, it's always the fault of capitalism. Or maybe foreign investors and private equity.
Recently I've visited a rental property to find shallow, not sound-proofed walls, askew doors made of something that looks like paper and not a single straight corner. And this is a 2023 build! It's brand new. And still looks awful.
I have an article about that. https://medium.com/@ifcllc/qualification-f33ec8fcb736 but man, it's getting worse and worse.
Just to have a 2-room apartment that I used to live in 30 years ago would cost over 1.5 mil today. Adjusted for that inflation of quality.
Some regulations are bad. Some regulations are good.
The abundance types do not want to remove good regulations, like structural integrity or fire safety regs.
They want to remove bad regulations, like parking minimums or building height limits.
Please understand this very important distinction.
These things are much more complex than simplistic single-variable models.
It is not actually more complex, you don't spend ~40% of CPI on apparel.
Much of what you can buy today did not even exist 30 years ago. For example, trail running shoes more or less did not exist. Perhaps you could have had a pair custom made, at a high price, with the worse materials available at the time, but today you can them "off the shelf".
Even the many shirts I've received for free are very high quality and have endured years of abuse.
Like yes a nice pair of boots costs more and you do get more value out of them compared to Amazon basics boots.. but far more people end up buying the cheap option because it's cheap and available.
Not only that, but the walls/floors were paper thin. We could hear the floor creak when our upstairs neighbors so much as shifted their weight.
Inflated building code is a great way to repress the rate of new construction, and if it's all in the name of safety or energy conservation, no one can stop it, even if it's entirely useless for your house. That leaves low quality materials as the only ones affordable for a starter house.
The last hurricane I survived, I had to spend time in my office building. It is made of concrete and real brick and mortar. There is no need whatsoever to “hurricane-proof it", save for the special shatterproof windows. Big, 4 by 6 shatterproof windows.
The shoebox I live in currently features the same shatterproof windows. 2x1 feet, small windows. I had to re-install all the light fixtures in the rented house because despite featuring white walls, it’s darker than a necromancer’s cave.
The former was built in the 70s. The latter - in 2023. The latter does boast an impressive array of anti-hurricane features. For example, it is bolted down to the foundation so it can't be torn by a wind gust. And the frame was re-inforced so it won't lean under the wind.
Shall I mention the fact that none of those features are necessary for a brick building?
To top it off, the AC has leaked in 2024, so I had to deal with that already. It was less than 1 year old at that moment.
Sometimes a problem and a cause don't snap together so obviously. I'm no fan of private equity but I've tried to inject some perspective into discussions on HN where people automatically assume that "private equity has operated in a space" and "there are problems in the space" form a complete mathematical equation and we don't need to look beyond them for any other factors.
The issue, is that for me, the reader, it framed the piece as the author seemingly positioning themselves as the "the other side", the one that knows best and isn't those "antitrust left". It felt like it was creating a strawman and was engaging in tribal signaling.
And when you consider the rest of the piece was them claiming they called the sources, and that the sources said that the "antitrust left" had misquoted them and misrepresented their findings, but the author somehow is this unbiased truth, and definitely really for real called the the sources and didn't at all misconstrue or anything, no they wouldn't do that, unlike the "antitrust left".
But also, the left isn't uniform on housing policy. Some folks want anti trust and limited capital ownership. Some folks want to de commodify housing. Some folks want all housing to be government built and owned. The left is a very diverse place (and the joke is no one hates leftists more than other leftists).
If someone said they were anti monopoly, that the government should do something to prevent businesses from operating like that, I'd never expect them to be from the right to be honest.
So consider several perspectives:
a. The government should be in charge of, or at least heavily involved in, planning and organizing most resources in a country.
b. The market is a good way of solving most problems, and it works best if you just leave it alone, enforcing only very minimal rules (like property ownership, contracts, and such).
c. The market can be a good way of solving many problems, if it's regulated so that it has the properties you want.
Now consider other questions: Should abortion or pornography be legal / easily available? Should we invest in a large military? Should the government actively support "diversity" programs? Should gay marriage be allowed? How should the government relate to transgender people?
There are LOTS of people who believe in c as a principle, but have very non-"lefty" opinions on the other questions. Loads of people who consider themselves "on the right" think that everyone "on the left" actually believes a, not c; and loads of people who consider themselves "on the left" think that everyone "on the right" actually believes b, not c.
My sense is actually that the reason he talks that way is to make sure that people who consider themselves "on the left" don't mistake him for being someone "on the right" (and therefore in camp b), and immediately dismiss his claims.
This is a tad naive I think. "antitrust left" is also to useful term to use to signal to the billionaire class of Democratic party that you are not their enemy. If the author actually agreed with many of the antitrust group's positions and housing policy was one of the few exceptions they disagreed on, they would shy away from using the term. The only reason you would use that term is because you want to bring disrepute to their entire platform.
These abundance folks appear to be the only hope the billionaire Democrats have after having sunk so low as to direct their media assets to support Cuomo and to pour bucketloads money into the coffers of the corrupt disgraced governor in order prevent those "wacky socialists" to gain any more traction.
Human beings like to know if the person they're reading is on their side before they take the time to read a long ass article to make sure they are in fact on their side, especially if they're billionaires and think they don't have the time to read long ass articles about housing policy unless they think it's going to an extremely useful to them beforehand. That's the whole point of giving that signal literally in the intro paragraph.
If so he has sorely missed the mark. I pretty heavily associate the phrasing "the $X left" with disengenuous right wing pundits. Knowing nothing else about the author, seeing that pop up repeatedly doesn't merely suggest that he's on the "right", but that he's writing the piece with a politically motivated axe to grind.
Ultra rich and very rich and rich and upper middle class and ..
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Also, it should be noted that we lack sufficiently concise but specific terms to use instead, and because alternative terms that are used are relative, and open to interpretation.
e.g.:
Many political commentators currently use the term "populist" to describe someone who's somewhat divergent from the capitalist political mainstream (and in US terms, I'd include the current Democrat establishment and traditional non-MAGA Republicans in this group). But when the term is applied to people as diverse as Corbyn, Sanders, and AOC on the one side, and Orban, Farage, and Trump on the other, it's nonsensical without much more explanation.
Just curious, how "left" and "right" anti-monopolist solutions might be different? I mean, naturally some "left anti-monopolist" people might be in favor of governments taking over industries, but presumably that's not what most of the people in question are advocating at the moment.
> But when the term [populist] is applied to people as diverse as Corbyn, Sanders, and AOC on the one side, and Orban, Farage, and Trump on the other, it's nonsensical without much more explanation.
I don't think so. It's essentially an accusation that they haven't thought through the hard issues: they're saying "We're going to achieve X", when in fact X is simply not possible given the current state of play (or perhaps, not possible without significant negative consequences, like erosion of human rights or setting up an economic or ecological disaster further down the road).
Boris Johnson's promise to conservatives that they'd be able to "make a deal" which allowed them to trade freely with Europe while not accepting immigrants from Europe was just a fantasy. A lot of populist "progressive" politicians make similar kinds of promises.
Left anti-monopolistic policy: destroy Musk via the press/court system.
It can just be an empirical question, right?
Regulating monopolies out of existence vs deregulating them out of existence.
Both approaches have obvious situations they fail in that their peddlers are careful to frame the discussion to avoid.
It makes sense then, that they'd spend more time attacking the left than the right, as they realize where the existential threat to the current democratic party lies. Personally, I think it's good that they're afraid.
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.
Until we address this, and the abundance crowd doesn't want to, all of this is pointless bickering.
Nimbyism and people’s desire to keep their property value high is part of it. The levers that have been used to make those values high include a ton of regulation that makes it impossible to build start ups homes even if you were a perfectly moral actor seeking to generate exactly 0 profit.
> until we address all of this
Address what? I was convinced by Ezra and Derek because they constantly show real evidence as the opposing side keeps bringing vibes.
What are your actual, concrete issues that you think the abundance crowd is not addressing and what are your specific policy positions that you think need to be implemented first?
If progressives want to expand government, government needs to be effective. Abundance liberalism is about learning from the mistakes of the past and making government better able to achieve to goals both liberals and progressives want.
If we're talking about factional infighting, leftists are "afraid" the neoliberals will offer a compelling path forward instead of pivoting to socialism, so they resist arguments that would otherwise be beneficial to their political goals.
That is an active change
Your last paragraph is a bit confusing; is it your position that Derek's lying? Which quote did you think was inaccurate? Or are you specifically concerned with his rhetoric?
Its a great article though, lots of facts to ponder. Would love a view of the next layer up into financial arrangements in those Texas housing markets.
The author of this article was also one of the authors of the titular Abundance book which named the movement, so he’s not positioning himself as the other side of the “anti trust left”, he quite literally is the other side that that group is fighting with
Unlike zero-sum political disputes where there is a winner and loser, this is a rare issue where both camps can win without impacting the other camp.
What we should not do is give the left their worst ideas, like rent control or stopping AirBNB. Give them their best idea, which is public housing.
You just described the Abundance agenda. Do whatever is politically viable to build more.
It's so radical that it's almost impossible to predict if it would be better or worse. But at least it had the moral ground that rent is one of the last remnant of pre-capitalist lords and barons economies.
The idea being it would commoditize housing. Millions of units would now be for sale, prices would drop, tons of people would now be able to afford buying. Home builders would be incentivize to build nicer, cheaper, as the competition would move entirely to the selling/buying market.
It's radical for sure, but I've always found the thought experiment fascinating.
What about those people that have homes but rent out a room? Or a townhouse that has 3 units, but the landlord lives in one?
I guess they could sell the units or move to a smaller place, but I think there may be an adverse effect of potential housing staying locked up because there isn’t a legal way to preserve options of ownership. It may decrease housing in some instances. Which force is more powerful though, I am not sure.
There is nothing inherently wrong with renting. The landlords provide capital that renter lacks for time being. But due to supply constraints prices have been driven too high.
I enjoyed most of this article, but it did slide into opinions periodically. This quote in particular stood out given the issues rural communities face regarding availability of competition in a lot of other services.
If you spend time in the individual communities where this battle happens, the voice of the classic NIMBY (worried about property values and crime) drowns out the left-NIMBYs that worry about "greedy developers" and gentrification. At least that's been my experience in West LA. Many of the less-online left critics eventually come around to realize that upzoning type solutions and public housing type solutions aren't actually in conflict with each other even if they disagree on relative priority and impact.
> According to the National Association of Home Builders, profit margins as a share of overall home-sale prices actually declined slightly between 2002 and 2024.
"Investors buying up housing" is a common explanation alongside "short term rentals taking over" but neither make up a large enough portion of the demand to explain prices.
Here's how a rational market works. If I build an apartment complex, eventually those apartments will get older and more affordable. And even before that upper middle class folks will move in, freeing up their previous homes.
But that's not how many in local governments see it. So you have affordable housing quotas on new developments.
You have developers building units for the homeless at 600k each. https://abc7news.com/post/new-high-rise-building-house-skid-...
Affordable housing vouchers, section 8, etc, become a dystopian nightmare.
11 year waiting list. https://laist.com/news/section-8-waiting-list
The problem is twofold, first it's too difficult to build homes. In California you can literally just claim a new highrise will block your sunlight and make you sad. That's enough to delay a construction.
Parking requirements ensure space that could be occupied by people is instead reserved for vehicles. Plus the parking structure itself drives up the cost to build, 30% of your construction cost isn't unreasonable.
On a macro level, many cities should of fixed their issues with inadequate housing construction decades ago.
On a personal level, you need to go where you can afford.
After about 4 generations of living in LA about half my family has left. It's more than possible to make it off a middle class salary, but you need to make that choice.
If you stay in an unaffordable city you can't wait around waiting for politicians to fix it.
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 given less credence… for good (by my estimation in this case) and bad.
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.
It requires active energy to keep a thing alive and we haven’t been fighting hard for building things.
Might regulations be the result of these "rational markets"? After all, if I invest a lot of money to build apartments, I might want to protect that investment by lobbying for regulations to make it harder for competitors, increasing the value of my investment. Or if I buy an apartment, I might want to prevent others from ruining my view, prevent noise, etc. All completely rational.
If it's the case that market participants have an imperative to convince the government to screw everyone else over: a solution preventing the government from being convinced by small petty nonsense seems remarkably simple, relative to the other kinds of policy challenges that exist.
For what it's worth, imho Thompson presents a strawman argument about oligopolies to avoid the real critiques. He even kinda contradicts himself at the end because it's convenient for his argument.
It's never really about oligopolies writ large, it's about the players in the local decision in the moment (which is all that matters) and who profits at whose expense with what consequences.
> It's never really about oligopolies writ large…
Then why is the anti abundance crowd crowing about how it’s about oligopolies and monopolies?
Housing crisis is observed in almost all what is called "first world" (europe, japan, usa). I believe that 90% of the issue is more global than a regulation.
And in many parts of what we might label as third world.
If there's a problem, it's too many empty homes in aging rural areas. Cities are doing just fine, even with a growing population in Tokyo.
New apartment prices in Tokyo are double what they were a few years ago. [1] The reason is foreign investors buying up loads of properties and sitting on them or turning them into AirBNBs. Locals can't afford them because wages aren't increasing. The concept of buying a property to resell it also isn't a thing amongst locals, so it's clueless rich people and corporations buying up properties and thinking they can flip them, which won't be happening any time soon.
But after a few years of squeezing, locals may have no choice but to pay their entire paycheck to foreign investors. Though thankfully the government is planning to take steps to potentially outlaw foreign buyers. If we're lucky, and some parties get their way, they might just strip the properties from them. If you're not living here, you have no business owning dozens of homes.
[1] https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUC183D80Y4A110C2000000/
so the original owner got a nice priced deal out of the sale. Then, when said clueless rich person decides to sell in the future due to being unable to hold on to it any more, they make a loss (which is a gain for that future buyer, whoever they are).
> after a few years of squeezing, locals may have no choice but to pay their entire paycheck to foreign investors
why the squeeze? If the airBNB is being occupied, then it simply means the price for the rental was correct, and it was artificially low before (due to the demand not being met for short term stays).
People who see homes as a mere unit of value meant to be priced on a global scale, and not something people should be living in, are simply inhuman. People in cities around the world are getting fed up with it, with justified protests and even riots happening.
Rentseeking has no limit. Unimaginably rich corporations can buy up every property and leave almost everyone homeless. They can take 90% of the paychecks of everyone else. And they'll say "well prices were artificially low before." No. Now they're artificially high. People in desperate situations pay more and take out debt because they have no other reasonable choice.
Everybody maximizes their profit and thinks first and foremost about themselves and only then about the rest. Case point - a better half of this forum works/worked for faangs and their variants who destroy privacy and more of whole mankind for the sake of profit for themselves, and even pat themselves in the back how effectively they helped the 'the goal'.
The idea that a city hall would need to organize some sort of public meeting before approving a construction project is a fairly new one. The city council is elected to represent the people. If they need "community input" why are they even here? (Nevermind the obvious problem with such participatory process - sane and normal people can't participate in every local government decision unless it's their job. Hence why we have representative democracy.)
If you told someone in the 1980s that the British parliament couldn't impose its will on QUANGOs and local governments to build a rail line, they'd look at you as if you were insane. Parliament's power is supposed to be absolute. Yet that's what's happening with HS2.
While true, times have changed. The information flow is orders of magnitude faster and have you seen any sane and normal people lately? The norm is spending hours scrolling social media. The argument that nobody has spare time/attention and thus we all need representatives falls flat to me.
We need to explore alternative forms of representation to allow people to choose their level of engagement in various levels of government. Perhaps I'm happy to delegate all national matters to a representative I trust but want to regularly weigh in on local decisions.
Between the technical challenge of trust/security and the inevitable political resistance to such ideas, I sadly don't expect to see them implemented any time soon.
That is, I'm claiming that government can't scale to the levels that the 20th Century escalated it to, with any degree of efficiency at all.
You mentioning Japan gives out that you maybe don't know what you are talking about.
> I believe that 90% of the issue is more global than a regulation.
Or maybe the case it, that also globally most urban areas tend to develop a version of excessive regulation.
Add UK, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands to the list of countries with housing crisis.
If it was, then the housing price would be correlated with the level of regulation, but it's not (housing less dense places is always cheaper than housing in big cities, even if you compare the most heavily regulated place on earth with the least regulated big city in the world.
> Here's how a rational market works.
A rational market made from human is as realistic as “dry water”.
The key issue is that housing is treated as an asset, and the policies made to boost housing construction are designed around building a market in a way that gives housing the same kind of financial yields as stocks. But while stock prices can grow because productivity increase, housing value can only increase if housing becomes more expensive.
Nothing will reverse this other than a tax on wealth. Tax wealth, not income.
Yes rising inequalities are a problem, but the housing price being absurdly high is a much broader problem: when a middle class family spends $500k+ for a house, they are part of the systemic problem. Same when the same family expects such a sum when selling the old house they inherited from their boomer parents.
I like your thesis, but can you give more information on the nature of the policies that drive the housing market in the manner you describe, but which aren't just "regulation" that makes it directly harder (e.g. you can't build housing in this zone) or more expensive (e.g. minimum plot sizes, parking requirements, building codes)?
There are as many such policies as there are countries so not all the above examples necessarily exist in your country (my country — France — having the first and the last one above but not the one about mortgage interests for instance) but they all share the same underlying world model of housing being an “asset you invest on” instead of the “commodity that slowly but surely loses value over time” it really is.
> will block your sunlight and make you sad
If a high-rise blocks a single electron of my apartment's normal sunlight, it would definitely make me sad.
The conclusion is you should go to where affordable housing exist.
The other option is to get on that 11 year waiting list.
Sadly this is the best advice for personal well-being. 'Sadly' because it disrupts families.
So what's the problem?
Land use should be regulated imho, just like air pollution and other commons phenomena.
I don't care what kind of towel you buy to dry yourself off with, but I do care if a developer affects the environment and housing around it.
That is not a sufficient justification to infringe upon property rights.
While I'm sympathetic to the whining about "well they're a big business interest they oughta be able to work around the constraints" we are at least nominally all equal under the law where those things trickle down and at the end of the day that type of garbage winds up most applying to the little guy who can't afford lawyers and convolution
If by property rights you mean your right to have house/apartment where you like it, otherwise no idea what you mean.
> The antitrust left
I love this phrasing. Derek Thompson has done some Serious Journalism and has discovered that if you support competition between homebuilders you are a Leftist.
Also there isn’t a concentration of homebuilders (in Dallas) but even if there was it doesn’t affect prices (in Dallas). Well there may be a concentration of homebuilders nationally, but Thomson spoke to a guy that doesn’t care about that. Anyway, wasn’t the takeaway from the Great Recession that monopolies are good?
But then I’m not sure he knows what a monopoly is
> If a homebuilding monopoly purposefully made crappy new homes, they’d be out-competed quickly
Or what is a good outcome or a bad outcome
> Can big companies hurt subcontractors by forcing them to accept lower prices?
> “Maybe, but if big homebuilders can offer trades longer guaranteed contracts”
Hmm… they can force subcontractors to accept lower rates, but that’s not that big of a deal because they can force them to accept lower rates for a longer period of time. Like for example it would suck to have your paycheck cut in half but knowing that there’s no chance of it going back up for several years would take the sting out of it. This is the reasoning of somebody that took a Hat Man dose of Benadryl
There is no shortage of land in the US. There are huge, huge empty spaces. There is only a shortage of housing in places where people want to live because local governments won’t let anyone build new housing.
Edit: Looked this up, and Bill Gates owns farmland, which is producing food, so this also wouldn't be available for people to live on anyway.
I doubt there is any significant amount of housing that is just bought and left vacant. Why would you do that? It’s a stupid and expensive place to park money. You have to pay taxes, possibly condo/co-op/HOA fees, pay someone to do maintenance and keep out squatters, pay transaction costs both buying and selling, it can’t be sold quickly.
Why would you do all that instead of just buying treasuries or some other liquid instrument that actually earns money?
There may be some of this from foreign investors that don’t have easy access to financial markets, but again, some Russian oligarch buying a $50M penthouse in Manhattan is not the reason an average 3 bed 2 bath suburban home is $700k. They are not remotely in the same market.
[0] https://www.jpmorgan.com/wealth-management/wealth-partners/l...
In high-demand areas property value often increases in value over time. You can literally “buy and hold” property, keeping it empty, doing nothing with it and expecting to sell it for a profit at some point in the future. It’s relatively safe and the rate of return can be significantly greater than inflation.
This ignores property taxes and costs of doing business of course. But there are also situations where you might want a reported tax loss on a profitable asset.
That says far more about official inflation numbers than it does commodity markets.
those with cash bleed out purchasing power
I'd be interested to see whose opinion this is.
Did you find any intelligent criticism you can point out? I'm too lazy to trawl through endless stupidity to try and find a nugget of truth! :)
Rapid growth of cheaper housing in a town is a financial challenge for the town because it creates a larger student base without creating a meaningfully larger tax base. In towns with a commercial tax base, the costs increase more than the tax base; in towns without a commercial tax base, taxes typically increase on the oldest / most established residents - which drives fixed-income people from the homes and towns they supported for decades.
In my suburban area, there are two main arguments to anti-growth zoning: (1) people don't want the density increase; they built lives in a less-dense area by choice and want to see that choice preserved. (2) There are legitimate school funding issues and tax base issues that encourage controlling the rate of growth.
I'm dubious of _any_ argument that finds a singular cause for housing prices. It's an extremely tangled and complex issue that touches on taxation, local control vs. state control, education, property rights, politics, a cyclical capital-intensive industry, immigration and labor supply, interest rates...
Personally, I vote for denser housing and more liberal residential zoning. But I also understand and respect the opinions of my neighbors who disagree. Looser zoning gives control of land-use to capital and takes that control away from the people who built and sustained the town for, sometimes, generations.
The UK had a decades long phase where they built a ton of affordable housing (council housing). This program was largely dismantled under Thatcher. Also over time, building regulations became more restrictive in the wrong ways, which makes supply more expensive.
Regulation plays a large role. But the right keyword is "reform". The right outcomes don't just happen magically if you deregulate.
There are places where housing got drastically increased in recent years, like in Paris under Hidalgo (7000 units/year).
It's about volume(loudness), access(to data) and exposure(visibility).
This is a false dichotomy. His opponents are clearly claiming that oligopolies restrict supply. Therefore they are intending to be YIMBY even if they might be wrong about the cause of the restriction.
So this is a weird rhetorical attack that undermines the claims in the rest of the piece.
And now I think about it, it applies to the title too.
The places you're seeing growth are places where we could buy the land for cheap: suburbs and exurbs. We build huge ass subdivisions and then we run highways to them. This fucks no one's housing value, it bails out struggling/dying land owners, the auto industry loves it, the energy industry loves it, people love their faux-castles with lawn moats, it's a full employment plan to developers, and it's essentially all middle/upper-middle class housing so it's thoroughly unobjectionable to the voting majority.
The reason cities in Texas are out building blue cities is that they just do the suburb/exurb thing. Blue cities don't: where are the workable SF or NYC exurbs? Abundance gets so close, it more or less blames bureaucrats and the Jane Jacobs veto points built into the liberal building process. But these things arise out of the culture on the left, and whether we admit it or not, we like the walled gardens we built. We like our multi-million dollar castles we've got something like $80k in. We like people not driving/riding trams/buses through our neighborhoods, and we vote accordingly.
I personally think this is intractable. I think SF/NYC/etc have reached the ceiling and if we're gonna fix the housing crisis we need to build density elsewhere. I think we should lean heavily into remote work, lighten the infra grid costs with off-grid tech like solar, lighten the construction costs with low-car built environments (few if any parking requirements, rail instead of huge highways for shipping/transit, etc), invest heavily in the schools, and subsidize people moving to these areas--like with cash, not tax rebates. This is essentially "build the exurbs", but the progressive version of it that better meets health and climate goals, while also building communities we know are better for human flourishing (less isolation, more eyes on the street, etc). Focusing on permitting reform or democratic veto points is way, way too small a vision here.
New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.
The US simply needs to build new cities, and link them with high-speed rail. You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries) and directing it to places that would fit according to a high-speed-rail master plan. Opportunity Zones have shown a lot of promise at helping to direct capital to under-developed regions, but the lack of a larger master plan in helping link these regions with better transportation links and job creation has prevented them from reaching their full potential.
> New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.
All kinds of places overcome these things. Pittsburgh, Hong Kong, etc. etc. Bridges and tunnels. NYC was doing this, but mysteriously stopped. SF and NYC don't even come close to densities in many Asian cities. You can think two things about this: we reject that kind of density, or we reject moving a city's center of commerce to a more geographically scalable area. For some reason, we put a low ceiling on density and refused to move where the jobs were, and I'm saying that reason was liberals culturally resisting it. We simply liked the status quo.
> The US simply needs to build new cities...
Extreme, full agree. Even if I disagree w/ you as to the causes of building woes in blue cities, I think we agree it's not worth it to fix. Let's try some new things.
> You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries)
Something that's different now than the last time we did this is that those large industries aren't gonna be (well, at least shouldn't be) places like auto plants or steel mills. I think the "large industries" part of your prescription should be some level of new tech.
Not really. All of downtown Portland, OR has been designated an Opportunity Zone[0]. "the Ritz Carlton Hotel that’s going up in downtown Portland was partly funded with these tax breaks."
[0]https://www.opb.org/article/2021/10/22/new-book-looks-at-por...
As an aside, puts on Jane Jacobs defender hat I just want to point out that Jane Jacobs was on the record with the assertion that an ideal urban fabric was effectively small apartment buildings at densities well beyond what your typical North American city and suburb currently has.
It's deeply sad that Boomers took her ideas and distorted her message to preserve an ultra low density single family detached housing status quo.
https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2012/06/01/jane-jacobs-style-d...
There's a common theme emerging here.
Let's look at it from a high-level. "Fixing" the housing criris would require a major depreciation of housing assets. Does anyone believe the companies and individuals holding onto multiple homes will accept this without fighting? Of course not. The same people that are arguably responsible (directly or indirectly) for the housing crisis have a vested interest in it persisting. And we know how powerful their voices are with the establishment democrats, the ones this ad-hoc "abundance" movement defends.
There is no simple solution to this crisis, it will require something more radical than just tweaking some numbers on a spreadsheet.
For this specific issue, homebuilding, and construction in general, are very regional businesses. There just aren't a few giant homebuilders controlling the industry across the nation.
There are certainly some antitrust issues with rentals, but they don't seem to be nearly as widespread as the housing issue in general.
I don't think the punching down vs up lense is a particularly effective way to analyz this issue. Nor do I think its easy to figure out who's "down" and who's "up".
The picture is probably more nuanced in the last half decade (post COVID), with many people moving to the countryside.
If you actually have some desire to consider the problem rather than discuss how many angels can dance on a pin head, start with considering why "Inflation" is not a measure of anything thing, but rather the sound of one hand clapping. What is the other hand? Wages.
In this country rather than fixing wages we are discussing solutions that make things worse. Let us add tariffs so that people can buy less. Let's create tax incentives that create more housing people cannot afford, with the tax incentives coming out of the pockets of the people who cannot afford that housing.
House prices seem to be increasing fastest in places with high incomes. This leads me to believe increasing incomes wouldn't solve this particular problem.
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.
This has actually been a known issue for over a century with Winston Churchill even commenting on it.
[ set in an urban tent city ]
"Sure, we destroyed the expectation of dignified living standards, but the glorious fact remains that we've capped returns to certain shareholders."
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.
They have been building houses as fast as possible here. When single family houses weren’t springing up fast enough then came the explosion of giant apartment complexes.
I am not discounting the actual economic causes mentioned in the article, but securing financing appears to be a major factor that slows things down.
The first two go hand in hand, and could elegantly be solved together:
1 & 2. Pervasively (and perversely), "property taxes" greatly undertax negative externalities, and then heavily (punitively) tax positive externalities.
1. The undertax is that only a fraction of property taxes are just for the land. Land is a limited resource, and "ownership" of land is exclusionary. Exclusion is a negative externality, which is ok as long as that is economically accounted for.
So taxing land more, would encourage more efficient and effective use of it.
2. Property on land is the positive externality. We all benefit when land enables higher active value. More housing, office space, etc.
But it requires investment to improve the usefulness of land, and we not only tax that, but tax it annually, an annual wealth tax!
This is highly perverse, in that it undermines the economics of increasing the productivity of land. Whether a land owner is rich or poor, the economics of putting work or capital into improving one's property come at the cost of being taxed on that improvement - every year - forever.
The solution is to only tax land, not property on it, so land is incentivized to be used efficiently, and investments that improve its active usefulness, are not economically disincentivized.
Making that change and renormalizing "property taxes", not just land taxes, for neutral public revenue, solves both problems with one stone.
A decade or so transition, would allow this change to happen, while giving land and property owners who have made investments under today's regime, time to adapt.
But the end result would be better for everyone.
More efficient, parsimonious, effective use of land. More investments and innovation in increasing property's useful for everyone.
Unlocked growth in real estate returns, as a market primarily based on improving net usefulness, with higher returns, than passive ownership. The latter providing no net benefit to society or the net real estate market.
Credit for the above analysis: Economist Henry George [0]
The third problem significantly compounds the problems of the first two, but would go away naturally if they were solved:
3. Markets take advantage of anything, even inefficiencies.
Given that land is a limited resource, that the value of land increases as investments are made in adjacent properties, even without investments in one's own land, buying up land (with whatever property is on it), and letting others invest in neighboring land is a very good way to get a reliable return on capital. Because demand for land is always going to up, even when used inefficiently, with the current tax regime.
This is an economically parasitical way to make money. It treats land like Bitcoin or gold, in prioritizing its use for passive returns, instead of investment in increasing its active value.
And this way of parking money, with passive returns, is so reliable, that this financial instrument demand for land drives up prices, in a circle of every rising prices. For an investment "use" that has no net benefit to society.
Resolving problems 1 and 2 would greatly reduce the passive return on land. Which would not only make land use more efficient, but eliminate the compounding pricing problems of near universal use of land as a passive parking place for wealth.
donatj•20h ago
Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.
Ericson2314•20h ago
bsder•20h ago
JumpCrisscross•20h ago
There is very little de-densification construction happening in hot housing markets.
elgenie•18h ago
JumpCrisscross•16h ago
Sure. The only reason developers do that is because land-use restrictions prevent the construction of denser, more-profitable and more-efficient housing.
tiahura•20h ago
JumpCrisscross•20h ago
Fleet economy standards.
bullfightonmars•19h ago
proggy•16h ago
SideburnsOfDoom•10h ago
Consider how huge trucks that mow down children because they can't even be seen over the hood are unregulated, even incentivised. (1)
Wrong regulation, maybe. But not merely "too much regulation".
1)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480122
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popu...
bullfightonmars•2h ago
PaulHoule•20h ago
https://www.libraryplaceithaca.com/
was almost a decade late, like a nuclear reactor, and they realized only after it was built that there is no market in our town for "luxury senior housing" because seniors with money go to Florida or Arizona. If they could fill the places you might say that it's better business to build expensive rather than cheap apartments but when these places are vacant you start to wonder if they are farming tax writeoffs or something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wfblqh9icQ
What you expect first is they are going to tell the local town they can't pay the property taxes, in a few years they'll tell the bank they can't afford the loans they took out to build it.
Other "luxury apartment" projects outside of Collegetown usually have some segment of subsidized "affordable" units, one of these has at least two police calls to it a day and in the last few weeks these have included murder and arson.
kccqzy•19h ago
galangalalgol•20h ago
freddie_mercury•19h ago
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/zip-codes-cities-home-pr...
nradov•19h ago
s1artibartfast•16h ago
infotainment•19h ago
Who is going to build a brand-new apartment and say "well, this is janky low-quality housing, you might want to live here if you're poor or something"?
elliotec•19h ago
kfajdsl•19h ago
lanfeust6•17h ago
But all things held equal, if you have a new house that's big and a new house that's small, the smaller one is cheaper. And further, mixed density builds will be cheaper than single detached homes. Beyond that there's nothing caked-in to the walls that makes a house cheaper or expensive. Shitty houses are just unmaintained, dilapidated. Flooding the market with houses will drop prices.
lambda•19h ago
New housing is simply more expensive; so it's marketed as "luxury", and it's sold at a premium to the higher end of the housing market. This reduces demand for the older, more affordable existing housing stock, and with depreciation and wear and tear, the new housing will become more affordable as time goes on.
If you're in a market with a shortage of housing, those with more money will simply outbid those with less, even for older, less desirable housing. I've seen it, where when I moved out of my last apartment before I bought a house, my landlady raised rent considerably when looking for a new tenant, and even then she got a tenant who wanted to pay her over the rate that she was asking for to ensure that they were able to get the apartment over all of the other applicants. Wealthy empty-nesters who were downsizing, and willing to pay a premium for an older apartment in a desirable neighborhood, forcing out anyone who might have otherwise been able to afford it.
So yes, while it does help for there to be some push to build more affordable housing, if taken to an extreme building only luxury housing will leave an unbalanced market, in a lot of cases building luxury housing is exactly what you want to do to reduce the competition for the existing, more affordable housing stock.
JumpCrisscross•19h ago
There is no natural reason for this to be the case. If anything, learning curves and economies of scale should result in new units costing less, not more, than ones built by artisans.
supertrope•19h ago
JumpCrisscross•19h ago
Baumol’s applies to jobs that “experienced little or no increase in labor productivity.” I’m arguing there may be extraneous causes for construction’s productivity stasis.
Schiendelman•16h ago
you know why we don't have modular, factory built apartment buildings? Not at scale? Because the municipalities won't permit them. and the real reason they won't permit them is because it would put all their inspectors out of business if you didn't have to do any walls open inspections because it was all built in a factory...
xnx•18h ago
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/sketch-of-a-theory-of...
pydry•19h ago
With an apartment if there's one plot available, you build the high margin apartment.
Land constraints matter.
A 100% land value tax would help solve this problem and would make buying apartments more like buying a car.
tptacek•19h ago
I'd like a land value tax too, but it's not going to happen, and an LVT would guarantee market-rate development.
pydry•19h ago
I think it's rather obvious that they do.
tptacek•19h ago
sedawkgrep•18h ago
I think the entire analogy falls apart the minute you realize houses almost always appreciate while cars do the opposite.
xnx•18h ago
elgenie•18h ago
s1artibartfast•18h ago
This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.
Schiendelman•16h ago
steveBK123•19h ago
Plus housing you are mostly paying for the land. The land is expensive because it is finite and because zoning constrains how much housing you can build on it.
In many places the land is 2/3 the cost of the housing. The cost difference in building what left nimbys deride luxury and what would be considered affordable is really marginal. It’s like $100k in finishes in a $1.5M condo type difference.
Der_Einzige•18h ago
donatj•4h ago
Your argument falls apart when you realize they manufacture and sell explicitly affordable cars. It's nearly half the market.
AlexandrB•20h ago
[1] https://financialpost.com/news/toronto-condo-market-falls-of...
JumpCrisscross•20h ago
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-prices-drop-q2/
[2] https://montanafreepress.org/2024/09/09/can-bozeman-find-rel...
echelon•19h ago
"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 drop.
The problem is nobody is building enough. The equations of taxes, property value, and developer profit all balance each other out and control the rate of building. Regulations slow this equilibrium even more.
A few policies that can help:
- Remove stupid regulations against building dense housing. Keep the fire safety regulations, but nix the multifamily zoning regulations, the building height regulations, curb space and parking space minimums, etc. There are so many NIMBY and outdated 1950's era regulations that make it costly and time consuming to break ground.
- Tax unproductive land use, eg. storage units and parking garages. This will convert those plots into housing and businesses.
- Heavily tax unused and dilapidated land that is not currently occupied by businesses or residents. Burned out houses have no place in the city. Tax these properties to the point that they fall into foreclosure and give cities the power to take over the land and sell it at a profit to developers. Give owners the chance to cure the issue, but make quick work of clearing these useless plots.
- More controversially, tax single family housing more than multi-family housing. Tax it proportional to how many people could live on the plot if it were occupied by a 10-story development. Or if you don't want to raise taxes, lower taxes on multi-family housing. This will encourage density.
- Give tax breaks to developers, apartment and condo complexes, and businesses that help underwrite development.
Note that these policies only make sense in dense metropolitan cities. Suburbs and rural areas don't need to operate in this way.
JumpCrisscross•19h ago
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.
echelon•18h ago
- 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.
ninetyninenine•17h ago
It is naive to think the topic is wholly subjective. Subjectivity is one aspect of value but not only does the subjectivity coincidentally correlate with entropy reversal… but entropy reversal is also intrinsic to all value as even a human being alive and assigning value to something carries an energy cost. This cost is non trivial as it takes a lot for you to live and a lot more to have the luxury to think in terms of value.
eddythompson80•17h ago
Each animal defines value differently (heck, different groups of different people define value differently). A half-eaten sandwich thrown on the street is trash to you, but a jackpot for your local crow. The crow has no interest in the housing market though.
lokar•18h ago
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
zahlman•16h ago
Good luck doing that before you've fixed transit, which will take forever even with a miracle of political will.
lanfeust6•17h ago
While being able to build detached homes faster is nice and all for those on the market, for an effective YIMBY approach allowing density is preferable.
Plus, trying to sprawl out into perpetuity is putting cities in the hole. The suburbs are money pits that are subsidized by the city cores.
kccqzy•19h ago
supertrope•19h ago
xnx•18h ago
davidw•19h ago
https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-...
Gigachad•18h ago
nielsbot•18h ago
Gigachad•18h ago
bardak•17h ago
JKCalhoun•18h ago
And yet, they build expensive homes because (I assume) that is where the bigger profits are.
xnx•18h ago
bwanab•18h ago
appreciatorBus•16h ago
No one is building apartments made of solid gold or concrete mixed with diamonds. They are building thoroughly ordinary buildings of concrete, wood and drywall. They fetch "luxury" prices & rents because for each one that exists, there are 40 ppl trying to live where, so they raise the price or rent to capture the riches of the 40, despite there being nothing particularly special or expensive about the physical structure.
You can do this with non-profit/govt/social/public housing too - if there isn't enough of it, every unit will require a "luxury" of time to wait for it to become available, even if the nominal price or rent is affordable.
s1artibartfast•16h ago