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Jeanne Kuang for CalMatters, "Abundance meets resistance: Are Democrats finally ready to go all in on building housing?". (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at TheSchism.)
Those of you who have followed this series may remember the sad history of attempting to upzone around transit in California. It's a straightforward idea: transit infrastructure is expensive to build, more people will ride it if more people live near the stations, and it's a bad idea for cities to enforce apartment bans in those areas. California has made two major attempts in the last decade to fix this, and is embarking on a third.
First, 2018's SB 827, which didn't even make it out of committee. Then, 2019's SB 50, which was delayed until 2020 and then failed to pass the Senate. Since then, there have been some significant reforms; see 2021, 2022, and 2023. But the YIMBYs haven't taken another big swing since 2020, and they're doing that and more this year.
The latter two bills have been absorbed into the budget process, which is the Governor's way of pushing them forward. The former has not.
The politics are interesting. The SB 79 Housing committee hearing is worth watching; the chair, Aisha Wahab, was opposed to the bill, but it passed by a single vote. (This is called "rolling the chair", and it's a big lift.) And then it happened again, in the Local Government committee, the chair, Maria Elena Durazo, opposed the bill, and it again passed by a single vote; it's headed to the Senate floor for a likely vote in early June.
The stunning thing here is that, despite the years that have passed since 2018, the discourse among the bill's opponents hasn't changed. Because this is California, and most of them are Democrats, they oppose it from the left, and seemingly sincerely; Wahab talks about how "affordable" (i.e., subsidized) housing would be preferable, but there's no mention of how to pay for that, so in practice, the alternative is what we've been doing for the last couple decades, i.e., nothing. The Building Trades representative talks about any bill which doesn't mandate union labor as being tantamount to murder because the working conditions and the produced buildings will be unsafe. And there's generally an idea that market rate housing is bad, but affordable housing is good, and somehow if we outlaw the former, the latter will prosper. This has clearly not happened.
This rhymes with the current Abundance discourse, which has been extensive. (I can't do it full justice, but the basic idea is that we've regulated the government into an inability to accomplish anything, and we should stop doing that. It's most dire in housing, but the same idea applies elsewhere.) Reactions on a national scale oddly mirror the left-NIMBY discourse in California, ranging from Zephyr Teachout describing zoning reform as "relatively small-bore" to Robert Jensen suggesting that maybe poverty and death would be better for the environment instead. (As a treat, enjoy Sam Seder beclowning himself in front of Ezra Klein.)
My theory of this, developed over a series of infuriatingly circular conversations, is that there's a faction which is very attached to the idea that every problem is caused by a failure to write big enough checks or a failure to sufficiently tax (or if you're edgy, guillotine) the wealthy. So, if housing is unaffordable, it must be because we haven't sufficiently subsidized below-market-rate housing, or down payment assistance, or because rich people are hoarding homes and leaving them empty, and if you think otherwise, you must be simping for billionaires. This view is incompatible with understanding the details; for example, in that Sam Seder interview, Seder would talk about the corrupting power of money, Klein would talk about cartels of homeowners, Seder would say that that's just more corrupting power of money, but Seder's approach is very specifically to target oligarchs and corporations, not homeowners.
And this is the kind of equivocation I see in the best-regarded left critique of Abundance I could find, from Sandeep Vaheesan at The Boston Review. He gets the details wrong--he points to the government's support of nuclear power via liability limitation and ignores ALARA; he claims that upzoning doesn't actually produce more housing (so why do the NIMBYs fight so hard?); he defends the exorbitant rents in San Francisco by saying that it's a "superstar" city unlike Houston (is San Jose?)--but at its core, he wishes the book had clear villains like Thomas Piketty's "clear portrait of patrimonial capitalists and lavishly compensated executives thriving at the expense of everyone else". His proposed solutions are, naturally, to break up large corporations and to write bigger checks to bureaucrats so they can do more paperwork.
At each point, Vaheesan equivocates: about "deregulation" (if you want to end apartment bans, you must want poor people to live on Superfund sites!), about "democracy" (if you don't want to hand out veto points like candy, you must love oligarchs), and about the efficacy of reforms (upzoning and streamlining are simultaneously ineffective and giveaways to the wealthy).
"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." This sounds like a promise, but in California's case, it's a warning. The problems, contradictions, and failures of blue governance are at their sharpest here, and if there's a way forward, it'll be here as well.
A joy to see another grendel-khan California housing update. As an excuse to reply, I present another Noah Smith blog anti-anti-Abundance post. Located via Hanania dunk. At the end, Smith presents some polling results:
If we take Demand Progress at face value (probably shouldn't), then the results suggest the largest plurality of Dems make the policy as presented a net negative for electoral reasons. I don't think this justifies Hanania dunk farming but the second result via Smith's blog might. If lefty progressives can successfully frame a
falsedichotomy that presents Dems a choice between Abundance and the moral clarity of anti-corporate sentiment, then the winner should be clear. There's a whole lot of equity in anti-greed memes even among moderate Dems.The worse stuff gets the less sensitive people are going to be to this kind of framing. Which already seems to be the growing reality. However, Republican coding the policies is not an empty threat to the movement. Which is why so much of the discourse online is focused on meta questions about the discourse. Popularity and electoral risk will determine how diluted the agenda gets before making it into policy and how much of the dysfunctional machine can be protected. An unthinkable, unlikely, but most entertaining outcome of this conflict would be Abundance Dems giving up on the party. Instead of the the more likely, boring outcome of progressives pouting as they continue to lose favor and power.
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The discussion surrounding this is a never ending source of amusement. Ezra says "please just let the government build shit and stop getting in the way", and then leftists say "what do you mean? I'm not getting in the way? but also, did you stop to consider... [words words words]" It's beyond parody. I'm impressed they don't ever see the irony.
If there's one thing the leftists get right, it's that this is a political nonstarter. The whole reason they're in this mess in the first place is that populists are fundamentally opposed to progress. Populists want handouts and they want their enemies destroyed. Higher principles are of no particular interest. And the Dem coalition is only getting more and more populist in the wake of Biden's presidency, despite its legislative successes, failing to build anything or deliver real results for the poor and stupid and over-socialized -- a case that Ezra made quite well in his book. Leftists look at Trump and don't think there's anything particularly wrong with having a retarded president (and why would they? they tried non-retards and got no handouts and no enemies destroyed), they just wish it was their retard.
Can we really blame the average left-leaning voter for feeling this way? It wasn't given a name until recently, but this whole "housing theory of everything" idea has been floating around in wonky circles for at least 15 years now and totally ignored by Dem lawmakers. People have been griping about the cost of housing since the Occupy protests. Obama could have, in the popular imagination, been the president who builds instead of the president who bailed out wall street, if he were so inclined and better advised, but it wasn't on his radar in the slightest. In what sense do Dems deserve the mantle of technocrats when they're so behind the game? Being right in this case doesn't really matter when the median voter can barely read.
right wing housing theorem of theory sounds a bit like high housing prices suppress TFR and this leads to an increase in immigration in order to maintain high housing prices. not sure if the data is consistent with that. i guess left wing housing theory of everything wouldn't include immigration but include inequality and some other left wing focused issues.
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Honestly, it’s a species of hyper normalization. We know they can’t fix it, they know that we know they can’t fix it, but what’s the alternative? Vodka I suppose. And it does go beyond housing. It’s education— billions spent, and English majors struggling to read book. It’s health— where obesity is normal, and any hospital stay requires a GoFundMe.
Solutions are out there. One I think might make a difference is to forbid corporations from buying houses, and limit how many houses an individual can own. This would at least prevent Blackrock from buying up SFHs the minute they go on the market to turn into a rental property.
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The thing about housing is that, except for the interests of existing homeowners (about the only thing that gets negative publicity), nearly everything blocking it is supported more by the Democrats or has been for most of its existence. Zoning and building codes, unions and labor laws, urban growth boundaries, environmental considerations, affordable housing mandates, etc. This makes it very hard for Democrats to build housing because the only problem they can see is "existing homeowners".
Yep, Abundance holds up a mirror to Democrats and many don't like what they see. A lot of their assumptions about governance and economics has be thrown out to accept its thesis. That's why there's so much nitpicking about political strategy and messaging efficacy and never any criticism of its actual prescriptions. Moreover, the existing homeowners (the much maligned NIMBY liberal) are usually moderate Democrats, so they make a good villain for leftists to blame. Meanwhile, The Groups are mostly leftist sinecures and axe grinders, making a good villain for technocrats to blame. Cue internecine conflict.
I think if COVID lockdowns had not tanked the credibility of technocrats everywhere, there would be enough trust that this agenda could get motion. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. It's almost absurd we live in this reality where we have such boundless wealth and nothing but frivolities to spend it on, where "We need more houses? OK, let's build more houses" and "We need more energy? OK, let's build more solar/wind farms" faces such extreme and multi-pronged resistance, but so it is. Put another trillion into NVIDIA. Perhaps God can save us from ourselves.
The reason is that it's not actually wealth, it's all debt. It's all people running away from debasement and trying to get decent interest to avoid value being destroyed.
So collapsing the ridiculous real estate prices by making them real is out of the question. And everyone, including the government, is locked in the line-go-up suicide pact because if you stop, you get a singularity where anything might happen. So we just manage decline and plug the holes with anything that is at hand.
God's coming alright, but he tends to take his sweet time, and you're not going to like the hangover when he does. Nobody will.
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My rather unpopular opinion is that if housing wasn’t an investment most of these problems would solve themselves.
Nobody really wants more housing supply because it means that the one asset most middle class people can aspire to have — a house — at best stagnates in value and at worst declines in value. No politician want to be the person who made housing values fall. They’d have a hard time getting elected dog catcher if they approve enough new development to lower the cost of housing. Heck, people might not be happy if their house doesn’t increase in value. As such you have a problem that pits the owners of homes against the renters who want to own homes. You have to pick one.
The other issue with everyone trying to buy single family houses is that it’s acre for acre about the worst possible way to build housing. Condos are probably better for housing a lot of families in less space, apartments are cheaper but probably better suited for single people. If you want housing, it’s probably better to build for density and put more people in less acreage.
Housing needs to be expensive to be useful though, because there's no other way to keep out the undesirables.
Oh there are a bunch of other ways, actually. There's just all impolitic in the West is all.
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See this is a problem with markets. Markets just aim for profits, that's what they're for and all they do. If you want anything more than profits (increasingly often highly short-termist profits), you need a non-market solution. We want deep, long-term investment and expansion of housing stock. That's good for the economy in the longterm, enables population growth, mobility, agglomeration effects. But you can't get there by just naively relying on markets to do their thing, that's how you get rentierism and ridiculously high property prices.
Naive state interventions aren't great either, regulation is much of the problem. Imagine a big state-owned corporation with the economies of scale and long-term planning to build housing en masse, build whole new cities. No stakeholder engagement, no endless procedural crap, no quotas for pregnant women or criminals, no building substandard housing and then shutting down the company when the cracks show to rinse and repeat later. No expensive consultants who charge by the hour running rings around bureaucrats who have no idea what they're doing, do everything in-house.
State-owned corporations are unfairly maligned by mainstream economics, they do plenty of excellent work. Nobody in the private sector, nobody on the planet can challenge China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Housing is simple, easy to build just like commercial shipping. Build in a factory, assemble on site. It's a perfect sector for a huge state-backed capital investment. Plus government has natural abilities regarding land, it's a match made in heaven. All that's needed is rigour and discipline.
If California made such a state-owned housing corporation, this is just what would happen. They'd make housing as quickly and as cheaply as they are making that bullet train. Endless quantities of taxpayer money would be set aflame in the furnace of consultant payments.
They'd in-house the cost disease.
The sad thing is that there is a way around this, you can actually build things if you have political will and funding. All you need to do is have the politicians eliminate all the regulation that stands in the way of the thing you want built, and have the actual building be done by the private sector, ideally with private funding.
A good contemporary example of this is the renovation of Notre Dame after the fire: the French parliament passed a law exempting the project from all legal compliance, one experienced and trustworthy man was given full power to do the thing and he hired specialist contractors with money obtained from private donations. And lo an behold, a construction project delivered itself in time for once.
People will perhaps rightfully say you can't do that for every project, but if you're not willing to do so for something, do you really want that thing?
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...no, you literally just have to remove the zoning restrictions on building housing and the market will trip over itself to build more housing until the price of rent collapses. Then you simply remove prohibitions on racial discrimination so that people don't have to use unaffordability as a way to keep out the underclass.
This whole mess is caused by the government refusing to let markets solve the problem.
There aren't significant problems with race in Australia such that urban centres are very unsafe. But property here is even more expensive than in much of America, compared to income.
Productivity in the construction industry has been falling in Australia. It's been falling in America too. Regulations are partly to blame but the whole thing needs a reboot. There's an entire genre on tiktok showcasing the poor quality of new-build American houses, all this wonky or leaky, shoddy construction work. There are problems with price, quality and quantity.
Housing is the sort of industry where it makes sense for big companies to do it, not tiny little shrimps. Learning-by-doing is clearly needed and not happening. There has to be close coordination with government anyway to build out the infrastructure needed, dams, water, power... It should be managed by the state but in a capable, effective fashion. I realise that last sentence sounds retardedly naive but it is possible in principle.
When in doubt, copy Singapore. It's run with heavy state involvement there, 80% of the housing stock is public housing, they have construction productivity that actually goes up and housing is actually affordable. Per Claude:
Singapore also has ethnic quotas in their public housing. https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/residential/buying-a-flat/buying-procedure-for-resale-flats/plan-source-and-contract/planning-considerations/eip-spr-quota
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They are 100% urban and 76% ethnic Chinese.
69% of Americans choose to live in suburbs. Ultra-urban state planning (even if competent!) won't work on us. It isn't relevant to our wants and inclinations.
This is like people who say America should be more like Japan because of their great health outcomes. On one hand, yes. On the other hand, we just aren't Japanese and a bunch of fat white people severely underperform them on health outcomes. There's no path from us to them.
If Western, white countries are unable to replicate the successes of Asian countries then we may as well give up on politics and civilization generally.
The Chinese didn't go 'oh well they're white and we're yellow, we'd better just accept inferiority, mediocrity and humiliation - we'll just be coolies working for pennies'. They copied what they liked about our civilization and discarded what they didn't want. Lee Quan Yew did exactly that, he went to London and America and brought back good ideas to try.
Low-crime isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Clean public transport isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Crime used to be low. Public transport used to be clean. It still is in many places. If the demographics are bad, adjust tactics to keep them in line or change the demographics. Send criminals to prison or blow their heads off - capital punishment has a long history in the West. You can just do things.
Americans should definitely stop eating chemical slop and eat more Japanese food - rice and fish. It tastes good and is good. Or they could eat excellent European cuisine. Nothing about being white condemns a country to substandard outcomes.
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Europeans (the supermajority population in most American suburbs) have lived in dense urban towns and cities for thousands of years too.
The American preference for suburbs also is less organic than many conservatives online suggest. Zoning laws effectively prevent mid-density inner suburbs of the European or even traditional American kind.
Not dense like modern Asian cities, or even modern European ones. I'm right now in a "city" in Europe that's less dense than the suburb (of NYC) I live in at home. For being a city it's surprisingly civilized; just not having so many damned people is a major advantage.
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Yes, pre-car America had dense walkable 'streetcar suburbs'. Not a modern lower density SFH car-based suburb, but a proper extension of the city. Some small houses mixed in with big apartment buildings. Just hop on the trolley to go to work.
Anyone with financial means fled them like they were radioactive as soon as it was feasible to do so. They transformed into crime-ridden slums with horrible public schools. Exactly the sorts of places I pay to not live in. We were in the New Urbanist Garden of Eden and voluntarily left with great haste.
Google tells me Europe was 5-10% urban circa 1700. And that's really straining the definition of 'urban' to include towns of a few thousand people. I don't think that special Chinese-only DNA makes Singapore function. But they have a certain set of social norms and types of people we don't much have in the US. Their ways aren't and won't be ours. Given the wildly different situations (ethnically Chinese ruled modern city-state vs much more pluralistic continent-spanning world power), I'd even say shouldn't.
Not exactly voluntarily; there was some ethnic cleansing.
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That didn’t happen because of the invention of the suburbs. Dense inner suburbs in New York City like Brooklyn Heights have some of America’s most desirable and expensive real estate even though their residents could easily afford huge McMansions further out into the (20th century) suburbs. In Paris and London they likewise remain extremely expensive and desirable real estate even though - again - their residents could easily move out to the modern suburbs and live in much larger houses with big gardens etc.
The factors that turned the inner suburbs of Baltimore and Philadelphia into shitholes have nothing to do with some inherent issues with that urban housing layout. There were indeed intractable problems with dense urban and particularly tenement housing until the mid-19th century but modern sewage, plumbing, hygiene and other innovations mean they were no longer relevant a century ago, let alone today.
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Condo + strata fees = single family home mortgage payment, so they're not actually cheaper.
The reason detached single-family units are important is because they deliver the ability to personally develop. With a condo you're not actually doing anything; you're not doing maintenance on your mechanical devices (unless you're fortunate enough to have a garage or driveway, of course), you're not really able to store anything, you can't do anything loud (no instruments, etc.), it's more difficult to entertain people, etc. The same thing applies to townhouses to a lesser degree.
You don't get Apple Computer (to name a particularly famous example) without a garage to work in, and condos don't usually have those.
Sure, but (and as "bullets instead of dollars" downthread mentions) that's also balanced against solutions that might be less than democratic (if the dominant voting bloc is smart enough to understand the issue they can avoid that, but they seldom are). Gerontocracies tend to be relatively bad at defending themselves simply because the average 70 year old tends to be an inferior soldier no matter how high up they believe their elbows might go.
This led me down an interesting rabbit hole - I am aware of the importance of the myth of the garage startup in Silicon Valley, but also that the main lines of mentor-mentee and exited founder-investor-founder genealogy run back to Fairchild Semiconductor via companies that were not founded in garages or, mostly, by garage tinkerers. A quick fact-check finds Wozniak denying that Apple was actually founded in the garage (the tinkering that led to the Apple I happened inside the house - it sounds like the garage was just used to store inventory), that pictures of Jeff Bezos founding Amazon in his garage show a room that had not been used to store motor vehicles for a very long time, and that the Google garage was commercially rented space which happened to be a converted garage. It looks like the last significant tech company founded in a space which was primarily designed to store motor vehicles was HP in 1939. Nvidia is often referred to as founded in a garage, but it was actually founded in a spare room in Curtis Priem's townhouse.
In other words, the point of the Silicon Valley garage isn't the idea of the garage as marginal space - it is that it was normal for middle-class Americans to have more square footage than they actually needed, giving space to work in. A spare room, something it is perfectly possible to have in a townhouse, or even in a condo if you live like middle-class Continental Europeans or super-rich New Yorkers do, works better as a home office/workshop than an unconverted garage. And the surplus of square footage is something that you don't get by insisting on sprawl zoning in a place as rich as Silicon Valley - nobody thinks that the next generation of Silicon Valley founders can afford SFHs with garages in the Valley, and it is notable that the only reason that the Apple founders had access to the garage in the first place was because Job's parents had bought the house it was attached to before Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley.
The even more important point is absence (or, in the case of California, lax enforcement) of laws against running businesses out of private homes. The canonical place to found a 21st century startup is a Stanford dorm room. Under UK charity law, that is illegal in a Cambridge College room.
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I’m not suggesting doing away with SF housing entirely, but I think it’s important to increase urban density if you want to solve the housing crisis. It’s not meant to be for everyone, but to provide enough housing stock that it’s reasonably affordable to live in the city within a reasonable commute of your job. For most people, that’s fine.
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I think that there are two distinct groups which value high house prices.
One group are investors. At the end of the day, they profit from the fact that land is in limited supply, and people have been moving towards cities for centuries, thus steadily increasing demand. The proper way to fix this is a Georgian land value tax. If any value you gain from owning land is 100% taxed in perpetuity, then the intrinsic value of the land for its owner becomes zero. (Realistically, one would impose taxes which would increase towards 100% over a few decades, so present-day investors might still reap 20 years worth of rent or so. This is certainly more than the kind of people who invest in goods with perfect supply inelasticity deserve.)
The other group are home owners who would prefer to stay apart from less wealthy people for good or bad reasons, the (home-) NIMBYs. While I am not very sympathetic to the NIMBYs, I can sort-of see their point. If you bought a house situated a quarter of an hour drive from the city half a lifetime ago, you have every reason not to be happy if the urban sprawl swallows your neighborhood and your suburban home gets surrounded by high-rises. Still, as Jesus said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
I think that the dynamic between these two groups is not always the same. To complicate things further, landowners generally also own the buildings on their lots, and depending on the type of building their rent could increase or decrease with further urbanization. If you own a hotel building, you will likely be more enthusiastic about urban development than if you own single-family homes you rent to wealthy people.
That's Spock. And Star Trek 3 and 4 completely (and explicitly) undermine that idea
That was the joke, surely?
I don't think the writers intended Spock to be the sole voice of wisdom in the series. If anything, he's used to show that pure rationality, while probably at least functional, isn't the
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Housing is a natural investment vehicle for two reasons:
In other words, while property is not a completely safe investment, it's a relatively safe one (if you're smart about it), and unlike other relatively safe investments like index funds and treasury bonds, you can live in it. Notably, it doesn't need to greatly increase in value for this dynamic to be controlling. That's just a quirk of certain spots becoming much more highly desirable.
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Honestly most people don't give a darn. They just want a place to live without yearly rent increases and an annoying landlord. Sure, SF boomers are gonna get a huge payout when they retire to move to a cheaper area, but for people moving for work or personal reasons, most of them are actually moving from low COL to high COL, and most of them also don't have a huge equity in their houses either. Of course being underwater sucks as af, but very few people in a trendy neighborhood that is getting upzoned actually believe that upzoning will nuke their property values, and if they do believe it then they're just retarded.
Speaking as a nimby myself, I don't want (American) transit because it's a huge drain on taxes due to graft and incompetence, and it also brings in undesirables. I also don't want density because brings traffic, makes people talk about transit, and brings in the libs too.
The ideal situation would be for time to forget my neighborhood for a decade so property taxes go down, then maybe for property values to spike through the roof the month before I sell. But time forgetting my neighborhood is about the best I can ask for. So anyways, fuck off, we're full.
This is a weird one that, while I'm generally YIMBY, I can see that if houses in my neighborhood were $20, the calibre of my neighbors (who are generally great folks) would drop precipitously. Price discrimination is in practice keeping the meth addicts living under bridges downtown out of my neighborhood.
It's the one part of the circle that "abundance" doesn't square for me. But marginal supply seems generally good and reduces prices in a mostly-stable fashion.
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Land is perhaps the ur-investment, the one thing guaranteed that God (and perhaps the Dutch) aren't making more of. Even in societies where the government owns all the land, like in China, and merely hands out leases you have crazy real estate bubbles.
There is fundamentally no way to uncouple housing from investment because houses are expensive and take a lot of time and effort to build. There will always be fewer houses then there are people willing to buy them.
Austin, Texas empirically shows that it is possible for rent prices to go down as long as you build enough housing. Whether people are still treating land as an investment or not is academic at that point. The important thing is to lower the value of houses.
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Whether it is an investment is beyond our ability to change. Whether it's promoted and protected as an investment is more malleable.
As an example, Canada's new housing minister said that prices don't need to come down. He is promoting housing as an investment instead of as shelter, and it doesn't need to be that way. He could've just as easily said "Prices need to come down because houses are for living in. To those who had planned on downsizing and using the extra money for retirement other purposes,
it sucks to be you, but too bad.we'll help you make a different plan. To the foreign investors who bought properties here, I'd like to saylol, thanks for the cash, suckersthat this will help us ensure sustainable growth that we can all benefit from."I live in Canada.
There's no amount of propaganda that can make land or housing an unattractive investment. If people want to live somewhere badly enough, it increases the subjective value. It is fundamentally a doomed proposition unless you adapt a communist system where the government decides where and how you live. Land is such a powerful store of wealth that the primary goal of wars - not just in human societies, but in apes, and all sorts of creatures who fight over territory - is its acquisition.
Even if you say: 'all land is no longer an speculative investment vehicle' - it will not change the essence of the fact that people will start exchanging property rights with bullets instead of dollars. Because that was the status quo, before the market.
I always liked the pithy Spanish "plata o plomo". Finally an equivalent English bon mot.
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Okay. But it's clearly impossible for housing to be a good investment in real terms and for it to be affordable at the same time. So the options that I can see are:
Gerontocracy. Buy now or be priced out forever. Housing to the moon. If you're too young or poor to get on the property ladder now, too bad - hopefully you're the eldest/an only child and your parents will leave you the house when they kick the bucket, unless the bills they rack up at the end of their lives consume the equity of course. And if you aren't too poor yet, don't worry: you will be.
Housing supply is allowed to increase and the price is allowed to decrease.
The Japanese method. Housing demand is forced to decrease so that the price decreases. Either cramming more people per household (intergenerational housing?) or expelling people from the country/area. I hear Canada has a lot of unpopular Indians, but note that this still involves prices going down and therefore housing being a bad investment.
Curious if I'm missing a fourth option here.
Economic growth faster than housing price growth
Any operational definition of "economic growth" in this context that results in it not getting harder to buy housing over time means that housing is not a good investment.
It means it isn’t a relatively good investment. The goal is to make housing affordable without decreasing eh value of housing. If wages grew 5% pa, housing prices grew 3% pa, and inflation 2% pa, then housing would become relatively cheaper without eliminating the equity in homes.
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For ants and sardines. For people, they're great, despite taking up more acreage per unit.
I mean people in other countries live in pretty dense urban environments without too much trouble.
Apartments are literally built different in America compared to Europe.
All the urban issues most cities have come down to onerous requirements. You want European urban centers? Then start using European regulations.
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Which is the city with high density, high per capita GDP, and high TFR?
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Yes, and their lifestyles are inferior to mine. Yet another indication of their enormous poverty relative to a professional American.
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If you look at the general progressive mindset as religious, this behavior starts to make a lot more sense. Government bureaucrats are a protected priestly class, similar to but lower status than academics.
Therefore all blame must be shifted away from them, towards the hated enemy: billionaires, conservatives, or whoever the outgroup happens to be at the moment. I don't say this as a sneer at progressives, conservatives do the exact same thing as well.
But as @coffee_enjoyer and others here have pointed out, there's no getting away from religion. Using the religious worldview to model politics has opened my eyes and explained quite a lot of this seemingly incomprehensible behavior.
It's not religion, it's politics.
Bureaucrats are friends of the left and enemies of the right. Which at once decides their loyalties and who wants to lower or increase their numbers and power. There's little else to it.
Religion is probably inescapable too, but what you're looking at here is merely the friend enemy distinction.
If you want to get political ends, such as actually building enough dwellings to lower the price thereof, you need to get enough people who actually hold the levers of that stuff on one coalition against the remainder. This is how anything is decided in human society.
Now lefties are not going to get any of that stuff done because there is a rift in their coalition on this issue, where some people want cheap housing and others want things that make this impossible (and they have more power). So the only way for the coalition to remain and people to save face is for everyone to pretend this is the work of some real or imagined enemy and look to something else they agree on. Therefore, it's all because of wreckers.
Right wingers do this too of course, much easier to pretend the dissolution of morals isn't aided and abetted by capital or that that the army isn't weak because of procurement being rife with embezzlement if we can all agree that it's the fault of degenerates and perverts.
The real dark truth here is admitting that this mechanism is necessary, because without this nonsense you can't actually maintain a coalition to do anything, let alone what has to be done.
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This seems like just partisan politics, nothing religious about it.
Their team bad.
Our team good.
There is an issue? Obviously their team did something bad and we need more funding for our team.
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Building trades unions are basically guilds; just giving them what they want might raise costs a bit, but it won’t stop anything from happening- they do actually do their jobs at high quality standards(and, admittedly, equivalent prices).
Take for example the IUEC. From WP:
See also this article (found with google, I can not vouch for the source):
I will grant you that building costs are not the biggest impediment to building, they come after high land costs and NIMBY, but they are very much part of the problem.
To be clear, unions are not saints. But also labor costs are just generally high in America, it's unfair to give unions 100% of the blame.
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Union leadership also limits membership to secure jobs for their members.
If the local union has 500 members and each can do 0.2 houses per year (e.g. a crew of 10 can do two houses per year), then I guess your city is building a max of 100 houses. What if you want more than 100 houses built? Too bad, union labor is mandated, and they're not interested in de-monopilizing the sector.
Those 500 workers will sure be happy that they're in so much demand. The union did its job.
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In many cases it raises costs significantly, not because the individual tradesmen are paid that much more (they are, but that's not the problem), it's that they have union-mandated staffing levels. If bargaining were truly Coasian (hah!) then you could easily make a deal to increase salaries even further in exchange for bringing staffing to international standard.
This killed a plan by Steph Curry to open a HQ in the dogpatch.
Not that this is politically feasible in the least, but to keep labor costs down, we could (like Singapore) bring in guest workers from places like Bangladesh to do construction work on the cheap—co-Asian bargaining, if you will
Ah, illegal immigration.
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