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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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You want to "fix" the housing problem? Kick women out of the workplace and a married family will be able to raise their kids on a single salary, with mom at home keeping an eye on the schools and housing prices will be within the reach of a single-family income.. as they were until the mid-late-60s.

Is there even the slightest shred of evidence for this claim? The number of new housing units being built has declined compared to population. The incomes of households will not change the underlying fact that there isn't enough housing.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given that this isn't even the 5th boldest claim you've made in this post without providing any sort of argument.

The two income trap as it is called is a real phenomenon, although it's effect size is debatable. Essentially a lot of the stuff middle class people spend a lot of their money on are inelastic in supply(Real estate in a good school district, tuition into high status schools ect) such that single income households weren't able to compete with dual income households and gradually either fell out of the middle class or adapted.

inelastic in supply (Real estate in a good school district, tuition into high status schools

This is entirely an artificial problem. We could build more housing, but no, because then NIMBYs might only make 300% returns on their house instead of 400%.

There are only so many kids we can stick in the high class school building before it degrades the exclusive experience they're jossling for. I'm not really even a proponent here but what the people are really bidding on is space in the high value social networks and the various benefits of proximity. We can and should be building more, but we also need to accept that there is always going to be high cost real estate because not everything actually scales.

You can build as many buildings and make as many good school districts as you have good kids to put in them. At least if that's your only constraint; other constraints like needing to be located near the parents' employment complicate things. It's not a pure status good, because most parents aren't looking for an "exclusive experience".

Not that doing anything about NIMBYism (the drumbeat for which seems to have increased lately; more millennials and zoomers who don't want to take out a mortgage wanting SFH homes to be torn down in favor of commie blocks to reduce rent, I guess) would help; it's largely NIMBYism which keeps the good districts good.

You can build as many buildings and make as many good school districts as you have good kids to put in them.

As someone put it in an recent AAQC, it's not the buildings or the 'magic' dirt that make some communities more desirable, it's the cohort. If your extra school buildings are filled with the kids of those who failed to compete for space in the original school buildings then you have created and interior product and everyone in the system can plainly see this. I live in Chicago, a city with stark economic shifts from one neighborhood to another, it is just simply the case that people do not move to the low cost neighborhoods unless they have no other option.