So much of the journalism we read is heavily processed and barely-reported and it's startling to see how much of a superpower simple shoe-leather reporting actually is. Derek Thompson's an incredibly sharp writer, but not really a subject matter expert on housing economics; all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed.
We're often so down on 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).
Animats · 5h ago
Reporters used to start at something like the City News Bureau.[1] For a century, the City News Bureau covered local news for Chicago and sent it in to the local newspapers. Lasted until 2005. Young reporters started there, covering every police station, every major crime, every major fire, every major trial, and getting the facts right, or else.
The bureau`s unsentimental motto: ”If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
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]
Sorry to derail this thread on journalistic merit..
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
>This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 1h ago
The Rust evangelists don't want you know this, but a land value tax would fix data races
api · 4h ago
The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars.
Would people pay for real journalism?
firecall · 25m ago
Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media.
You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start:
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.
hamhock666 · 4h ago
Don't people already pay for things like the NYT?
I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.
Onavo · 3h ago
NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.
bobthepanda · 1h ago
Also NYT has spent a lot of time and energy into diversifying into things that are not news.
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.
Mtinie · 1h ago
I’m reasonably sure that most of the national-level news media companies have been owned by millionaires (and now billionaires) for the last century. William Randolph Hearst, E.W. Scripps, the Ochs-Sulzberger family, Raoul H. Fleischmann, Cyrus H. K. Curtis are a few of the prominent wealthy owners of nationally-distributed news outlets and publications in 1925. Back farther to the Civil War you find more “independent” publications but it’s a challenge to determine which of them were privately owned by individuals of considerable wealth vs. those owned by their publishers who may or may not have been wealthy.
> The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests.
How is the NYT an exception?
insane_dreamer · 3h ago
a large paid subscription base
thaumasiotes · 2h ago
That's no different from the other papers and magazines.
Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers. They relied on advertisements, just like the websites that killed them.
eddythompson80 · 1h ago
That's not entirely true for NYT as OP mentioned. NYT is 170 years old. They have been through many phases and models.
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"
thaumasiotes · 16m ago
The Washington Post is also a public company (before 2013). In their 2009 filing, they state that the newspaper's revenue (in 2008) was 51% ads, with the other 49% not attributed.
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?
eddythompson80 · 3m ago
Why are you looking at 2009? Is it because it fits your narrative? What happened in 2008 I wonder that may cause companies to be struggling? NYT is a profitable company with majority of their income coming from paid subscriptions. Does that answer your question about how they are different or do you wanna check their revenue split and financials in 1928 too?
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
bobsmooth · 40m ago
>Would people pay for real journalism?
See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.
lanfeust6 · 4h ago
I think about this from time to time. Personally I would pay per article if it's convenient. I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks.
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.
Animats · 3h ago
> I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks.
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.
setopt · 1h ago
I love their writing, but I hate their subscriptions. The only way to cancel is to talk to customer service via chat or phone, who will keep begging and insisting that you not cancel and offering discounts to try to stop you. When I finally did manage to cancel, it required at least half an hour of insisting to some salesman.
I originally planned to just take a break, but after that distasteful cancellation procedure, I didn’t feel like resubscribing.
freetime2 · 23m ago
The Economist regularly goes on sale at discountmags.com. For years it was $1/week, but recently the price increased to $75/yr. It's not on sale at the moment, but for anyone interested, I recommend setting up a deal alert at slick deals [1] to get notified the next time it's on sale - probably around Black Friday / Christmas.
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).
Yeah, it's good. I just find it expensive to pay for regularly.
bnralt · 4h ago
> 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 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.
anitil · 1h ago
Links for the curious - DCCrimeFacts [0] and I assume the FAA case is Tracing Woodgrains [1], though I could be wrong
> how much of a superpower simple shoe-leather reporting actually is. Derek Thompson's an incredibly sharp writer, but not really a subject matter expert on housing economics; all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed.
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.
tptacek · 2h ago
Link? I'd love to read countervailing reporting.
tptacek · 1h ago
I want to say something about Stoller bringing a knife to a gunfight but really this fight only required Thompson to have a telephone.
What did Stoller think was going to happen? Calling people up on the phone is Thompson's entire schtick at this point.
jdminhbg · 19m ago
> What did Stoller think was going to happen?
The problem with Matthew Stoller is that he's not very smart.
educasean · 1h ago
Appreciate the fact digging!
dannyobrien · 5h ago
I've been involved in a lot of discussions about "what is journalism? what do real journalists do?", and the best response I've heard was from Ian Betteridge (of Betteridge's Law fame), who told me "Journalists pick up the phone." It may have already dated as a pithy description, but the idea of literally calling[1] people to fact-check or dig deeper is a low bar that a surprising amount of current journalism doesn't clear. And I say this as someone who has definitely done the non-journalism: just writing an opinion, or a column, or blog post, or whatever. Or, perhaps most insidiously, when you have a thesis for an article and you just collect the (partial) facts you need to flesh out that thesis.
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.
starkparker · 4h ago
> 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.
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.
tptacek · 1h ago
Urban primary school teachers get a pretty attractive comp package these days!
YZF · 2h ago
Appreciate the inside perspective.
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?
Terr_ · 4h ago
> But I'd also emphasise that it's a vocational skill that not everyone is built for, or trained to do.
What does it mean that “so much of what we read is […] barely reported”?
tptacek · 1h ago
That the people writing it do very little of their own reporting. "Reporting" isn't writing or thinking; it's the act of collecting external facts. Calling a primary source on the phone is reporting; traveling to a location and observing events is reporting. Synthesizing existing facts and reporting is not reporting. It's still journalism! Reporting is a specific practice within journalism.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 1h ago
It's copy-pasted from Twitter, or it's explicitly a press release from a company with minor rewording. There is no digging for the truth because the news can't afford any labor
didibus · 2h ago
> all he did here was read papers and call up the authorities they cited, and the narrative behind those papers collapsed
Did it collapse, or he simply created another dubious narrative to replace the previous one?
tptacek · 2h ago
It collapsed.
didibus · 2h ago
I assume I'm somewhat impartial, I don't know this author, it's the first time I hear of the "antitrust left" or of the argument that big monopoly builder purposely keep the market scarce to increase prices. And it's not an issue that I hold a strong opinion about.
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.
graeme · 1h ago
Hold on. Take the first claim. Derek Thompson called the author of the paper who effectively said "no my paper does not support the claims made".
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.
tptacek · 1h ago
"He said they said, so I talked to them, and they said otherwise".
chubot · 6h ago
Yes, and I found Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein to be very credible on Lex Fridman:
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:
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.
tptacek · 6h ago
Fridman is on the other end of the spectrum I'm describing.
chubot · 6h ago
You said heavily processed and barely-reported
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
tptacek · 6h ago
I'm not making a value judgement. There are analysts and opinion writers I enjoy reading and get a lot of value from. But hosting a podcast interview with someone is basically the opposite of shoe-leather reporting. I guess if you did "stitch incoming" every couple minutes and cut to Fridman calling someone else to have conversations with other sources about whatever claim his primary guest just made, you'd be getting closer.
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!
WillPostForFood · 4h ago
You are touting "call up the authorities" and shitting sitting down and talking face to face with authorities, which reads like a value judgement.
fn-mote · 3h ago
> sitting down and talking face to face with authorities
I think the issue is the number of authorities. One isn’t enough.
tunesmith · 3h ago
Not the authorities. The sources.
chubot · 5h ago
I think there's journalistic value to showing a raw conversation on a podcast. It's closer to the primary source than calling them on the phone and writing down parts of the conversation.
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)
tptacek · 5h ago
I never said there was "no journalistic value" to anything.
mulmen · 5h ago
Journalism is about presenting a topic, not about presenting a person. I don’t care about Elon Musk as a person. I don’t care about his opinions on lawn care or cooking eggs. But in a story about self driving car technology I want to hear his input and the input of Ford and GM and Waymo and Uber and suppliers and academics and regulators and users. Compiling all those sources and presenting a narrative on the topic of self driving cars is journalism.
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.
wredcoll · 4h ago
This is a great point and well made.
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.
mulmen · 2h ago
Yes, absolutely. Journalism is fundamentally a fact or truth seeking exercise. I do still think there is room for presenting factually incorrect opinions so they can then be challenged and disproved. So I will meet you in the middle and say that journalism is the factual presentation of a topic. One of those facts could be that an influential person believes or says things that are incorrect.
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.
wredcoll · 3h ago
Someone "interviewing" a pundit by letting them speak for 3 hours contributes very little to our understanding of reality. We might understand a bit more about the pundit's opinions, which can be entertaining, and could theoretically be valuable, but rarely is.
Someone actually looking for facts about reality would be far more useful and valuable to society. Not that we reward that sort of thing.
chermi · 2h ago
Letting someone talk for 3 hours is good information. It contributes a lot. Just because it's not distilled and you're not told what to think about doesn't make it not valuable.
btreecat · 2h ago
> ...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.)
Im sorry but what evidence do you have to support such a claim?
nathan_compton · 5h ago
This article is good, but the phrase "antitrust left" really turned me off. I am probably some kind of a leftist (I want higher taxes on rich people and a society much more welfare oriented with a substantial degree of labor and resource allocation performed democratically instead of by markets) but I don't know a single leftist who actually cares about this housing shit except to think that houses should be cheaper by any means necessary. Like the idea that there is an active contingent of leftists trying to construct some kind of defense of the current housing system or critique of reforms (in general) aimed at making it easier to build houses strikes me as truly bizarre.
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.
tptacek · 4h ago
I live in a very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive muni (almost certainly in the top 5 nationally), and my primary political project is zoning reform, and I assure you that left-NIMBYism is a thing, and that the "we should make blue state governments perform better and increase supply of things people want" thesis of "Abundance" (Thompson and Klein's book) is a bête noire among those leftists.
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.
crooked-v · 4h ago
Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.
davidw · 1h ago
I have been doing YIMBY stuff for around 8 years now, and it does not map nicely onto any kind of left-right narrative.
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.
cocaclub · 3h ago
Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon.
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.
majormajor · 1h ago
> 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.
tptacek · 1h ago
I mean, in my local case, the Chesterton's Fence answer is pretty clearly and directly racism.
nathan_compton · 4h ago
I guess this is a bit definitional, but I do not think of "very wealthy, extraordinarily progressive" people as typically leftist. I think of them as liberal and only in the American brain is that associated with leftism, so much so that we usually distinguish between "leftists" and "liberals" rhetorically. With, say, Hillary Clinton, being a classic American liberal and Bernie Sanders being more like a leftist. If you visit the DSA contingent I doubt you'd find anyone per se against zoning revisions to build more housing. Eg, Mamdani had literally building more housing as a part of his platform.
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.
tptacek · 4h ago
Again, if you try to collapse this down to "leftists" vs "Derek Thompson", you're totally missing the point. Thompson's rhetorical adversary here are "people who believe we shouldn't do the zoning and envelope reforms required to increase the supply of housing", a subset of whom are on the political left and thus in his target audience: his term for them --- fairly applied! --- is "the antitrust left", but you could (like I do) call them "left-NIMBYs" and be in the same rhetorical place.
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).
AtlasBarfed · 4h ago
Politics is local and there's nothing more local than your housing values
woooooo · 4h ago
> Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats.
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.
Hammershaft · 2h ago
Many leftists have a problem with zoning deregulation.
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.
jordanb · 2h ago
> Many leftists have a problem with zoning deregulation.
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.
tptacek · 2h ago
I live and am politically active in a front-line municipality for these issues (Oak Park, IL --- the actual redlining bastion of the western suburbs, a 4.5 square mile gravity well for Cook County school funding so egregious it was one of the first examples in Johnny Harris's NYT "Blue States, You're The Problem video) and I'm telling you, straight out, leftist defenses of existing zoning rules are a very real thing. In fact, where I live, they are the entire defense of those zoning rules: progressives have a supermajority of the board.
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?
jordanb · 2h ago
I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016 (probably calling Bernie a sexist) and voted for Biden and against progressive income tax in 2020. They are not leftists. You seem to be having some trouble understanding the difference between democrats, liberals, and leftists.
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.
pj_mukh · 1h ago
"I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016"
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.
tptacek · 1h ago
You couldn't be more wrong; this is absolutely Bernie country. In the primaries, it made Washtenaw County MI look like Maricopa County. No, I think I understand just fine what I'm talking about.
Again: this is one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the country.
athrun · 1h ago
Sounds like you're just applying somewhat arbitrary purity rules to what falls into the "leftist" bucket or not.
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.
dragonwriter · 47m ago
No, that's not what “leftist" generally means, it means adherence to any of a broad grouping of anti-capitalist ideologies (the more widely recognizable being the various forms of socialism and communism). It overlaps a little bit with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the US, but beyond that is mostly outside of the US major party system. The only people who use “leftist" to describe a superset of the Democratic Party also use “socialist” and “communist” in the same way.
woooooo · 1h ago
It's standard among self-described leftists, to distinguish themselves from establishment liberals.
I'm not even very far left and I identify with the term because party leadership are all 80yo and out of touch.
tptacek · 1h ago
"Liberal" is an epithet here too (I'm a liberal, for whatever that's worth).
woooooo · 48m ago
For what it's worth back, a lot of the opposition towards "establishment libs" is based more on optics than policy IMO.
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.
pj_mukh · 2h ago
FWIW: Ezra Klein called for Biden to step down before most others and asked for a fast national convention (not Kamala). Broad brushstrokes are energy saving, but just incorrect.
lanfeust6 · 3h ago
> People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face.
Housing is that.
This just sounds like you want populist things and the outcome doesn't matter. Like price controls and tariffs.
woooooo · 2h ago
Its about the message. Centering the message on something that has indirect, timelagged effects and isnt even actionable at the federal level is terrible messaging strategy for the national party.
It's a disturbing trend that extremely complex issues are framed as a 'symptom' of broad political leanings. At the very least, it's a distraction and disservice to their own good argument, when an otherwise-intelligent narrative constantly reverts back to the polarisation "it's mostly those Others, from the Other Side".
Just let arguments stand on their own merits. The minute an article includes the term "lefties" or "righties", it's gone wrong imo.
energy123 · 4h ago
Mamdani - rent control. Dean Preston - NIMBY. UK Greens Party - NIMBY. Australian Greens Party - NIMBY.
Explain?
yen223 · 3h ago
In the last election, Australia's Green Party was the only party whose housing plan involves actually building homes.
The major parties went with throwing more money at the problem.
athrun · 1h ago
Aside from the fact that the few policies they made explicit in their platform would actually be counter-productive to getting more supply (such as National-level rent freezes), they also don't have a good track record at the local level when it comes to housing.
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.
energy123 · 3h ago
Talk vs action. The Australian Greens opposed Australia's build-to-rent legislation. They didn't oppose the entire legislation. They opposed the one part of the legislation that would have helped the problem.
svachalek · 4h ago
"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"
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.
nathan_compton · 4h ago
Yeah, I get it. But we also use liberal and I think in this particular case its worth drawing the distinction between these two "camps" of the democratic party.
bluGill · 4h ago
The meaning of liberal and conservative has shifted so much over time that the term is now useless. The original meaning of liberal was about not killing you neighbor if they were a different religion - from which we get freedom of religion. That slowly expanded to things like freedom for slaves and women voting.
jordanb · 2h ago
This is Phil Ochs describing liberals in 1966
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.
bluGill · 43m ago
1966 is still modern. The liberals I'm describing go back much farther. The decleration of independence is perhaps their most famiuos work though even then things were changing
lawlessone · 4h ago
The impression i get as an outsider is that liberals are basically republicans that don't hate minorities.
tptacek · 4h ago
No. Republicans believe in full privatization of schools, Social Security, and Medicare, in flat taxation, the abolition of the regulatory state, the replacement of government-provided services with cash vouchers, and policymaking devolved out to the states. Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs.
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.
jordanb · 2h ago
> Liberals generally commit to none of these beliefs.
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.
nathan_compton · 4h ago
They are usually also ok with LGBQT people, which is good. Realistically, I think liberals are just not particularly reflective about the economic realities our system creates. Americans are drowning in propaganda, of which the right wing sort which characterizes Trumpism is only the most obvious. Add on top of that that the 20th Century makes a pretty compelling case that leftism as imagined in that century isn't a going concern, its not really a sign of a major moral failing that one might be a "republican who isn't into cruelty."
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.
Alive-in-2025 · 4h ago
Excellent comment. I agree that not many leftists support the current housing system. Probably only some existing home owners are excited about how it works today - they may want home prices to stay high. I'm lucky to be a home owner but I also see that the current system is incredibly destructive, having not enough homes and very high home purchase prices is really hard on people. We should not have to spend so much of our income pursing a home.
cocaclub · 3h ago
My guess is that the "leftist critique" isn't one of not wanting new houses built, but of not wanting extensive government subsidies and political energy to go to builders and other groups who will not solve the problem, a la our storied history with broadband subsidies.
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.
lanfeust6 · 4h ago
> houses should be cheaper by any means necessary.
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.
delusional · 6h ago
I sometimes think back to a passage in "dialectic of enlighenment" where the authors write what amounts to "input without analysis is meaningless, but analysis without new input is madness as the analysis eventually becomes only analysis of other analysis".
I think that generally a true problem nowadays. Popular culture does a lot of "analysis", but not a lot of reality seeking.
999900000999 · 1h ago
Excessive regulation is 90% of it.
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.
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.
imgabe · 1h ago
For years in Washington DC there was one single crank who went to every community engagement meeting and prevented hundreds of units of housing from getting built.
mjvmroz · 55m ago
I’ll be so interested to see what happens to this kind of thing.
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.
crtified · 35m ago
Perhaps they have not been given the credence that you assume. It is typically not the NIMBY complainers who have the capacity to hire powerful experts to argue their cases in Councils and courtrooms ad nauseam. That is heavily weighted towards the developer side. I say that having worked for such developers, to further their cases in great detail.
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.
ThinkBeat · 6h ago
There is an incredibly large lobby group who is fully invested in
house prices rising or at least not falling, namely homeowners.
and since most politicians at a high level usually own one or more
houses, they are fully invested in it as well.
xnx · 5h ago
> and since most politicians at a high level usually own one or more houses,
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!
> 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!
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?
jerlam · 6h ago
It's a much bigger group than homeowners. Banks don't want housing prices to fall, since then homeowners start foreclosing and then banks lose interest payments and own undesired property. Cities don't want housing prices to fall, since they were counting on money from developers and property taxes.
waldohatesyou · 5h ago
I don’t agree with this take, we’re overly simplifying the nature of housing here. It depends on the housing mix as well. If the vast majority of the pro-housing prices crowd is heavily invested in single family residential then they should favour widespread upzoning and deregulation of apartments because that would increase the value of their SFHs through two mechanisms: 1) presumably single family homes will be destroyed so any remaining single family homes become more valuable and 2) every single family home is now a potential townhouse or high density building which increases the value a developer would pay for it.
Are there any serious objections to that line of reasoning?
jerlam · 4h ago
No, what you said is mostly correct; but I'm mostly talking about not having home prices go down, which is different but related.
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.
__turbobrew__ · 5h ago
Property taxes are relatively independent from the absolute value of the property. Only the relative value of a property to other properties in municipality determines property taxes.
antisthenes · 1m ago
> Property taxes are relatively independent from the absolute value of the property.
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.
TJSomething · 2h ago
In Nevada, it's a percentage (approximately 0.5%, varying from city to city and with other conditions, like commercial usage) of its assessed value, which is 35% of taxable value. Taxable value is the market value of the bare land plus the replacement cost for all improvements on the land, less depreciation.
__turbobrew__ · 2h ago
Ok, but if real estate prices half the city can just double the tax from 0.5% to 1%? Correct?
tomrod · 1h ago
Yes, but every elected official will lose their job at that millage rate increase and you'll have riots.
jerlam · 4h ago
I live in California where property tax is fixed at 1% due to Prop 13, so I don't really know how it works anywhere else.
__turbobrew__ · 3h ago
Ok, I guess that is specific to California. Where I live it doesn’t work that way.
frollogaston · 1h ago
That's fine. On one hand the other saying "no" too much will stagnate the local economy, on the other a city doesn't need to accommodate an infinite number of people moving there. Either extreme will hurt property values in the long run, so there's a balance. I've seen places sell themselves out, I've also seen suburban sprawls where naive homeowners feel good about holding a house 20 years only to make 30% gain.
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.
Gigachad · 41m ago
This has just lead to Boomers getting a death grip on every city. Young people are forced to pay out the nose to rent the scraps of housing left, and then also get taxed to pay out the pensions of the same boomers because they moved all of their cash out of the bank and stocks to put in to a 5 bedroom house in Sydney so now they qualify for welfare.
frollogaston · 36m ago
What do you propose instead to allow younger people to buy homes, and if it were implemented, why would young people still want to buy a home under those rules?
Gigachad · 16m ago
I propose construction approvals be managed by a higher government level than the local council which has so far resulted in disastrous outcomes.
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.
munchler · 1h ago
There's also a large lobby group that is fully invested in building new houses, namely real estate developers, and since most politicians at a high level usually need large campaign contributions, they are fully invested in it as well.
gboss · 3m ago
This is not the problem. We should not castigate people who want to build homes and earn a rightful profit from that endeavor. The problem is the undemocratic process that is the town hearing. It is unreasonable to expect working families and young adults to attend week day, day time hearings to state their position on the construction of new homes or anything else for that matter. The atrocities of urban renewal by Robert Moses and his followers in the 50s and 60s which wrecked many urban and black urban communities, many of which still haven’t recovered, led us into this mess. The antidote was that all movements towards progress must be debated by citizens (mostly seniors as they are the only ones with the luxury of time) in a hearing format. The citizens able to participate are most likely not going to live long enough to see the results of their positions anyways. It’s a disaster.
frollogaston · 1h ago
Yep. A town can become desirable after its residents carefully built its character and reputation, then suddenly apartment/condo developers want in.
brokencode · 1h ago
Are you suggesting that the problem with housing is that we are producing too much of it?
munchler · 1h ago
No, I'm suggesting that one problem with housing is wealthy real estate developers who have undue political influence.
jdkoeck · 1h ago
I wish they had more influence, then they’d be able to build more and prices would go down.
munchler · 1h ago
I'm all for building more housing, as long as it comes with the necessary infrastructure - schools, roads, parking, public transportation, etc. Where I live, developers seem to get government approval to build in locations where they can rake in a lot of money at high prices without having to worry about such things.
(In fact, my local government is actually closing roads near new housing because "f#ck cars" is apparently a hip idea these days.)
jdkoeck · 35m ago
Your own example seems to show that the culprit lies with local governance, not developers, wouldn’t you agree?
munchler · 29m ago
No. Let's not pretend that it's OK for developers to try to obtain undue influence over government officials.
munchler · 38s ago
I'm not saying that developers are the cause of the housing shortage.
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.
jdkoeck · 6m ago
There’s a puzzling contradiction between your claim that developers are the problem, on one hand, and then your own anecdote on the other, not to mention the article that very convincingly debunks the idea that housing shortage is the fault of developers. I must be missing something, because frankly this isn’t making any sense.
lokar · 5h ago
I never see the NIMBY movement really engage with what falling prices would mean in practice. It just seems impossible to be allowed for any really duration over a large area.
I think a more realistic (but depressing) goal is modest loss to inflation (so prices go up by 1-2% less then inflation).
kettlecorn · 4h ago
> 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.
typewithrhythm · 2h ago
They are going down the same path of making a lower quality product available, then using deceptive averages.
I have not seen anything that would create a supply of equally desirable properties (compared with detached dwellings).
lokar · 1h ago
Most families being able to afford a detached SFH was a historical anomaly that came with massive costs, and won’t be sustainable long term.
typewithrhythm · 38m ago
The "anomaly" happened when we were less productive overall. What change made it possible, and why can't we go back?
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.
adgjlsfhk1 · 1h ago
10 years of 2% is a real value decrease of 20%. that would be amazing!
lokar · 1h ago
But it’s pretty rare to see a contentious policy last that long without really clear results.
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.
moneycantbuy · 41m ago
Gary's Economics claims wealth inequality is at the root of housing unaffordability. Basically as wealth concentration grows, the ultra-rich bid up the assets. See the price of gold doubling in the past few years. Government stimulus is also captured by the richest. It's also a global phenomenon, i.e., every major city is now unaffordable for most people.
This doesn't make sense. Each wealthy family can only live in one house at a time. Yes, they might have multiple homes, but a billionaire having a luxury vacation home in Lake Tahoe or a penthouse in Manhattan are not the reason housing is unaffordable. The type of home a billionaire would buy would never be affordable anyway.
moneycantbuy · 19m ago
Bill Gates owns 275,000 acres in the USA. I doubt he's even gazed upon half of it. The billionaires aren't buying homes to live in like us proles, they're buying lots of finite land and water rights and such.
imgabe · 5m ago
That is about .01% of the US land area, and I’m guessing it’s not downtown in major cities or other places that people want to live. It’s probably mostly undeveloped wilderness for conservation, right? That has zero effect on home prices.
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.
simpaticoder · 6h ago
What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage? Even if supply is eased, the wealthy (those who have enough capital to earn passive income) will buy the extra supply and rent to the poor. The Piketty effect takes over, they invest their profit in more housing, wealth inequality continues to get worse, and while more housing exists, it owned by an increasingly small cohort.
Personally I'd like to see legal constraints on investment in primary, single-family homes, and fewer legal constraints on building them.
appreciatorBus · 3h ago
Piketty logic assumes infinite demand. Housing demand is very large, large enough to seem infinite when North American cities have spend 100 years banning every form of housing imaginable except the single family house, but it is not actually infinite.
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.
throwawayqqq11 · 2h ago
The housing market is much more inelastic than eg. the cars market. Whether demand in housing is infinte is a question of scale of population and wealth growth and elasticity. With that given, i would assume the postulated effect of run-off construction and renting, but we only have poluation growth and not the other two.
__turbobrew__ · 4h ago
My gut feeling is that wealthy people buying up the housing stock to rent out is not actually as common just supply restrictions not meeting the demands of individuals.
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.
spicyusername · 3h ago
What about wealth inequality as the root cause of housing shortage?
Keep building.
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.
dandanua · 1h ago
This will not work if there is an exponential wealth inequality in a society, which is where everything is heading.
627467 · 52m ago
Can you explain "exponential wealth inequality"?
Sounds a bit like "problem A is unsolvable because - look at here! - no one is solving problem C!"
tptacek · 6h ago
You haven't actually worked this example out. Try it. The wealthy buy the extra supply; they now compete with all the existing supply for tenants. What happens next?
gopher_space · 4h ago
Collusion using online management services to fix prices across a region.
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.
Schiendelman · 3h ago
I live in Seattle, and this is a scapegoat. it's another way to point a finger at anything but massive restrictions on supply. The easiest solution to collusion to keep prices high is to let lots of other people build and compete down price. In Washington, most new construction happens on a very small number of parcels, because that's the only place we allow it.
gopher_space · 3h ago
Nobody concerned about rent price fixing thinks that we don't also need to build more housing here. This is just another part of the problem. Are you defending the practice?
Schiendelman · 2h ago
I think it simply doesn't matter. The only reason it could have any impact at all is in an incredibly constrained market. Unconstrain the market and they just won't be able to; it wouldn't work.
Also - I don't think it actually affects prices. It's just that they've gotten good at seeking price equilibrium.
bugglebeetle · 1h ago
“Yes” would’ve been a sufficient answer.
rcpt · 2h ago
There are too many competing landlords to form a functional cartel.
scoofy · 3h ago
Housing is a depreciating asset. Even if you're trying to continuously corner the market, you'll be losing money in the long run if you're not actually renting the units for more than you're buying them for.
If supply can be built to meet demand, trying to corner the market to achieve monopoly rents will fail in the long run.
HDThoreaun · 2h ago
Collusion on housing only works when there is a shortage. As soon as the shortage ends units go unfilled and landlords defect. Collusion works in industries where supply can change in the short run, tough to do that in real estate. Real estate elasticity is so high though that small collusion can work, but only if there is already a shortage. Yet, again the solution is just build more.
nielsbot · 5h ago
Depends on how many tenants there are: is is a buyers' or sellers' market?
elevaet · 5h ago
Their point is that an increased housing supply should shift it to a buyer's market - it's not just how many tenants there are but how many housing units vs how many tennants.
tptacek · 5h ago
Whether it's a buyer or seller's market depends on supply!
nielsbot · 5h ago
If the wealthy buy up existing limited housing supply and there are many tenants looking for housing, then they can continue to raise rents, no?
tptacek · 5h ago
The premise here is investors that just continually buy up all the supply, even as supply continues to increase, in the hopes that some day housing, the single largest asset class in the United States, will reach the limit of all possible supply? You don't feel like this is "spherical cow" calculating? The amount of investor-owned housing in most metro markets is a rounding error, and the amount of vacant investor-owned housing is smaller than that.
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.
wredcoll · 3h ago
I'm trying to track this argument through this thread but I feel like something has gotten lost here, is there someone arguing against increasing the housing supply? Like, did someone upthread say something like "no, I think we should not build more houses"?
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...)
stale2002 · 2h ago
> is there someone arguing against increasing the housing 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.
Avicebron · 5h ago
Yeah except it almost always gravitates to a cartel, almost always, because that is how people work, even when piloting corporate machines.
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
ch4s3 · 5h ago
Housing returns have constantly lagged behind equities in the US. In the long run it’s almost always preferable to hold stocks as most of your investments in the US.
Schiendelman · 3h ago
Again, that means the answer is to stop limiting how much housing is built.
baby_souffle · 5h ago
If - hypothetically - I had a ton of money and buying another house or two or fifteen wasn't a big deal, wouldn't there be a clear-ish signal that I should stop my demand for more housing lest too much supply screw with my income? I would also have an incentive to deploy some of my resources/capital to making sure that the supply of housing is juuuuuuust right for my extractive needs.
pixl97 · 5h ago
Thats what I'm trying to figure out myself, which bank is going to give out loans on a depreciating asset. Funding will dry up as supply increases.
simpaticoder · 5h ago
>What happens next?
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.
tptacek · 5h ago
I was thinking more along the lines of a simple math problem and less along the lines of an outline for a dystopian novel. Like, show the work.
simpaticoder · 5h ago
If capital returns 5% and the economy grows at 1%, where does the extra wealth come from? Spoiler: it's a transfer from the poorest to the wealthiest. Asset classes include stocks, bonds, real-estate, art, and metals. So if artists make more art, will this make art ownership more accessible to the average person? Or will it be a small transient soon erased by the monumental financial forces pulling all assets into the ownership and control of a tiny few? That art that your grandparents bought for $500 is now work $100k; you have student debt and high rent, so of course you sell it. The house your parents bought for $18k is worth $1M and they need end-of-life care, and you're own kids are expensive, so of course you sell it. The movement is irrestable.
spankalee · 4h ago
tptacek is asking how investors buying properties to rent them out, which clearly leads to increased rental supply, then somehow supposedly leads to higher, not lower, rents.
wyre · 4h ago
Increased rental supply at the cost of decreased home ownership.
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.
cocaclub · 3h ago
Recognizing your frustration with reality's failure to adhere to the academic: the fact is that rent rates for corporate-owned units generally don't go down. At least, not in recent history. In the rare cases where cartel behavior doesn't work to cement rates, and owners have to respond somehow to market conditions in order to avoid cash-flow disruption, they will offer "specials" that lower the out-of-pocket cost, but not the on-paper rental rate, for a unit. Your oft-found "1 month free"-type deals (that are actually a monthly bill credit for the initial lease term). Upon renewal, your increase is based on that paper rate, not what you were actually paying.
MobiusHorizons · 1h ago
Recent history has been corporate rents not decreasing amid tight supply, the question being asked repeatedly (and repeatedly not answered) in this thread is “how exactly would landlords continue seeking high rents if housing were no longer scarce?” The only answer so far has been “by buying up the supply and renting it out” which completely ignores the obvious fact that renting out housing may reduce the supply of purchasable properties, but increases the supply of rental properties. There is no reason to assume collusion among a set of landlords would be enough to keep rental prices high if supply is no longer tight. So how exactly would landlords continue seeking be able to keep prices high if supply continues to increase?
raincole · 4h ago
Can you at very least try to answer the comment you're replying to?
skinnymuch · 4h ago
Nice points. And of course your first reply in this thread is anlredy light grayed. Classic Hacker News
arrosenberg · 4h ago
The total housing supply remains static - the number of owners goes down and the tenants increase, so the S/D curve for housing stays the same. Then the wealthy consolidate the supply into smaller, more powerful groups who drive up rents via monopolist and cartel behavior (eg RealPage).
tptacek · 4h ago
It costs money to hold on to a unit of housing. Supply is increasing (that's the premise; nobody is proposing a one-time increase in supply). How does the investor profit?
arrosenberg · 4h ago
If a small number of landlords continue to control the supply (which I understand to also be part of the premise) then they can charge whatever rate allows them to profit. Housing is pretty inelastic and is a first order priority for most people, so they will pay the maximum they can afford if they have to. At least near me, most of the housing being created is owned by large corporations like the Irvine Company, it’s not individual owned.
tptacek · 4h ago
I'm asking: how does a small number of landlords continue to "control the supply" of an ever-increasing supply of housing when each of their holdings is non-remunerative (and, in fact, incurs tax and maintenance costs). This seems like a pretty simple math problem, a bet that you would not take if it was laid out in front of you, but I'm waiting for someone to explain how that might not be the case.
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.
arrosenberg · 4h ago
I’m not arguing they’re keeping it vacant, that’s someone else in the thread.
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.
cocaclub · 3h ago
How did Uber et al. offer services below cost until they'd driven out all competition? The property holdings are not these landlords' only source of income. Why would milk producers deliberately dump millions of gallons of milk (representing a commensurate amount of labor to both produce and then dispose of)? Because they've created an oversupply that threatens to destabilize the price.
The math works, it's just heinous.
tptacek · 2h ago
I never understand why people think Uber is some kind of mic drop. I don't like Uber as a company, but Uber is vastly better than the system it replaced. It this a generational thing? Are the people casting Uber as archvillains just too young to remember not being able to get a cab at 9PM, or having their cabs kick them out halfway to their destination because they decided to go on a break?
joe_the_user · 4h ago
The investor profits from the appreciation of the property - they may Airbnb in the meantime also. Especially, often the speculator will fix-up the property for a sale - and then the next buyer fixes it up as well. Eventually it be a vacation home or someone might even buy it but the entire process keep a lot of property off the rental market and that increases rents.
joe_the_user · 4h ago
Yeah, Neither you nor the parent have worked the forces out to describe what's happening now.
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.
Schiendelman · 3h ago
There's just no evidence to support this. Appreciation is nowhere near as cost-effective as putting that same money in the stock market.
bgwalter · 5h ago
They leave it empty (that actually happens a lot, especially with foreign investors) or convert it to their 100th AirBnB.
ch4s3 · 5h ago
Empty properties barely exist as a percentage of total housing supply in high cost of living areas in the US. You’re looking at no more than a few tenths of of a percentage point of NYC’s more than 4 million units.
ordinaryradical · 3h ago
Examining empty ownership as a percentage of overall housing in America, which has tens of millions of units, is not a very helpful way of categorizing a highly localized and locally felt phenomenon.
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.
ch4s3 · 1h ago
> Examining empty ownership as a percentage of overall housing in America, which has tens of millions of units, is not a very helpful way of categorizing a highly localized and locally felt phenomenon.
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.
quodlibetor · 4h ago
> a few tenths of a percentage point of NYC
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.
Vacancy doesn’t mean units held empty as either a parking place for cash or held off the market. Vacancy happens when you’re painting and repairing between rentals. Vacancy happens when there’s a renovation. Things like that are normal and not nefarious. Have 1.4% vacancy rate means there is essentially no usable housing for rent.
I was talking about the myth that there are tons of apartments held by rich people who don’t use them for anything.
quodlibetor · 2h ago
My understanding is that vacancy means available units for rent. So, plausibly, if you say 50 of the 100 units in your building aren't available for rent because you say they're being painted then they don't contribute to the vacancy of your building.
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.
Do you have any actual data on the rate of unoccupied properties that are not recently or soon to be available to rent in any major US markets? It seems like kind of hard data to find from my brief perusing around. I'm very interested in seeing some reliable data on this.
I had thought such units would have been included in the housing vacancy statistics, but apparently they are not.
ch4s3 · 1h ago
I haven’t spent much time looking at any place other than New York. But there’s census data, tax data, and a lot of public records. The number of empty units is small. The total is probably close to 40k, but that’s a fuzzy number and moving target. That includes regular vacant units.
1.4% vacancy in a housing market is extraordinarily low. Remember: there is structurally always some material amount of vacancy, because people vacate housing units well before new people move into them. This, by the way, is a stat whose interpretation you can just look up. Real estate people use it as a benchmark.
quodlibetor · 3h ago
Yeah I know it's among the lowest in the world, it's still an ~order of magnitude higher than a few tenths of a percent, which would be shocking for the reasons you mention.
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.
ch4s3 · 3h ago
I was replying to this claim
> They leave it empty (that actually happens a lot, especially with foreign investors
Not talking about rental vacancy.
tptacek · 5h ago
Yes, we get it, they buy the unit and leave it empty. What happens next.
spankalee · 5h ago
Where's the evidence that wealth inequality is the root cause of housing shortage, as opposed to say, the real and factual lack of building?
Even if the wealthy did buy up extra supply to rent out, that would only mean increased supply of rentals, which would lower rents.
moneycantbuy · 11m ago
The ultra wealthy don't even care if it's rented, they're just diversifying their asset portfolios.
oarla · 4h ago
Not commenting on the ethical side of it, in many instances rentals are just a side income, the real value is in the increasing price of the house due to demand outpacing supply. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37855625 for past discussion on this.
Schiendelman · 3h ago
Want something really interesting? There's a pretty decent chance that our wealth inequality is entirely caused by restricting housing supply. ;)
nicoburns · 4h ago
If people had the wealth to own land and build on it then they'd build their own.
immibis · 5h ago
It can be both. Wealthy people make it illegal to subdivide large housing units.
lokar · 5h ago
Who owns housing is orthogonal to the rent or imputed rent for an owner occupied unit. The effective monthly rent is supply and demand.
imgabe · 1h ago
Higher supply still means lower prices. Even if "the wealthy" buy it all and rent it, they are still competing with all the other wealthy who are doing the same thing and that will limit how much they can charge for rent, and will make it a less profitable investment than other things the wealthy could invest in.
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.
Workaccount2 · 3h ago
>will buy the extra supply and rent to the poor.
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.
energy123 · 4h ago
Rental stress is a bigger problem than price appreciation, though. Investors cannot cause rents to increase by buying stock.
uses · 2h ago
To the extent that housing speculation exists, it's because of the lack of supply. So you have the cause and effect reversed.
lanfeust6 · 4h ago
When interest rates were rock-bottom a bigger chunk of new builds were purchased, but they're not anymore. Vacancy rates in cities, though, are very low, and if you constrain supply of rental units, rent prices go up. That impacts the poor demographic far more. People who rent entire houses are not typically poor, unless maybe you count places where houses are cheap like Mississipi.
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.
burnt-resistor · 6h ago
[flagged]
tomhow · 4h ago
I have a soft spot for anyone with a background in Turbo Pascal from the 90s (my father built our family business on Turbo Pascal then Delphi through the 80s and 90s, so I grew up with it around the house).
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.
"Trickle-down" economics is a direct subsidy for high-income earners meant to spur demand. That's the opposite of what increasing the housing supply does.
burnt-resistor · 6h ago
Totally wrong strawman missing the bigger point. It's still a vague, misguided utopian ideology focused on helping the rich supposedly "overproduce" while doing nothing for everyone else. That's trickle-down economics 101.
tptacek · 6h ago
Well, you have the economics wrong, and our ability to handwave at each other about whose policy is "miguided" and "utopian" seems like a pretty boring conversation. Regardless: it's obviously not "trickle-down economics". Trickle-down economics are policies that deliberately and directly subsidize the wealthy in the hopes of spurring demand.
jeromegv · 5h ago
Supply and demand is not an ideology, it’s the most fundamental way that pricing works in a capitalist society. Has been studied for centuries. To think that supply and demand would not apply to housing and instead be trickle down economics is a hell of a statement.
bee_rider · 5h ago
The Supply and Demand model makes some assumptions that are not always true (perfect competition, for example).
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.
How about for fun, instead of rhetorical devices and snarky projection, just look at the facts. The data on effects of zoning reform in places like Minneapolis and others, about where housing is cheaper wherever it's easier to build, about rent dropping ( https://denverite.com/2025/07/25/denver-rent-prices-drop-q2/) when you build way more units, etc.
No comments yet
esseph · 5h ago
Trickle down was a Reagan thing.
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.
nielsbot · 5h ago
Dems are also beholden to the wealthy--not sure they tried that hard, overall.
burnt-resistor · 5h ago
Then you're too focused on political concerns. Neoliberalism doesn't recognize political parties, it recognizes money. As Gore Vidal would say, the Property party.
immibis · 5h ago
To avoid confusion: neoliberalism has not much to do with the liberals (Democrats). It's closer to libertarianism, but only about money.
esseph · 4h ago
I think I was confused (speed) reading through it and hit the Democrats part and was just thinking to myself... They have extremely limited power right now, and aren't passing laws?
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 ;-) )
skinnymuch · 4h ago
Neoliberalism, trickle down, abundance. They are all similar and/or the same.
didibus · 2h ago
I just couldn't keep reading with the constant "antitrust left" being refered to on every sentence.
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".
IFC_LLC · 3h ago
Pretty much any criticism of a current housing market can't happen without mentioning the quality of said housing. I have just come back from one of the apartments I was looking at to see an abysmally small shoebox with some sort of doors and windows installed in there. I live in a house with 9-foot ceilings and I feel like a king. But this is insane.
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.
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.
Schiendelman · 3h ago
That's right, and that's caused by restrictions on supply. Almost every problem we have with housing comes down to us restricting how much can be built so much that extremely low quality units are competitive. If you allowed 10 times as much construction, those units wouldn't be able to compete, because other builders would offer better units for the same price.
abdullahkhalids · 2h ago
Apparel markets are much more free and competitive than housing markets, and have basically no restrictions on supply. Yet, the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen. And we get incredibly cheap incredibly low-quality garbage.
These things are much more complex than simplistic single-variable models.
kacesensitive · 1h ago
I mean by that logic wouldn't the cheap house just cost even less? What about housing prevents it from being a race to the bottom like every other product?
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.
ajkjk · 3h ago
It seems like fewer restrictions would mean more garbage getting built.
energy123 · 2h ago
Bundling all regulation into a single monolith is a classic mistake.
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.
Schiendelman · 2h ago
The restrictions, paradoxically, are what cause garbage! when the unit you build is in incredibly high demand, you do not have to build good quality, someone will pay you for it. If you are competing with other people building for the same rental market, you can't get away with that.
chiefofstuffs · 3h ago
Depends on the restrictions.
Not being allowed to cast a shadow on the neighbor’s zucchini garden or having to pay off permit expediters has no impact on building quality, mandating wood vs cardboard does.
Hammershaft · 2h ago
Fewer regulatory roadblocks like zoning would lead to more supply, which would lead to more competition, which would lead to better quality and cheaper rents.
sapphicsnail · 2h ago
At least in cities, it will probably just lead to more high-end housing that's bought up by people who don't even live there. The market doesn't work with so much income inequality.
jagged-chisel · 3h ago
The idea is that there will be more competition.
lanfeust6 · 3h ago
More realistically: right now it can take years to get approval to build somewhere, only specific builds for specific places.
peab · 2h ago
I had to break a lease on an apartment recently. The apartment was built in 2023 or 2024, marketed as a luxury apartment. We had no hot water for a month because they used a couple centralized tankless water heaters, and we happened to be the furthest away from the heaters - if they turned it too hot, it was burning hot for the apartments closer to it.
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.
energy123 · 2h ago
Apartments are either "small" or "luxury". No matter what you do, you get smeared for building housing.
mayneack · 1h ago
This is a very online oriented debate. Derek Thompson might hear mostly from left coded anti-trust types on twitter, but I really don't think that's the main opponent to abundance.
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.
BrenBarn · 2h ago
This makes sense, but as far as I can tell it doesn't really answer the question of whether the housing crisis is driven by "monopolies and the corruption of big business". It just rebuts a particular article's claims about whether the housing market is driven by monopolies in the homebuilding industry. But I would say the issue is larger than that. Monopolies and corruption in general have led to great wealth inequality and that is at least exacerbating (if not driving) a housing crisis in many places.
asta123 · 1h ago
In Australia most of the narrative on the housing affordability crisis is around lack of supply and nimbyism. In the meantime Melbourne has dropped to 4th most expensive city in the country and becoming more affordable. Most likely reason - land tax change in that state which is turning off accumulating multiple properties through investment and investors turning to other states where prices are still going up. So, while supply is relevant, I would say it is investor demand that is driving prices up.
cyberlurker · 1h ago
Am I wrong, or is this kind of a silly date range considering the housing crash was in the middle?
> 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.
energy123 · 2h ago
Here's the political solution: Do both public housing and zoning reform.
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.
rcpt · 2h ago
You realize that local busybodies hate both of those things and they're the only political group that matters
scoofy · 3h ago
It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when the value of his home depends on his not understanding it.
whatever1 · 4h ago
Housing crisis is just a result of increasing income inequality and the resulting real estate investment craze. The population of America (real demand) did not suddenly double at any state/city.
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.
appreciatorBus · 3h ago
The population of a place doesn't have to double, or even change at all, for prices to go up. All that is necessary is for more people to want to live in a place. Those with the $ to satisfy that desire will outbid those who don't and you can easily double/triple/10x prices with no change in population.
whatever1 · 2h ago
How come more people want to live in the entire US if the population is relatively flat? Prices are up everywhere.
The only answer is that the increased observed demand is a result of the increased investment demand (rather than native demand)
No comments yet
varenc · 3h ago
This seems like it contributes to the problem, but doesn't feel like the root cause at all. Every homeowner, not just the ultra wealthy, has an incentive to oppose new housing. (Though in many metros any homeowner is automatically wealthy by some definition). The lack of supply seems like the core issue here.
veqq · 1h ago
> The population of America (real demand) did not suddenly double at any state/city.
The population has literally doubled multiple times, and housing supply has not increased. There used to be significantly more units per capita.
Workaccount2 · 3h ago
A lot of the time it's not rich people bidding over a home, it's people in a game of chicken to see who will put themselves in the worse financial position.
Schiendelman · 3h ago
What if the housing crisis is what's causing wealth inequality? Piketty's data pointed to this.
whatever1 · 3h ago
Definitely is a negative feedback loop. So I expect the trend to accelerate as long as foreign investment keeps flowing into the US in the same rates
Schiendelman · 2h ago
Other than people claiming it, what actual evidence have you seen that foreign investment would be a problem if we weren't restricting housing supply?
whatever1 · 2h ago
If it is just internal money the bubble will burst. If you have the entire world pouring cash to bid on us real estate it can really go to almost infinity
robertclaus · 2h ago
Quote: "I don’t see the value in discussing a “national” crisis in homebuilding oligopoly from which the 49 biggest metros are exempt."
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.
huitzitziltzin · 3h ago
Not surprising at all to hear that Matt Stoller got the economics of an antitrust issue wrong. I appreciate the attention he brings to the topic and his diligence in digging up stories but his own analysis is often just totally wrong. I don’t think he’s worth taking seriously as an analyst. Maybe as a reporter at best.
whoknowsidont · 2h ago
>Not surprising at all to hear that Matt Stoller got the economics of an antitrust issue wrong.
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.
phendrenad2 · 2h ago
Too often people hear that some lions escaped from the zoo, and then hear that shoplifting went up, and decide that the lions must be robbing convenience stores.
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.
jjk166 · 4h ago
> So, Dallas doesn’t meet Quintero’s oligopoly threshold. Now let’s consider the rest of the country. I tracked down a complete listing of the country’s 50 largest homebuilding markets, from #1 Dallas to #50 Cincinnati. How many meet Quintero’s first oligopoly threshold (two companies = 90 percent of the market)? Zero out of 50. And how many meet his second threshold (six companies = 90 percent of the market)? One: Cincinnati. It turns out that the largest homebuilding markets just aren’t that concentrated
> 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.”
---
> 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.
---
> 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.
whoknowsidont · 2h ago
>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.
herf · 18m ago
Correlation isn't causation - the post here says smaller homebuilders can't get financing right now, and so a supply shortage is correlated with larger actors who can, but it isn't caused by concentration directly. The question is if government can have remedies for broken markets other than breaking up companies, because here it sounds like "fixing builder financing" would help:
Sadly, many of the issues he called out remain in the final, approved version.
didibus · 2h ago
Most interesting proposal I heard on this topic, is that the solution to housing prices is to ban renting altogether.
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.
cyberlurker · 1h ago
Prices would drop where homes are commonly rented. I suppose rent could turn into lease to own in the interim period. It’s an interesting idea, I wonder if any economists have played it out.
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.
dinkumthinkum · 1h ago
It wouldn't work. Good luck trying to enact that. Also, the amount of leftism in this thread is like a pure-sugar-diet for Marxists. When houses have no value, people don't value them. Look at what happens when you give large amounts of people free housing, what do they do with it?
pembrook · 4h ago
While we’re debunking that can we debunk the weird leftist conspiracy theories around index fund companies like Blackrock “buying up all the residential homes.”
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.”
whoknowsidont · 2h ago
>While we’re debunking
The entire article is just blatantly lying about what the source article says lol.
dinkumthinkum · 1h ago
While, I am not onboard with leftist conspiracy theories, I find the defense of BlackRock a little odd:
"You have to force behaviors. At BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors." - Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock.
mlhpdx · 4h ago
> … profit margins as a share of overall home-sale prices actually declined slightly
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.
deckar01 · 4h ago
I find the term “anti-abundance left” odd. He wrote a book called “Abundance” laying out the case for deregulating zoning laws. Claiming global monopolies in aggregate seems more like a conspiracy theory. I thought the mainstream (left) opposition to deregulation was to subsidize affordable housing regardless of the cause.
tptacek · 4h ago
Restating something I said upthread, but I think the right way to think about Thompson's rhetorical adversary here is "people on the political left who believe that antitrust is the high-order bit on housing affordability and that zoning reform shouldn't occur until after antitrust issues are addressed". He's arguing with people who are pushing back on legalizing housing density. He is not arguing broadly against the political left; in a reasonable US macro view of politics, he is part of that political left; there are people much further to his left that are nonetheless in lock step with him on housing, all of whom I believe he'd be thrilled to endorse.
specialist · 3h ago
Paraphrasing: along with a dozen other pressing issues, anti-trust was out of scope for this book.
> 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.
tptacek · 2h ago
There really is an internal struggle in the Democratic party (totally natural after a major election loss!) and people are just inclined to read everything as taking one side or the other in it. Ironically, Klein and Thompson really tried to go out of their way not to take either side; in fact, most of the oxen that get gored in the book are establishment Democrats!
denimnerd42 · 5h ago
i hope the next part of his article covers the zoning issues. because I'm certainly not seeing the zoning issues making the homes be on bigger lots or requiring things like 3 car garages? If anything the lots in new tract developments in dallas fort worth are smaller and have less land using features like they don't have alleys. and then in Dallas city limits any small slice of land that can possibly be used for new houses have way smaller lots than any neighboring decades old homes.
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.
matthavener · 1h ago
It's absolutely a zoning issue. The Texas legislature is literally overriding large cities to force them to allow smaller lot sizes. Most of Dallas, for example, is R-7.5, which drives up cost because land is expensive and it requires you to dedicate a lot of it to your yard (max 45% coverage). Only a few areas, like some PDs in old east Dallas, have been rezoned to allow the smaller lots, though you seem to believe its all of Dallas city limits.
oh cool thanks. max 45% coverage is pretty low. I guess I must be thinking of some very specific developments that must have gotten variances.
tptacek · 5h ago
He just did a podcast episode about envelope restrictions and how they're pushing the market for housing out of the sun belt. The subtext of all this stuff is ultimately zoning.
ajmurmann · 4h ago
Long permitting processes also encourage construction of larger SFHs. The permitting cost is largely fixed whereas three profit margins scale with the value of the home which mostly scales with the size of the home
denimnerd42 · 2h ago
yes bigger houses to an extent are way more profitable because there is a somewhat linear relationship between sqft and value but houses have a lot of fixed cost. there's probably a sweet spot around 2500sqft in suburban/exurban Dallas Fort Worth to maximize the market for the house and still generate low $/sqft such that the guy building something bigger next tract over isn't crushing you on $/sqft.
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.
ajmurmann · 1h ago
All this is why I believe our best bet is allowing density. Even if one doesn't want to live in a busy city center, making this an option for those who want it, reduces demand and thus prices for people who want SFHs
pixl97 · 5h ago
I feel lucky in the sense that I have both the physical ability and the skill to do almost all of my own maintenance myself. With what I saved on landscaping alone I was able to buy all the tools I needed for almost any project.
No comments yet
throwawaybob420 · 2h ago
“Abundance” is neoliberal BS. Typical centrism, half measures that don’t actually make anything better and manage to make everyone angry.
matthest · 2h ago
"Abundance" is really just supply and demand 101. Which has proven to work over and over and over and over again throughout human history.
jrflowers · 1h ago
This is one of the funniest articles I’ve read in a a long time. I’m not sure what is better, the “I quite literally set out to find support for my narrative and find exactly one (1) guy that’s both willing to call himself an expert and give me my desired answer for each of my individual points” thing or the lazy neocon virtue signaling
> 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
whoknowsidont · 5h ago
Incredibly dishonest article. It's shocking to see people support this. And I love the way it's framed in a conspiratorial tone, and uses coded language to make you doubt this is a quantifiable problem.
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.
This "Abundance" nonsense is simply liberal repackaging of Reagan's trickle down economics and deregulation. That's all it is. Reagan's policies were designed to transfer wealth from the young and the poor to the old and the wealthy. Abundance will do (more of) exactly the same.
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.
ajmurmann · 3h ago
"your margin is my opportunity" will lower prices and does so in all areas of the economy that aren't highly regulated. The exception are of course cartels but Thompson shows here that those aren't present
specialist · 3h ago
How would government go about creating that additionl housing?
cyberax · 3h ago
Sigh. The whole housing narrative has been hopelessly taken off the rails by well-meaning but clueless urbanists.
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.
evil-olive · 6h ago
> 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.
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.
'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.
evil-olive · 6h ago
> Thompson is responding to a specific paper.
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.
It's not on him to rebut every single argument Stoller has ever made. Several arguments Stoller made were refuted by the authorities Stoller himself cited, which is both interesting to read and also telling.
Stoller is free to find similarly decisive refutations of arguments Thompson had made (they're unlikely to be forthcoming).
jawarner · 5h ago
I think for this to be interesting to an outside observer, it should at least address the bulk of the debate around the topic. If the GP is right and it's missing the key points of the anti-abudance critique, then I'm afraid it's missing the forest for the trees and misleading to a general audience.
whoknowsidont · 5h ago
>Several arguments Stoller made were refuted by the authorities Stoller himself cited
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.
tptacek · 5h ago
I feel like not a lot of celebrity gossip consists of calls with economics professors who wrote cited papers discussing those citations, but we might just read different rags.
whoknowsidont · 5h ago
Notably, he never included the full conversation. It's almost like the question asked to the economic professors and their responses are completely different from the way the questions are presented in the article. Claims and questions the target article never mentions or implies.
I think there's like, I don't know, a few fallacies named for such practices.
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.
evil-olive · 2h ago
> It's not on him to rebut every single argument Stoller has ever made.
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)
Thompson writes these articles to deflect valid criticism.
nradov · 6h ago
Collusion among landlords can only work in a housing shortage. With an abundance of rental units, individual landlords would "defect" (in a game theory sense) and lower rents in order to fill their vacant units at the market price.
nielsbot · 5h ago
Don't we have a housing shortage? Also, many (institutional?) landlords are happy to leave units vacant and/or evict tenants spuriously for higher profits.
tptacek · 5h ago
Explain the economics of keeping units vacant in the face of increasing supply.
whoknowsidont · 2h ago
Maybe read the referenced article?
diziet_sma · 5h ago
Yes we do. The OP's point is that _if_ there is collusion, building housing will help solve the collusion problem _and_ solve the housing shortage.
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.
radixdiaboli · 6h ago
> it seems like Thompson is being awfully selective about which antitrust-related criticisms he's responding to here
He was responding to a specific critique of his book. So... yes. That's how that works.
davidw · 6h ago
I wish everyone who cares about the price of housing could go to a hearing like this one. Sadly, they happen in every community so if you're curious, you ought to go:
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.
thegrim33 · 6h ago
You're claiming that your idea of 'X' is true, and for evidence of this, you're linking to a site that was created by people whose mission is to advocate for the idea of X.
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?
davidw · 3h ago
I care about fixing the housing shortage in the city I live in. I spend hundreds of hours as a volunteer, see a lot and read a lot. I'm pointing out what I see on the ground doing the work. And what I see is NIMBYs, not institutional investors or RealPage or 'foreigners' or whatever else the bogeyman du jour is.
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.
Schiendelman · 3h ago
If you start digging into this issue you'll find every example you want. If you only challenge people you disagree with, you will remain wrong.
NoahZuniga · 5h ago
"You're claiming X is true, and providing me with a source you believe has good arguments for X being true. Very suspicious."
tiahura · 6h ago
Why do people think they have a right to live wherever they want? The people Bend are happy with Bend as it is. If you can't afford to live there, move.
tptacek · 6h ago
Why do people that happen to live somewhere believe they have a right to prevent others from living there? If you don't like who's moving to Bend, move somewhere else.
appreciatorBus · 3h ago
"Why do people think they have a right to control what other people build on private land? If you don't like what's getting built, move."
Why is the govt's job to control where people live? I thought individual freedom was a big part of the whole deal?
jeffbee · 6h ago
Can you cite some evidence of a place where RealPage's supposed power has led to a consumer harm like higher rents? I may be biased because my research has been cited by RealPage in their suit against the city of Berkeley, but to me RealPage just finds the market clearing price, and that's not particularly evil in my book.
chrisg23 · 4h ago
All I know is I moved to the Dallas area 4 years ago, and I'm still shocked at the housing affordability compared to where I moved from. Both in terms of absolute price and general overall cost of living.
johndhi · 5h ago
I know this isn't how our political system works, but if I were king of America I'd try to solve the problem of expensive housing like this:
-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
tyleo · 4h ago
The first part of this may be overly simplistic but I got a good chuckle reading the second part.
donatj · 7h ago
The bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy.
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.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
Affordable housing is NIMBY whitewashing of reducing supply through rationining. (Note the supporters of affordable housing programmes count the largest landowning families in San Francisco and New York among their ranks.)
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].
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.
lokar · 5h ago
And housing is a substitutable good.
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
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> "Supply and Demand" is a law of nature
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.
eddythompson80 · 4h ago
Ecologists have been studying how groups of animals deal with famines, natural disasters, loss of habitat, climate change, etc for many years. These conditions change supply and demand on resources that are out of those animal populations control. Studying cooperation in bacteria colonies from a similar lens was pretty hot in academia in the late 2010s from what I remember.
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.
ninetyninenine · 4h ago
Value is partly subjective but all value eventually can tied to the reversal of entropy. And the reversal of entropy costs energy.
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.
echelon · 5h ago
A lot of other models closely resemble economics:
- 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.
zahlman · 2h ago
> Tax unproductive land use, eg. storage units and parking garages.
Good luck doing that before you've fixed transit, which will take forever even with a miracle of political will.
lanfeust6 · 4h ago
There's that, but also it's more difficult to get mixed-density builds than detached homes developed, or the type of builds the left associate with "affordable housing".
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.
supertrope · 6h ago
If US car sales were capped at 10 million cars per year manufacturers would immediately focus on their luxury brands and leave their regular brands out of stock. When you keep strict zoning, give NIMBYs veto power, let environmental review be weaponized as a delay tactic, you are capping new construction.
xnx · 5h ago
They did exactly this when supply chain disruptions limited the amount of cars they could produce.
Ericson2314 · 6h ago
Asking why they don't build affordable housing is like asking why don't they build used cars
lambda · 6h ago
This is a perfectly succinct way to put it.
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 · 6h ago
> New housing is simply more expensive
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.
xnx · 5h ago
You would think, but constructions seems amazingly resistant to this. construction-physics.com writes extensively and convincinly on this.
Baumol’s Cost Disease means construction labor cost rises faster than productivity. We’re allergic to prefab construction - banks and insurance companies block it. A lot of construction workers left the industry after 2007. Baby Boomers are retiring and told their kids to not get a blue collar job. New housing has to be ADA compliant. People expect to give each kid their own bedroom and have two car garage instead of one car or no garage at all. Recent immigration crackdowns and trade wars are the icing on the cake.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> Baumol’s Cost Disease means construction labor cost rises faster than productivity
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 · 3h ago
there are! Land use code. And permitting. Municipal processes for permitting housing have stifled any really serious innovation in construction.
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...
sedawkgrep · 5h ago
> This is a perfectly succinct way to put it.
I think the entire analogy falls apart the minute you realize houses almost always appreciate while cars do the opposite.
xnx · 5h ago
Land appreciates. Houses depreciate.
elgenie · 4h ago
Houses depreciate if there's an adequate supply of newer housing keeping up with the housing demand of the area. If there isn't then the general GDP growth of the area in which the house is located dictates that the house's value grows as well.
s1artibartfast · 4h ago
Houses appreciate too. The materials and labor cost required to build my house have outpaced inflation by far.
This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.
Schiendelman · 3h ago
Cars would appreciate the same way if we only let you build half as many as there are demand for. And kept doing that for 50 years.
pydry · 6h ago
With cars you can build a high margin luxury and a low margin affordable model if there are two buyers and collect profit from both.
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 · 6h ago
When you build the high-margin apartment, people vacate other housing units to move into it, reducing demand on the older units, which reduces prices in the area. This is just the law of supply and demand, but you don't have to derive it axiomatically: it's empirically what happens when we increase supply at market rates.
I'd like a land value tax too, but it's not going to happen, and an LVT would guarantee market-rate development.
pydry · 6h ago
Your argument here is simply "rich people dont take second homes".
I think it's rather obvious that they do.
tptacek · 6h ago
The number of rich people buying random unoccupied apartments in new multifamily developments has measure zero in the greater scheme of North American housing policy. Meanwhile: the construction of still more housing works against the interests of anyone who would buy a random apartment and hold it vacant as an investment interest, so this is a doubly facile point.
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
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 · 6h ago
How are they still able to live in subsidized affordable housing after they are convicted of murder or arson? Don't we have jails for this kind of criminals?
infotainment · 6h ago
Exactly -- all new housing is going to be marketed as "luxury".
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"?
steveBK123 · 6h ago
Exactly
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.
galangalalgol · 6h ago
Except that outside of Japan, it is unusual for detached homes to depreciate in value. Apartments though you do have a point. Unless the location adds the value they will depreciate over time.
freddie_mercury · 6h ago
It's not unusual at all. Here's a bunch in America just over the past 12 months and during a huge economic expansion with low unemployment.
Detached houses almost always depreciate in value everywhere and require constant maintenance expenses just to keep from falling apart. It's the land under the house that appreciates in value. People often mix those two numbers up.
s1artibartfast · 2h ago
Not my experience. Cost to rebuild and cost/sqft seem to outpace inflation.
Der_Einzige · 5h ago
r/cars swears up and down that they'd buy a brown manual wagon pre-used from the factory!
tiahura · 6h ago
Why don't they build $10,000 Ford Rangers anymore?
bullfightonmars · 6h ago
The same reason housing isn't being built, it was regulated out of existence.
proggy · 3h ago
This is the real answer, not the pat “no one builds new used cars” nonsense. It is entirely possible to build new, no-frills apartments that are 100% habitable and to code. But because of all the regulatory boxes one needs to check — namely all the fees spent, and time spent waiting for seemingly endless approvals — it is simply not possible to rent out bottom-dollar builds at a low market rate. The same logic applies for single family homes sold for purchase. The startup costs are just too damn high.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> Why don't they build $10,000 Ford Rangers anymore?
Fleet economy standards.
bsder · 6h ago
The problem is that you don't generally destroy the used car in order to build a new one. So increasing the new cars on the road eventually also increases the number of used cars on the road.
JumpCrisscross · 6h ago
> you don't generally destroy the used car in order to build a new one
There is very little de-densification construction happening in hot housing markets.
elgenie · 4h ago
De-densification isn't required; a one-for-one knocking down and rebuilding of a single family residence suffices.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> De-densification isn't required; a one-for-one knocking down and rebuilding of a single family residence suffices
Sure. The only reason developers do that is because land-use restrictions prevent the construction of denser, more-profitable and more-efficient housing.
elliotec · 6h ago
No… it’s like asking why they don’t build cheap cars. Which they do.
kfajdsl · 6h ago
Do they? Are there any production cars under 20k? Plenty of used ones for that.
lanfeust6 · 3h ago
This is a fair point, but the analogies to vehicles don't really work anyway: they're a depreciating asset, houses are not. Even a tiny rundown place can cost millions owing to location.
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.
appreciatorBus · 3h ago
When housing is scarce, all housing, even 100 year old dumps, will sell or rent at luxury prices.
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.
davidw · 6h ago
Building "luxury" apartments dropped rents in Bozeman, Montana, which is one of those cities that "everyone wants to move to"
Building only affordable housing is how you get cities into a downward spiral. The people who want luxury housing are the well-to-do. They probably contribute 10x the sales tax per capita than the people who live in affordable housing. And almost by definition luxury housing causes more property tax to be paid to cities than affordable housing. Both sales tax and property tax revenues shrink. And the city gets into a fiscal crisis. The city reduces services. People leave. Housing becomes more affordable but also more undesirable.
Gigachad · 5h ago
Luxury is just a realestate buzzword that means newly built and has stone countertops. Nothing that actually meaningfully impacts the pricing.
bardak · 4h ago
The vast majority of "luxury" properties are just regular property that spend a marginal amount on nicer appliances and finishing.
nielsbot · 5h ago
No matter, it comes down to what people will pay for. At the very least they're selling/renting to people with more wealth.
Gigachad · 5h ago
Yes, new builds are targeting wealthier people. Those wealthy people then move out of their previous housing and that becomes the affordable housing. Like another commenter pointed out, you can't get affordable used cars without producing new cars.
xnx · 5h ago
Today's affordable housing are the "luxury" units from 30 years ago. If you want to decrease the cost of housing you need to build more of whatever people will buy.
bwanab · 5h ago
Presumably, if they're sitting at 20-30% occupancy, somebody (like the developer) is going to be having trouble paying their bank loans. You understand what happens next? (hint: prices plummet). If that isn't happening then your diagnosis of the problem is very likely wrong.
AlexandrB · 6h ago
Toronto's housing market has a similar problem, except they also mostly built one bedroom shoeboxes for investors. Will be interesting to see how this unwinds[1].
Agree. I am not seeing starter homes being built in Omaha. They keep moving further out west, north and south — there's nothing there but fields and fields. I'm not sure that they're in anyone's "back yard".
And yet, they build expensive homes because (I assume) that is where the bigger profits are.
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).
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...
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.
Would people pay for real journalism?
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 guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.
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.
For a current breakdown, see: Index of News Media Ownership: https://futureofmedia.hsites.harvard.edu/index-us-mainstream...
> 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
See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.
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...
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-...
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.
The problem with Matthew Stoller is that he's not very smart.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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!
I think the issue is the number of authorities. One isn’t enough.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
Again: this is one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the country.
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.
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
Just let arguments stand on their own merits. The minute an article includes the term "lefties" or "righties", it's gone wrong imo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that generally a true problem nowadays. Popular culture does a lot of "analysis", but not a lot of reality seeking.
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.
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?
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.
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.
(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 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.
https://youtu.be/BTlUyS-T-_4?si=P0mdHxtq1F7DV4jo
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.
Personally I'd like to see legal constraints on investment in primary, single-family homes, and fewer legal constraints on building them.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
If supply can be built to meet demand, trying to corner the market to achieve monopoly rents will fail in the long run.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I was talking about the myth that there are tons of apartments held by rich people who don’t use them for anything.
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...
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...
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.
Even if the wealthy did buy up extra supply to rent out, that would only mean increased supply of rentals, which would lower rents.
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.
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.
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 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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...
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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 ;-) )
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".
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.
These things are much more complex than simplistic single-variable models.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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The population has literally doubled multiple times, and housing supply has not increased. There used to be significantly more units per capita.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.”
---
> 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.
---
> 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.
https://x.com/NewsLambert/status/1951100530341847343
It's about volume(loudness), access(to data) and exposure(visibility).
Sadly, many of the issues he called out remain in the final, approved version.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/01/texas-legislature-sm... https://developmentweb.dallascityhall.com/publiczoningweb/#d... https://dallascityhall.com/departments/sustainabledevelopmen...
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.
No comments yet
> 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
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...
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.
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.
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?
-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
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.
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...
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Good luck doing that before you've fixed transit, which will take forever even with a miracle of political will.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/sketch-of-a-theory-of...
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.
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...
I think the entire analogy falls apart the minute you realize houses almost always appreciate while cars do the opposite.
This is most clear in insurance data where replacement cost is isolated from land value.
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.
I'd like a land value tax too, but it's not going to happen, and an LVT would guarantee market-rate development.
I think it's rather obvious that they do.
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.
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"?
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.
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/zip-codes-cities-home-pr...
Fleet economy standards.
There is very little de-densification construction happening in hot housing markets.
Sure. The only reason developers do that is because land-use restrictions prevent the construction of denser, more-profitable and more-efficient housing.
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.
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.
https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-...
[1] https://financialpost.com/news/toronto-condo-market-falls-of...
And yet, they build expensive homes because (I assume) that is where the bigger profits are.