I think it's a positive step for American housing market to slowly check off the list of pointless non-solutions so that we can finally arrive at the conclusion that the only way out of the crisis is to build housing. We're just following the San Francisco process here. Ban realpage. Tax vacancies. Complain about foreign investors. Put a tax on "mansions" that's actually a tax on apartment buildings. We will slowly, slowly check off all the boxes of the pointless things. Then 50 years later we can start building houses.
The housing problem is a lot like the medical problem but with a 30-50yr head start to the regulatory capture.
You've got what was at one point a broadly accessible necessity, various degrees of government subsidy and market intervention, a bunch of ancillary industries trying to get their place on the coattails enshrined in law, etc, etc. Then that feedback loop was let to run for a couple generations and you get the current shit.
And it can't easily or promptly be cut back because it's such a huge fraction of commerce (slavery was 12% gdp in its day for comparison) that so many people would take a haircut that you'd start a war if you tried to do anything decisive. But on some level you have to, because to quote Tucker Carlson. "there's more to a national economy than real-estate and high finance" (specifically selected to be inflammatory, not like he's anywhere near the only one saying this).
One big difference:
- ~10% of Americans work in healthcare (i.e. big source of income)
- ~66% of Americans own their homes (i.e. big asset want to protect)
- there's societal stability reasons to encourage home ownership
In poorer places, people would just see a problem exists, and then solve it. Expensive housing? They'll get roommates, put up shacks, or live in cardboard boxes on the street. These things are illegal in expensive-housing places, and the more expensive the housing is, the more illegal they are - IIRC some states were considering banning roommates.
"Just build/produce more" (abundance) sounds fantastic if you are part of the upper classes who have been on the right side of wealth inequality trends. It allows us to avoid the issue of inequality. Just grow the pie!!
But surely you can see how this agenda is not appealing to most Americans who have been on the wrong side of wealth inequality? Even if you double the size of the pie, how do you convince them that their proportional slice of it won't halve in the same period? Because that HAS been their experience so far in the past ~50 years.
We do need to build more, but that has to also come with reform to be politically viable.
I'm not sure a simple citation to the law of supply and demand can count as "bad faith"? I genuinely don't understand your argument, which is why I called it incoherent.
You genuinely don't understand that <median real wages have been stagnant/decreasing for decades in USA, particularly in relation to skyrocketing housing/education/medical costs? Do you have any situational awareness of what just happened politically in NYC?
I would assume users engaging in economic debate on HN would have a knowledge of the basic economic facts and trends, and not dismiss them as "incoherent".
This level of derangement pervades the housing discourse from the left, and it's best to ignore it. At best you will argue in circles forever. At worst, you will be called a fascist bootlicker, etc.
People with normal mental health agree that having enough homes for all the people is a precondition of considering the housing problem to be "solved".
Whoah, this degree of incivility also not helping the case I want to make here!
I agree with pretty much everything you've said on this thread, which makes it all the more important to me it be expressed persuasively and not angrily. Remember: you're not just writing to the person you're responding to, but also to everybody else who reads the thread. Trust readers to spot inane arguments, if you perceive them to be coming up!
Long-term rental listings jumped nearly 30% after the ban, that’s far from ‘no effect.’ For a comparison, that’s about double what Austin was getting YoY for most of its massive building boom.
Yes, no one ever visited NYC before AirBnB. And you’re ignoring a boatload of negative externalities, but that’s the glory of our current economic setup, isn’t it?
New housing is subject to cost disease. Now exacerbated because the off the books workers the industry depends on are being kicked out. You can't just materialize houses without the labor to make them.
Then reduce minimum costs. Let 50 people share an empty lot and put up a slum made of wooden planks from the hardware store. They won't allow this because it'd make house prices decrease.
That plus a history of people dying from building things not to code and trying to live in it, plus the externalized costs of having to put out the ensuing fire due to a non-electrician wiring the thing.
