Leftists doing anything except just building more housing
Rent is falling all over the Southeast where housing has been built in droves, and actually in greater quantities than new demand. The only solution is just flooding the market with housing.
I voted you up because you're correct, in that the only solution is construction and there are people that are doing everything in their power to avoid that truism.
But I don't think it is a left/right issue. In certain regions it may be the left, in others the right, but generally it is subset of both that have investment in artificial scarcity. It's just the justifications that change depending on ideology.
I'm very progressive in some ways but I do think progressives make this particular problem worse, often with good intentions. Both sides are equally NIMBY but liberals also have:
- More environmental regulations that can be used by NIMBY.
- Attempts to solve the using various forms of rent control, which make it worse.
- Related: conservatives favor less regulation, which leads to more construction.
- Liberals hate for (or at least distrust of) landlords. Some of this is well-deserved but I've seen liberals oppose good policies because it will "help landlords".
Lastly, home owners--including liberals--like to see the value of their property go up and tend to favor policies that make it so. It would be nice if we could get people to stop looking at their homes as financial investments.
And despite saying that they're the party of YIMBY, in practice we can clearly see that Democrats simply aren't. They'll say that they allowed ADUs, but then Dallas will come along and build 10,000 homes in the time it took Seattle to simply debate ADUs.
At some point you have to look at the actual results of policy.
See NIMBYs all down the west coast. I bet 90% of city dwelling homeowners would identify as “democrat or further left”, but are very conservative with the character of their neighborhood.
In my experience the bulders and tradesmen who are more right-wing have more to gain from allowing more and faster construction and are more interested in removing laws and restrictions.
A lot of this comes from the attitude in the 60s and 70s where the liberal strategy was to sue the government to stop them from destroying the environment. People from that era saw the smog and the flammable rivers and are generally against development , even though today’s development processes are starkly different from back then.
Right, it's not an inherently left vs right thing. Today NIMBYism has been largely a left-wing phenomenon, with really high end housing developments that are politically untouchable by housing projects.
The answer is always the same tho: make it easy to build housing, and build more housing. Keep building housing until there's a glut of supply.
I've noticed that it's super-rich leftists who oppose permits for new housing, not all leftists.
An interesting group of people they are, the super-rich leftists. The way they weaponize the environment to prevent others having what they want... really makes you wonder.
I don't have their names, but you can look them up. The super-rich leftists are the people who funded the politicians elected to various positions in Monterey, CA who have opposed desal in the area despite drought-like conditions for a decade.
Also, the super-rich leftists are the people who funded the politicians in CA who have banned nuclear power in the state, and also various kinds of mining in the state.
It's not even the "super" rich. They don't care what you do. They can afford walls, hedgerows, extra land as a buffer, the finest sound deadening windows, etc, etc, etc. And they can afford to live among people like them so pretty much all that is only of limited relevance to begin with. They make the rules of the game so they make money and their assets go up either way.
It's some jerk who makes $200k who can afford the house but can't afford to not care what their neighbors do that drives all this at scale.
He's the one trying to scheme up some way to get the government to use other people's tax dollars to threaten them if they try and do something he doesn't like, because that's his only lever to pull. And there's enough of these jerks the government(s) pander to them. The result is everything gets stifled and red-taped. Can't run a bar here. Can't have an apartment building there. Can't have too little parking, but if you have too many cars you're running a junkyard, and on and on and on and on. It's these people in aggregate that result in the existing body of regulation of which there always seem to be a few lines that can block any given development.
And then they have the gall to turn around and whine about the sum total of all this. Not enough housing, not enough amenities, what does get built is ungodly expensive.
"man, this park sure is dirty" <throws cigarette butt on ground> "I wonder how it got that way".
Retirees increasingly don't want to live in the empty desert. They want to live in the convenient and familiar places. Except that's where everyone else wants to live too, but since the retirees have the money, the existing land, and the voting power, they're blocking everyone out.
Exactly, building in areas where people want to live and work are exactly what these strategies are designed for. You can't ignore the competing interests in these areas and reduce the argument to "build more".
In this vane, I'm tired of the 'right' pointing out the dystopian and ugly 'communist' or 'socialist' mass housing that the USSR and China did during the Cold War. Sorry about aesthetics I guess? Should be more concerned about Evergrande ghost cities, contemporarily.
Half-agree: zoning restrictions and non-essential building regulations are a de-facto government handout to existing property owners.
At the same time, apologists for rentiers will do anything except taxing unimproved land value (which among other virtues, functions as a vacancy tax to reduce unproductive speculation, and incentivize development).
The blunt reality is a zero-sum tension: homeowners and landlords want number go up, new buyers and renters want number go down.
> Half-agree: zoning restrictions and non-essential building regulations are a de-facto government handout to existing property owners.
The government represents existing property owners, so they are effectively a handout to themselves for creating and/or sustaining a desirable area. I don't see why things would be any other way.
> At the same time, apologists for rentiers will do anything except taxing unimproved land value (which among other virtues, functions as a vacancy tax to reduce unproductive speculation, and incentivize development).
LVT is a terrible idea. There's a reason why leftists support it, which is that it centralizes control over property values (and therefore control over said property) in the hands of the state.
If you want development, you don't need to incentivize it. You need to just stop getting in the way of it.
Certainly, building new housing works well at a policy level. But calling for new housing doesn't seem to work at a political level. We've been fighting this fight ever since the financial crisis and every election cycle brings us a few victories with an equal number of reversals. And it isn't only within the left that the opposition arises; it wears red in progressive neighborhoods, but it seems to have a taste for brown when that's convenient.
I don't think that the urbanist movement can succeed if it is driven by policy wonks who want to throw out the rulebook and impose reforms from the ivory tower without a real small-d democratic political strategy. Many of us are used to fighting the political battle against climate change by being Absolutely Correct and expecting that Science with her indefatigable armies of Reality will guard the flanks. A fully economic fight like this one just doesn't have the same kind of inevitability. Every step forward on the ground weakens the sense of urgency in the legislature, leading to an equilibrium trap without a vigorous political movement that can hold momentum.
Nerds do not usually want to do politics, but in housing you have to do politics.
IMO, this is largely because the government's job is to stay out of the way, and people who hold elected office in areas where this is a problem (the Northeast Corridor and West coast generally), mostly have a certain something in common that indicates they are likely to think they need to "help" the market along.
It's not a coincidence that the "housing crisis" continues unabated in places like NYC that are losing population, yet appears to be solved in areas in the south that are absorbing those people.
Does this not have more to do with desirability? It's kind of hard to compare property prices in NYC with Alabama. Like no shit housing will be affordable in places that, no offense, are kind of a shit hole. In Canada, housing prices are crazy in beautiful in beautiful Vancouver, but are totally "affordable" in the arctic circle. It has nothing to do with legislation.
NYC rent being unaffordable is due to legislation that keeps apartments off of the market due to not being financially viable to repair to habitable standards in addition to legislation overly empowering local groups to block new construction.
That's funny because a lot of people in Huntsville, AL would consider San Francisco, CA to be a literal shit hole. And yet SF real estate prices are much higher. It turns out there are many factors: local government development policies, weather, jobs, geography, etc.
Housing prices represent a tradeoff between affordability and desirability in most cases (with a major aspect of desirability being access to desirable employment).
It's not hard at all to compare property prices in NYC to Alabama using a cost of living index (and to some extent a quality of life index, though these are fairly subjective).
People are voting with their feet every day, and they largely aren't moving because they are looking for a decrease in their standard of living.
Many, many, many people think NYC, SF, Vancouver etc. are shitholes. The good news is that people are currently allowed to choose where their surroundings look like, though many politicians and bureaucrats seem hell-bent on changing that. And now we're back at the start of this discussion...
There's no one silver bullet, it will have to be a multi-front push:
1. Just build more
2. Zone for multi-family housing
3. Get rid of minimum parking and minimum lot size requirements
4. Allow mixed-user residential and commercial buildings
5. Shift property tax towards taxing the land and exempting buildings from tax, to force speculators to sell vacant land and derilect buildings for development
6. When things start moving, invest in walkability and public transit to support dense urban cores. Cars are great for low-density, but paying for miles of road and polluted air in dense city cores is silly behavior
#2 - #4 are really just specific ways of accomplishing #1.
Most people don't want to live in dense urban cores, so #5 and #6 can easily backfire and stunt progress on #1.
Just let people decide what to build where, both as individuals and communities. If dense urban cores truly are the "better" way of living, it will prove itself soon enough without the urbanists trying to force everyone down their path to their own detriment.
If you don't want to live in an apartment, buy a house outside of the urban core. Are you arguing that cities should not build infrastructure or make it nice for the people living there?
No, he's saying the government should get out of deciding what to build and make it legal to build so that people build more housing, of any type, period. "Just buy a house outside of an urban core" is only possible if such housing exists.
There are reasons to have some kind of building rules. Noice, smell and shade are valid reasons to limit certain types of buildings (or activities within those buildings).
No, I'm saying that the assumption shouldn't be that everyone wants to live in an urban core, that everyone should live in one, or that it is righteous to advocate for everyone to do so.
Specifically, most government planners seem to assume increased density is a universal good, which is not the case in reality, so I'm saying that those planners should not compel everyone to live in a dense urban core.
Has anyone ever assumed that all people want to live in urban cores? However, current planning in the US seems to assume that most people want to live in car dependent suburbs.
> Most people don't want to live in dense urban cores, so #5 and #6 can easily backfire and stunt progress on #1.
80% of the US population would disagree. It really seems like you’re applying what you like to the entire population and then assuming that anything else is rubbish.
Having grown up in a rural community, and small towns, I never really want to go back. Dense urban areas are wonderful, I find huge amounts of joy in multiculturalism. The plethora of ideas, language, food, and art is inspiring. I will never get that anywhere except dense urban areas.
Demand vs supply is the crux of the affordability crisis, and the points outlined in the post you’re replying to are all valid and great ways to help increase supply.
And FWIW—- you’re absolutely welcome to enjoy and appreciate sparsely populated areas, but I really think you need to understand the vast majority of people disagree with you. Not because they’re “stuck” in some dense urban area but because they want to be there.
I don't know where you're coming up with that 80% number because the actual percentage of people living in dense urban cores is much lower. Many people live in neighborhoods that the Census classifies as "urban" but that includes a lot of neighborhoods that most regular people would classify as suburban. It turns out that given a choice, most people prefer to have some space and privacy rather that being squeezed together in high-rise apartments.
> 80% of the US population would disagree. It really seems like you’re applying what you like to the entire population and then assuming that anything else is rubbish.
I live by choice in what would be considered an urban area by the US Census, but is far from a dense urban core (by the character of the neighborhood, it's only a few miles away by distance). Either you don't understand what the Census data is saying or you're misrepresenting what myself and others are saying here.
> Having grown up in a rural community, and small towns, I never really want to go back. Dense urban areas are wonderful, I find huge amounts of joy in multiculturalism. The plethora of ideas, language, food, and art is inspiring. I will never get that anywhere except dense urban areas.
Good for you. My point, which seems to be lost on most urbanists, is that not everyone feels that way, or wants to live in that environment (consider me part of the second group, as I enjoy having access to quality food, art, entertainment, etc. but also enjoy having a yard for my kids to play in and enough distance between myself and my neighbors to have privacy and peace at home).
If someone has no interest in being inspired by multicultural food and would rather eat at a familiar restaurant in a small town, I feel no need to compel them to experience it.
> Demand vs supply is the crux of the affordability crisis, and the points outlined in the post you’re replying to are all valid and great ways to help increase supply.
Some are more valid than others. Building is good, compelling communities to increase density against their will is not.
> And FWIW—- you’re absolutely welcome to enjoy and appreciate sparsely populated areas, but I really think you need to understand the vast majority of people disagree with you. Not because they’re “stuck” in some dense urban area but because they want to be there.
There's a large gulf of housing stock and communities between "sparsely populated areas" and "dense urban areas" commonly called "the suburbs", where most people in the US live.
And I don't think the people who live in dense urban areas are stuck there. I just don't think the echo chamber of city planners, YIMBY advocates, and leftist politicians, all of whom believe that more density across every metropolitan area is the "correct" path forward, should have the final say on what communities are allowed to build or not build.
places where there is remaining land to build more single family homes don't actually have zoning regulations requiring developers to build high-density units. there is nothing stopping anyone from buying land and building there, except a lack of demand.
the place where there is leverage is in taking high-demand areas historically zoned for single-unit and opening them up to the market to build higher density housing.
> the place where there is leverage is in taking high-demand areas historically zoned for single-unit and opening them up to the market to build higher density housing.
And if the current residents don't want to open up, then what?
And they are not the only opportunity to increase density or satisfy demand, just the most politically convenient one for the party in power in almost every case.
what's your alternative? (a) leave things they are and if people near cities get desperate enough they can move to the sticks even though they don't have jobs there (b) ?
My alternative to higher levels of government deciding to overrule local preferences is that people move to "the sticks", get roommates, or compensate current residents for the decrease in their quality of living that comes with increased density.
China built a lot of housing and it didn't do anything until the ponzi scheme started unraveling.
Asymptotically what you said might be true, but before it gets there years might pass as they did in China. It's not clear how long this madness would last if not for COVID.
Outside of the major city cores, much of what China built wasn't "housing" in the sense that most Westerners think of housing. The buildings often looked superficially like housing but were never really usable for that purpose. They were more like physical "tokens" used as speculative trading vehicles. Now some of those are being demolished, either due to lack of consumer demand or because the "tofu dreg" construction quality was so bad that they aren't safe to occupy.
Housing prices cratered in China, because, yes, eventually supply catches up and then the ponzi schema has nowhere to go but down. Lots of people hold real estate thinking it's an investment just by itself, so it's been a vicious cycle of prices going up. But if you build enough supply, the market stops treating property that way.
I don't think the Chinese real estate market will ever truly "recover" to the Tulip Mania levels it hit before. Especially with a declining population.
Currently the housing price index in China is at 115/100 points in reference to 2010 - down from a peak of 145 in 2021.
That is what, 15 years and counting of waiting for the market to return to affordability despite using more concrete every 2-3 years throughout this time than the US did in the entire 20th century?
To quote Kimberly Wilkins: ain't nobody got time for that
Now, inevitably, the pendulum went the other direction - people lost money and companies went bankrupt.
You can't play fast and loose like that with such a basic need as housing.
Considering the absolute number houses in China were not affordable at any point in recent history.
2010 is often cited as a reference point, most likely because it's when the Chinese stock market started experiencing a slump despite the initial post-2008 recovery, so investments shifted into real estate:
Unless this is a very generous approximation, 2.0 is less than 2.1-2.4.
Even setting that aside, homes per capita is not indicative of supply and demand - if everyone in SF wants to live in a house alone, it really won't matter that SF has slightly more homes per capita.
I thought it was development companies that build houses? And why would development companies build so much housing that the value started to drop? Are you saying that "leftists" put up barriers to new housing such as regulation that helps drive up the overall cost of building and hence the price of housing? I would agree with you there. Are you sure "housing has been built in droves" is what brought the price of rent down?
House prices went sky high because of investors/speculators increasing demand (and massive immigration). Maybe if the government regulated more who buys housing (home dwellers not investors) rather than regulating what gets built. Also, have more sensible immigration levels.
Since developers will be less likely to build with falling prices perhaps the govt can build rent to own housing for lower income earners. Or incentivize private developers to build affordable housing.
High prices doesn't necessarily mean its purely a supply problem. If profit is high with low supply for developers what incentive would they have to increase supply?
I'm not going to downvote you, but all of your preferred solutions are exactly the problem. Everyone who thinks more oversight and "support" will fix the problem has their own specific bogeyman responsible for higher housing prices, "bans" it, fails to actually ban it, and then all they have accomplished is that it's now at least slightly more difficult to build housing, and therefore at least slightly more expensive.
> And why would development companies build so much housing that the value started to drop?
Because they have very healthy margins currently, and would probably continue to build if their margins drop from around 20% to around 15%. At some point it would become an issue, but we haven't seen that in the areas where building is keeping up with demand or even exceeding it slightly.
> Are you sure "housing has been built in droves" is what brought the price of rent down?
Yes. What else could it possibly be?
> House prices went sky high because of investors/speculators increasing demand (and massive immigration). Maybe if the government regulated more who buys housing (home dwellers not investors) rather than regulating what gets built. Also, have more sensible immigration levels.
That, plus the many, many artificial restrictions on increasing supply, which actually are the issue. Hint: "speculators" are a tiny portion of the market and aren't leaving homes unoccupied for extended periods of time, and "massive" immigration is also a very small portion of the increased demand for housing. Also, if you want to understand the alternative to population growth, see the Rust Belt in the 1980s.
> Since developers will be less likely to build with falling prices perhaps the govt can build rent to own housing for lower income earners. Or incentivize private developers to build affordable housing.
This already happens. It's ineffective.
> High prices doesn't necessarily mean its purely a supply problem. If profit is high with low supply for developers what incentive would they have to increase supply?
Because its literally how they make money, and new participants in the market are not barred from entry?
The urban orthodoxy is around demand rationing. Supply-side arguments are incredibly new. The evidence cuts in one direction. (Unless we want a hukou system.)
Largely a left-wing echo chamber here (and also seems to be much more European here than the average forum), so everyone here all thinks Musk is doing something illegal just because he's right-wing.
Not sure if you're a .NET/C# person, but PDBs are a bit different tho in that they contain full debug information and you can absolutely decompile a .DLL + .PDB combo. Very successfully even in the case of obfuscation.
Fight against obfuscation is different from fighting for readability
I've tried Ghidra, IDA and BinaryNinja, and all of them display code on the level of "C with classes" from early 00s (and declaration of variables at the beginning of function in style of structured programming of the 90s)
I'd be perfectly fine with that output, had there been good way to interactively fix it (refactor without changing behaviour)
Yep, and nobody ever goes on these types of threads and says the EU is collapsing, even though there's demonstrable evidence that things are not going great for the EU (the UK left, there is virtually zero economic dynamism or tech investment, Russia has seized 1/3 of Ukraine who was trying to join the EU, and the continent has no money, no navies and terrible demographics to compete globally in the next century). People gloss over issues about the EU because it aligns more closely with their political beliefs.
Hope and wishing aside, if you think anything Trump is doing is gonna benefit the economy, you really show your ideological side.
For example, businesses are hesitant to invest in domestic manufacture because the tarrifs can be undone by next president. But the reputation that US is building right now cant be undone. Investment in manufacturing takes years, not to mention that its not like America has lots of people wanting to go work in mines and factories. Meawhile as countries with sane leaders adjust, US is gonna be less and less relevant.
So in 5 or so years when your house value and investments are way down and there is a Dem president and you think about complaining about economy is bad under liberals, remeber who cause it all. Most of the current economic problems that existed in late 2020s have origins with Reagan era economics.
Or a wicked disease state like Huntington's that causes your DNA to slip.
Simple failures with catostrophic outcomes are much more likely than rewiring and restarting all of the developmental program across huge cell and tissue populations.
It would be more likely to grow transplant tissue exogenously. It's far safer than using the body as a test tube.
These gene editing techniques are used to fix simple (typically one cause) genetic diseases. Not reengineer live organisms "in flight".
Rent is falling all over the Southeast where housing has been built in droves, and actually in greater quantities than new demand. The only solution is just flooding the market with housing.
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