6 ms·

There's all kinds of research showing that supply and demand are very real for housing and that adding supply helps contain prices: * https://cayimby.org/its-o

• whitemary 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • davidw 4y ago
    Trickle down is a completely different thing: the idea was to give wealthy people extra cash and hope some of it came to the rest of us. Supply and demand is pretty basic, apolitical economics, but it is true that if there's a shortage, it's going to hit hardest those with less money. Which means we should aim for an abundance of necessary goods like housing and food. We should do that by building both more market rate and subsidized housing in the places people want to live.
    • whitemary 4y ago
      > give wealthy people extra cash and hope some of it came to the rest of us Is letting them run hog wild through our cities replacing neighborhoods with luxury high rises for foreign investors any different? Obviously we could always use more updated housing in urban areas, but you are either stupid or acting like it when you pretend the argument is not about who should be building that housing and whether anyone should profit from owning it.
      • hackerlight 4y ago
        Everyone, notice the rhetorical sleight of hand operating here. An apartment, perhaps with 2 bedrooms, that costs significantly less than a "modest" or "quaint" single detached house in the same locale is labelled "luxury". That labelling scheme is chosen in order to persuade by way of demonization. But such labelling never gets applied to houses. Three bedroom houses that cost more than 99.9% of all apartments in existence, including the majority of apartments that are labelled as "luxury", never themselves carry the label "luxury". Instead they get endearing labels like "family home". These are the rhetorical tricks that NIMBYs use to push their political agenda to weaponize government in order to ban poor people and keep the price of their house high.
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
          The luxury label is used by the developers themselves to market their product, whether it be newly built apartments or houses. How can that be a trick by NIMBYs? Everyone knows that luxury means “new”, or at best, “shiny stainless steel appliances and quartz countertops”. The fact that it is new, and so has to comply with the most updated standards, is probably the most luxury aspect of all since materials and connections and whatnot have improved. This designation of new and old is more important in the apartment market than house markets because apartments tend to get neglected by landlords, whereas houses either get updated or can be updated by the owner. Also, in the case of houses, where a lot more money and due diligence is required, simply using luxury to describe them is insufficient, and not very useful to sell new housing developments.
          • hackerlight 4y ago
            > How can that be a trick by NIMBYs? It's a rhetorical device that carries no substance, whether it happens to be NIMBYs using it as a political weapon to demonize, or developers using it to sell a product. However, I am going to focus criticism on NIMBYs when they are doing it, since they are the ones being dishonest and hypocritical when they only apply such labels to apartments. At least if a developer/agent was to try to sell a house, they'd try to find similar flowery language in order to market it, instead of only singling out apartments for that treatment in order to push their damaging political agenda.
    • opo 4y ago
      >Trickle down is a completely different thing: the idea was to give wealthy people extra cash and hope some of it came to the rest of us. Trickle down is a political label used by people to attack policies they don't like by claiming a policy helps wealthier people at the expense of less wealthy people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
      • whitemary 4y ago
        Then what is communism?
      • throwaway173738 4y ago
        See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
      • freshpots 4y ago
        Saying it's simply a label for attack ignores the real issues surrounding the economic philosophy underpinning it which has resulted in massive increases in wealth for the top, especially the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 80+%. Society has suffered and watched their incomes and life decline since the implementation of "Reaganomics" or "Trickle-down economics". Communities have declined, due to tax changes which overwhelmingly benefit the super rich, while wages, job security, housing, virtually everything of the average person has been degraded.
        • opo 4y ago
          >Saying it's simply a label for attack ignores the real issues... As the wikipedia article says, "trickle down" is a political term. Any proposed tax policy deserves real debate on the pros and cons - using political terms like "trickle down" (or for that matter terms like "tax and spend", "bleeding heart" etc.) are not done to help advance the debate. They aren't trying to advance an argument - they are trying to shut down debate. People who use political terms like that are usually trying to either poison the well or are creating a straw man.
        • 4y ago
• nerdchum 4y ago
  isn't it a slippery slope though?? You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally. So if you add a ton of houses you have the same problem just many years later but now everyone is living in a massive overcrowded area. Adding supply seems to just be postponing the problem. The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work. There's tons of gorgeous places between the coasts that wonderful to live but there's no jobs.
  • outime 4y ago
    >The real solution imo is to spread out the jobs to other areas so that these major urban areas aren't the only places people have to move to find work. While that definitely works whenever doable, I'd say investing in much better infrastructure to reduce commuting time and complexity is the other big factor. Living far away from the workplace isn't a biggie if I can take for example a train and be there in a reasonable amount of time. For sure an expensive solution but a solution that will pay off nevertheless.
    • nerdchum 4y ago
      Completely agree. But you still hit a limit at some point, even with commuter trains and mass transit. I mean does anyone want to take a train 2 hours both ways to get to work? We just need good jobs/offices available in other regions.
      • throwaway173738 4y ago
        We need all of the above. More density, replacing more roads with mass transit, good jobs outside coastal cities, and more ways to work from home. None of these things are mutually exclusive.
  • Kalium 4y ago
    > Isn't it a slippery slope though?? You have to just keep adding supply but unfortunately the amount of living space that can be built in an urban area is constrained at some point both vertically and horizontally. You're absolutely right. There's definitely real limits, vertically and horizontally, to how much density is physically possible. As an upper limit, we have good historical examples density of around 1.2 million people per square kilometer being workable. I don't think any part of the US today comes close to that - what data I can find says that the most densely populated part of the US is at 66,000 people per square km. That's multiple orders of magnitude different. With that in mind, I think it's possible that we haven't yet hit any real physical or space-based limits in American cities. Only political ones.