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Right. Also it’s a manufactured scarcity. The too brass of this capitalist system we working class suffer under could clearly fix house scarcity.

gcau 3y ago
How? By hugely cutting down immigration?
BenFranklin100 3y ago
House scarcity is caused by restrictive zoning laws that limit or even outright ban the construction of new homes in high demand areas. It has little if anything to do with capitalism. The main supporters of restrictive zoning are homeowners who oppose new homes in their neighborhoods. See Katherine Einstein, “Neighborhood Defenders’. http://tinyurl.com/mr394vbe http://tinyurl.com/mr394vbe House scarcity is a result of too little capitalism, not too much.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  NIMBYs are incentivized to restrict zoning to preserve the value of their capital.
  - BenFranklin100 3y ago
    You’re equivocating on the terms ‘capital’ — the monetary assets required for a business to provide goods and services— and a ‘capitalist system’ — an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned. Neither of these terms have much to do with restrictive zoning. A more precise statement is that NIMBYs support public municipal regulations that preserve and/or increase the value of their private assets, i.e. homes.
- adrianN 3y ago
  I don't think zoning is the problem in Nigeria, but I know little about Nigerian politics.
  - BenFranklin100 3y ago
    Nor I. I interpreted the OP’s comment to be a general statement not limited to Nigeria. In the Western world at least, zoning is the problem.
    - pkfmi8 3y ago
      Zoning implemented by top of the capitalist food pyramid. Zoning is not divine mandate. It comes from people. We can’t fix zoning without going through capitalists at the top who work tongue their way into owning all that they do. They’ll fight it as a violation of their right to turn us all into serfs I tire of the technical euphemism. It’s like Soylent Green; just people hallucinating BS about themselves all the way down
      - ben_w 3y ago
        As someone who wants a lot more to be built in a lot more places, not so. The UK doesn't use zoning, and still has expensive (and small) housing. When I lived there, there were a lot of relatively ordinary people going door-to-door collecting signatures petitioning against "affordable housing" because it will attract "the wrong kind of people to our neighbourhood". Now I'm in Berlin, completely different system to the UK, lots of rentals and it has rent controls to keep the costs down… and yet homes are still expensive.
        int_19h 3y ago
        The real reason, quite bluntly, is overpopulation. Our natural population density is what the land can support from hunting and gathering; even in places that are particularly good for that, like temperate rainforests (Salish PNW, Jomon-period Japan) this only scales up to the level of large villages. Coincidentally, this is why intertribal warfare at this level is so constant and so brutal - the resource everybody wants is the land and its riches, and every extra mouth is "stealing" from that, so extreme xenophobia and genocide is par for the course. Then we started doing agriculture, and population densities started coming up. And because agriculture produces a surplus of food wrt the number of people involved, it's a positive feedback loop: more food surplus -> more people who can spend their time on something other than growing food, like say trading or inventing things -> higher productivity -> more food surplus -> ..., with higher and higher population densities on each iteration. The end result is the anthill cities that we consider the norm today. Our monkey brain is still not adapted to such an environment, though, and wants to reduce the density to what it expects; hence NIMBYism, anti-immigration, zoning, race covenants etc - which all boil down to the same basic idea that if we drive out "them", then "us" will have all the (obviously abundant) resources of this land for ourselves. Of course, that's not how our modern economy actually works, but the monkey brain does not operate on a rational level.
- flandish 3y ago
  No, it’s caused by capitalism’s “profit over people” design. The problem is capitalism and greed. Entirely.
ben_w 3y ago
> Right. Also it’s a manufactured scarcity. The too brass of this capitalist system we working class suffer under could clearly fix house scarcity. No. While capitalism does create incentives for manufactured scarcity, houses aren't that. The only things the "top brass" can do would be reducing the standards in building codes so that anyone can build anywhere, but that would lead to shanty towns[0] without good connections or services, which isn't likely to attract the job opportunities that make cities desirable and expensive in turn. If you want to make houses cheap, figure out how to make infrastructure cheap: the roads, the sewage system, the power lines… all the boring stuff. [0] they might be nice looking, for example this holiday home which is large enough to live in, whose material cost is just 5% of the cost of a "proper" house sale price (the latter includes land, but still): https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/ https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/ but that doesn't solve the actual issues, and it's still saving money on the list price only to raise long-term costs on heating and fire safety.
- grugagag 3y ago
  There are perfectly good towns that don’t attract job opportunities because all jobs concentrate in a few areas, for no good reason. See RTO for example…

gcau 3y ago

How? By hugely cutting down immigration?

BenFranklin100 3y ago

House scarcity is caused by restrictive zoning laws that limit or even outright ban the construction of new homes in high demand areas. It has little if anything to do with capitalism. The main supporters of restrictive zoning are homeowners who oppose new homes in their neighborhoods. See Katherine Einstein, “Neighborhood Defenders’. http://tinyurl.com/mr394vbe http://tinyurl.com/mr394vbe House scarcity is a result of too little capitalism, not too much.

idle_zealot 3y ago
NIMBYs are incentivized to restrict zoning to preserve the value of their capital.
- BenFranklin100 3y ago
  You’re equivocating on the terms ‘capital’ — the monetary assets required for a business to provide goods and services— and a ‘capitalist system’ — an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned. Neither of these terms have much to do with restrictive zoning. A more precise statement is that NIMBYs support public municipal regulations that preserve and/or increase the value of their private assets, i.e. homes.
adrianN 3y ago
I don't think zoning is the problem in Nigeria, but I know little about Nigerian politics.
- BenFranklin100 3y ago
  Nor I. I interpreted the OP’s comment to be a general statement not limited to Nigeria. In the Western world at least, zoning is the problem.
  - pkfmi8 3y ago
    Zoning implemented by top of the capitalist food pyramid. Zoning is not divine mandate. It comes from people. We can’t fix zoning without going through capitalists at the top who work tongue their way into owning all that they do. They’ll fight it as a violation of their right to turn us all into serfs I tire of the technical euphemism. It’s like Soylent Green; just people hallucinating BS about themselves all the way down
    - ben_w 3y ago
      As someone who wants a lot more to be built in a lot more places, not so. The UK doesn't use zoning, and still has expensive (and small) housing. When I lived there, there were a lot of relatively ordinary people going door-to-door collecting signatures petitioning against "affordable housing" because it will attract "the wrong kind of people to our neighbourhood". Now I'm in Berlin, completely different system to the UK, lots of rentals and it has rent controls to keep the costs down… and yet homes are still expensive.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        The real reason, quite bluntly, is overpopulation. Our natural population density is what the land can support from hunting and gathering; even in places that are particularly good for that, like temperate rainforests (Salish PNW, Jomon-period Japan) this only scales up to the level of large villages. Coincidentally, this is why intertribal warfare at this level is so constant and so brutal - the resource everybody wants is the land and its riches, and every extra mouth is "stealing" from that, so extreme xenophobia and genocide is par for the course. Then we started doing agriculture, and population densities started coming up. And because agriculture produces a surplus of food wrt the number of people involved, it's a positive feedback loop: more food surplus -> more people who can spend their time on something other than growing food, like say trading or inventing things -> higher productivity -> more food surplus -> ..., with higher and higher population densities on each iteration. The end result is the anthill cities that we consider the norm today. Our monkey brain is still not adapted to such an environment, though, and wants to reduce the density to what it expects; hence NIMBYism, anti-immigration, zoning, race covenants etc - which all boil down to the same basic idea that if we drive out "them", then "us" will have all the (obviously abundant) resources of this land for ourselves. Of course, that's not how our modern economy actually works, but the monkey brain does not operate on a rational level.
flandish 3y ago
No, it’s caused by capitalism’s “profit over people” design. The problem is capitalism and greed. Entirely.

ben_w 3y ago

> Right. Also it’s a manufactured scarcity. The too brass of this capitalist system we working class suffer under could clearly fix house scarcity. No. While capitalism does create incentives for manufactured scarcity, houses aren't that. The only things the "top brass" can do would be reducing the standards in building codes so that anyone can build anywhere, but that would lead to shanty towns[0] without good connections or services, which isn't likely to attract the job opportunities that make cities desirable and expensive in turn. If you want to make houses cheap, figure out how to make infrastructure cheap: the roads, the sewage system, the power lines… all the boring stuff. [0] they might be nice looking, for example this holiday home which is large enough to live in, whose material cost is just 5% of the cost of a "proper" house sale price (the latter includes land, but still): https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/ https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/ but that doesn't solve the actual issues, and it's still saving money on the list price only to raise long-term costs on heating and fire safety.

grugagag 3y ago
There are perfectly good towns that don’t attract job opportunities because all jobs concentrate in a few areas, for no good reason. See RTO for example…