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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 aff

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. You have developers building units for the homeless at 600k each. https://abc7news.com/post/new-high-rise-building-house-skid-row-homeless/14976180/ 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 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.

imgabe 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    These people were only ever given credence as a pretext for whatever the entrenched interests wanted to do in the first place.
- nikanj 1y ago
  Every avenue of life has it’s weirdoes, but why have we as a society decided a single weirdo can stop a hundred homes from being built?
  - theptip 1y ago
    I don’t think a decision was made, we just fell down the slippery slope to Vetocracy. It requires active energy to keep a thing alive and we haven’t been fighting hard for building things.
TFYS 1y ago
> Here's how a rational market works. Might regulations be the result of these "rational markets"? After all, if I invest a lot of money to build apartments, I might want to protect that investment by lobbying for regulations to make it harder for competitors, increasing the value of my investment. Or if I buy an apartment, I might want to prevent others from ruining my view, prevent noise, etc. All completely rational.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- niam 1y ago
  Whether it is or isn't seems immaterial if you're of the opinion that government should step in to solve issues where the market has proved ineffective. If it's the case that market participants have an imperative to convince the government to screw everyone else over: a solution preventing the government from being convinced by small petty nonsense seems remarkably simple, relative to the other kinds of policy challenges that exist.
- derbOac 1y ago
  I think this is the thing these types of arguments miss. Regulations are the result of another type of market, the vote market. That's the whole point, to counteract hidden failures of the market with another feedback mechanism. For what it's worth, imho Thompson presents a strawman argument about oligopolies to avoid the real critiques. He even kinda contradicts himself at the end because it's convenient for his argument. It's never really about oligopolies writ large, it's about the players in the local decision in the moment (which is all that matters) and who profits at whose expense with what consequences.
  - lovich 1y ago
    What is the strawman > It's never really about oligopolies writ large… Then why is the anti abundance crowd crowing about how it’s about oligopolies and monopolies?
podgorniy 1y ago
> Excessive regulation is 90% of it. Housing crisis is observed in almost all what is called "first world" (europe, japan, usa). I believe that 90% of the issue is more global than a regulation.
- ghiculescu 1y ago
  Is there a housing specific crisis? Or is inflation impacting housing like it impacts everything?
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    Housing prices have skyrocketed in the developed world since the 90s, and it has nothing to do with inflation (as the inflation in the 90s — early 2000s was very limited).
    - munksbeer 1y ago
      > Housing prices have skyrocketed in the developed world since the 90s And in many parts of what we might label as third world.
- 0xB31B1B 1y ago
  where is the housing crises in japan?
- bluecalm 1y ago
  And excessive regulation is the norm in all of those (at least US and EU, no idea about Japan).
- ramchip 1y ago
  Japan doesn't have a housing crisis. I'm in a great location in Tokyo, the rent is under $750/month, and it's been the same for the decade+ I've been in this specific place. If there's a problem, it's too many empty homes in aging rural areas. Cities are doing just fine, even with a growing population in Tokyo.
littlestymaar 1y ago
> Excessive regulation is 90% of it. If it was, then the housing price would be correlated with the level of regulation, but it's not (housing less dense places is always cheaper than housing in big cities, even if you compare the most heavily regulated place on earth with the least regulated big city in the world. > Here's how a rational market works. A rational market made from human is as realistic as “dry water”. The key issue is that housing is treated as an asset, and the policies made to boost housing construction are designed around building a market in a way that gives housing the same kind of financial yields as stocks. But while stock prices can grow because productivity increase, housing value can only increase if housing becomes more expensive.
- lll-o-lll 1y ago
  No. The key issue is just the rise and rise of inequality. As more money funnels to the top (thanks covid) the top buy more of the available assets leading to asset inflation. Nothing will reverse this other than a tax on wealth. Tax wealth, not income.
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    This is way too narrow of an explanation. Yes rising inequalities are a problem, but the housing price being absurdly high is a much broader problem: when a middle class family spends $500k+ for a house, they are part of the systemic problem. Same when the same family expects such a sum when selling the old house they inherited from their boomer parents.
- mft_ 1y ago
  > The key issue is that housing is treated as an asset, and the policies made to boost housing construction are designed around building a market in a way that gives housing the same kind of financial yields as stocks. But while stock prices can grow because productivity increase, housing value can only increase if housing becomes more expensive. I like your thesis, but can you give more information on the nature of the policies that drive the housing market in the manner you describe, but which aren't just "regulation" that makes it directly harder (e.g. you can't build housing in this zone) or more expensive (e.g. minimum plot sizes, parking requirements, building codes)?
siwatanejo 1y ago
> you can literally just claim a new highrise > will block your sunlight and make you sad If a high-rise blocks a single electron of my apartment's normal sunlight, it would definitely make me sad.
- ndileas 1y ago
  Good news! You can't perceive the electrons in sunlight, only the photons.
  - siwatanejo 1y ago
    did you just well-actually'ed me?
Sloowms 1y ago
Throw out a made up percentage and proceed to start talking about rational markets as if they exist in the real world. I immediately know this analysis is going to be great. Older houses are obviously cheaper for some reason even though housing prices in city centers keep increasing. Poor people are the real problem for needing a place to live. With the conclusion that there is nothing that can be done and people just have to take it. That's abundance (jazz hands)
- 999900000999 1y ago
  >With the conclusion that there is nothing that can be done and people just have to take it. That's abundance (jazz hands) The conclusion is you should go to where affordable housing exist. The other option is to get on that 11 year waiting list.
MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago
> If you stay in an unaffordable city you can't wait around waiting for politicians to fix it. Sadly this is the best advice for personal well-being. 'Sadly' because it disrupts families.
derbOac 1y ago
> 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 So what's the problem? Land use should be regulated imho, just like air pollution and other commons phenomena. I don't care what kind of towel you buy to dry yourself off with, but I do care if a developer affects the environment and housing around it.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >So what's the problem? That is not a sufficient justification to infringe upon property rights. While I'm sympathetic to the whining about "well they're a big business interest they oughta be able to work around the constraints" we are at least nominally all equal under the law where those things trickle down and at the end of the day that type of garbage winds up most applying to the little guy who can't afford lawyers and convolution
  - jajko 1y ago
    But you are infringing on others property rights just because you consider your rights higher and better than others and your cause holier than theirs. May be true or not, not something I nor you can judge objectively. Your rights end where others' begin and so on. If by property rights you mean your right to have house/apartment where you like it, otherwise no idea what you mean.
- lovich 1y ago
  I don’t care what kind of towel you buy to dry yourself off with, I do care that you inherited a house from your ancestors who moved into the area 200 years ago and now a major metro area can’t build enough housing because you like the view.

imgabe 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  These people were only ever given credence as a pretext for whatever the entrenched interests wanted to do in the first place.
nikanj 1y ago
Every avenue of life has it’s weirdoes, but why have we as a society decided a single weirdo can stop a hundred homes from being built?
- theptip 1y ago
  I don’t think a decision was made, we just fell down the slippery slope to Vetocracy. It requires active energy to keep a thing alive and we haven’t been fighting hard for building things.

TFYS 1y ago

> Here's how a rational market works. Might regulations be the result of these "rational markets"? After all, if I invest a lot of money to build apartments, I might want to protect that investment by lobbying for regulations to make it harder for competitors, increasing the value of my investment. Or if I buy an apartment, I might want to prevent others from ruining my view, prevent noise, etc. All completely rational.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
niam 1y ago
Whether it is or isn't seems immaterial if you're of the opinion that government should step in to solve issues where the market has proved ineffective. If it's the case that market participants have an imperative to convince the government to screw everyone else over: a solution preventing the government from being convinced by small petty nonsense seems remarkably simple, relative to the other kinds of policy challenges that exist.
derbOac 1y ago
I think this is the thing these types of arguments miss. Regulations are the result of another type of market, the vote market. That's the whole point, to counteract hidden failures of the market with another feedback mechanism. For what it's worth, imho Thompson presents a strawman argument about oligopolies to avoid the real critiques. He even kinda contradicts himself at the end because it's convenient for his argument. It's never really about oligopolies writ large, it's about the players in the local decision in the moment (which is all that matters) and who profits at whose expense with what consequences.
- lovich 1y ago
  What is the strawman > It's never really about oligopolies writ large… Then why is the anti abundance crowd crowing about how it’s about oligopolies and monopolies?

podgorniy 1y ago

> Excessive regulation is 90% of it. Housing crisis is observed in almost all what is called "first world" (europe, japan, usa). I believe that 90% of the issue is more global than a regulation.

ghiculescu 1y ago
Is there a housing specific crisis? Or is inflation impacting housing like it impacts everything?
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  Housing prices have skyrocketed in the developed world since the 90s, and it has nothing to do with inflation (as the inflation in the 90s — early 2000s was very limited).
  - munksbeer 1y ago
    > Housing prices have skyrocketed in the developed world since the 90s And in many parts of what we might label as third world.
0xB31B1B 1y ago
where is the housing crises in japan?
bluecalm 1y ago
And excessive regulation is the norm in all of those (at least US and EU, no idea about Japan).
ramchip 1y ago
Japan doesn't have a housing crisis. I'm in a great location in Tokyo, the rent is under $750/month, and it's been the same for the decade+ I've been in this specific place. If there's a problem, it's too many empty homes in aging rural areas. Cities are doing just fine, even with a growing population in Tokyo.

littlestymaar 1y ago

> Excessive regulation is 90% of it. If it was, then the housing price would be correlated with the level of regulation, but it's not (housing less dense places is always cheaper than housing in big cities, even if you compare the most heavily regulated place on earth with the least regulated big city in the world. > Here's how a rational market works. A rational market made from human is as realistic as “dry water”. The key issue is that housing is treated as an asset, and the policies made to boost housing construction are designed around building a market in a way that gives housing the same kind of financial yields as stocks. But while stock prices can grow because productivity increase, housing value can only increase if housing becomes more expensive.

lll-o-lll 1y ago
No. The key issue is just the rise and rise of inequality. As more money funnels to the top (thanks covid) the top buy more of the available assets leading to asset inflation. Nothing will reverse this other than a tax on wealth. Tax wealth, not income.
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  This is way too narrow of an explanation. Yes rising inequalities are a problem, but the housing price being absurdly high is a much broader problem: when a middle class family spends $500k+ for a house, they are part of the systemic problem. Same when the same family expects such a sum when selling the old house they inherited from their boomer parents.
mft_ 1y ago
> The key issue is that housing is treated as an asset, and the policies made to boost housing construction are designed around building a market in a way that gives housing the same kind of financial yields as stocks. But while stock prices can grow because productivity increase, housing value can only increase if housing becomes more expensive. I like your thesis, but can you give more information on the nature of the policies that drive the housing market in the manner you describe, but which aren't just "regulation" that makes it directly harder (e.g. you can't build housing in this zone) or more expensive (e.g. minimum plot sizes, parking requirements, building codes)?

siwatanejo 1y ago

> you can literally just claim a new highrise > will block your sunlight and make you sad If a high-rise blocks a single electron of my apartment's normal sunlight, it would definitely make me sad.

ndileas 1y ago
Good news! You can't perceive the electrons in sunlight, only the photons.
- siwatanejo 1y ago
  did you just well-actually'ed me?

Sloowms 1y ago

Throw out a made up percentage and proceed to start talking about rational markets as if they exist in the real world. I immediately know this analysis is going to be great. Older houses are obviously cheaper for some reason even though housing prices in city centers keep increasing. Poor people are the real problem for needing a place to live. With the conclusion that there is nothing that can be done and people just have to take it. That's abundance (jazz hands)

999900000999 1y ago
>With the conclusion that there is nothing that can be done and people just have to take it. That's abundance (jazz hands) The conclusion is you should go to where affordable housing exist. The other option is to get on that 11 year waiting list.

MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago

> If you stay in an unaffordable city you can't wait around waiting for politicians to fix it. Sadly this is the best advice for personal well-being. 'Sadly' because it disrupts families.

derbOac 1y ago

> 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 So what's the problem? Land use should be regulated imho, just like air pollution and other commons phenomena. I don't care what kind of towel you buy to dry yourself off with, but I do care if a developer affects the environment and housing around it.

potato3732842 1y ago
>So what's the problem? That is not a sufficient justification to infringe upon property rights. While I'm sympathetic to the whining about "well they're a big business interest they oughta be able to work around the constraints" we are at least nominally all equal under the law where those things trickle down and at the end of the day that type of garbage winds up most applying to the little guy who can't afford lawyers and convolution
- jajko 1y ago
  But you are infringing on others property rights just because you consider your rights higher and better than others and your cause holier than theirs. May be true or not, not something I nor you can judge objectively. Your rights end where others' begin and so on. If by property rights you mean your right to have house/apartment where you like it, otherwise no idea what you mean.
lovich 1y ago
I don’t care what kind of towel you buy to dry yourself off with, I do care that you inherited a house from your ancestors who moved into the area 200 years ago and now a major metro area can’t build enough housing because you like the view.