3 ms·

Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is wor

Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.

bluGill 3mo ago
I do not disagree.
cogman10 3mo ago
I disagree. I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates. It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.
inigyou 3mo ago
Everyone who owns a home is incentivized to keep the property value up, but not all of them actually feel and respond to that incentive. In the same way that a pig farm owner is incentivised to keep the beautiful clean nature, but makes more money farming smelly pigs instead.
- bluGill 3mo ago
  People regularly have conflicting incentives.
- hakfoo 3mo ago
  Isn't the solution just to take the market out of real estate? At the individual-homeowner level, a lot of NIMBYism, HOA activity, and other toxic activity is grounded in "I have $400k of equity sunk into this square of land and it's the only meaningful asset I have for my increasingly oncoming retirement." There are probably plenty of people who are subconsciously self-sabotaging due to that-- they may personally prefer a denser neighbourhood or more mixed-use facilities, but that Zillow number is blinking in their mind at the same time. If the real estate were nationalized and people were leasing it from a state-owned trust, at basically its cost of operation (maintenance and amortized construction costs), it would free up a lot of resident income for other use or investment opportunities, and make a lot of changes less threatening to residents. (ISTR claims that rents in the USSR were on the order of 5% of income, and this when 30% or less was still a feasible story in the US)
  - cousin_it 3mo ago
    If people can move freely, and there's no price mechanism to allocate housing and construction, there will be problems. So "taking the market out of real estate" is a very big ask. In the USSR you couldn't freely move to another city, you needed to get government approval on the basis of a job change. People complained about this registration system all the time.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      There's still a cost. Cost of living in the most popular places is that they're slums, because everyone is building everything. The slum factor will cancel out whatever was making them popular.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Yes it is, but history has proven the state can't be trusted to do better either.

bluGill 3mo ago

I do not disagree.

cogman10 3mo ago

I disagree. I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates. It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.

inigyou 3mo ago

Everyone who owns a home is incentivized to keep the property value up, but not all of them actually feel and respond to that incentive. In the same way that a pig farm owner is incentivised to keep the beautiful clean nature, but makes more money farming smelly pigs instead.

bluGill 3mo ago
People regularly have conflicting incentives.
hakfoo 3mo ago
Isn't the solution just to take the market out of real estate? At the individual-homeowner level, a lot of NIMBYism, HOA activity, and other toxic activity is grounded in "I have $400k of equity sunk into this square of land and it's the only meaningful asset I have for my increasingly oncoming retirement." There are probably plenty of people who are subconsciously self-sabotaging due to that-- they may personally prefer a denser neighbourhood or more mixed-use facilities, but that Zillow number is blinking in their mind at the same time. If the real estate were nationalized and people were leasing it from a state-owned trust, at basically its cost of operation (maintenance and amortized construction costs), it would free up a lot of resident income for other use or investment opportunities, and make a lot of changes less threatening to residents. (ISTR claims that rents in the USSR were on the order of 5% of income, and this when 30% or less was still a feasible story in the US)
- cousin_it 3mo ago
  If people can move freely, and there's no price mechanism to allocate housing and construction, there will be problems. So "taking the market out of real estate" is a very big ask. In the USSR you couldn't freely move to another city, you needed to get government approval on the basis of a job change. People complained about this registration system all the time.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    There's still a cost. Cost of living in the most popular places is that they're slums, because everyone is building everything. The slum factor will cancel out whatever was making them popular.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Yes it is, but history has proven the state can't be trusted to do better either.