Here in extremely liberal Portland, there are a huge number of people who genuinely believe that 'greedy developers' are the cause of the nationwide housing shortage, having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money.
That belief has reached prominent political leaders as well. I listened to a bit of the Ocasio-Cortez/Tim Walz Madden livestream on Twitch, and they were talking about how something needed to be done about the greedy developers who were driving the housing shortage.
I have been doing YIMBY stuff for around 8 years now, and it does not map nicely onto any kind of left-right narrative.
There was one conservative dude who ran for city council here who was all about 'private property' and 'get rid of government regulations', who also ran against the idea of liberalizing zoning.
I've met left wing people who I agree with on many issues who will do the most spectacular, Olympic level mental gymnastics to avoid the notion that 'supply and demand' apply to housing.
There are moderate Democrats who are big backers of various reforms. And some on the far left who get that if you want Vienna style social housing, you also need Vienna style zoning and building regulations.
A former mayor here is a moderate Republican - he totally got what we were about and said some really nice things about welcoming new neighbors in one speech a few weeks after he met up with our YIMBY group.
It's just not an issue that - so far - has been slotted into the trench warfare that other issues have been.
It's dogmatic among the left that "market based solutions are bad". And because Abundance embraces market solutions, it must therefore be bad too.
Basically, all the arguments I've seen against Abundance tend either towards the ideological, or irrelevant. I tend to see very little empirical arguments.
No, the problem is when the markets are freer than the people.
I don't disagree with that. I think economic power getting concentrated in a relatively small number of hands is unequivocally bad.
That said, the Abundance argument for building more housing is that in many local housing markets, the pendulum has swung too far the other way in ways that are well-meaning but ultimately counterproductive. This very article makes the case that oligopolistic economic power is not the reason for unaffordable housing.
Tons of the critics of the book haven't even read it, because large portions of it are about making the government work better, not just using market-based solutions for all our problems.
Housing, though, could definitely use a better market with less constraints like zoning.
But you literally described the moderates being YIMBY and the more radical being NIMBY, which is left-right, but instead of left vs. right on pole ends opposing, it's the leftists and rights agreeing on NIMBY against the moderate centrists. Horseshoe theory strikes again. There is a growing populist frustration where citizens like both people like Tucker Carlson and Bernie but hate the moderate establishment. Low educated are frustrated with outcomes (ironically being NIMBY on housing is a primary cause) and go extreme compared to the educated moderates.
I also included a far left example who got it. I should have kept going with the examples because there are also plenty of moderates who do not want to rock the boat. The governor of CT vetoed their big housing bill this year.
It really does not map onto left-right.
Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon.
The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.
> Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.
This willfully ignores evidence that community after community has actively passed laws to stop that industry from building more.
Chesterton's Fence: why do those laws exist? Because people thought they were necessary to stop housing construction (especially, but hardly exclusively, densification).
It's not a partisan thing - red states are full of NIMBYs and littered with HOAs too - but the largest cities in red states have happened to not be hit quite as hard yet because they are generally newer cities, with plenty of room to sprawl horizontally still, starting from a lower baseline.
I mean, in my local case, the Chesterton's Fence answer is pretty clearly and directly racism.
> Supply destruction to put a floor on prices is not an unknown phenomenon.
The business model of construction companies is to buy a piece of property, develop it and then sell it for something more than the cost of buying it plus the cost of developing it. Constraining supply increases the cost of property which they then have to pay in order to acquire properties to develop. It isn't really in their interest to increase their own costs.
The most significant way it could be is if they were buying lower density units and replacing them with higher density units, so they'd be selling more units than they're buying and therefore benefit from the price per unit increasing. But in order to benefit from that they'd need to be increasing rather than decreasing the supply, which is contrary to the premise of them doing the opposite.
> The effort to make it seem silly to think that there aren't enough houses because the industry whose job it is to build houses did not build enough houses is itself a little silly. Circumstantial as the evidence may be, it's logical to assume that they didn't because it was more profitable not to.
Suppose that it would be profitable to buy a single family home and replace it 10 condo units, except that there is a law prohibiting you from doing that. Then it would be more profitable not to build those units, since doing so is illegal. But who is to blame for this?
> The business model of construction companies is to buy a piece of property, develop it and then sell it for something more than the cost of buying it plus the cost of developing it. Constraining supply increases the cost of property which they then have to pay in order to acquire properties to develop. It isn't really in their interest to increase their own costs.
Let's say for a moment that this is close but not quite actually the business model.
Let's say that the construction companies have spent a long time buying up vacant lots, faster than they are developing them, such that they now have a large inventory of land and would not have costs go up to continue operating if they did what you say.
What would you expect would happen in that case?
At that point you've ceased to describe construction companies and are now describing real estate speculators while calling them construction companies.
Moreover, notice how little sense that business model makes. To do that you would be sinking capital into vacant lots that you're neither developing nor receiving rents from while paying both property taxes and opportunity costs. You're paying interest on the loan or could have been getting ~10%/year by putting your money into the stock market. A real construction company would be trying to minimize the period they're holding an unproductive property.
And even if you wanted to be a real estate speculator, how does that make you more money than investing in rental properties and then actually renting them out so you receive rental income on top of any price appreciation?
Meanwhile, what, if not for zoning rules and other regulations, is preventing anyone else from undoing your attempt to constrain supply by opening up a new construction company which is actually a construction company?
You must be drawing from experience in a specific locality in the US, probably a rural one, because what I described is how land sales in the largest cities in the US has worked for half a century.
Doing what I described in New York City is exactly how Donald Trump made an initial fortune back in the 80s. It's happening right now in Seattle.
The business model not making sense, is due to the incorrect assumptions you make. For one, that land or buildings in cities appreciate less quickly than the stock market.
> At that point you've ceased to describe construction companies and are now describing real estate speculators while calling them construction companies.
I'm not sure what you think the difference is in practice. There may exist some construction companies that don't engage in real estate speculation, they just aren't the big or most profitable ones. Which addresses:
> Meanwhile, what, if not for zoning rules and other regulations, is preventing anyone else from undoing your attempt to constrain supply by opening up a new construction company which is actually a construction company?
The fact that the most valuable land is owned by other construction companies who have more money because of the real estate speculation.
> Doing what I described in New York City is exactly how Donald Trump made an initial fortune back in the 80s.
The total value of NYC real estate is approximately $2.8T. Trump has a net worth of something like $5B. Even if all of that was invested only in NYC real estate (which it isn't), it would be less than 0.2% of the NYC real estate market, which is hardly enough to have market power.
> The business model not making sense, is due to the incorrect assumptions you make. For one, that land or buildings in cities appreciate less quickly than the stock market.
That doesn't appear to be accurate. Metro housing prices have increased by more than wages but not by more than e.g. the S&P 500.
> I'm not sure what you think the difference is in practice. There may exist some construction companies that don't engage in real estate speculation, they just aren't the big or most profitable ones.
You're just pointing out that real estate speculation has been more profitable than construction, which is exactly the problem -- we make construction too expensive, on purpose, which is what increases the profitability of speculation. That some companies do both is a poor excuse to blame the construction companies for what the speculators are doing.
> The fact that the most valuable land is owned by other construction companies who have more money because of the real estate speculation.
Nobody even owns most of the land in any major US city, much less all of it. The properties that could derive the largest increase in housing units would be to replace single family homes with multi-unit complexes and the majority of existing single-family homes are owner-occupied.
,"having talked themselves into the nonsense belief that building fewer homes makes people more money."
Can you show me an example of someone pushing this?
keep reading along in the comments, I've come across an example already
So people in comments are pushing it? That's not meaningful. I can find a Republican who pushes pedophilia would you act against Republicans because of that?