I discovered a new framework for understanding the housing bubble, the financial crisis, and costly housing markets.
See my substack link for ongoing analysis.
What happens when only a handful of giant grocery store chains like
@Kroger
dominate an industry? They can force high food prices onto Americans while raking in record profits. We need to strengthen our antitrust laws to break up giant corporations and lower prices.
Unaffordable housing is WEIRD.
Housing was affordable basically everywhere until 1980. It was still affordable in 75% of cities as late as 2002.
Making affordable cities doesnโt require some unprecedented complex set of new policies and programs.
Monthly employment data is probably the best real time clue on changes in population. There is no sign of 20,000 new residents, let alone Haitians.
Home price appreciation has been normal.
The cat thing was ridiculous. It distracted everyone from realizing it's all ridiculous.
It doesn't matter much if the median new home can't be constructed at a price that is affordable for the median household.
New homes are 1% of the market.
The most important result of building a lot of $500,000 homes is that a bunch of $250,000 homes start selling for $200,000.
Does everyone know that thereโs a tax deduction self employed people can take on new cars, but the cars have to weigh at least 6,000 lbs?
(Section 179)
I was in a chat with some academics where I mentioned how crazy it is that we've gotten to a point that people will oppose local amenities to try to keep housing costs down.
A Chicago trained economist who had written on housing said he'd never heard of such a thing.
1/
The tiktok girl crying about her long commute has a point. Not on tiktok are the countless locals who gave up, who said goodbye to extended family, generations of friends, social networks, etc. and traded down their life goals to some sunbelt city that wasn't in their first plan
@MadisonECondon
@mucha_carlos
High School Graduate: I know everything
Bachelors Degree: I don't know everything
Masters Degree: I don't know ANYTHING
PhD: NOBODY knows anything!
You cannot overstate how culturally toxic the housing shortage is.
We are to a place where people say, "It's local employers' fault because they fund very well-paid jobs in my town."
You literally cannot overstate how culturally toxic the housing shortage is.
YIMBY vs. NIMBY is one iteration of the New Money vs. Old Money conflict that is an inevitable part of the capitalist experience.
It's a source of horseshoe politics, since conservatives and Progressives can both be Old Money-friendly.
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Holy crap.
In my next substack post, I will apparently be making the case that the recent pullback in home prices really is due to the California YIMBY movement!
WALLACE SHAWN is inconceivably here at the White House with
@IfNotNowOrg
and
@JvpAction
demanding President Biden fight for a ceasefire and end the killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians.
2021: Thereโs a structural housing shortage. We didnโt build enough homes for millennials
2022: Oh really? Hereโs a map of all the
#Airbnb
listings in LA area
Someone said to me that basic economics tells you that if you increase housing supply the market will lower rents.
That's not how it works. If you look at the stats around increasing supply and density you'll see that's just not how it has worked historically. Let me explain. 1/
Blue and red America are united in legislating homelessness.
In every case, the perpetrators don't feel responsible. They're just outlawing one little thing: co-living, mortgage lending, multi-unit projects, redevelopments, etc.
Straws and camel backs everywhere.
Itโs so pitiful that people so often get away with claiming that housing supply wonโt help with affordability.
Every metro with growth of about 2% or more is relatively affordable. We have tons of examples of cities choosing supply and it always works.
I don't think she understands that NIMBYs are her problem, not the 9-5 work day. That's ok. It's not obvious, which is why the issue is so hard and so important.
A bunch of her detractors don't understand either. 4 hours a day of commuting isn't a natural state of being.
Never seen this before. Land Covenants from a 1946 neighborhood in Phoenix.
Restricts Negros, Mexicans, Asians, Hindus and Indians from from buying taking title to homes this subdivision,
@William48759211
Other commenters have suggested that the co-op could have a mortgage on the building that members have to cover, if I'm understanding them correctly.
If farmers had to ask neighbors with allergies for permission before they could plant alfalfa, our livestock would starve, and the academy would be pumping out papers titled, "Financialization is degrading our nutrition: Neoliberalism is anti-protein because it isn't profitable."
I wonder if part of what is going on is that a lot of rural places & small regional centers are depopulating, but some have drawn in a lot of immigrants. In those places the aging existing residents think โimmigrants ruined this cityโ when the immigrants actually saved it.
I just don't get this take. All my life I've lived in areas with a ton of immigrants -- not just in the city, but in MY neighborhood. Most were Mexican, some were Asian. Personally, I've never seen ANY negative effects -- not on crime, or culture, or anything. That fits with the
The irony of the immediate yimby project is that the solution - that we need to legalize and build 10-20 million extra housing units - sounds outrageous. And yet, if those units were equally distributed across every city, would be barely noticeable in the built environment.
The sociology prof did the thing. The very thing I had mocked.
The economist didn't seem to register that this is what happened.
I'm pretty sure that if you asked either of them today whether the thing I described really ever happens, they would say they've never seen it.
5/5
Housing supply & demand:
Demand declines when a family sells a home they owned. This is determined by interest rates. Upon selling, they take ethereal form & no longer require shelter.
Supply declines when a corporation buys a home, which they leave empty bc 4D chess.
We have underbuilt secularly for 40 years, and the way to fix things is to overbuild SECULARLY, which will also take years. And, it is never going to happen if every time we start to, we react by thinking that we are overbuilding cyclically, and that we have to kill the cycle.
1/
Uh oh. Not good. My informal U-Haul housing market tracker has just moved to a cyclical low for LA to Phoenix moving trucks.
Something to watch. A few months ago, a 20' truck would have cost you over $1,100.
Los Angeles and San Francisco displace about 2% of their population each year, mostly the poorest. And now, after 30 years of that, we've got folks going, "It's just expensive to live there because they're so rich and productive!"
1/
@maxdubler
@crulge
Ironically, the only sustainable, functional way to solve this problem is to build a lot more "shitty apartments for yuppies", and yet the average person, seeing the scale of the problem, will not believe that & will insist on public policy reactions that make the problem worse.
I frequently read that adding more housing supply to expensive cities won't solve the cost problem bc supply induces more demand.
Let's take a moment to honor the selfless actions of NIMBY homeowners who sacrifice capital gains by limiting new supply, to keep costs low for us.
This is such a salient example of how facts are completely irrelevant if you have a faulty model of how the world works.
It happens again and again in housing.
This would be a disaster.
Like literally push us into full on social upheaval.
But it seems viscerally obvious to many.
Wall Street is increasingly buying up single family homes and pushing homeownership out of reach for Americans.
ย
My Stop Wall Street Landlords Act will stop the financialization of housing.
Here's why all estimates of "needed housing" are far too low:
You could look at the stats of an underhoused city and say, "Oh, 40,000 families were regionally displaced. We need an additional 40,000 new homes to fix that."
1/8
1. Not enough homes. The most vulnerable residents become homeless.
2. People say, โwell, of course theyโre homeless. Look at how they live.โ
3. The city suggests building shelter for them.
4. People say, โWe canโt have THOSE people living near us! No shelters!โ
5. Go to 1.
Today, thousands of members of our community joined together to say no to building a menโs shelter next to our schools, daycare centers, and senior centers. Together, we are calling for more affordable housing, senior housing, mental health services, and improving our programs
A city that builds lots of market rate homes with a strong safety net has stresses and isnโt perfect, but itโs pro-new money bc itโs pro-everyone and itโs better than a city focused on below-market building, where Old Money doles out favors to lessers who genuflect just right.
Staking your own reputation on apologism for the criminal finances around Trump's tryst with a porn actress might be a little cringey for a moment, but I'm sure this will be it. This will be the last hit you would need to take for him. So, it's probably worth it. Just this once.
Thereโs a certain type of guy who owns a business that depends on hiring unskilled workers in dead end jobs at $10/hour. And they all think the country is going to hell because all the people that show up to work for them are dysfunctional and lazy.
The automobile allowed us to avoid the slightly uncomfortable task of naturally changing and growing cities for a century, so there are generations of people who have a lived experience that is simply unsustainable. Structural forms in cities must be able to change.
Statewide NIMBY group Livable California has released a list of policy demands. It's as insane as you'd expect.
They want:
- "geographic equity" (aka no more housing in affluent coastal cities/suburbs)
- a focus on single-family sprawl
- New job growth shifted to rural areas
I came in to YIMBYism through the back door.
I embarked on what I intended to be a short review of the pre-2008 housing bubble, and realized that all the conventional reasons for it were weak, and so I was left with the mystery. Why did it all happen?
1/
I think it's important to pull the mask off regarding these allegiances, because underneath all the egalitarian theatrics is the basic notion that a city belongs to the people who got their first and a lot of the rest of it is, IMHO, self deception about the ethics of that notion
I've literally know someone who passed on the car they wanted because it didn't weigh enough to get the tax deduction, so it was more economical for them to buy a heavier one.
Housing is a great example of โpower corruptsโ. Many of the people demeaning themselves at public meetings with bogus complaints about new homes would probably be relatively hospitable if there wasnโt a process for them to complain.
1/
This is what America is here for. A great alternative to human suffering. It is a disloyalty to what it is to be American that we donโt have open doors to these victims.
1/
๐จVenezuela is missing approximately 8 million people due to the massive emigration caused by the socialist regime since 2013.
If Venezuela's population stayed on trend, it would number 34.6 million. Instead, the IMF estimates only 26.5 million Venezuelans remain in the country.
Housing markets are the craziest thing.
Building new luxury units doesnโt help with the supply of affordable housing.
But taxing existing vacant luxury units does!
Itโs very subtle and complicated.
Maybe the key to affordable homes in NYC was to make sure units lacked key features of convenience so that they remained cheap like the apartments she had decided not to rent.
4/
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they pass a city-wide ordinance to make sure nothing like you ever gets built again.
Then they make you a historical landmark.
WTF happened in 1971 (or basically the 70s)?
We made it hard to build homes in cities, so that costs from arbitrary scarcity became the driving force of our economy.
I argued this in Shut Out, but I think I underestimated the importance of it.
@conorsen
Itโs funny that you, of all people, would think this. During the housing boom before the Great Recession, Atlanta might be the best example of an American city where moderate building was lowering rents.
From 2002 to 2006, real rents declined 17% in Atlanta.
BREAKING: Mayor Adams basically conceding New York City is done because of illegal immigration and warns New Yorkers illegals will flood ALL neighborhoods.
Then, later, a sociology professor (if I remember right) on the chat bemoaned her ability to find an affordable apartment in Brooklyn. She said the only affordable ones were very old units with 3 bedrooms and one bath, which could never work for her family.
2/
@NYCMayor
Theyโll be:
A) stolen by homeless as carts, or temp shelters. They cost $50-100 a bin, right?
B) Blue recycling bins will be constantly raided and spilled out on street by bottle/can seekers.
Horrible idea NYC.
For those claiming the federal government can't do much to help increase the supply of homes:
Before 2008, the avg. value of homes getting new Fannie Mae mortgages was about $250k and the avg. current value of homes paying off existing Fannie Mae mortgages was about $250k.
1/
We should generalize the vacancy tax.
Tax unemployed workers.
Tax idled machinery and factories.
Tax empty tables at restaurants.
a blanket tax on non-production. Everyone without income pays $x.
Letโs fix everything all at once.
Then, she complained that economists don't support subsidized units enough, and said that, lacking subsidized units or rent controls, maybe she had happened upon the solution. The affordable units had been missing key modern amenities, like multiple bathrooms.
3/
Very good example of axiom number 1 in housing.
There is no naturally occurring housing affordability problem.
Unaffordable housing has one and only one cause: purposeful, communal enforcement of it.
This is legislated poverty.
Sorry. This may just be repetition, but I'm finishing up something where the point is just so obvious, and I have to get it off my chest.
We now have 2 decades of a pattern where the cities with the most expensive housing lose population during putative building booms...
1/
As labor becomes a constraint in our aging society, we should look back at what we lost in the 2010s decade when we could have built the next decades' shelter, but instead maintained a new policy regime that kept a couple million construction workers in longterm unemployment.
By my estimation, some combination of these bullshit statements occupies a plurality of urban American sentiments.
The irony is that people who complain that America is an empire in decline are the sentimental carriers and purveyors of it.
Arizona governor Katie Hobbs just failed. A big honking "F". What a waste.
And her letter is a bunch of NIMBY garbage.
"We can't have generally legal housing, because what if cities are complete morons and can't manage to build infrastructure?"
Cities that build less housing systematically see more people move away and the people that move away tend to have lower incomes than the people that stay.
SF is one of the red dots.
I decided to kick a Georgism hornets nest this morning. Why? Idk.
It got a surprising amount of engagement.
I must report that these were the most pleasant and thoughtful hornets Iโve come across on this site, and twitters reputation is at risk if we let these people hang around.
I'm thinking about becoming homeless and moving to the west coast, because of all the amenities. Any opinions about the best place to do the homeless grift? LA? San Francisco? I'm hearing its all the rage.
The thing where affordable housing is only available as a public subsidy based on how high your occupation scores on a social desirability scale is unfair for exactly the same reason it feels fair.
A place where it costs 10x+ the average income to build a home is an astoundingly poor place. Maybe among the poorest ever to exist. Few humans in history have been so destitute that it took 10+ years of labor to build shelter.
1/
Do we know for certain that the pardoned turkeys have no connection to Hunter, Burisma, or the Chinese?
Why were they pardoned?
How will we know if we donโt investigate?
Why are the homebuilders offering rate buydowns?
Because they can.
Because their margins are healthy.
Because they want to sell the homes they are finishing so they can start some new ones.
Because they are making money on them.
A bunch of people who are a part of the monopolist political housing cartel have Marie Antoinette syndrome, so they are willing to be openly grotesque because they can't even imagine that they're the baddies.
So they just put it out there in the most insufferable way possible.
Millennials are furious about rent prices being so crazy and housing prices being completely out of reach. (She is in Boston)
๐ ... ๐ค
Is she right? or is she complaining too much and just making bad choices? I think she is in a high cost area and likely just not making the
@lugaricano
Reminds me of this quote from โTellerโ, which I think applies to success in general,
โSometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.โ
I strongly support free markets.
But this corporate large-scale buying of residential homes seems to be distorting the market and making it harder for the average Texan to purchase a home.
This must be added to the legislative agenda to protect Texas families.
@mnolangray
I don't know it it makes me happy or sad, but so many of these that you highlight make it clear how EASY dense infill should be. Density increases by multiples, and it barely changes the neighborhood at all. You'd hardly know by walking past it.
If we suspended zoning for a decade and built 30 million homes across the country with no planning, 90% of neighborhoods would look almost exactly the same as they look now, but the houses in them would be 30%-70% cheaper, depending on their location.
Itโs unfortunate that she doesnโt understand this and probably never will. Few do.
For every one of those 7 million homes that she says we are short, there is a family that would have built one if her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would have let them.
Woman of system.
You ever wonder how your grandparents bought a home for 7 raspberries, but you canโt afford a one bedroom apartment? Itโs not you.
Weโre facing a national housing shortage. The government needs to tackle this crisis head on.
The popularity of the "tech workers are driving up housing costs" POV in San Francisco is a product of the OM v NM tradition.
Capitalism is, broadly speaking, the institutional support of "New Money", or even more broadly speaking, of change.
2/2
We're annoying because, regardless of what's right, the status quo is ridiculous. Pointing that out is annoying to the people who maintain it.
The existence of generally annoying people like me in the movement is a spurious correlation.
"We Are a Gentle, Annoying People"
5/5
Just saw a Harris/Walz ad that said โSheโll make groceries more affordable by cracking down on price gouging, and sheโll cut housing costs by taking on corporate speculators.โ
How it works:
Phoenix builds more market-rate units which makes existing units in Phoenix available at affordable rents for families from Los Angeles.
The main reason for this program's success is that it can't be brought up for a vote in Los Angeles.
This is the key challenge of our time. Arbitrary limits to new housing in places like LA mean their populations are countercyclical - the better the economy is the more people have to move away from those key cities, bc their housing stock can't grow as fast as a good economy.
1/
vaccines also do this.
Also seat belts.
Oncology.
Baby formula.
Modern sewage management.
The number of things that are driving up rents would blow your mind.
@IrvingSwisher
To me, this also speaks to the idea that recessions are somehow cathartic, killing off weak businesses. As we are seeing now, growth is perfectly capable of "sweeping out the chafe".
Lately, I've been seeing a lot of comments about how housing is important for "building generational wealth". I think this is a bad idea.
First, I was raised firmly middle class with homeowning parents, and none of us expected a significant inheritance from them.
1/
@ModeledBehavior
1) Make it illegal to just do ordinary, normal stuff that is part of a regular life.
2) People without political power or expensive credentials can't get jobs or start businesses.
3) Services become oppressively expensive.
4) Sisyphusian tax and redistribute scheme.
Repeat
Mythology about the 2008 crisis has created a โLump of Housingโ fallacy. Vacancies are like unemployment. They are mostly due to market frictions.
Not only is it wrong to think there was a time when we had overbuilt housing. Itโs wrong, really, to even think it is possible.