the locals have far less incentive to abolish zoning laws than the Feds have to solve the problem. the more sensible YIMBY view is to take zoning out of the hands of locals, but i don’t think affluent homeowners — well enfranchised at all levels — just roll over and let their neighbors densify. 1/
i don’t think the YIMBY strategy wins the war even if it wins the battle for zoning, because i don’t think you just defeat the best enfranchised mass constituency in the country. you have to convince them, coopt them somehow. perhaps a sufficiently severe political crisis persuades then, though. 2/
if you want my views about this stuff, here and the links in the end. drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/13/y... /fin
except it has pretty poisonous side effects if the dosage is not carefully titrated. the 30-year prime fixed mortgage was a huge state-led innovation, but loan limits based on pricing metrics other than what the last one sold for are necessary to prevent this kind of thing.
yes. there is an impasse only an activist state can break. you’re not going to YIMBY your way to middle-class apartments in the Hamptons.
i find if you bring up housing, the groans are pretty close to the surface. if you talk to homeowners it’s more abstract, since they both perceive the hazard of utter unaffordability should something happen to their home, but also the relief and cushion of the home valuation. 1/
in FL, just ask your typical nice-people neighborhood homeowning Trump voter (meaning my neighbors, genuinely nice people!) what they would do if a hurricane took their home and insurance didn’t come through. there’s an awareness there’s no way back. /fin
what did New York state try? (genuinely asking, i don’t know what you’re referring to.)
full employment is a phenomenon of social democratic governance, always outside of booms local in time and space. 1/
same as state-led housing expansion. we are richer than we ever have been. if we could afford to keep everybody decently paid in the past, we can do it in the present, but it’s up to the state to arrange the institutions. /fin
yeah, like the wages you could make even when the labor market was quite tight (well before the election) were nowhere near sufficient to cover a mortgage in places people want to raise a family. fucking crybabies. why don’t they just look at BLS stats?
a storm represents a disequilibrium, some vast accumulation of potential energy looking to ground, finally smashing all obstacles and finding it. a bubble is the eerie calm before the storm, the accumulation of those energies that must disruptively find their way. 1/
droplets are already falling, gusts picking up steam. trump’s election is a phenomenon of the storm, like hail. 2/
only when the storm has passed do the seas calm. in the meantime, batten down the hatches. /fin
i’m not trying to blame Biden. i’m pointing out why the economy he superintended did not feel as great as upscale Democratic partisans imagine it should have felt. 1/
the Federal government is not at all helpless on housing. The 20th C is full of examples of state-led mass housing expansions, almost always by developing new districts will rather than infill of already desirable places. 2/
i don’t blame Biden for the political impossibility of embarking on this path under his term, though i’d have loved it if he conspicuously tried. i think we might not have Trump if he had. no, under 2022-24 politics it would not have happened, not yet, but it’s the only road out of here. 3/
eventually we will have state-led housing expansions. the only question is whether it will be crisis-provoked, slapdash, likely crime-ridden barracks or favelas, or whether it will be the near utopias someone like @holz-bau.bsky.social could help organize and design. /fin
In the long run, said Keynes… 1/
local booms are normal, but they tend to coincide with local increases in opportunity. people are left behind, but there’s reason for hopefulness to offset the fear. 2/
30-40% national boom over less than 3 years is pretty unprecedented. there was no great national triumph, no glittering new opportunity to offset the shock. 3/
most of those of us who are not homeowners came to understand we never will be (in the US), and will remain at the mercy of a rental market also extraordinarily expensive anywhere you’d want to raise a kid. 4/
perhaps the storm will pass, the sea will calm. i doubt i will live to see it, and i wonder if our republic will. 5/
this was always the glaring hole in the Bidenomics story. they wanted to take credit both for wage compression and for the asset boom, without understanding that for the assetless many, the cost of the boom was far more than the benefit of the compression. /fin
it’s not a dark enlightenment, what we are undergoing is a dark reenchantment. people’s understanding of the world is increasingly formed by sources seeking to intrigue or awe, rather than inform with anything like procedurally vetted approximations of mundane truth.
if you configure a bell to chime every time you get a like, that’s an engagement ring.
to be fair, the humans don’t seem to do much better with their tiktok than the llms do with all the crap and slop in their training data.
beer amphora.
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lots of conversation inspired by this, arguments about interest rates and square feet etc, but i think people fail to appreciate how profoundly just *the last five years* of this graph have contributed to a profound sense of hopelessness for many of us. (with interest rates way up, not down!)
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A graph showing median home prices growing much faster than median incomes, with a really shocking increase in median home prices since the 2020 pandemic.
i'm sure i've missed some text or tweet or mail or call and offended you.
after sunlight is reflected across so many funhouse mirrors, does it still serve as a disinfectant?
yesterday i was a bit shocked by the degree to which “flat earth tiktok” had otherwise perfectly normal people just asking questions.