“To speak of a dollar trap flatters them. To be trapped you have to have some impulse towards escape… To use the language of the Cold War historiography, if this is empire, it is empire by invitation.” @adamtooze.bsky.social

cc @steveroth.bsky.social

you could be a nicer person when you converse. China has overbuilt, including in some places that haven’t worked out. so yes, there are empty places. but some of the once infamous ghost cities are now thriving, and they don’t broadly have housing shortages in their superstar cities. 1/

they err on the side of overbuilding, and then the problem they face is making the places they’ve built desirable. which they’ve had some success at doing. sure, incomplete success, there are empty buildings and disappointed investors. a much better problem than we have. /fin

you're not taking away anyone's agency by creating new options. of course you want to create options the very best you can, that people will be excited about. no one force people to move. 1/

imagining you are providing "agency" only by providing new housing where risk averse private money will provide it is dumb. you are providing agency by creating new options, the more and better you create the more agency. 2/

restricting to already desirable places restricts agency, cuz you just can't do it at scale. /fin

postscript: no polity ever does things perfectly. you do the best you can, but you'll overshoot or undershoot. if i had to pick a problem, i'd gladly take China's housing overshoot over our undershoot. ps1/

the fact that China's real-estate boom, no bubble, is collapsing means more of that housing will become available to people of lower means. ps2/

does that suck for the people who bought investment properties during the boom? yes it does. that will be its own political problem for the Chinese govt to deal with. ps3/

but the worst housing problem is scarcity of quality, well-maintained, reasonably located, transport served housing. i wish that we like China were dealing with the problems of overshoot. /psfin

to me the wise form of housing politics is to sell an optimistic vision of greenfield housing in strategically placed new districts designed by people like @holz-bau.bsky.social. it is genuinely the best solution, and we can offer beautiful renderings of optimistic visions. 1/

i think the tendency toward “reality based” cynicism among liberals is a huge political problem. Trump promises a golden age, Kamala promises what? 2/

i don’t think nonfascists should start promising mythical golden ages and ponies for everyone. but i think we should sell the outer edges of an achievable positive visions, and make our case by making progress towards those edges… 3/

rather than wearily, sophisticatedly, discussing a very straitened adjacent possible, for fear of disappointing people with the idea that a better world might be possible (or fear of upsetting people who prefer this much worse world for their place in it). /fin

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

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

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

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