Yes! The Federal government can pay people in ways that change what they want. Homebuilders presently want to sustain capital discipline for pricing power. Subsidies could be designed to change their calculation. An example of cooptation rather than conflict.

I’m not saying you should accept what’s bad. I am saying that cooptation or circumvention often succeeds where conflict will not. The salience of land use policy to incumbent suburbanites perhaps does not contribute to desirable reforms.

i’m in the dense greenfield camp. density is what matters for the environment. if you can get people living densely at scale and more quickly via greenfield projects, that is how you save the planet. drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/20/i...

i am profoundly pissed off that the apparent glut was not. before the crisis, i thought it kind of great that China was basically building homes for us (on the theory that the appetite for US debt subsidized mortgages), and i remain pissed that we abandoned that abundant supply path.

i don’t think you’ll win big enough to address the problem if the strategy is overcoming bad policies over homeowners’ objections. i think you need some combination of greater emphasis on dense greenfields and using carrots to homeowners to diminish their objections.

no. NIMBYism is a means of sustaining a status quo — financial, physical, sentimental, and sociological — to which homeowners are desperately and precariously levered. it’s more loss minimization than profit maximization. people buy homes in neighborhoods to shed risk that dynamism reintroduces.

We are so close to agreeing. The way that I’d put it is NIMBYism is endogenous to homeownership, especially in capitalist economies where homes become an highly levered antidiversified overwhelmingly predominant asset. To me, that suggests open conflict with NIMBYism may not be the wisest approach.

the money is for establishing the cartel. if the immediate gain of a new profitable sale were sufficient to overcome coordination for longer-term benefit of restricted supply, cartel wouldn’t even be a word.

it’s a separate set of claims. many factors can inhibit new supply relative to a supply-until-prices-meet-the-marginal-cost-of-physical-production model. i suspect different factors are binding in different places and circumstances.

(yeah, the “won’t hurt” new supply point stands.)

decisions surrounding whether to build ADUs are made by quite the opposite of volume builders. there’s a kind of natural antitrust there that can promote delightfully ruinous competition.

from “What determines rent?” @fromarsetoelbow.bsky.social fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2025/07/what...

they used to mock us with “Green Lantern theory” when we tried to make this point.

most people won’t ask for a comprehensive compilation. they’ll ask for a summary and evaluation. which requires judgments about what is important and which claims are credible. different LLMs will, based on their training, tend to treat different kinds of claims as credible and important.