the X links aren’t working for me now. (dunno why?) 1/

i think you’ll find much of the country, however mistakenly, hasn’t gotten your caution, and perceives high home prices as not reflecting their consumption choices (they are not homeowners) but simply as a barrier to consumption and more importantly insurance they’d like but cannot have. 2/

i’m not saying you are wrong from a kind of macro perspective. among the population that is homeowners, there are choices the go bigger and nicer embedded in those prices for sure. but that reflects their consumption choices divergence of economic outcomes that homeownership noisily demarcates. 3/

people who’ve done well are disproportionately homeowners. and their consumption choices absolutely create barriers for more downscale people who would love a newish, smaller place of their own in a great neighborhood. 4/

those don’t pencil, because the consumption choices of the better off are where the money is, because land in nice places would price out more downscale buyers, because it’s only a small fraction of nonhomeowners who could afford to buy even reversing those consumption choices. 5/

to a first approximation, consumption choices have nothing at all to do with the post 2020 boom. as you say, there were special circumstances that can explain it. but however it came to be, it’s a fact and a huge, yawning, insurmountable barrier. 6/

you can definitely argue, from a macro and financial stability perspective, that the best way to address the overshoot is let nominal prices grow henceforth more slowly than inflation. from a macro perspective that makes sense. 7/

from a micro perspective, it means it will be a generation before half the country can think about buying a home rather than rent. 8/

a reversal of home prices would be a catastrophe for the financial system and the more upscale half of the country. the absence of such a reversal is a catastrophe for the rest of the country. 9/

of course, a financial crisis could disemploy everyone. we must always protect wall street (here interpreted broadly as assetholders) in order to protect main street. /fin

“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