[HN Gopher] Scarcity Truthers
___________________________________________________________________
Scarcity Truthers
Author : jseliger
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-05-12 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (philo.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (philo.substack.com)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I don't take issue with housing as a topic which is most of the
| article because there actually is scarcity issues, but I take a
| lot of issues with the idea in general summed up in the piece as
| _" Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity"_
|
| While I'm no fan of 'web3' or cryto I think the existence of
| artificial scarcity imposed on abundant digital resources not by
| a cartel but by ordinary people dispels that idea. Scarcity is in
| many ways the only way to create individuality and authenticity.
| We're already in a world of abundance in the West at least, our
| waistlines don't suggest that we lack in essential goods, with
| few exceptions.
|
| The idea that bigger pie = more stuff = world better has little
| pull any more even among people who aren't particularly well off.
| Another user is quoting a Christian theologian, and I've
| personally seen younger people be interested in religion again,
| mostly for that reason. The article also mentions healthcare in
| the US but ironically it seems to me that abundance lifestyles
| are by far the biggest drivers of healthcare costs. We could safe
| ourselves a lot of doctor and dentist visits if we cut down the
| soda and took the bike out for a ride. I don't think it can be
| overstated how much of our disease burden is related to our
| consumption. Heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes and so on.
| Among the poor predominantly.
|
| It seems to me almost bizarre when one looks at countries like
| Singapore where national healthcare spending is 4% of the GDP,
| compared to 20% in the US that the issue is not having enough
| doctors. Rather than talking about the culture in which we live
| and how it's affecting us.
| yunwal wrote:
| I feel like a huge amount (not all) of NIMBYism is also due to
| the total disregard for aesthetics or cohesiveness of new
| developments with existing neighborhoods. Look at new
| developments in Brooklyn
|
| https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62552986/...
|
| vs. a Brooklyn Brownstone
|
| https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lXakKpLLBt65Mj0q-QKtmnoVLtQ=...
|
| If you live on a block with the former, and someone comes in
| wanting to build the latter, of course you're going to say no.
| Some might say that this is just a preference for low-density
| housing, and big buildings will just always look worse to some
| people, but I disagree. There are plenty of attractive churches,
| schools, and other high-density buildings that don't look out of
| place.
| orange_joe wrote:
| Kind of an unfair statement because those buildings are
| actually in downtown Brooklyn, which is a dense downtown in its
| own right. I don't think there are many brownstones in that
| area. The buildings in the more residential areas tend to be
| far less conspicuous, even if they don't tend to strictly hew
| to the styles of early 20th century architecture.
| xxpor wrote:
| The brownstones were hated when they were built, because they
| didn't fit in the neighborhood!
|
| https://twitter.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/14363665088091504...
|
| Your personal aesthetics shouldn't dictate what others do with
| their property.
| Mizza wrote:
| That tower isn't even the worst example, though. Philly is
| flooded with this kind of crap now: https://billypenn.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/08/DSC_0484-10...
|
| Really low quality builds, random stupid rectangles, you can
| hear everything your neighbor does, yadda yadda yadda. The
| market is so ridiculous, they can build it as cheap as possible
| and somebody will snatch it up no matter what.
|
| A lot of them are quite big and use wooden frames, even though
| they're not really supposed to, because of a loophole with
| fire-retardant treated wood. There will likely be some major
| disasters in the next decade.
| korse wrote:
| >Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity.
|
| Sadly, this isn't the case. Being rich is about more than having
| abundance. It is about having 'above average' abundance with the
| 'richness' level being determined by how far above average you
| are.
|
| Create a post scarcity society and the bar will move, likely with
| major societal consequences. I don't know if I'm ready for the
| paradigm shift.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I agree. Indeed, conspicuous consumption is often about showing
| off that you own things that are scarce (the more scarce, the
| better) and non-scarce items have little value in this context.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > The problem with redistribution is that it cannot overcome an
| artificial cap on supply.
|
| Yes it can.
|
| Tax the unimproved value of the land, not the people who live and
| work there. "Redistribute" the wealth generated by the people who
| work in the city to the people who work in the city, not to the
| landlords and property owners. Make it pointless to sit and hoard
| property while you wait for other people to make it more
| valuable.
|
| Suddenly, the incentives are better aligned.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Make it pointless to sit and hoard property
|
| I can assure you that property owners, in high cost of living
| areas, would love to "improve" their land, by building lots of
| tall buildings on that land, if it were legal to do so.
|
| Its the laws that prevent them from acting on their incentives.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Looking like evidence for a severe scarcity of editors.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| Right. It could have more succinctly summarized just by quoting
| Hayek's: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to
| men [or people, if you'd rather] how little they know about
| they imagine they can design."
| Tycho wrote:
| Isn't it a good thing that these coastal hubs become too
| expensive eventually and stop growing. Doesn't it force the
| economy to re-centre on hubs in other locations and give the rest
| of the country a chance to flourish. Do we really want most of
| the country living in the shadow of a few megacities.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Sorry but the US doesn't really seem to have a left politics. You
| seem (to me) to have two conservative-centrist parties in power,
| both with extremely neoliberal economics, and with slight
| differentiations on very emotional side shows like abortion and
| gun control.
| drewcoo wrote:
| You see what most of us Americans can't.
|
| We get too caught up in two-party partisanship to focus on the
| larger picture.
|
| It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma, actually. We could
| collaborate on solving mutual problems but we know the other
| party isn't trustworthy. Or we could focus on just getting our
| own way and making sure the other party doesn't take advantage
| of us.
| zwieback wrote:
| Pretty true for economics but not for much else. On pretty much
| anything cultural there are two very vocal poles and a bunch of
| people in the middle picking one pole or another as the lesser
| evil.
| [deleted]
| golemotron wrote:
| > Sorry but the US doesn't really seem to have a left politics.
|
| Maybe from a European or South American perspective but not
| from the perspective of the world as a whole.
| vdnkh wrote:
| We have a left, it's just overshadowed and punished by the
| Democrat centrist majority, and the right wing political
| majority. Plenty of politicians in the progressive caucus have
| been pushing for reform for years, but the sad reality of our
| political system is that it's incredibly difficult for them to
| pass legislation. But that's not to say we don't have a left.
|
| Furthermore, the US left leads on progressive social values
| compared to Europe, such as immigration and social justice. The
| average European sentiment on race and immigration, such as
| their attitude towards Romani/"Gypsies" and Muslims is
| definitely considered right-wing in America.
| aixi wrote:
| >Furthermore, the US left leads on progressive social values
| compared to Europe, such as immigration and social justice.
| The average European sentiment on race and immigration, such
| as their attitude towards Romani/"Gypsies" and Muslims is
| definitely considered right-wing in America.
|
| Just because the US is fixated on identity politics does not
| mean it leads on progressive social values. Germany, a
| country with a quarter of the US population and way less
| territory has hosted a third of the amount of refugees the US
| has. Not even mentioning the data on total amount of refugees
| hosted by the EU because it absolutely dwarfs the US. As a
| migrant to the EU, the path to (legal) residency was
| extremely straight forward and easy, compared to the US. This
| is without going into topics such as socialised health care.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I disagree. If anything, US is _far_ too left. The current
| leftist politics and the administration is distinctly different
| from Obama 's run. Btw, this goes for right as well (Trump vs.
| Bush era).
|
| Worth going through this entire article:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-...
| asow92 wrote:
| I think you nailed it.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Socially the US is far more liberal than basically every
| country in Europe (even ignoring Eastern Europe.) Only people
| who have not lived in both places say otherwise. The US also
| -by far- spent more per capita during the COVID economic
| recovery than any country on earth (even excluding the
| retainment loans.) No country comes even close. That doesn't
| really fit the "right" wing dogma.
|
| There's a myth around American politics largely pepetuated by
| people that have only had political experience in one place or
| only uses the media as a means to know the politics of
| countries. Even on abortion, the US has among the least
| restrictive in the entire world, looser than Germany, France,
| etc.
|
| The big thing America really lacks is universal healthcare,
| which is the main axe people wield over the head of American
| politics to claim it's only corporatist right leaning.
| Government outlays really tell a different story than the
| narrative.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| > The big thing America really lacks is universal healthcare
|
| Throw in employee protections and reasonable amounts of
| vacation time, and I'm with you 100%.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| > Socially the US is far more liberal than basically every
| country in Europe
|
| You're telling me that rural Alabama is more liberal than
| Sweden? I think your viewpoint is leaning on definitions of
| "social" and "liberal" and "US" that are not universally
| understood.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| New York City alone has a similar population to all of
| Sweden, and is twice that of Alabama. I'm sure you can find
| 1.5% of the Swedish population that is just as
| conservative.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| The problem here in the US is that Alabama has much
| representation in the Senate as NY state.
| abrokenpipe wrote:
| That's how the Senate is supposed to work.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| That doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
| fabian2k wrote:
| It's more than healthcare, the entire social security net is
| far more extensive in Germany than in the US. This also
| affects the part about COVID, one really important measure
| here was to essentially have the government continue to pay
| people in jobs that would otherwise have been lost during the
| pandemic. That was an already existing measure that was
| expanded during the pandemic.
| [deleted]
| CPLX wrote:
| Extreme disagree. The United States does not have a party
| that represents the interests of working people, and has done
| almost nothing to stem the consolidation of corporate power
| for decades.
|
| It's not even a close contest. There's literally not a labor
| party here.
| marcusjt wrote:
| Within Europe, Germany and Italy eclipsed the spending of the
| USA in terms of %GDP, and globally, Japan eclipsed them - see
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107572/covid-19-value-g.
| ..
| [deleted]
| ch4s3 wrote:
| When it comes to housing both parties for different reasons
| promote something that looks a lot like protectionism.
| Republicans often try to keep housing values high, and
| Democrats like to punish real estate developers or
| alternatively have bizarre ideas about what makes housing
| affordable. They both accomplish their different goals by
| making it hard to build. Obviously there are regional
| differences in local parties. Republicans will often favor
| building out and not up, preferring suburban development.
| Democrats have lost the plot on housing, IMHO.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Compared to Europe America skews politicians more slightly to
| the right and or center. Also, elected presidents become more
| centrist once they are in office .
| rayiner wrote:
| > slight differentiations on very emotional side shows
|
| Slight differences? In the U.S. right now there are states that
| would ban abortion immediately if _Roe_ were overturned, and
| ones that allow abortion until birth, limited only be the
| conscience of the doctor. The two sides are further apart than
| the most extreme poles of the EU.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think the GP was missing a comma or something - they
| probably meant that differences between the Republican and
| Democratic Parties (I should stress that this is about the
| parties, not thr voters), even those as embittered as
| abortion, gun rights, gay marriage etc, are small compared to
| the overwhelming amount of policy they agree on almost
| entirely (foreign policy, medical care, primacy of corporate
| interests, little will to battle climate change).
|
| Sometimes the policies both parties agree on are in stark
| contrast to the will of the US electorate, such as the case
| of many recent wars, or Medicare for All.
| rayiner wrote:
| Small in what sense? We have Obamacare and most people now
| support it, and there isn't that much support for program
| that's $3 trillion a year bigger. We supported foreign
| wars, and did a few, then we didn't, and so now we're not
| intervening in Ukraine. As you observe, we have little will
| to battle climate change. Everybody dislikes corporations
| in the abstract, but we vote with our wallets and keep
| voting for Amazon over the Mom & Pop. If you keep in mind
| that the median voter is like 45, I don't really see how
| the country doesn't closely reflect what most people want.
|
| By contrast, our disagreements regarding what you teach my
| kids about the nature of marriage and our purpose on the
| earth, or the laws around terminating human life, or
| whether we should have a color blind society or not, seem
| pretty important by comparison. Whatever problems we
| perceive ourselves as having, we don't trust others to fix
| them if we disagree about fundamental things like the
| socialization of children.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| While Medicare for All itself is only polling at 55%,
| with most Republican voters (62%) opposing it, a public
| option is polling at a whopping 68% support, including
| 55% support among Republican voters [0]. And yet, neither
| party is willing to implement it (a public system would
| significantly reduce Healthcare costs for the entire
| economy - remember that the USA has by far the largest
| expenditure on health-care out of any country on Earth,
| while doing relatively bad among rich countries at
| outcomes).
|
| For wars, the occupation of Afghanistan has been opposed
| by the public for at least 10 years before Biden
| withdrawing, with strong support from voters of both
| parties, as seen in both Obama, Trump and Biden winning
| with a platform of ending the war, but without any
| concrete action from the first two (if anything, Obama
| intensified the war, ordering even more illegal drone
| strikes on civilians than George Bush, and even
| publically admitting to assassinating an American citizen
| on "suspicion of terrorism").
|
| Also, voting with your wallet doesn't work when Amazon
| undercuts the Mom&Pop, pumps billions into marketing, and
| outright buys what they can't compete with - as do all
| others.
|
| [0] https://morningconsult.com/2021/03/24/medicare-for-
| all-publi...
| rayiner wrote:
| > While Medicare for All itself is only polling at 55%,
| with most Republican voters (62%) opposing it, a public
| option is polling at a whopping 68% support, including
| 55% support among Republican voters [0].
|
| Polling like that (do you want this free stuff?) is
| meaningless. Look at polls that ask how many people
| support taking action on climate change, versus ones that
| ask what people are willing to pay in higher utility
| bills for such action. People want change, but only if it
| costs less than $10/month:
| https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-
| pay-10-month-...
|
| Even millenials, who skew liberal, generally would prefer
| smaller government if bigger government meant higher
| taxes: https://reason.com/2014/07/10/millennials-prefer-
| small-gover....
|
| Americans support universal healthcare--right up until
| you propose to pay for it the same way everyone else pays
| for it, with payroll taxes on middle class people.
|
| > And yet, neither party is willing to implement it (a
| public system would significantly reduce Healthcare costs
| for the entire economy - remember that the USA has by far
| the largest expenditure on health-care out of any country
| on Earth, while doing relatively bad among rich countries
| at outcomes).
|
| And here is where the abstract choice rubber hits the
| political reality road. After the Obamacare experience,
| very few people believe that they'll get more from a
| government program while paying less. Also, people are
| broadly in disagreement about why healthcare costs more
| in the U.S. and what drives our outcomes.
|
| > For wars, the occupation of Afghanistan has been
| opposed by the public for at least 10 years before Biden
| withdrawing, with strong support from voters of both
| parties, as seen in both Obama, Trump and Biden winning
| with a platform of ending the war, but without any
| concrete action from the first two
|
| Obama won because he was willing to recognize the war as
| a mistake, but that isn't the same thing as believing we
| should pull out. Opposition to ending the war didn't
| reach a decisive majority until 2012:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/world/asia/support-
| for-af.... And by the end of Obama's term, we were down
| to 1/3 of what they had been at the start of Obama's
| term: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-41014263. Even then,
| the majority of Americans disapproved of the execution of
| Biden's pull out:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-give-biden-
| low-ma...
|
| > (if anything, Obama intensified the war, ordering even
| more illegal drone strikes on civilians than George Bush,
| and even publically admitting to assassinating an
| American citizen on "suspicion of terrorism").
|
| Virtually nobody cares about that.
| DrewRWx wrote:
| Neither of those are side shows.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| They're more like a 'marketing scheme' than a sideshow.
| simonh wrote:
| They are, because in both cases the party wanting to change
| the status quo cannot possibly do so and the party leadership
| know it. They are simply exploiting it for political gain
| with showy but pointless time wasting banner legislation to
| stoke up the base. The activists don't know it's pointless,
| but generally speaking the activists on both sides are
| dissociated from reality.
|
| On gun control there is no conceivable way gun ownership, gun
| crime and gun death statistics can be meaningfully changed.
| They are just too many guns out there already. Those states
| that do have 'strict' gun laws by US standards are right next
| to ones that don't and have open borders. As has been said
| many times, once Sandy Hook happened and didn't shift the
| consensus on the issue, it was all over. Face it, school
| shootings are going to be a fact for a very long time. You
| can have some local regulation like no conceal carry and
| such, fine, but banning guns and getting them off the streets
| and out of people's homes at a society level is impossible
| and pretending that it isn't is disingenuous.
|
| On abortion, pregnant women are just going to go somewhere
| that allows abortion. Face it, women are going to get
| abortions if they rally want them. You can make it harder and
| coerce some vulnerable women, but broadly you can't stop them
| all you can do is mess with them.
|
| The only effect of strict punitive anti-regulation in either
| case is to aggravate members of the pro-community, and harm
| people in edge case situations.
|
| At least that's how it looks from the other side of the
| Atlantic.
| yifanl wrote:
| They absolutely are not, but in the context of economic
| scarcity, I can see why they're put off to the side when
| comparing policy.
| rayiner wrote:
| The other way to view this is that america is a prosperous
| country, most americans recognize where that prosperity
| comes from, and instead are divided mainly be cultural
| issues.
|
| I suspect immigration actually has a lot to do with it. I
| have a theory that, in the long run, immigration prevents
| the development of a meaningful left-wing party in the U.S.
| The left of center party ends up getting co-opted by
| immigrants who are open to same change, but not that much.
|
| You can see this happening in the U.S. in real-time.
| Eroding support among hispanics may well cost Democrats the
| election in 2022. A notable fact about Hispanics is that
| they enjoy strong income mobility--typically moving up from
| the bottom to the middle within a couple of generations:
| https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. If
| you're vastly better off than your grandfather who came
| here from Mexico, you may well be skeptical of efforts to
| change things too much.
| golemotron wrote:
| Important article. This is the biggest blindspot of our era.
| We've enculturated several generations into a zero-sum scarcity
| mindset because we feared growth. As population growth collapses,
| the change that we need in the zeitgeist is going to be jarring
| to most people.
| jjmorrison wrote:
| Great article. This is always the tension on the political left.
| Adding restrictions to protect a group accidentally creates
| downstream effects of hurting this group.
|
| The right is no better and can tend toward abusive and unfair
| advantages.
|
| Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our way on
| this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a tribal
| LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Neither is side correct or better, we all need to feel our
| way on this edge and be clear minded enough not to fall into a
| tribal LEFT > RIGHT or RIGHT > LEFT.
|
| It might be more accurate to say, scarcity issues are worst
| when neither party advocates for abundance.
|
| In housing, neither party advocates for densification nor
| deregulation on the front of zoning; instead party lines
| revolve around subsidized housing, mortgage industry
| regulation, etc.
|
| In medicine neither party talks about increasing the supply of
| doctors(or the ability for hospitals to deliver care more
| efficiently without being hamstrung by insurance), party lines
| are fought over who pays for it.
|
| In education the two sides might bicker over affirmative action
| and how Harvard decides which high school seniors get to
| attend; but not whether it's OK that the worlds foremost
| university accepts only 2000 undergrads a year.
|
| None of these are easy problems to solve, but the common theme
| is that both parties accept the status quo. Housing is scarce,
| desirable education is scarce, medical care is scarce.
|
| On the other hand, food or gas prices start moving and it
| becomes a priority political issue for the current
| administration guaranteed. It's night and day.
| t_mann wrote:
| Interesting article! But two corrections are in order:
|
| " _it is not like very many rich people have three apartments_ "
| - oh yes, they absolutely do - " _or take nine years to finish
| undergrad_ " - let me tell you about a time and place in Europe
| that had effectively removed education scarcity with free college
| for everyone. People lurking in (sometimes multiple) degrees for
| close to a decade was so common that there was a word for it. Not
| that that was a terrible place to live, quite nice actually.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I have close friends in Germany who worked on multiple degrees
| for years without progress. While I personally don't see that
| as ideal life choices and they would agree, it actually came at
| very little cost for the university. The reason they took so
| long is because they were hardly studying. This also means not
| submitting homework, usually not coming to lectures and taking
| up space there and more often than not, not even attending the
| exam, so there was nothing to grade either. In the case of my
| friends, it turned out the degrees they focused on initially
| weren't right for them in the end. But they were able to
| realize that on their own time and settle for something that
| suits them better and despite that aren't stuck with crippling
| debt.
| tonetheman wrote:
| Where I live, housing scarcity is mostly drive by rich-investors
| and then in general supply chain issues.
|
| I am sure reasons vary locally all over the place.
|
| But at my location if you could stop investors from buying houses
| it would help a lot.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yes. Housing is expensive for the same reason bitcoin is
| expensive, not because of scarcity.
| jkaptur wrote:
| The article addresses this.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The article simply shows this is not born out by evidence in
| certain cities. That doesn't mean it can't be true in others.
|
| In general, it seems pretty clear that if a city is
| attracting new people, the article is right: whatever else
| you do, keeping the housing supply limited will increase
| prices. The mistake NIMBYs make is typically to assume the
| city population won't grow if they prevent new housing stock,
| but this is not the case - even if a city has tight
| regulations on no new housing, adjacent communities will
| likely not, and will simply cause sprawl from there.
|
| However, there may be cities that are not seeing significant
| population growth, and are still seeing significant price
| increases, for various other reasons (tourism, realty as
| investment, gentrification, etc).
| tsimionescu wrote:
| While I think much of the article is right, the amount of time
| spent on dismantling housing NIMBYism is somewhat unfortunate.
| The analysis is right to some extent, but there are also valid
| reasons to consider that urban sprawl should be limited, while
| also protecting historic city centers, and trying to make sure
| normal people can still afford housing close to or in the center
| of their cities.
|
| A very problematic tendency with a free housing market and free
| reign for development is that it ties the price of buildings to
| the price of the land they sit on. No one is going to, of their
| own accord, buy a piece of land in downtown Manhattan and build a
| low-income housing building there. So, free development does
| allow prices to overall go down even as the city grows larger,
| but at the cost of moving poor and middle-class people towards
| the periphery of the city.
|
| Land near the city center and other landmarks is naturally
| scarce, there is no way to create an abundance of physiccal
| space. That inevitably drives the price of that land up as the
| city expands. The only way to prevent the rich buying it all up
| and excluding everyone else from those areas is for the city to
| regulate the need for low-income housing being built or regulate
| the price itself.
|
| A better policy overall, though no one has managed it to any
| extent, would be to find a way of developing in a less
| centralized way - stop growing cities to this mega metropolis
| level, and somehow encourage the creation of more big-but-not-
| huge cities. Or, find a new way of organizing cities so that they
| are less centralized themselves.
|
| Abig part of this, I suspect, would be reducing centralization of
| companies as well. The huge behemoths we have today control a
| vast amount of resources, so their decisions of locations
| naturally force people to gather in the same city, and create
| high value space. If instead you had a much larger range of much
| smaller companies, there would be less need to have huge HQs with
| thousands of workers in the same building a la Apple's Infinity
| Loop 1.
|
| The best proof, I think, that this type of decentralized
| development can work at some scale lies in Europe. Even though
| individual European countries and cities have similar problems
| and tendencies to those in the USA, these are much more recent
| problems, and overall there are many times more large cities
| across the EU, and no mega metropolises like NYC or LA. And, many
| of these cities have city centers that are somewhat frozen in
| time for 100 or 200 years, not since the 70s, without reaching
| the ridiculous prices of San Francisco for example (though they
| might get there).
| solveit wrote:
| Which European cities do you think are good examples of this
| kind of development where a lot more land is more-or-less
| equally desirable while the city as a whole stays as desirable
| as NYC?
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| > there is no way to create an abundance of physical space.
|
| Sure there is. The sky is the limit, quite literally. A 10
| floor building can fit 10x the amount of people that a single
| house can.
|
| We have the technology, we have people willing to put the time
| and effort into using it. The only thing stopping this is some
| nonsense law.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I was very explicit that I am discussing the land, not
| constructed surface.
|
| My point is that _the land_ close to a major attraction is
| forever scarce and thus expensive, and that this attracts
| only developers who want to build _expensive constructions_
| to maximize their return on investment. I agree with the
| article that this still pulls median prices down, but it does
| so by forcing middle class and poor people towards the
| peripheries. Taking this to the extremes, you get cities like
| Sao Paolo - with extremely expensive city centers and dirt-
| cheap favelas where people live in squalor.
|
| Looking at my own city (Bucharest) this is very visible in
| new constructions - the farther away from the expensive city
| center most constructions are, the _smaller_ the apartments,
| the less nicely looking etc. Of course there are exceptions,
| especially once you get to the suburbs, but this is the
| general trend for the city itself, and is a common trend in
| most cities.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| _This should generally hold for housing as well. Even though land
| is finite, we can build upward, so each individual new unit uses
| a negligible amount of land._
|
| Perhaps the author has forgotten that the land base required to
| support a given human population cannot be expanded upward? The
| minimum area of productive farmland required to support a rather
| subsistence-level diet (95% vegetarian say) is about a hectare -
| two football fields - per person, according to most studies I've
| looked at.
|
| Technology can mitigate some of these issues to some extent, and
| already have - extensive inputs of fossil fuels to agriculture in
| the form of fertilizer and diesel powered water pumps have
| doubled per-hectare productivity, but at the cost of fertilizer
| pollution and eventual exhaustion of groundwater supplies. Hence,
| we have to conclude that there really are hard ecological limits
| to human economic activity.
|
| Property developers and their affiliated investors have an
| unfortunate habit of ignoring these realities, and for their own
| pockets it might make sense - build some housing, ignore the
| demands on the surrounding area, sell the housing, take the money
| and run. Most communities can see through these efforts. Now
| there is an argument for Tokyo-style tiny apartments (i.e.
| subdivide existing housing into smaller units) and little houses
| to lower prices and house the homeless and so on, but these
| approaches aren't really that profitable in terms of return-on-
| investment.
|
| P.S. If you want to examine 'artificial scarcity driving market
| prices' the place to start is the diamond industry.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > Tokyo-style tiny apartments
|
| It seems you perhaps haven't been to Tokyo, or haven't been to
| America. The typical Tokyo apartment today is larger, newer,
| and cheaper than the typical apartment in New York. That's the
| result of decades of housing construction policy, in both
| places, but in opposite directions.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I researched your claim briefly. Doesn't seem very well-
| supported.
|
| https://japanpropertycentral.com/2020/02/apartments-in-
| tokyo...
|
| > "Just under 40% of all new apartments were in the 70 sqm
| (753 sq.ft) range, while just 9.1% were sized between 80 ~
| 100 sqm. The biggest shift is in the 30 ~ 50 sqm (323 ~ 538
| sq.ft) sector where the total share has increased by 3.1
| points to 10% in 2019."
|
| https://nypost.com/2022/03/03/why-the-size-of-an-nyc-
| apartme...
|
| > "Data collected from 765 residential Manhattan buildings
| shows that their apartments grew from 950 square feet to 975
| square feet on average over the last five years -- roughly a
| 5% increase... Despite much-hyped tiny housing trends, the
| vast majority of new development in the city over the last 20
| years has been in the "luxury" sector (i.e., larger than
| average). Meanwhile, each year, unit combinations enlarge the
| average square footage of individual apartments, while
| shrinking the city's housing stock."
|
| That's actually the opposite trend on size in both places,
| isn't it?
| JadeNB wrote:
| > "Data collected from 765 residential Manhattan buildings
| shows that their apartments grew from 950 square feet to
| 975 square feet on average over the last five years --
| roughly a 5% increase...."
|
| I know you're quoting, but that sentence alone makes me
| suspicious; it represents an increase of under 3%, not 5%.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > Now there is an argument for Tokyo-style tiny apartments
| (i.e. subdivide existing housing into smaller units) and little
| houses to lower prices and house the homeless and so on, but
| these approaches aren't really that profitable in terms of
| return-on-investment.
|
| How do you figure? Japan has one of the most laissez faire real
| estate markets around. I would assume whatever steady state the
| housing market assumes is most profitable
| hprotagonist wrote:
| https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-liturgy-of-abund...
|
| _Joshua warns the people that this choice will bring them a
| bunch of trouble. If they want to be in on the story of
| abundance, they must put away their foreign gods -- I would
| identify them as the gods of scarcity.
|
| Jesus said it more succinctly. You cannot serve God and mammon.
| You cannot serve God and do what you please with your money or
| your sex or your land. And then he says, "Don't be anxious,
| because everything you need will be given to you." But you must
| decide. Christians have a long history of trying to squeeze Jesus
| out of public life and reduce him to a private little Savior. But
| to do this is to ignore what the Bible really says. Jesus talks a
| great deal about the kingdom of God -- and what he means by that
| is a public life reorganized toward neighborliness.
|
| As a little child Jesus must often have heard his mother, Mary,
| singing. And as we know, the sang a revolutionary song, the
| Magnificat--the anthem of Luke's Gospel. She sang about
| neighborliness: about how God brings down the mighty from their
| thrones and lifts up the lowly; about how God fills the hungry
| with good things and sends the rich away empty. Mary did not make
| up this dangerous song. She took it from another mother, Hannah,
| who sang it much earlier to little Samuel, who became one of
| ancient Israel's greatest revolutionaries. Hannah, Mary, and
| their little boys imagined a great social transformation. Jesus
| enacted his mother's song well. Everywhere he went he broke the
| vicious cycles of poverty, bondage, fear and death; he healed,
| transformed, empowered and brought new life. Jesus' example gives
| us the mandate to transform our public life.
|
| Telling parables was one of Jesus' revolutionary activities, for
| parables are subversive re-imagining of reality. The ideology
| devoted to encouraging consumption wants to shrivel our
| imaginations so that we cannot conceive of living in any way that
| would be less profitable for the dominant corporate structures.
| But Jesus tells us that we can change the world. The Christian
| community performs a vital service by keeping the parables alive.
| These stories haunt us and push us in directions we never thought
| we would go._
|
| Walter Bruggemann, 1999
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Great comment / quote.
|
| FWIW, I don't identify as Christian, but was raised as such by
| devout parents. The Bruggemann citation reminds me of a book
| "The Jesus I Never Knew" which, despite the cringe-inducing
| title, is worthwhile, as a non-religious look at the life of
| the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. If Christianity had
| developed differently, in an alternate reality where its
| adherents modelled their behavior on that person's teachings,
| what a different world it'd be.
|
| A blogger named Andrew Sullivan coined a term "Christianist" to
| avoid conflating followers of Jesus' teachings with the
| nationalistic right-wing political movement that's highjacked
| the GOP. I hope the term catches on.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Bruggemann, Crossan, Stringfellow, and a few others trace a
| through-line of really very subversive dissent, back to the
| beginning, and make for really fascinating reading.
| morelisp wrote:
| That would be Andrew Sullivan the eugenicist and warmonger?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Even a clock running backwards at double speed is right
| four times a day!
| mbgerring wrote:
| The train de-rails about 2/3rds of the way through the article.
| You can't argue that more housing supply is the answer to
| affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are
| pointless.
|
| If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the vacancy
| tax, and NIMBYs have weakened their position by losing an excuse
| to block housing construction.
|
| If there are a large number of warehoused homes, and a vacancy
| tax successfully puts those homes on the market, then housing
| prices go down, and if they're still high, the argument for
| building more homes is even stronger. You will have a bunch of
| progressives who have seen with their own eyes that increasing
| supply lowers prices.
|
| This confusing ideological misalignment also happened with AirBnB
| regulations. YIMBYs, in general, were against it, but the week
| that San Francisco's law regulating AirBnB went into effect, a
| flood of new apartments showed up on Craigslist, nudging the
| overall price for new apartments down a few percentage points.
|
| Either you believe in supply and demand, or you don't. We need
| new housing construction, and we also need to make it
| extraordinarily expensive to keep homes intentionally empty in
| cities with low vacancy rates.
| bobcostas55 wrote:
| The opposition to vacancies in real estate is one of the most
| absurd memes I've seen recently. Imagine if you went to a
| supermarket and all the shelves were empty. That's what zero
| vacancies in the real estate market looks like! There's nothing
| wrong with available stock.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I think in context, "vacant" means a property that nobody is
| living in and _is not_ on the market for rent. It 's simply
| owned by someone as an asset. This was the complaint in some
| parts of Canada: Chinese owner/investors buying condos and
| not renting them out but just letting them sit empty.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Slap a "for sale" sign on the window. It's "on the market"
| now.
| kansface wrote:
| > You can't argue that more housing supply is the answer to
| affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are
| pointless.
|
| I don't follow at all. The argument that vacancy taxes are
| pointless is that there just aren't many vacancies compared to
| the enormous housing shortage. We could tax vacant apartments
| 1M$/day and not move the needle on pricing.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That would move the needle on pricing... Upwards. By a lot.
| The only way landlords could afford that would be to get the
| tenants to pay for insurance against that kind of disaster,
| and also to include clauses against leaving until a new
| tenant had signed to replace you.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Alternatively, they could cease to become landlords, by
| ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out
| the units, or buy it and actually live there.
|
| Obviously 1M/day is ridiculous, but even in that obscene
| case there are conceivably financial institutions that
| would be willing to take the real estate off your hands -
| or you can gift it to the federal government, which can
| sell it to someone who actually wants to live there rather
| than contribute to the constriction of supply.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Sounds like a great way to make owning and building
| apartment buildings let's attractive.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _by ceding the properties to someone who will actually
| rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there._
|
| Unfortunately, the vacancies I am describing are
| unavoidable, because people do not rent apartments
| forever and empty apartments cannot instantly be leased.
|
| > _there are conceivably financial institutions that
| would be willing to take the real estate off your hands_
|
| And pay the vacancy tax themselves? They'd be in the same
| position as the previous owners.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| If the taxes are not the obvious hyperbole of 1M/day,
| there are equilibrium options which result in the
| scenarios I laid out - and _even accepting that
| ridiculous premise_ , there is the escape hatch for
| giving it the federal government the day-of, who
| obviously don't care about paying taxes to themselves.
|
| The point is that there are logical paths where even
| punitive (or intentionally ridiculous) levels of vacancy
| taxes result in a decrease in real prices.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _there are equilibrium options which result in the
| scenarios I laid out_
|
| Yes, but they are that the tenants pay the taxes.
| Capitalists are free to move their money anywhere they
| want to keep the return on investment up, but people must
| live somewhere.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Further, a vacancy tax creates a risk that if too much
| housing gets build I end up holding the bag. So it creates
| some amount of disincentive to build or own housing. Just
| think about owning an apartment building in Detroit in 2008.
| Everyone moves away. Now I have no tenants and get punished
| by a tax. I'm already paying a mortgage or opportunity cost
| for not having my wealth in another form.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the
| vacancy tax
|
| Hum... Yeah. The name for a tax that nobody pays is exactly
| "pointless".
| blowski wrote:
| If the aim of the tax is to raise revenue, then it's
| pointless. If it's to change behaviour, then perhaps it has
| worked.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If there was never anybody to pay for it, like the GP said,
| no, it didn't.
|
| But if people don't pay because there was actually somebody
| doing the bad behavior and they changed, then it would be
| useful.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > If there is truly no housing vacancy, nobody will pay the
| vacancy tax, and NIMBYs have weakened their position by losing
| an excuse to block housing construction.
|
| Is 1,893 vacancies in the entire city of Vancouver close enough
| to "nobody" for you? Is it enough to fix the crisis and render
| housing affordable again?
| Retric wrote:
| Don't assume the only options are a 100% fix or do nothing
| dropping prices by even 1% makes a significant difference.
|
| Further these taxes aren't about the every day situation they
| are to get the market to respond to temporary dips which
| helps deflate bubbles and keep the market healthy.
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