This is really good! I'd love to see more breakdowns of leftists (or dare I say SOCIALIST) urban planning like this. This helps give more data to some of the work I do in my city trying to fight mass evictions so properties can be remodeled or improved. It's not that residents disagree with repairs and upgrades to the apartments they live in, they've often been begging for that for years, but when developers do it they expect to kick out the poorer residents and market to richer folks and the affordable housing market is so tight there is no where left to go. This also explains why a co-worker of mine, who makes a middle income salary, has found it impossible to find a new place to rent after her old lease expired despite my city (Atlanta, GA) having TONS of new united being built all over the place. Basically all of those new units are high rent/purchase price and got rid of affordable ones. I'm not against building in the abstract, we definitely need it if we ever want to have a hope of something besides infinite urban sprawl, but market rate building isn't working for current residents and it barely even works for the transplants coming in. Of course the Faircloth amendment on the federal level and Georgia's state level ban on rent control means these things can't just be local fights, we've got to tackle all levels of the US government to make any progress.
Your channel has really impacted me. I thought I got urban planning and how socialism and capitalism impacts it, but I was stuck in that yimby mindset. You've genuinely made me want to work towards a Marxist understanding of urban planning
One issue my county has is a “keep it rural” movement in the county commission that says no to every development. They act like it’s keeping out Californians, but what it’s doing is making it to expensive for young families to live here unless they have California type money.
Dude your videos are highly underrated. I make videos (mostly on another platform) about Vancouver's development history and this pattern is so obvious it's criminal that people dont notice it.
There's a remarkable lack of diversity in Urbanist RUclips. And it's not just politically. It's a lack across the full spectrum of all the kinds of people that are out there. Everyone's politics is within the same range. It's usually no further left than maybe winking towards DSA type stuff at most. The bulk of folks are white (primarily though not exclusively, men) with liberal to liberal progressive poltics. And certain issues make that really obvious, e.g. attitudes about housing or using law enforcement for urbanist ends. While I might agree with a lot of their ends, I often find myself cringing at the means to get to them. I think *a lot* more thought should go into "just transition" rather than individualizing and moralizing these urban problems.
This video kinda made something click for me that has been bothering me with a lot of urbanism and yimbyism. I personally believe most yimbys are motivated by the right ideas, we need more housing, but a lot of the potential in the movement has been sapped by the current institutions and structures to push their frustrations towards only the policies that would benefit them, without the changes that would benefit us all. It feels like the discussion ends at upzoning and building. Not who is getting built for, and where are we upzoning. I see most zoning policy in the US as something closer to regulatory capture than anything else, and in many places could be very helpful in adding housing supply. But without changing some of the fundamental structures, we won't really solve anything, and will really just push problems down the road a bit while probably only upzoning areas where the vulnerable live, not the million dollar homes in more key locations to build more housing. Without a push to repeal Faircloth, and build more social and public housing nothing will be solved. Any urbanist or yimby that doesn't include that in one of their key goals shouldn't really be taken seriously, and are really just being used to push an agenda that will likely happen anyways. This all goes without mentioning that most of the stuff that is being built is garbage, and will not be livable in the near future given the realities of climate change. We are wasting precious time and carbon emission to build housing that's going to need to be rebuilt or abandoned as wildfire smoke chokes our cities and extreme temperatures wreck havoc on our utilities. Building more one bedroom apartments in huge towers downtown is not a sustainable way to live, and only caters to the very young and wealthy.
thanks for your videos. i've been going down a housing rabbit hole and it's hard to find analysis from a leftist perspective. the YIMBYs are trying to turn me into a neolib
Another Wonderful 🌹🌸🌹thing about the rental market now is that even those cheaper apartments have a higher bar to get into beyond the rent itself. Low income has income caps so if you make a lil too much for low income, some say 200 dollars more in rent may want tenants who qualify double or triple the rent. This makes moving without a high paying job or no job more difficult. That’s not even getting into fees for applications, paying double for down payments that some landlords expect, trash fees, landscaping, waste and pest extermination (seperate from trash for some), that 1200 dollar apartment is unaffordable or not even available to purchase.
This. Honestly I don't care how unrealistic it is, I always argue that no we don't need to build more, we need to fill the empty housing that we already have and subdivide giant empty mansions just sitting around. We do actually have the housing already, we just need to regulate the landlords and the corporations that own them into the fucking dirt.
The breakdown of 421A in New York seems off. Your figures would suggest that the market apartments cost the developer 1.6 million per apartment, while the city could have built deeply affordable units for 13000 dollars each.
Ah, fair. Tho, even accounting for the correction, it still seems optimistic. In my locality public housing costs twice as much to construct as privately built. Don't ask me why.
oh my god this video taught me about faircloth and I'm so mad right now jesus fucking christ. How the hell did this ever make it as a bill? I'm so mad it's insane
Weird request I know, but I've written and am producing/directing a musical that imagines Robin Hood as an unhouse anarchist organizer and deals with some matters of housing development, squatters rights, and housing coops... and I'd love to ask you to read it and offer feedback. Like I said, I know, weird request.
Thing to consider: Since the height of the housing boom material costs have shot through the roof in many places. I live in a semi rural area of canada and work with contractors, city people, rural folk etc. I could before go to a wholesaler and buy plywood for next to nothing, now if you want to buy many of these materials you basically have to be some sort of contractor (in fact many places now wont even sell to you unless you are even if you've been buying from them for years) the costs are just so high for material that it's not worth it. Contractors take this same mentality to the extreme, that theres no sense risking their business and position by buying this high cost material to maybe break. My brother had a house built and we were astounded at how much perfectly usable material was wasted, even if they had entirely salvaged and used every scrap I couldnt see them making up for the costs in today's market. This is also why contractors are eager to get contracts for very high cost jobs. Luxury condos etc. Because they are a guaranteed profit, it helps that most cities care more about keeping property values high than actually meeting demand. The amount of times I've seen cities call for affordable housing only to end up with million dollar condos and pat themselves on the back for solving the housing crisis is obnoxious. And owners would never renovate these lots for low income housing, in fact them doing so would only cost them more. To me the best thing to do is try to bring down material costs. A good chunk of contractors will never let go of high profit deals on luxury development, but if there is impetus for smaller contractors to make that up it helps a lot. The big issue is that low income developers make usually single family low density housing, and luxury developers make low density rises like you showed. There is a missing middle in some respects. In areas near me they a couple years back built dozens of 6 story high density low income housing units, then the economy fell off and the prices for everything went through the roof.
I develop housing in CA and I got into it so so could try to build affordable housing. But I can’t build for less than $400 a sqft… meaning it’s impossible to build a 1,200 sqft house for under $500k… I gave up on anything but luxury because I am poor and needed to first make some money before we try to build something more affordable. But I just do not see us building affordable unless it’s subsidized tremendously
Great video. Excellent research and documentation of claims. How about if we do just expropriate all that vacant housing instead, though, and solve the affordable housing crisis and environmental impact of overbuilding in one gesture. Meanwhile, yes, time to repeal the Faircloth Amendment and push for public housing in the US. Our housing policy is a global disgrace.
I certainly don't disagree with the notion that governments would do a lot more to fund social housing, but I think you're going a bit too far in disgusting the benefits of increased zoning. I wouldn't want zoning laws demolished entirely, but removing all low density zoning and replacing it with low-middle density, where 3 storey apartments and row houses are allowed, would make such a huge difference in many ways. It has pretty obvious benefits in terms of housing supply, but it also has so many more wide-spread benefits in terms of enabling more efficient public transport, allowing people to have a lower dependence on expensive car ownership just to be able to live their life. If you add mixed-use zoning into the mix you're also enormously helping out local small businesses which are currently artificially held back in favour of large national and international chains. We absolutely need more public housing, but this should be mixed-use medium-density development mixed in with permitting the same kinds of development to be run by the private sector, by eliminating artificial restrictions against that.
I think if I have one thematic gripe, it's that you don't consider that big developers like high barriers to entry to keep out competition. If the only way to get approval to build is to negotiate with politicians behind closed doors for years, even without corruption (big if), big developers will be at an advantage. That's why big developers don't push for broad upzonings. That'd open up too much competition. We see this in Ontario now. The Conservative Premier is pushing a bill that makes it easier to build towers next to transit and greenfield sprawl. Coincidentally these are the types of housing built by big mega donors. But it's notable how he didn't upzone for multiplexes and low-rise apartments in single-detached neighbourhoods. It's not that developers don't want to build these types of housing, it's that it's less profitable for big developers to build this type of housing. Yes it's not particularily leftist to push for reforms to increase competition, but broad upzoning is not some policy big developers want at all.
I think you mis-state the cost of 421a, the report says 22.2 billion, not 2.2 billion. But the conversion from that stat to a number of deeply affordable homes assumes that other current funding streams like the LIHTC chip in at the same rate as they currently do. So I think it's a little misleading for how much deeply affordable housing costs.
not only that, but they didn't build 2MM homes/month in the early 1970's. That was the annualized pace. Is this radical planner a planner at all, have any idea of economics, or just into the politics of urban life?
Your blog post/stack piece as a “source” to discredit filtering on housing.. man, that article is wild. We have phrases like "...supply-sider psychosis", "The obfuscation on display here is actually pretty complex by the standards of neoclassical dullards...", and "...the crocodile tears of a capital accumulation fetishist". Those are some, uh, fighting words, to say the least. >The study assumes the region is closed. When an apartment becomes available, the study assumes someone already living in the study region will inhabit it. The study does not account for people moving to the region from somewhere else This is all pretty well covered in the intro of the article. Specifically, “Rosenthal (2014) and Weicher, Eggers, and Moumen (2016) find that new units slowly become more affordable over time, particularly after entering the rental stock. Anenberg and Kung (2018) use a neighborhood choice model to estimate extremely small price effects of new housing. Their result may be driven by the assumption that each new unit induces a new migrant to a city, which Nathanson (2019) relaxes in a calibrated spatial equilibrium model, finding a much larger effect. More broadly, Piazzesi, Schneider, and Stroebel (forthcoming) use a model of a segmented housing market to show that a localized shock’s broader effect depends heavily on connections between the shocked area and the rest of the market.” Your intuition should be that the effect of new housing construction on affordability within a region is blunted by the elasticity of demand for housing in that region. I would note though that you could simply expand your definition of "region" and find that new housing in San Francisco frees up low-income housing in San Francisco and Sacramento. In no case does that critique imply filtering doesn't work, but it does change how big a magnitude of a price effect you'd get if you built more housing. There are other things that effect the magnitude of the effect -- levels of income inequality, type of housing construction, etc, all matter, but the direction is consistent: more housing -> a looser housing market. I would also mention, however, that it's not like the model is ignorant of this; in Mast's baseline specifications he allows chains to fail for any reason at a rate equal to the rental vacancy rate. You can quibble with whether this rate is high enough, but to say moving chains ending is "unaccounted for" is a misreading of the paper. >The study assumes lower cost apartments are undesirable. When a higher cost apartment is built it will be immediately occupied. This would mean that tenants of lower cost apartments always vacate those apartments once something more expensive is available. This is a misreading of the model. The model says that lower quality apartments are undesirable and that landlords have to charge lower rent to get people to live in them (relative to higher quality rentals). The intuition is that if a new 100 unit luxury apartment pops up then the landlord of that building has to induce people to move into that apartment, which she does by pricing them slightly below the market rate for that type of unit. People from middle quality units see the lower prices and move into these units, which creates a moving chain, and so on. If the lower price doesn't induce people to move then the luxury landlord would either lose money or be forced to lower prices until people were willing to move in. Overall, I think the writer has a pretty clear ideological bent and a poor understanding of the papers he is trying to evaluate.
The answer to getting affordable housing is simple. According to socialist theory, being a property developer is easy and risk-free. Therefore socialists should all immediately become property developers and build affordable housing with their own money and then use the endless vast profits to build housing for the poor.
@@Justwatchpro Yes that would be great. If we put a wealth tax on land we would get loads of money to build free houses for people who do not feel they should work for themselves. I personally should run the fund and decide who gets the money. What could possibly go wrong?
This is a poorly researched video. We need diverse dense housing, each meeting requirements by goals met. Example, Market Rate + Affordable + Social etc. Moreover, we need tenant protections. #yimby
You clearly didn’t watch this video all the way through or if you’re like most yimbys, you didn’t watch it at all. I didn’t recommend that we stop building market rate housing. The video is about how we don’t have a social housing program in America and we need to work to reinstall it to offer an alternative to our completely market-based system.
@@gusbreslauer713 You better believe if we filled every super market with beluga caviar it would see a drop in price. Which has happened to many luxury foods over history. That black pepper on your table used to be only affordable to nobility and the bourgeoisie. Now its so easy to produce and transport its on every table in the developed world and most of the developing.
Excellent video, very well researched. Can't wait for more. I love your perspective, I was wondering if you'd be interested to cover other aspects about housing and development. For example, applying permaculture principles for new and retrofitted housing. Like what David Holgrem is advocating for, or even what "utopian" eco-villages have thought about, like things from The Venus Project or One Community. If you go down that route, I'd love an exploration of what could be possible, like arcologies. Though it seems sci-fi, you could frame it though a criticism of NEOM, by showing what a more "grounded" and realistic project could look like, while still reimagining a much less damaging impact on our environment and a much better standard of life. For example, though it's a very "amateurish" video, this is a very inspiring exploration of this possibility: ruclips.net/video/iV3v80g9nxI/видео.html. But more importantly, talking about city design from an ecological and resource use perspective is really enlightening. Given that most cities become a deathtrap once fossile fuels become unavailable, it would be awesome to see the retrofit or recommendations to avert a mass exodus from cities if supply chains break, oil prices soar, food or water become unavailable, centralized power distribution breaks, and so many more problems currently happening in some places already. Andrew Millison explored a few of those possibilities, like water capture or retention with the equivalent of urban "swales", but the more we look at those problems, the more it become a unified, all-encompassing systemic issue that we need to adress: reconciliating our material footprint in a world where natural resources are less available/destroyed. Basically I'd love to see a re-imagining of our housing once profits are not the chief consideration globally and we are on the down-slope of the easy access to the labor of fossile fuels. This mean much shorter supply chains, the need for resiliency, access and production of less stupid use of resources, and ideally ecological regeneration. For this stuff, channels like "Leaf of Life", "Andrew Millison", "Nate Hagens", and many more explore these things. Btw, given your channel theme, you might like to listen to "Cities After", a podcast from Democracy at Work, which is overlapping exactly with your content, and might give you some inspiration or reactions.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
I no longer call it Affordable Housing. It's Equitable Housing for me. Affordable Housing is now a wall street real estate term.
This is really good! I'd love to see more breakdowns of leftists (or dare I say SOCIALIST) urban planning like this. This helps give more data to some of the work I do in my city trying to fight mass evictions so properties can be remodeled or improved. It's not that residents disagree with repairs and upgrades to the apartments they live in, they've often been begging for that for years, but when developers do it they expect to kick out the poorer residents and market to richer folks and the affordable housing market is so tight there is no where left to go. This also explains why a co-worker of mine, who makes a middle income salary, has found it impossible to find a new place to rent after her old lease expired despite my city (Atlanta, GA) having TONS of new united being built all over the place. Basically all of those new units are high rent/purchase price and got rid of affordable ones. I'm not against building in the abstract, we definitely need it if we ever want to have a hope of something besides infinite urban sprawl, but market rate building isn't working for current residents and it barely even works for the transplants coming in.
Of course the Faircloth amendment on the federal level and Georgia's state level ban on rent control means these things can't just be local fights, we've got to tackle all levels of the US government to make any progress.
Your channel has really impacted me. I thought I got urban planning and how socialism and capitalism impacts it, but I was stuck in that yimby mindset. You've genuinely made me want to work towards a Marxist understanding of urban planning
One issue my county has is a “keep it rural” movement in the county commission that says no to every development. They act like it’s keeping out Californians, but what it’s doing is making it to expensive for young families to live here unless they have California type money.
Dude your videos are highly underrated. I make videos (mostly on another platform) about Vancouver's development history and this pattern is so obvious it's criminal that people dont notice it.
Videos like these are really important. The layman just does know these things and will end up advocating for ineffectual solutions.
This is so understandable for someone like me. Thank you.
There's a remarkable lack of diversity in Urbanist RUclips. And it's not just politically. It's a lack across the full spectrum of all the kinds of people that are out there.
Everyone's politics is within the same range. It's usually no further left than maybe winking towards DSA type stuff at most. The bulk of folks are white (primarily though not exclusively, men) with liberal to liberal progressive poltics. And certain issues make that really obvious, e.g. attitudes about housing or using law enforcement for urbanist ends.
While I might agree with a lot of their ends, I often find myself cringing at the means to get to them. I think *a lot* more thought should go into "just transition" rather than individualizing and moralizing these urban problems.
This video kinda made something click for me that has been bothering me with a lot of urbanism and yimbyism.
I personally believe most yimbys are motivated by the right ideas, we need more housing, but a lot of the potential in the movement has been sapped by the current institutions and structures to push their frustrations towards only the policies that would benefit them, without the changes that would benefit us all.
It feels like the discussion ends at upzoning and building. Not who is getting built for, and where are we upzoning.
I see most zoning policy in the US as something closer to regulatory capture than anything else, and in many places could be very helpful in adding housing supply. But without changing some of the fundamental structures, we won't really solve anything, and will really just push problems down the road a bit while probably only upzoning areas where the vulnerable live, not the million dollar homes in more key locations to build more housing.
Without a push to repeal Faircloth, and build more social and public housing nothing will be solved. Any urbanist or yimby that doesn't include that in one of their key goals shouldn't really be taken seriously, and are really just being used to push an agenda that will likely happen anyways.
This all goes without mentioning that most of the stuff that is being built is garbage, and will not be livable in the near future given the realities of climate change. We are wasting precious time and carbon emission to build housing that's going to need to be rebuilt or abandoned as wildfire smoke chokes our cities and extreme temperatures wreck havoc on our utilities.
Building more one bedroom apartments in huge towers downtown is not a sustainable way to live, and only caters to the very young and wealthy.
Your channel is so good man. Keep it up
" was started by nixon and accelerated by regan"
thanks for your videos. i've been going down a housing rabbit hole and it's hard to find analysis from a leftist perspective. the YIMBYs are trying to turn me into a neolib
Caught yourself in time!
Everything I've been screaming into the void about since the pandemic, so glad this channel exists.
Thank you for this video, it was really informative.
Another Wonderful 🌹🌸🌹thing about the rental market now is that even those cheaper apartments have a higher bar to get into beyond the rent itself. Low income has income caps so if you make a lil too much for low income, some say 200 dollars more in rent may want tenants who qualify double or triple the rent. This makes moving without a high paying job or no job more difficult. That’s not even getting into fees for applications, paying double for down payments that some landlords expect, trash fees, landscaping, waste and pest extermination (seperate from trash for some), that 1200 dollar apartment is unaffordable or not even available to purchase.
Fantastic- same problems in Canada. Thank you so much! Much needed education. What is a pithy response to those who say ‘free market’?
We have almost the exact same problems as the US except they are on steroids.
"the market has had decades to solve this problem, and hasn't even tried"
This.
Honestly I don't care how unrealistic it is, I always argue that no we don't need to build more, we need to fill the empty housing that we already have and subdivide giant empty mansions just sitting around. We do actually have the housing already, we just need to regulate the landlords and the corporations that own them into the fucking dirt.
The breakdown of 421A in New York seems off. Your figures would suggest that the market apartments cost the developer 1.6 million per apartment, while the city could have built deeply affordable units for 13000 dollars each.
read the description - that was a script error
Ah, fair. Tho, even accounting for the correction, it still seems optimistic.
In my locality public housing costs twice as much to construct as privately built. Don't ask me why.
Even in inflated prices
today, a $10K - $15K,
1500 sq.ft., 3 bd. 2 ba.
house is doable...
Thank you! Omg, a small window of sanity!
Excellent and necessary video. Also, your Evan Mast wisecrack made me laugh out loud.
oh my god this video taught me about faircloth and I'm so mad right now jesus fucking christ. How the hell did this ever make it as a bill? I'm so mad it's insane
Thank you! Subscribed!
Weird request I know, but I've written and am producing/directing a musical that imagines Robin Hood as an unhouse anarchist organizer and deals with some matters of housing development, squatters rights, and housing coops... and I'd love to ask you to read it and offer feedback. Like I said, I know, weird request.
If it's any consolation, things are not much better here in the UK. But I don't suppose it is...
I just found this channel, it’s fucking excellent.
Thing to consider: Since the height of the housing boom material costs have shot through the roof in many places. I live in a semi rural area of canada and work with contractors, city people, rural folk etc. I could before go to a wholesaler and buy plywood for next to nothing, now if you want to buy many of these materials you basically have to be some sort of contractor (in fact many places now wont even sell to you unless you are even if you've been buying from them for years) the costs are just so high for material that it's not worth it. Contractors take this same mentality to the extreme, that theres no sense risking their business and position by buying this high cost material to maybe break. My brother had a house built and we were astounded at how much perfectly usable material was wasted, even if they had entirely salvaged and used every scrap I couldnt see them making up for the costs in today's market.
This is also why contractors are eager to get contracts for very high cost jobs. Luxury condos etc. Because they are a guaranteed profit, it helps that most cities care more about keeping property values high than actually meeting demand. The amount of times I've seen cities call for affordable housing only to end up with million dollar condos and pat themselves on the back for solving the housing crisis is obnoxious. And owners would never renovate these lots for low income housing, in fact them doing so would only cost them more.
To me the best thing to do is try to bring down material costs. A good chunk of contractors will never let go of high profit deals on luxury development, but if there is impetus for smaller contractors to make that up it helps a lot. The big issue is that low income developers make usually single family low density housing, and luxury developers make low density rises like you showed. There is a missing middle in some respects. In areas near me they a couple years back built dozens of 6 story high density low income housing units, then the economy fell off and the prices for everything went through the roof.
I develop housing in CA and I got into it so so could try to build affordable housing. But I can’t build for less than $400 a sqft… meaning it’s impossible to build a 1,200 sqft house for under $500k… I gave up on anything but luxury because I am poor and needed to first make some money before we try to build something more affordable. But I just do not see us building affordable unless it’s subsidized tremendously
The housing laws (prop 13 for one) and politics of housing in California is a book's worth of material. It's a mess.
Levittown
Great video. Excellent research and documentation of claims. How about if we do just expropriate all that vacant housing instead, though, and solve the affordable housing crisis and environmental impact of overbuilding in one gesture. Meanwhile, yes, time to repeal the Faircloth Amendment and push for public housing in the US. Our housing policy is a global disgrace.
I certainly don't disagree with the notion that governments would do a lot more to fund social housing, but I think you're going a bit too far in disgusting the benefits of increased zoning. I wouldn't want zoning laws demolished entirely, but removing all low density zoning and replacing it with low-middle density, where 3 storey apartments and row houses are allowed, would make such a huge difference in many ways. It has pretty obvious benefits in terms of housing supply, but it also has so many more wide-spread benefits in terms of enabling more efficient public transport, allowing people to have a lower dependence on expensive car ownership just to be able to live their life. If you add mixed-use zoning into the mix you're also enormously helping out local small businesses which are currently artificially held back in favour of large national and international chains.
We absolutely need more public housing, but this should be mixed-use medium-density development mixed in with permitting the same kinds of development to be run by the private sector, by eliminating artificial restrictions against that.
You're wrong. There were no housing shortages before land-use zoning.
I think if I have one thematic gripe, it's that you don't consider that big developers like high barriers to entry to keep out competition.
If the only way to get approval to build is to negotiate with politicians behind closed doors for years, even without corruption (big if), big developers will be at an advantage.
That's why big developers don't push for broad upzonings. That'd open up too much competition. We see this in Ontario now. The Conservative Premier is pushing a bill that makes it easier to build towers next to transit and greenfield sprawl. Coincidentally these are the types of housing built by big mega donors. But it's notable how he didn't upzone for multiplexes and low-rise apartments in single-detached neighbourhoods. It's not that developers don't want to build these types of housing, it's that it's less profitable for big developers to build this type of housing.
Yes it's not particularily leftist to push for reforms to increase competition, but broad upzoning is not some policy big developers want at all.
No need to complicate this Land value tax solves this.
I think you mis-state the cost of 421a, the report says 22.2 billion, not 2.2 billion.
But the conversion from that stat to a number of deeply affordable homes assumes that other current funding streams like the LIHTC chip in at the same rate as they currently do. So I think it's a little misleading for how much deeply affordable housing costs.
not only that, but they didn't build 2MM homes/month in the early 1970's. That was the annualized pace. Is this radical planner a planner at all, have any idea of economics, or just into the politics of urban life?
Your blog post/stack piece as a “source” to discredit filtering on housing.. man, that article is wild. We have phrases like "...supply-sider psychosis", "The obfuscation on display here is actually pretty complex by the standards of neoclassical dullards...", and "...the crocodile tears of a capital accumulation fetishist". Those are some, uh, fighting words, to say the least.
>The study assumes the region is closed. When an apartment becomes available, the study assumes someone already living in the study region will inhabit it. The study does not account for people moving to the region from somewhere else
This is all pretty well covered in the intro of the article. Specifically,
“Rosenthal (2014) and Weicher, Eggers, and Moumen (2016) find that new units slowly become more affordable over time, particularly after entering the rental stock. Anenberg and Kung (2018) use a neighborhood choice model to estimate extremely small price effects of new housing. Their result may be driven by the assumption that each new unit induces a new migrant to a city, which Nathanson (2019) relaxes in a calibrated spatial equilibrium model, finding a much larger effect. More broadly, Piazzesi, Schneider, and Stroebel (forthcoming) use a model of a segmented housing market to show that a localized shock’s broader effect depends heavily on connections between the shocked area and the rest of the market.”
Your intuition should be that the effect of new housing construction on affordability within a region is blunted by the elasticity of demand for housing in that region. I would note though that you could simply expand your definition of "region" and find that new housing in San Francisco frees up low-income housing in San Francisco and Sacramento. In no case does that critique imply filtering doesn't work, but it does change how big a magnitude of a price effect you'd get if you built more housing. There are other things that effect the magnitude of the effect -- levels of income inequality, type of housing construction, etc, all matter, but the direction is consistent: more housing -> a looser housing market.
I would also mention, however, that it's not like the model is ignorant of this; in Mast's baseline specifications he allows chains to fail for any reason at a rate equal to the rental vacancy rate. You can quibble with whether this rate is high enough, but to say moving chains ending is "unaccounted for" is a misreading of the paper.
>The study assumes lower cost apartments are undesirable. When a higher cost apartment is built it will be immediately occupied. This would mean that tenants of lower cost apartments always vacate those apartments once something more expensive is available.
This is a misreading of the model. The model says that lower quality apartments are undesirable and that landlords have to charge lower rent to get people to live in them (relative to higher quality rentals). The intuition is that if a new 100 unit luxury apartment pops up then the landlord of that building has to induce people to move into that apartment, which she does by pricing them slightly below the market rate for that type of unit. People from middle quality units see the lower prices and move into these units, which creates a moving chain, and so on. If the lower price doesn't induce people to move then the luxury landlord would either lose money or be forced to lower prices until people were willing to move in.
Overall, I think the writer has a pretty clear ideological bent and a poor understanding of the papers he is trying to evaluate.
Would you be interested in having a discussion on this topic? I think we both want the same goal in creating more affordable housing in our lifetime.
I think more Greenfield Development would help with affordability
The answer to getting affordable housing is simple. According to socialist theory, being a property developer is easy and risk-free. Therefore socialists should all immediately become property developers and build affordable housing with their own money and then use the endless vast profits to build housing for the poor.
A Land-Value Tax would help make this a reality.
@@Justwatchpro Yes that would be great. If we put a wealth tax on land we would get loads of money to build free houses for people who do not feel they should work for themselves. I personally should run the fund and decide who gets the money. What could possibly go wrong?
This is a poorly researched video. We need diverse dense housing, each meeting requirements by goals met. Example, Market Rate + Affordable + Social etc. Moreover, we need tenant protections. #yimby
You clearly didn’t watch this video all the way through or if you’re like most yimbys, you didn’t watch it at all. I didn’t recommend that we stop building market rate housing. The video is about how we don’t have a social housing program in America and we need to work to reinstall it to offer an alternative to our completely market-based system.
We should make farmers sell at a loss. That will make food more affordable.
what if we filled supermarkets with Beluga caviar that will free up other affordable food for the hungry to eat
@@gusbreslauer713 You better believe if we filled every super market with beluga caviar it would see a drop in price. Which has happened to many luxury foods over history. That black pepper on your table used to be only affordable to nobility and the bourgeoisie. Now its so easy to produce and transport its on every table in the developed world and most of the developing.
Excellent video, very well researched. Can't wait for more.
I love your perspective, I was wondering if you'd be interested to cover other aspects about housing and development.
For example, applying permaculture principles for new and retrofitted housing. Like what David Holgrem is advocating for, or even what "utopian" eco-villages have thought about, like things from The Venus Project or One Community. If you go down that route, I'd love an exploration of what could be possible, like arcologies. Though it seems sci-fi, you could frame it though a criticism of NEOM, by showing what a more "grounded" and realistic project could look like, while still reimagining a much less damaging impact on our environment and a much better standard of life. For example, though it's a very "amateurish" video, this is a very inspiring exploration of this possibility: ruclips.net/video/iV3v80g9nxI/видео.html.
But more importantly, talking about city design from an ecological and resource use perspective is really enlightening. Given that most cities become a deathtrap once fossile fuels become unavailable, it would be awesome to see the retrofit or recommendations to avert a mass exodus from cities if supply chains break, oil prices soar, food or water become unavailable, centralized power distribution breaks, and so many more problems currently happening in some places already. Andrew Millison explored a few of those possibilities, like water capture or retention with the equivalent of urban "swales", but the more we look at those problems, the more it become a unified, all-encompassing systemic issue that we need to adress: reconciliating our material footprint in a world where natural resources are less available/destroyed.
Basically I'd love to see a re-imagining of our housing once profits are not the chief consideration globally and we are on the down-slope of the easy access to the labor of fossile fuels. This mean much shorter supply chains, the need for resiliency, access and production of less stupid use of resources, and ideally ecological regeneration. For this stuff, channels like "Leaf of Life", "Andrew Millison", "Nate Hagens", and many more explore these things.
Btw, given your channel theme, you might like to listen to "Cities After", a podcast from Democracy at Work, which is overlapping exactly with your content, and might give you some inspiration or reactions.
Even in inflated prices
today, a $10K - $15K,
1500 sq.ft., 3 bd. 2 ba.
house is doable...