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Comment by dcposch | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I love about Palladium (and closely related, Samo Burja's newsletter) is the depth of research.

Like the detail that one of the most egregious episodes from California HSR involved a Spanish company that performed excellently on rail projects in Spain. Overall, this piece makes a strong case that the problem is specifically NIMBYism and loss of government institutional capacity.

I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better. The current situation looks dire. Obviously a charismatic leader with a broad anti-NIMBY mandate would go a ways at getting competent people to want to work in government. You saw that succeed on a small scale with orgs like US Digital Service.

The elephant, after that, is merit-based pay and promotion. Someone needs to sell this to the public. RN literally random cops and plumbers make mid six figures thru overtime while the directors of $100b mega-project are low-energy lifers making less than that. That's not gonna work.

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I'm very much anti-NIMBY, but I've had a hard time getting involved with YIMBY organizations. It feels like a lot of YIMBY stuff is good but it always feels like there's a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents. Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?

Also please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't dug too deep into YIMBY aside from surface level digging.

> Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?

I think you're probably wrong, yes. Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it. They pass it down to family members. They unofficially sublet it for years. They are not particularly poor, they just are paying below market for rent so why would they ever give up that sweet deal? And therefore one rental unit is off the market, and the rest of us are competing for the remaining apartments and subsidizing the low rental unit. I would prefer we let rents equalize based on supply and demand, and the government just supplement the rent of low income individuals.

> Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it.

Yes, because they're rare, and the only way to not be uprooted. How are you posing this as a bad thing? If there were more rent control, then this wouldn't be a problem. Why should rent get to rise so drastically above inflation? The core reason it does today is because people are buying them endlessly as investments, and as the property exchanges hands at completely arbitrary values, the new owners have to raise rents.

Pretty sure you have this backward. Landlords don’t get to decide how much people are willing to pay to rent. They charge the market clearing price (or as close to it as possible).

This isn’t based on what they paid for the property, though the value of a property will at least in part be based on the income it can generate.

If rents seem too high, it is because demand has outstripped supply, and the marginal renter in the market has more money than you do. If you want rent to come down for everyone, you can:

1. Reduce demand by making the area less desirable.

2. Increase supply by making more rental units.

Rent control is just a lottery that benefits the people lucky enough to get it at the expense of everyone else.

I had a rent controlled apartment for 5 years in San Francisco. Which, incidentally, I was subletting from someone who had moved to LA but didn’t want to lose his place in case he came back. In no way was I deserving of special financial treatment, I had a high paid tech job, and a wife making decent money. Anyone else who moved into my neighborhood was paying literally double when I left.

It was nice to randomly get a $20k/year windfall, but did not feel like sound housing policy.

Sounds kind of similar to the idea of bringing gas prices down through a "gas tax holiday"...

Rent control is well studied. Several bad things happen in rent controlled areas. Non-controlled rents rise. Gentrification accelerates outside of the protected buildings. People live somewhere they don’t necessarily want to be. Units are converted into lower density housing to drive up price. Commutes lengthen. If the city becomes less of a draw in the future, the controls don’t allow graceful lowering of prices.

In contrast to most economic issues, rent control has robust bipartisan opposition.

Rent control needs to be implemented well to work. Badly implemented rant control doesn't work. Everything you're describing comes from rent control not being universal, to prices being allowed to increase between tenants, and to zoning laws allowing the construction of low density housing in high density areas instead of only allowing low and medium density.

You can encourage graceful lowering of prices by putting in inoccupancy taxes.

Rent control is easy to fuck up, and almost every place in the US that implements it half asses it by either making it only apply to part of the city, allowing unlimited rent increases between tenants, disallow reasonable rent increases for improvements, and so on. Rent control has to be implemented well to work. There are plenty of examples of cities where it works wonderfully, and plenty of places where there is multipartisan consensus in favour of them.

Occupancy taxes and codified reasonable increases can’t create a dynamic rent market. Even if an entire city were to be put under a construction freeze, which would be incredibly unhealthy, problems would spill into suburbs. The rest is just re-assertions and a wish for perfect city planning.

The purpose of inoccupancy taxes and reasonable increases is to remove any disincentive to move out from your rent controlled appartment. So as long as there is not massive influx into the city outpacing constriction, there will be a dynamic rent market.

I don't understand what you're getting at with construction freezes and so on. The basic principle is that badly implemented rent control in badly palnned cities can exacerbate problems, while well designed rent control in well planned cities can solve problems. It's not a magic bullet but its not a curse either.

Construction freeze probably wasn’t the best term. You were saying that workarounds to increase revenue wouldn’t be permitted and those would have to be comprehensively restrictive.

This is a big topic; I guess I’d say to just read more about how it’s gone historically and why “just do it better” isn’t viable. Appreciate the zeal.

There are no needs for workarounds to prevent an increase in revenue. There are no restrictions on improvements or additional construction as long as the rent increases are justified by the cost incurred. Revenue can be increased as long profit stays reasonable.

I've read a lot on how it's gone historically, and you'll even find economics literature over natural experiments showing positive outcomes for rent control.

I gave you a set of characteristics of well implemented rent control laws. If you could show me an example of where those failed I'd appreciate it, because I can give you examples of where those succeeded and are still working.

> How are you posing this as a bad thing?

It should be self-evidently a bad thing that a small number of people benefit from artificially low prices, up to 1/3rd of whom are not low income (from what I've read).

I don't have a strong opinion on whether rent should be "allowed to rise above inflation", though I don't think you understand how pricing works in a market system. There is a market clearing price, which is not dictated by the price that the owners buy it for.

I'm not opposed to more radical solutions to housing distribution, as a lifelong renter I'm certainly not happy about the money I pay in rent annually, but I don't see how the status quo of rent control does much to help control prices.

I also pay a very high rent currently, but my landlord also loses money on the building maintenance and upkeep, as well as regulatory compliance costs. So it's not that simple.

> It should be self-evidently a bad thing that a small number of people benefit from artificially low prices

1. Nothing artificial about it.

2. Just expand the fraction of rent control and more people will enjoy it.

3. If X% of renters are in rent-control apartments, they don't contend with us on non-rent-controlled properties. That's not a huge effect but it's _an_ effect.

4. "My landlord also loses money" - ok, I call BS. Either you're not a renter or you have some other kind of ulterior motive. Your landlord makes money off of you, and is not renting out as a form of charity; plus, they're already rich, owning (most likely) their own accommodation and the apartment they rent out to you.

i live in Montreal. Every appartment is rent controlled. People move out en masse every year. The issue is rent control only applying to a few appartements and not every appartment, and not having allowances to keep prices low when tenants move.

That's an issue. It's debatable whether it's the issue. But yes, obviously if every apartment has the same rent ceiling nobody will have a reason to stick in one of the lottery apartments forever. Good luck getting that passed in NYC/SF.

Deep down, another goal isn't just to lower rents, but actually to lower property costs, and well implemented rent control helps do that. I agree it's going to be hard to get that passed, but that's going to be true for literally any real solution to housing because they all imply hurting the mass of current real estate investors very hard.

I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't. We shouldn't compromise on building quality so those regulations should stay in place, but we should soften zoning rules and remove parking minimums for example. Also, specifically the state of california needs to rework CEQA and limit neighborhood input to projects.

I'd also point out that areas that encourage more construction have been growing and becoming attractive places to live. Emeryville for example has been building aggressively and its becoming a nice place to live (minus the highway nearby). Some parts are surprisingly walkable and it even has free public transit (the emery-go-round). Compare this to SF which has blocked housing (especially apartment buildings); its becoming increasingly unaffordable and suburban feeling compared to east bay. Density also leads to more diversity.

>I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't.

I think that's the core issue with most of our political dialog. "Regulations are bad." The person saying it is thinking A, B, and C and is probably right. The person hearing it is thinking D, E, and F and is also probably right. They aren't even talking about the same thing. It's no wonder they can't come to common ground.

"Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social security," can be uttered by the same individual because when he thinks about socialism he thinks Castro nationalizing all US industry in Cuba, not Social Security Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

To your point, words certainly matter.

> "Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social security," can be uttered by the same individual because when he thinks about socialism he thinks Castro nationalizing all US industry in Cuba, not Social Security Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

or the person may see the contradiction clearly and oppose the idea of social security benefits, while also being opposed to having it clawed back after they've spent their entire working life paying into the system.

Social security is not an account you individually pay into and then draw from later, it is a wealth transfer program that taxes presently working individuals to support presently retired individuals.

You are correct. Nonetheless, those paying in to the system today acquiesced to the plan under the assumption that they would one day be able to take their place as beneficiaries. They gave up significant amounts of money which could have been invested toward their own retirement to pay those SS taxes. Simply ripping it away without compensation is neither fair nor realistic.

> those paying in to the system today acquiesced to the plan...

No, they didn't acquiesce to anything. They were required to pay whether they wanted to or not.

I didn't mean to imply there was anything like voluntary consent involved. I'm on your side here. But there is popular support for this program which wouldn't exist if it were presented purely as a wealth transfer with no upside for those forced to pay in. They gloss over the fact that paying SS taxes doesn't formally entitle you to any future benefits, but in practice cancelling it without offering some compensation to those who paid so much in would amount to political suicide.

This brings up and interesting question: If more people enter the work force and pay taxes every year, how is SS (as im told) "drying up"? I don't doubt that it's dwindling, however, what happened?

In 1945 there were 42 workers paying SS taxes for every retiree collecting benefits. For equal pay / retirement income after SS taxes, each worker only needs to provide 2.3%.

Today (actually since 2009) that ratio is three workers per retiree. Each worker has to provide 33%. By 2050 the ratio is projected to fall to two-to-one.

You can find the historical ratios here: https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html

Did we get more people not working and paying taxes, or did we get more people consuming this resource? If it is the latter, how'd that happen?

Mostly people are living longer. When SS first started only 55% of males and 60% of females who made it to age 21 would have survived their working-age years to retire at age 65 in 1940. By 1990 that figure had risen to 72% and 83%, respectively. Life expectancy after retirement also increased, from 12.7 (M) or 14.7 (F) years in 1940 to 15.3 or 19.6 years in 1990. (https://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html)

yes and no. that is how it's actually implemented, but from the outside it does look similar to a defined contribution plan. you pay into it during your working years and then receive a monthly payment in retirement. the payment amount is related (albeit not directly proportional) to the amount you paid in.

in any case, I feel pretty confident saying that most people see social security as a deal where they pay in now to receive benefits later during retirement. they may or may not think very hard about the fact that they might be far better off if they had the option to put the money in a 401k/IRA instead, but they surely would not be happy to pay now without the expectation of getting something later.

that's all just to say that it's not a "haha gotem" moment when you find someone close to retirement who "opposes socialism" but doesn't want to see social security go away (for them).

>that's all just to say that it's not a "haha gotem" moment when you find someone close to retirement who "opposes socialism" but doesn't want to see social security go away (for them).

It wasn't an attempt at a "haha gotem," sorry if it came out that way. It was more of an example of the irony of being for and against the same concept by having different understanding of the meaning than someone else.

SSI was probably a bad example, anything useful will fit. "Socialism bad," but "please fix the potholes in my road, pick up my trash, put bad guys in jail, put out that forest fire, keep the shipping lanes clear, etc. etc." All those a person could like and they are socialistic, but ask that same person what their opinion on socialism, he thinks Castro nationalizing US industry in Cuba, not all the service he finds infinitely useful day to day.

I guess that's the complicated way of saying we should talk about political ideas in a much more narrow sense, like "lets lower the medicare age to 55; we're already paying for the most expensive demographic," rather than "Socialism good."

I dunno, it seems the people who say "socialism is bad" these days use it to explicitly mean those contexts that have little to do with actual socialism, like paid parental leave or universal healthcare. They may not be including SSI there, but for all intents and purposes they could, with the crucial difference that SSI is something that exists and the proposed "socialist" policies don't.

Well, SSI, Medicare and Medicaid aren't socialism by any, let's say, "internationally recognised" definition.

> We shouldn't compromise on building quality so those regulations should stay in place

Careful about the phrase "building quality" there. If by quality you mean safety, then yes, absolutely. But there are quite a few regulations that describe themselves about "quality" that do things like: prescribe a minimum number of parking spaces, or a minimum size for a kitchen, or number of bathrooms, etc. And all of those absolutely need to be eliminated.

Rent control doesn't "create" any housing. It simply puts a cap on the price of housing. I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money, not start a charity. Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use. This drives down real estate values in the adjoining neighborhood and makes real-estate less attractive to investors and you wind up creating a slum.

Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away. The market has its fair share of issues and inefficiencies, but it's still more efficient than affordable housing programs dreamed up by government bureaucrats.

> Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use.

This is not necessarily the case. Social housing in Vienna has both low-income residents who are subsidized and higher-income residents who are not. We haven’t done it as well as they do historically here in the US, but we could!

I think this comment pretty much sums up my issue with these movements.

> I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money, not start a charity.

This mindset is where these issues come from in the first place. Housing as become more and more an investment, and groups of people (immigrants, disabled folks, poor people) are not as good of investments, so they're avoided by private investors.

At the same time, private investors and builders are pushing back on tools that make the lives of these less profitably people easier (rent control, public housing).

From what you're saying, if I want to promote more affordable housing, I keep you away from it. Where's a profit in cheap housing/low rents?

If you want to promote affordable housing, you shouldn't demonize the people who are going to increase the housing supply. You'll leave behind blustering politicians, and no capital - public or private - to develop anything.

The problem is the ones wanting to increase the housing supply are for-profit investors, and affordable housing shouldn’t be about profit. That’s my takeaway of this deadlock. Perhaps the government should directly build housing, or subsidize the cost and have it be owned and operated by the city.

Why do you think the government is more efficient at building housing than private companies?

Every city I've seen try this ran into substantial cost over runs and ended up with 12 1 br condos to rent to poor people at the cost of 6 million dollars.

Why shouldn't it be about profit, we use a profit motive for the manufacturing of everything else in our economy, why is housing the exception?

Housing should be an exception because it’s a place for someone to stay and necessary for survival. Food can be prepared at home, people can take public transit to get around to earn money, and entertainment isn’t necessarily required for survival. But a house is a cornerstone for building your life out, and as such I don’t think it should be about maximizing profit.

If it costs the government more money to build shittier housing should we still use it government to build housing?

The government is far more efficient when it's competent because it has access to eminent domain and is recession proof. It doesn't need to deal with margin calls during recessions, has much less risk doing development, and doesnt need profit to fund new investments, so it can move faster and cheaper with greater scale.

You've never seen it work because you're presumably American, and as the title points out, America can't build anything anymore. If you care about you're country's wellbeing, that needs to be fixed, and building affordable housing efficiently and more hands on without piles of unaccountable subcontractors is a great way to get started.

In which countries can the government build housing more cheaply and efficiently than the private sector?

Sure. Singapore and Vienna (not a country, but done at a city scale) are good examples.

I'm pretty sure Singapore usings contractors to build the HDBs and doesn't employee labourers themselves.

But also Singapore's construction per sq ft isn't insanely cheaper than the US. You're looking at $120 per sq ft and you would expect Singapore to be much cheaper because they have $2-3/hr labourers, less labor laws, and far less environmental restrictions.

And the HDBs don't really house the poor but the middle class. The poor live in cramped dormitories for foreign immigrants.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with public housing being extended to the middle class or even the upper class. As long as it pushes housing prices down.

Labourers in Singapore do not make 2-3$/h anymore. Nowadays it's closer to 10$/h for the bare minimum. Yet prices are still at 120$/sqft or thereabouts.

The HDB in Singapore owns a controlling stake in many contractors, but yes the general construction is often handled by contractors. That's still different from the US methodology that subcontracts everything from design to maintenance, and it maintains the structural advantages of the government building housing I put forth above.

I genuinely believe that it’s a fallacy to try and build affordable housing. Build housing, and some housing will become more affordable.

I think the problem is that a lot of investing in real estate isn't creating more housing, it's extracting wealth from people who have a need to be housed. like if you buy a second home to rent out, you didn't create housing. You just made it less affordable for people to build wealth.

> This mindset is where these issues come from in the first place. Housing as become more and more an investment, and groups of people (immigrants, disabled folks, poor people) are not as good of investments, so they're avoided by private investors.

This only happens when supply is artificially constrained. The private markets want to serve as many people as they can - that's how you maximize profit. But when you can only sell 100 units and there is demand for 1000, obviously you want to sell to the richest 100 buyers.

The solution to the problem is to increase supply. Rent control, zoning, et al reduce supply.

> Where's a profit in cheap housing/low rents?

1. The size of the housing problem grossly outsizes the budget of the public sector. Its not even close - this problem can only be addressed through private capital. 2. Private capital will only build things that are profitable with a comfortable margin considering unexpected costs and other, possibly more efficient allocations of the same capital. 3. Every regulation/requirement you throw at housing developers increases the minimum cost of new housing. As it currently stands, its mostly a physical impossibility to build middle class housing in SF profitably given existing requirements (which effectively add a couple hundred thousand to each unit). This means that no middle class housing will be built.

If you want more affordable housing, you fundamentally need to change the incentive to build affordable housing. You can't do this and chase off developers at the same time.

Real estate investors are not typically developers. They also generally are opposed to things YIMBYs support since as mentioned it would cut into their profits. YIMBYs, though not a monolith, largely support rent control and public housing. They also support private development. The goal is to reduce housing costs, and a variety of means are necessary.

Government housing can work, but it needs large, sustained amounts of funding, which is not really a reality with cash-strapped local and state governments and extremely low federal appetite for such a program.

There isn‘t a realistic path to a solid, pro-public housing bloc of 60 senators.

> I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap

Good. It is real estate "investors" like you that have contributed to the Bay Area, and California in general, pricing people out and becoming a rent-only housing economy where only the rich of the rich can even dream of buying a fairly modest house. Housing should not make you investment-style returns like the stock market. You're profiting by rent-seeking, arbitrary zoning requirements, and NIMBYism driving up the price of housing constantly just so you can make a nice "investment." Housing and shelter are for people to live, not to extract money for real estate investors.

> You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building

Have you considered that poor people also need a place to live and maybe that doesn't involve you leaching every percent of profit you can?

> Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away

Section 8 housing in LA - as house prices have surged to multi-million two-bedroom homes since COVID - can lower prices at least as low as $400/mo after the voucher. You are simply and transparently lying for your own benefit and it is shameful.

It's a lack of development of new housing for decades that caused the high prices we see in places like the Bay Area.

And the ones that do get built are promoting “luxury living” when people just want “basic living”. None of the new construction is no-frills apartments, they’re all glitz and glam with stupid high rents - 2br is about 5K in some of these places. That’s ridiculously high. There’s even an apartment complex that advertises a redwood grove in the center - that’s just extra cost that could have been saved and passed on to the renters.

You need to fill out the highest tier, as that opens up mid-tier housing for lower paying renters. Otherwise it pushes the highest-paying renters into the mid-tier housing stock, raising the prices for all below.

I really don't understand this logic. Just income-cap the rentals, so high paying renters aren't eligible for the low-tier housing. Only filling out highest tier means that only high tier housing gets built.

Nope. Primarily, people moving into the new housing lower cost pressure on lower tier housing. And pretty quickly, the highest tier is saturated and lower tier housing is built.

Or higher tier housing is overbuilt and drives down costs of all tiers.

It could just be where I've chosen to live, but I have never seen a new "lower tier" apartment building go up. It's been "luxury" apartments (though actually built fairly cheaply, just expensive to rent…) 100% of the time.

It's not that surprising. The housing market is in a state of shortage in pretty much every major metro area.

> And pretty quickly, the highest tier is saturated and lower tier housing is built.

That’s definitely not what happens. Highest tier is saturated, developers say that “the market only wants highest tier housing”, and so more of the same gets built.

> Or higher tier housing is overbuilt and drives down costs of all tiers.

The opposite is what’s happening - the highest tier gets more and more expensive, and the lowest tier goes up too.

> That’s definitely not what happens. Highest tier is saturated, developers say that “the market only wants highest tier housing”, and so more of the same gets built.

If it's actually saturated, them prices will begin to drop.

> The opposite is what’s happening - the highest tier gets more and more expensive, and the lowest tier goes up too.

Because it's not actually overbuilt - they're still just trying to catch up. Most metro areas are still in a state of housing shortage.

So if you catch a raise you are evicted?

Not necessarily - maybe your rent can just go up to market rate + 10% (or some nominal fee because you’re taking up spots in the low income section). Maybe an extra clause that you have to move out within X months after going above the limit.

The laws just needs to disincentivize staying there when you’re not eligible. You obey traffic laws because it’s costly to ignore them. There can also be some buffer to income so you don’t have drastic changes just because you earn an extra 5 to 10K or something per year (depending on family size).

From my interactions it's mostly frustrated renting millenials rather than developers in the movement. And that aside, I don't see why people think developers are evil. Someone built the place you're living in.

Personally (as just a homeowner) I feel like the crux of our problem is constraints, and while the YIMBYs are working that problem, they're also contributing new constraints like rent control, inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement measures, etc that negatively offset the gains made elsewhere.

I don’t know what they are like in California, but where I live in Canada developers are generally disliked because

1) They tend to build houses not communities, for example it’s rare a developer will include parks, community spaces like markets, bike lanes, plant trees, or do anything else to make the housing tracts livable

2) They don’t tend to expand infrastructure to match, so you get developers getting approved to put 10000 houses on a 1 lane each direction road, or housing going in without adequate medical service or other necessities, which puts strain on the existing community resources

3) they are constantly lobbying local government to let them build in forests, wetlands and other natural habitat, so if you care about that at all you generally have a bad view of developers

Combine all this with generally extremely poor build quality results in people viewing developers as adversaries for the most part.

It's not a developers job to build infrastructure IMO, it's the city's job to build infrastructure and zone appropriately.

Rent control doesn't create affordable housing. It benefits existing residents at the cost of everyone else who wants to move into the city. It is a classic example of why price caps don't work: in practice, in order to win the application for rent controlled units, you slip the landlord a few hundred $, security deposits balloon in size, and the quality of the units declines precipitously. In NYC the bribe is more like a few thousand dollars.

Public housing is its own problem. It creates de facto ghettos, which is a major reason why locals oppose construction of public housing. It turns out that landlords' financial incentive to screen prospective tenants generally does a good job of weeding out trashy people who destroy the unit and surrounding area.

The main way to make affordable housing is to make more housing so there's enough dwelling units where people want to dwell.

But - in areas where there is already very high density, you need transportation that lets people live cheaper but still get to work. You don't need to worry about housing a bank VP in New York; but housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed.

Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.

Rent control disincentivizes landlords from building high density housing. Take a look at two cities in Minnesota [1] which approached rent control in very different ways. Rent control caused new housing starts to decline 80% in one of the cities, primarily because the city decided it needed to apply rent control to all units including new construction.

> housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed

Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not even close to "very high density". I suggest you visit China - even the US's densest cities still have a 10x factor to go before they reach practical limits on density. We need more high rises and less height restrictions.

> Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.

No, rent control creates a black market for housing and destroys the quality of housing stock available on the market. If you live in the Bay or NYC and rent this is very obvious. It's very common to slip some extra $ or have a shittily maintained unit if it's rent controlled. I have rented units with mouse infestations, splinters in floorboards, and black mold growing out of pipes in the floor, none of which were fixed.

[1] https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...

> Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not even close to "very high density".

High density is a terrible way to live. I thought we learned from the pandemic that high density living is unsanitary and promotes the proliferation of disease, and that a 600 square foot box is a really depressing place to be when you're stuck inside working from home.

The solution that the current generation loves to hate is to go back to a more suburban lifestyle. But it's possible to do suburbia without making it completely car-dependent. Look at planned cities like Portland, OR, where they have a lot of mixed use development paired with good public transportation and bicycle infrastructure well into the more suburban parts of the city. In a country like the United States where we have vast expanses of land, it makes a lot more sense to spread out than develop vertically.

Single-family homes can get surprisingly dense, depending on how you move the numbers and sizes around.

But more importantly, all towns and most cities were at "suburban" densities years ago (check the "old towns" of most towns, etc) - the key was "travel to services" was limited by walking or sometimes subways, etc.

If instead of one Walmart every 30 miles you have smaller stores every 2-5 miles, suddenly density isn't as mandatory for livable cities.

Mixed usage and transit backbones are the key - you could design "pods" that are about two miles in diameter centered on train stations that would be entirely walkable/bikable - then you can even have the massive city centers.

People having cars isn't a problem if they don't use them for commuting, and some small changes in city design can lead to that.

The reason that the current generation hates suburbia to me seems like a result of a cultural process that can be considered borderline indoctrination and the fact that for whatever reason suburbia doesn't move on with the times. I can understand those who are dissatisfied with the current state of suburbia (e.g. lack of entertainment options, lack of public spaces that don't look like a repurposed commercial property), though many of those issues may be attributed to the scale of the land as a whole, but you'd be surprised that the idea of moving to an apartment block from say a generic suburban home is not viewed as a downgrade by some. Another thing is that classic suburbia often has a uniform look, which might negatively contribute to the entire perception of suburban housing, but then again, same people who complain about it have no problem with same-looking generic apartment blocks.

The reason why apartment minded folks say little about generic 5-over-1 units and a lot about suburban housing is because most folks live in dense areas for access to their services. Due to SFH zoning there's little to do in most of suburbia outside of your home, so a lot more focus needs to be on the home to be attractive and entertaining.

As for cultural reasons behind preferring apartments, everyone has various reasons. I doubt you'll find consensus among those that dislike SFH development over what it is they dislike, but they're unified as a bloc in their desire for density.

Public housing can be made properly like in Vienna. You have to build a lot, build nice, and worry about having many different socio-economical tenants in the apartments, though.

And be ready to kick trashy people of course.

IMO public housing is the best tool, but it seems that in many places they just want to set up some buildings and forget about it, and that way it will never work.

It seems like for many people it's just a naive idea of getting problematic people out of the streets, but that shouldn't be the main idea. The main idea is to get the most modal income people out of the offer/demand cut, so they can save more money and use their increased disposable income locally.

If you build enough and make private developments easy enough everyone benefits.

In fact, Vienna is starting to have problems because their conservative government (I think they have a coalition now) doesn't want to spend money on the program and private developments have a set of restrictions that allow price gauging.

> And be ready to kick trashy people of course.

Not going to happen in US cities. Literally every person actually living in a city knows this, which is why many people protest having public housing built anywhere near them.

Many Americans claim to like European welfare state, but they they don’t seem to be aware as to what it takes to get there. One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy), but another thing is more ruthlessness in enforcing social norms. Nowhere in Europe you can just sit on the sidewalk and shoot up heroin: you’ll be arrested, put in rehab, and if you persist, jailed. Psychotic mentally ill who scream obscenities at passer-byes are involuntarily committed. Tent campers are arrested and forced into shelters. None of this is happening in many UD cities, which claim that their policies of looking the other way, or subsidizing the underclass lifestyle, is “harm reduction”, and continue to repeat that as number of people living this lifestyle is not reduced, to the contrary it keeps growing.

Well, then you guys have to do something because, honestly, some famous cities in the US are in a deplorable state.

You know what your problems are and you don't even have to come up with anything new or revolutionary, as solutions are already invented and tested.

The US can build public housing and can manage it properly. The money is there, and it has already been done (built, not managed properly). Mix public housing with transit oriented development, mix-use zones, more lax private development and you'll get nice neighborhoods for modal income people which is what's really important.

As for cars, you can build multi-story car parks with commercial and/or residential development on top too. Not cheap but necessary given your constraints.

The US has IMO very strong civil society organizations. Take advantage of that and go advocate for this.

  > One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy)

interesting, because thats the opposite of what i thought...

any good charts/data for that?

See eg. https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/growingunequalincomedistributio... which states that the United States has the most progressive tax system among developed countries. It has not fundamentally changed since 2008.

CA is working on mixed income public housing. I think it will avoid the faults of the previous projects we built. See AB 2053.

Because one only need to look at history in past times of housing crisis in our history. The response and solution to times of housing shortages and high prices has always been to build out more supply. There was a housing crisis in the 1940s due to decades of stagnation of building homes from the great depression and WWII, and homes were unaffordable, until the 1950s brought on supply that was not generated by government intervention but by private developers and even the Sears catalogue. About all the government did was stimulate the private market by providing capital in the form of the GI bill, and coupled with the available zoned capacity surrounding cities, developers were able to build and meet demand that now had capital to afford supply which was able to be built thanks to the available zoned capacity.

Since the 1960s however, we've slashed our potential to add capacity (1), and prices have soared in markets like Los Angeles that were historically more affordable to wage earners.

1. https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3717

YIMBY organizers still get a lot of criticism from its early days where they would show up to support housing wherever it was being built, and in the mid-2010s that typically meant low-income, minority neighborhoods that were already experiencing a lot of displacement pressure. This gave them a bad reputation among equity organizations which supported alternatives like rent control and moratoriums on new construction. Some YIMBYs still think that policies like rent control are like a metaphorical wrench in the housing market machine which reduce the incentive to supply more housing but even more still realize that the machine is already full of wrenches like apartment bans, onerous parking requirements, and single-family-only zoning, excessively long discretionary review processes, etc [1].

The latest in the movement for new public housing in California is actually supported by YIMBY organizations [2]. AB 2053, The Social Housing Act is making its way through the state legislature right now. While just about every YIMBY organization supports it, it's opposed by NIMBY orgs like Livable California, the League of California Cities, and even the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the orgs which have long talked about supporting social housing are taking either no position or support-if-amended stances on the bill because they don't like that the way it generates subsidy for below market housing is by building market-rate housing to cross-subsidize it. They strongly believe that any new market-rate housing causes displacement but don't want to be on the wrong side of history when this bill succeeds.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/709917153557088183... [2] https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/

St. Paul enacted rent control and saw -80% permit application rates. Minneapolis (immediately adjacent) saw permit applications rise in the same time. It should be plainly obvious that reducing the utility of housing units reduces the demand to build them.

https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...

St. Paul's rent control does go pretty far. Personally, I think it's a mistake to have it apply to new construction. If you remember California Prop 21 from 2020, even that would have only allowed rent control on buildings which are at least 15 years old.

I see almost all of our housing problems as direct descendants of the original sin of making it too hard to build and use structures. Any form of rent control is another form of NIMBYism, just this time with a progressive coat of paint.

This article has a bunch of cringeworthy prose, but has some worthwhile graphs of data showing that price-fixing isn't the answer:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin...

See also numerous Planet Money stories about rent control:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/05/700432258/the-...

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/31/1077086398/is-it-time-to-cont...

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/29/707908952/the-evidence-agains...

Note that even very-progressive Jerusalem Demsas was once against rent control and has only switched sides as a palliative measure because fixing the root cause of the problem is proving too difficult.

Freakonomics also did a show on the topic:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-rent-control-doesnt-wor...

In many California cities at least, you can connect all of the rent control measures in the late '70s to significant downzonings which occurred in the previous decade or so. I wonder if it could also be be considered a factor which contributed to the passage of proposition 13 in 1978.

https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/programs/housing/housing-supply/z...

edit: So I actually consider rent control to be a result of low housing production rather than the other way around. Associate Professor Shane Phillips from the Lewis Center (linked above) also considers rent control to be a very reasonable policy as long as there's plenty of realistic zoned capacity for more housing. Everyone is always arguing that if we build more then that would keep rents from rising so why not have rent control anyway then?

I don't follow. If you don't have a problem (in this case expensive housing) why would you need to do something about that problem (in this case rent control)? It's extra complexity serving no purpose. And that will inevitably come with enforcement issues, disputes, lawsuits, etc.

But yes, I think you're right that rent control is typically a political result of insufficient housing production. But it's a bad policy. Price fixing is never the answer to a supply problem, even if it's a popular one.

> rent control and moratoriums on new construction.

Literally the worst way to make housing more equitable. All rent control does is give long term residents a handout at the expense of everyone else while increasing commute times due to being unable to move and lowering the quality of the housing stock.

Two thoughts, 1) it will be impossible to get out of our current housing hole without making developers rich. 2) We are so far into the hole that any availability will be gobbled up by those with money or those with connections.

I have a townhome and in our complex one had to be sold as a low-income unit. The person who got it was well connected to the developer, "My Aunt has known him for 30+ years".

YIMBY Action (https://yimbyaction.org) member here.

You should try to drop in to one of our meetings. It is a very big tent here. You have people not only involved on making it easier to build more housing, but also ensuring that we build affordable housing and that we keep tenant protections.

I am of the idea that 90% of the problem could be solved by streamlining housing of all types (e.g. remove zoning, making permitting a 30 day process, by-right building, etc.) and the last 10% can be covered via government intervention (e.g. public housing, housing vouchers, rent control, etc.).

But you can find folks within YIMBY Action that think the mix is 50% / 50% or 20% / 80%. And you will see that our endorsements and activism reflects that! We are as often promoting removing barriers for building housing as we are ensuring that we protect those that need it the most.

We all agree, however, that you _need_ to build housing, that the problem is a problem of supply, and that the culprit is Byzantine regulation and NIMBYism.

Come join us!

You are probably just getting too much anti-YIMBY propaganda from the high level overview. The problem is that developers built nearly everybody's home, yet people want to hate developers.

Think about how much money a developer makes on building something, versus how much more money homeowners make by blocking housing, and you'll be astounded. A developer makes 5%-20% returns for a one-time project, that houses people. This is modest versus annual, compounded investment returns 5%-10% for homeowners/landlords, and those unearned profits also continually take homes out of reach of more and more people. So you can see why landlords and homeowners are so anti-developer, because it puts their gravy train at risk.

That sounds like it's "pro-developer" propaganda, but it's actually just anti-NIMBY propaganda. And perhaps they are the same.

There are two problems with the "affordable housing" strategy, IMO.

One is that many (most?) advocates for this are actually being dishonest. It's a cudgel that can be used to stop just about any development project, because nothing is ever affordable enough. Any proposal that involves a mix of market-rate and subsidized housing should have more subsidized housing. Any proposal that's 100% affordable housing should be bigger and better. (I kid you not, I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO). Non-market rents are too high, unless they're in existing apartments, in which they can never ever be raised. And so on. The result is that people who're only casually involved in city politics basically sign up for a total ban on construction, because "affordable housing" sounds reasonable.

The other is that economically, it's basically price controls, and that never has good results. The fact is, the housing crisis is a simple lack of housing. We need a lot more housing in most cities. The population has grown and industrialization/post-industrialization has shifted economic opportunity away from small towns and cities toward the largest cities. Housing is expensive because demand has gone up, but we've artificially restricted supply by not allowing construction. The affordable housing "solution" is to keep restricting housing supply, but shield a select group from the consequences of that. Who qualifies is subject to debate, but it's always a small number of people, and everybody else is SOL. So either you bought a long time ago, you're rich enough to buy now, or you're part of the protected class. Everyone else is SOL, and that includes a lot of people that spend a good chunk of their lives commuting because they can't afford to live where they work. Heck, it also includes a lot people in the protected class that would like to move but can't afford to lose their subsidy.

> I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO

This is a common problem in American policy. You're going to have the thing and it's going to be nice, or you're going to be priced out of having it at all.

See minimum floor space regulations, (non-fire related) residential occupancy limits, regulations requiring certain coverage in medical insurance plans, etc. There is a reason that short term insurance plans (STLDIs) that are not subject to as many regulations are much cheaper.

YIMBYs typically are in favor of public housing and tenant protections. On rent control it’s more divided; some are in favor and some aren’t. It doesn’t seem likely to solve the housing affordability problem but may add some stability, so I’m generally I’m favor of it personally, but only in tandem with building more as well.

But that said, more market rate housing is good too! Provided it’s not replacing subsidized units, anyway. We need housing to not be scarce in general; it’s not an either/or thing.

You say that you are anti-NIMBY, but you are concerned about people who want "to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"? You don't see the problem here?

Sorry, by residents I mean the general population of a given area, not homeowners specifically. When the issue is people finding an affordable and safe home to live in my mind doesn't automatically go to "how will this affect house prices in this area".

What I mean by being concerned with deregulation that could hurt residents I mean things like gentrification, legislative reduction in rent-controls / tenants rights, relaxing safety laws / codes around what is considered a livable space. If that's NIMBYism then I am all sorts of confused :P

I definitely think that's NIMBYism because it stifles construction, and lack of supply is the problem.

Which is what I hear from the YIMBY crowd a lot, that if you're not pro de-regulate home builders and landlords then you're automatically a NIMBY. I think building more is good but I am not convinced pure market supply/demand economics is the main way to get people into affordable and safe housing. The way you describe it sounds like it will solve for a very specific group of people: folks who are _almost_ able to buy homes but priced out by market forces. Maybe my concern is outside the YIMBY / NIMBY dichotomy if it's just a fight for middle-class folks.

I bet a lot of how applicable you feel the labeling is will depend on where you are. SF Bay Area and NYC are probably the US epicenters of this problem and will see a bit more polarization on that front. California in particular is estimated to represent the lion's share of the ~4M housing unit shortage, so it's very acute there. With remote work the shortage is increasingly being felt across the rest of the country, and most folks want to blame anybody but themselves for the problem. It's developers! It's foreign speculators! It's institutional investors! But the data never supports those accusations.

I'm in the SF Bay Area. Very few people under 35-40 can afford a home even if they're well-paid tech workers, and the age of affordability seems to creep up almost in real-time. It's a huge problem and we need millions of homes built to fix it. Small patches like subsidies for the very poor work fine if you only need to deploy them on a small minority of cases but fall apart miserably when a 90th-percentile earner still needs your help. Overturning Euclid v. Ambler, a constitutional amendment to create some basic right to build housing on your own land, or something similarly drastic is needed to turn this tide.

I'm one of the luckiest ones. A combination of good professional fortune and generational wealth have led me to own a home in a highly exclusive community. And now I'm hoping to open that community up to more people. Maybe my less-fortunate tech-worker friends will be able to stay nearby rather than be forced to move elsewhere.

Consider that as house supply increases, house prices should keep dropping, towards the cost of construction - right now supply is so constructed prices are limited by buyer ability to pay rather than sellers cost of construction.

So supply will allow much more than just the few people on the edge of ability to buy - it will also help everyone else at lower price points.

It's rarely the cost of the house that is the problem. It's the cost of the property. And property within a certain distance from any attractive city center is limited, by its very nature.

To a point, anyway. https://www.builderonline.com/land/local-markets/californias...

How is it a problem to recognize that in Real Life things are rarely as binary as they are made out to be on the Internet? Shade of grey and all that... most things exist on a continuum that ranges between the extremes, and not only as a binary dichotomy.

The person you're responding to never said or implied there is no spectrum. But if someone says "I'm very much anti-NIMBY" and then goes on to point out his hypocrisy, it's fair to call him out for it. Especially since said someone specifically asked for criticism and seems open to a conversation.

Everybody wants to change the world but nobody wants to change themselves.

Most everyone is YIMBY in theory but NIMBY in practice.

Indeed. When somebody is a true YIMBY it's major news: https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-terry-m...

You’re just describing a NIMBY - someone who may be pro-development in theory but not in their backyard. YIMBY is an explicit rejection of that. In fact few people are YIMBY in theory.

While the replies are jumping onto rent control (which is bad) the other parts of your suggestions bare a much better solution imo: public or for-public housing. My native germany also fucks this one up, but the best thing would he to use some form of eminent domain to kick out stratefically located villas and old homes, tear them down/renovate them and build up public housing in small-but-cheap apartmenta that can then be given to resident coops or other democratic-but-not-the-state entities. Vienna does this (public housing, not evicting millionaires or old-settles-residents) and it works quite well because it addresses the demand side. Induced demand for housing of this type is limited I think (it's a big decision and people don't generally choose cities only because od the price) and you could even adress the "granny loses her old house" to some degrew by offering evicted tenants extra-nice apartments as a reimbursement on top of the eminent domain reimbursment (at least in germany this one exists, government cannot simply take your land).

Like this you drop the prices in the "normal people" segment without rent control

I feel like if we just limited the number of homes any one person or company can own (to like 4 max), it would solve a lot of issues. Also no foreign investors. Also make building easier. If developers get rich so be it.

NZ banned foreign investors and average home prices are up about 50% in the couple of years since that happened.

Foreign buyers just don't make up enough of the market, and neither do people with 5+ residences.

The lack of any capital gains tax plays a big role in this case

The only reason people bother owning multiple dwelling units is because they're a "good investment" because there's more demand than supply.

Let supply outstrip demand and suddenly they're not a good investment anymore, so people go back to owning them for living in.

My parents own three, none of which they keep as an investment. One is their primary home, a second is their winter escape, and a third was supposed to be a place for my grandmother. But she died shortly after my parents bought it, and they can't be bothered to sell or rent it to anybody. So it's a storage unit now.

Not that this is a good use of a perfectly fine basic housing unit, but it isn't an investment.

So your parents are preventing two young families from starting their lives.

Seriously, a "winter escape"? Literally noone needs that. Literally noone should have that until everybody's basic needs are met.

Which won't happen with all these "storage unit" houses there are.

I don't necessarily agree that "nobody should have X until everyone has Y" is a workable general rule; no family should have two cars until everyone has one; no family should have two jobs until everyone has one.

The second home is already slightly tax disadvantaged compared to the primary residence, perhaps it should be "punished" more.

Which is why I assume the parent post mentioned 4, I would have said two or three myself (as your example shows).

If that third house had some form of tax penalty associated with it being unused/empty they might bother to sell it.

But the housing crisis isn't perpetuated by empty homes in general; empty homes exist because there's an investment aspect of it. If the grandma house was losing at IRS depreciation rates, it'd likely be sold (though a storage unit might cost a similar amount).

I keep trying to convince my parents to sell it. They're spending a lot of money on it for property taxes and HOA fees (it's a condo unit) but they simply don't care enough. On the bright side, it's in a town that hasn't yet been swept up by the housing crisis. Only a matter of time though.

What about renters? People who own multiple residences usually don't let them sit empty; they rent them out, and a robust rental stock is important in any city. Look at Montreal, for example. Most people rent, but someone has to own the buildings.

People don't rent for the fun of it, they rent because they can't afford a house. Pretty much anybody would be glad to swap paying rent for morgage payments. As it is, you often have the messed up situation of your rent going to pay somebody else's mortgage interest

Renting is not always just an intermediate step to being too poor to buy a home, it can be a freeing experience to not have the hassle of a home.

With WFH especially now you can work in various parts of the city or move all over the world and at most be tied down to a place for about a year.

Homeowners also never talk about things like paying tens of thousands of dollars when a pipe burst or the roof needs repairing.

That's not true. Owning a home is a hassle and ties you down. Like I said, most people in Montreal rent, and Montreal has some of the cheapest housing in Canada.

By “homes” do you mean buildings here or housing units? Because if it’s the latter, doesn’t that preclude most apartment buildings?

"a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"

A side of it? I would guess more than half of it is astroturfing developer groups, aka paid liars. It is such a disservice because it is a real problem that they are selfishly exploiting. They aren't interested in sustainable development, just cashing in and leaving a problem behind for the local taxpayers to clean up decades later. They exploit otherwise well meaning idealists - like the ones that are so common here - with amazing skill.

Yeah I hear you though note that given how backwards, arcane, obsolete and convoluted the way we plan for and agree upon future urban development is, there's really a TON of opportunity to BOTH better listen to residents and actually get things built.

See my friends startup InCitu.us for a great example of the opportunity for win/wins in the space: https://www.incitu.us/

In general a mix of both, public housing + private development, in less restricted zoning.

> I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better.

Simple: offer salaries that compete with the private sector. Of course, this involves raising tax revenues which is incredibly unpopular politically. But we get what we pay for and as long as public sector pay remains a joke compared to the private sector, we are always going to have this problem.

I don't think it's just that simple to be honest.

Government organizations are going to be held to the highest standard for equity, transparency and governance (and ideally security, but...). Building a product with artifacts that demonstrate and/or attest to all of these things creates incredible friction. I'm just coming out of a seven year stint at one of the largest banks in the world, and despite loving the people I work with I couldn't take it any more. I've on the other side of the summit in my career and I don't really want to have navigating bureaucracy be a major component of my professional efforts for the remainder of it.

Not to make you feel old or anything, but this sounds a lot like what happened with my dad. I'm 6 years into my career and he's mostly through his. His highest-income years were doing software development in the law department of one of the big oil companies. It basically broke him to learn what they were doing. Now he's trying to find the motivation to do contract work in his 50's because he doesn't want to deal with corporations ever again...

lol nothing you can do to make me feel older than i already do :)

Give your dad a fistbump for me, it's tough, but once he finds the right customer he'll be off to the races. I've been there before and I've been thinking about doing the same myself.

In Washington State, teacher salaries were raised substantially, with no change in educational results.

The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit.

I've proposed a system where teachers get a base salary, plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.

>>plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year

Don't be surprised when all of a sudden almost every student magically 'meets grade level expectations' and teachers get their large bonuses, and yet many of the students can't actually read when they graduate. Unfortunately, this is just an incentive to inflate grades and fudge results to make them look better.

Naturally, the teacher won't be in charge of evaluating their own students.

But there is no real firewall between teachers and administrators - most administrators are former teachers - it's a pretty cozy club in most schools.

I am not opposed to the idea in theory, but don't see any way to honestly make it work. Also fairly certain almost every teachers union will oppose it - and I say that as someone who has the experience of negotiating teacher's union contracts from the other side of the table.

Do what other organizations do. Have a separate organization to the evaluations.

> Also fairly certain almost every teachers union will oppose it

Of course they will. Those unions are absolutely, irrevocably committed to the idea that teacher merit is totally determined by length of service and having a master's degree.

And of course the people who are won't have any conflicts of interest of their own.

There are well known techniques to deal with this. It's hardly a new problem.

There are factors other than teacher's merit that affect outcome. You're saying that a teacher who gets two learning-disabled students (who need to be paired due to sibling issues) is less deserving than their peer who didn't have the disruption of two learning-disabled students?

The moment you tie income to results, you incentivize teachers leaving behind students who won't perform.

It's amusing (and sad) that almost everyone involved with a school can quickly point out the best and worst teachers there, but there's no way to "programmatically" encode it so that the bureaucracy can do something about it.

Because it's not that hard to measure teacher quality. But once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It gets gamed and manipulated. When it was just a measure, no one bothered to game it, so it wasn't that hard to tell who was good and who wasn't.

Imagine a system where of 500 teachers, 25 that have a track record of doing much worse than average are let go. You then roll the dice to get new teachers.

Could you pay more to attract better teachers in that situation and get better overall value for the kids being taught?

So how do you identify poor teachers? I would guess that if you let each member of the faculty vote for the 25 top teachers and then have parents do assessment of their children's teachers and then average the results over 3 years, you could come up with something that has virtual no false positives as to who the worst teachers were.

Evaluating teacher quality is difficult and impossible to do perfectly. Even a simple effort to evaluate quality would be vastly superior to the current state where quality isn't even a consideration.

I agree with the ensemble of evaluations approach - student tests at the start and end of year show student attainment, student and parent feedback, peer feedback, and administrator feedback. Come up with a weighted average and experiment with it. Retain average and better teachers, reward rockstars, train underperformers, and let the bottom ranks and those who don't improve with training go.

Yeah, I've noticed that, too. It's the same in every office in every organization.

The idea is to randomly assign the students to teachers. Sometimes teachers will get students who will never reach grade level, and sometimes students who will effortlessly achieve. By being random, it evens the opportunity out.

That sounds horrible. Right now, schools try to give each teacher an even number of high-performing, average, low-performing, and “difficult” kids. But the numbers are so small it’s hard.

An average sounds like a shitty, shitty system. Imagine finding out your kid is in a classroom with every low-performing and difficult kid in the grade just because it was random.

The concept sounds good in theory, but I think it's going to be nigh unworkable in practice. The NCLB/high-stakes testing era exposed many problems with tying educator pay to student outcomes -- chief among them that student outcomes didn't improve.

As I recall they had the teachers themselves graded those tests, so naturally they cheated.

> In Washington State, teacher salaries were raised substantially,

Can you cite where you saw this data, what time period it refers to, what "substantially" actually means, and include a comparison against inflation, please?

> ... plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.

I think basing teacher pay on merit is a great idea in theory but I have some problems with it. Most of all, student performance is influenced to a greater degree by things outside the teacher's control like the student's socioeconomic status, their attendance (or lack thereof), their parent's education, and even the air quality in their school.

I also don't know how "teacher" raises based on "meeting grade level expectations" would work past elementary school when students are cycling through seven teachers a day? Just because one child excels at math do you give the math teacher a greater raise?

Finally, what if a student does NOT meet grade level expectations, but shows the greatest improvement year-over-year against any other student. Do you fail to recognize the achievement of the teacher who improved this student's outcome because the student does not meet grade-level expectations?

These are just some of the problems which make this a much thornier issue and worth greater consideration. It sounds good when you say teacher pay should be based on merit, but it oversimplifies things quite a bit.

> Can you cite where you saw this data

Not offhand. It was the topic of the Seattle Times for months.

Let's take a look at the private sector. Pay is based on accomplishing goals. It works well. Sure it is imperfect.

> it oversimplifies things quite a bit.

It would be hard to be worse than the current system, which simplifies merit as "has a masters degree". I answered your other points in other replies in this thread.

This is just muddy thinking and hand waving. “Pay in the private sector” is not based on accomplishing goals at all. If it were, there wouldn’t be a huge disparity between men and women, or between those who live in Kansas City vs those who live in San Francisco. Or between those who are over six feet tall and those who are under. And you also say this as if accomplishing goals isn’t figured into teacher pay.

> “Pay in the private sector” is not based on accomplishing goals at all.

Where does one start with such an egregiously wrong statement? Companies go out of business if they have employees that cost more than they produce. They can't just raise taxes like the schools do. They can't run deficits like the government can. What do you think regular performance evaluations of private sector employees are for? Why do you think a lot of employee compensation is commission based?

> those who live in Kansas City

Think about it. The only reason pay is higher in SF is because it is more productive to have people in SF, i.e. people accomplish more being in SF.

> as if accomplishing goals isn’t figured into teacher pay.

It isn't, other than getting a master's degree. Which teachers in the government sector are paid based on how well their students do?

> The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit.

Agreed - to me it seems like paying teachers more is a tool. This enables you to offer incentives to improve student performance, but it also enables you to raise the bar (in some way) when hiring to get better teachers. If you just raise existing salaries across the board, you'll see no immediate change other than more people applying to be teachers. In theory if you have a good way of filtering for the "best", you might be able to then slowly overtime replace your existing teachers with (on average) better teachers.

Once hired, good people still need incentives to perform. This is well understood in the private sector.

So all the teachers want to work in rich suburban schools where students perform above grade level and no one wants to work in poor inner-city schools where they don’t? The only reasonable thing you can base merit pay on is a delta. You test a performance difference between incoming and outgoing students. If a student starts a year at grade level and makes no progress you shouldn’t reward the teacher for having them at grade level.

All the teachers want to work in a rich suburban school already.

Basing the bonus on the increment is probably a good improvement.

Plenty of teachers are willing to work in an environment where they feel they could make the biggest impact. My mother spent her whole career working in schools that could be classified as inner city with high percentages of new immigrants. Not everyone wants the easiest job possible in their field, some people see rewards in being able to make a bigger difference in people's lives.

That doesn't seem to line up with your previous post?

My point is don’t actively screw those people by coming up with a dumb compensation formula that punishes them for students underperforming before they ever entered their class. If you have merit based pay you need to evaluate how much a student improved under a specific teacher’s watch.

Even a blunt results based compensation would be far better than the current situation.

It wouldn’t if the obvious consequence of the bluntness was to chase good teachers out of the schools that most need them. And that’s what a blunt policy that punishes teachers for having students enter their class at a low level does.

That last has been basically tried, and you end up everyone always "exceeding expectations" unless you tie it to some sort of standardized testing (which has its own issues).

Your best bet may be removing the obstacles that people who want to do a good job encounter (for example, the best teachers seem to often leave higher paid public teaching jobs to go to private schools that pay less - investigate why?).

There are always going to be issues around evaluating student achievement. But by and large, compensation based on results works very well in the marketplace. And we certainly see the results in the public schools of no merit pay. It's hard to see how it could be worse.

BTW, MIT has gone back to SATs. The reason is simple - despite all the controversy about SAT validity, when the rubber meets the road the SAT does a better job than anything else at evaluating candidates.

Great Idea!

We just tell the teacher that "hey you'll get a bonus if everyone in your class gets an A"!

Who's in charge of giving their students grades again?

Grade inflation has been around a long time under the current system. It's also why the teachers union tries so hard to get rid of all testing.

Cool, so no one will ever teach anywhere except a rich suburb.

Same as now.

I've known people who work for various government agencies, some that pay well for their respective fields. It seemed to be a pattern where someone would accrue a large salary through time on the job, internal patronage, etc, but then be totally incapable or uninterested in doing their job well. They'd just hire someone else to do this person's job and shuffle titles around.

No one gets fired for non-aggressive incompetence. Merit is below two or three other things when considering promotion and salary hikes. At least in the cases I'm familiar with, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Increasing top-level salary would not fix this, but probably just increase the lack of fairness by over-paying to a greater extent the embedded poor performers.

Not really. If you brought on vastly more competent people and digitized+automated government like the private sector, you wouldn't need to hire so many people, so you can afford to pay the competent people more. Of course, this means stepping on the toes of a bunch of incompetent lifers who are just there for the 9-5 chill life and pension, so it will never happen.

You've gotta ask yourself: if private sector style pay would cost more, then wouldn't that imply the private sector is vastly more inefficient than the government? But that's clearly not the case, so we come to the conclusion that private sector pay and hiring standards must result in much greater output per dollar.

The worst part is that it wouldn’t even require any noticeable increase in tax revenue! The salaries of the dozen or so government employees managing a billion dollar contract are a rounding error in the total cost

We could shift the model from guaranteed pensions to employee contribution retirement funds, and shift the savings to salary. We’d get better pay for civil servants, remove the incentive for bad ones to stay, and make cities and states more financially sound all in one shot.

Citation please? Everything I’ve seen implies public sector employees in California make massively more than their private sector counterparts.

The article doesn't:

"Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours."

I mean that public sector employees are underpaid. Comparing consultants and in-house cost is always going to to result in 2-3x disparity (you’re paying a premium for swing capacity). I’m willing to bet the state employee is overpaid Vs his private sector non-consultant counterpart. You then have ask why hire a consultant and I think the answer is that it’s some combination of not being able to fire state employees after the project, or that those employees are actually ineffectual/incompetent.

(As an aside I’m willing to bet the #’s aren’t apples to apples with the consultant being a fully loaded coast, and the in-house not including pension benefits etc)

It may depend on the author, as some articles in the publication are inconsistent with the characterization of “in-depth research.” Previously, the publication wrote about “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” but made some omissions that misrepresented some key facts used as evidence of Stanford’s supposed demise.[1]

Two key things pointed out by our fellow HN readers included the (1) failure to acknowledge the association of the defunct fraternity, wistfully characterized as emblematic of campus social life, with the Brock Turner rape; and (2) the mischaracterization of Lake Lagunita as a beloved campus waterfront neglected by Stanford, when it was in fact an artificial pond created by a dam that the municipality stopped servicing.[2]

These may or may not necessarily be important for a casual audience, but for a publication that presents itself in the self-appointed realm of “governance futurism” there is a lack of rigor and a palpable sense of linguistic license. Take it for what you will.

[1]https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-...

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31732944

The Stanford article rings true to me as an alum. The justification for KA losing their housing was entirely unrelated to the Brock Turner case. He was not a member, he just happened to be attending the party.

My time predates most of the events of this article but the war on fun was well underway. Sentiment was that the frats in trouble at the time (kappa sig and SAE) largely deserved it, especially SAE, but there was a sense that anyone else could be next. The university values conformity over social life or even safety. The abrupt removal of the European theme houses without any justification pretty much confirms the former, the banning of hard alcohol and end of the "open door" drinking policy confirms the latter. The coops are probably next on the chopping block.

EDIT- Unrelated fun fact, there is tunnel underneath lake lag that the endangered salamanders and other wildlife can just to get to the other side of the road. This also creates an ambush point for local raccoons and coyotes to eat what comes out.

Not an alum so I can’t speak to the first person experience, and the quirks of Stanford are not interesting. My comment’s purpose is limited to that of a discriminating reader seeking to become more informed.

I think these observations would have been fine independently but the context is important, if only for the sake of refuting it. The failure to acknowledge it, and the license taken with respect to other facts is what is unsettling.

I agree that context is important, but context here is that they were put on probation four years later for something completely unrelated. Criticizing its omission without pointing that out might mislead people.

The quirks of Stanford may not be interesting to you but it is literally an article about Stanford social quirks. If there's any criticism to be made of the article it's not acknowledging why SAE or Sigma Chi were removed from campus as their behavior was far more abhorrent (a targeted harassment campaign against a sorority member and a roofie incident by a non student friend of the fraternity members.

I think that’s a worthwhile discussion, and readers would have definitely appreciated a discussion of, “Does reputational damage precipitate organizational dissolution in the context of college associations?”

It would have been enlightening and gotten to the heart of the nominal issue with respect to both the theme houses and the fraternity houses, I think.

That was not what the article was, however, and I think we can acknowledge Stanford’s failures and the failure of authorship in the article-publication in the same breath.

My impression of Burja is that he’s better at the writing - there are always interesting details - than average but not generally a superior analyst.

For example: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/modern-russia-can-fight... has interesting and useful details but I think has been demonstrably and obviously short of similar analysis from experts in the field who are less certain but more reliable vis-a-vis outcomes.

> depth of research

I've enjoyed Burja's work but he does enter patterns that I would categorize as just needlessly contrarian. I believe he once used the number of ships to say the US navy is slipping, rather than by tonnage - by numbers the north Koreans should be really powerful, and they are right?

NIMBYs don't cause the gross mismanagement of funds on existing rail lines.

>Like the detail

Whats interesting is that it was the “parent” company ACS Grupo that was successful. (They bought a decisive stake in Dragados)

Seems like old school corruption=>incompetence=>credential laundering to me.

https://www.vozpopuli.com/economia_y_finanzas/empresas/acs-f...

On top of all that, You also have to solve for the structural inefficiency of public sector pay and benefits. Public sector employees make tons more than than private sector counterparts when you account for pensions and benefits, but those only really accrue if you “put in your 20” - making government service basically a non-starter for someone that doesn’t want to be a lifer…

Other countries that can build major projects better than the USA don't have merit-based pay and promotion for their civil servants.

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