Corporations aren't the reason your rent is too high
noahpinion.blog
noahpinion.blog
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> [Proceeds to do nothing but knock down political strawmen]
I thought you were perhaps leading up to your having a different take that isn't captured here. Do you?
edit: looks like that's a no.
I thought that would be obvious by now.
Not that I expect you to care about evidence.
Additionally looking at national averages is misleading. Investor pricing power can exist in individual markets without being ubiquitous across the nation. The allegations made against RealPage are a notable example, if true.
A more insidious issue besides just pricing power among investors is the direction of cash flow. When you rent, cash is paid to the owner. When you take out a mortgage, interest is paid to the bank. These are both mechanisms for rentier capitalists to extract cash from those with less - by paying for a basic need - essentially wealth redistribution in the wrong direction.
It seems like your gripe about cash flow is that people pay anything at all. Nevermind that wealth does get redistributed for those who have less income (in various ways), and they also pay less.
Fanciful ideas aside there's plenty of evidence that increasing supply of housing lowers prices
Wealth inequality continues to increase. These measures are insufficient.
The best effect that YIMBY can have on housing is to put a slight downward pressure on prices. Prices can still go up, and often do, in locations where YIMBY is adopted. That’s because it’s a superficial measure that does not address the structural cause. Slightly lower prices cannot house the growing homeless population for example - slightly lower prices can never house people without money.
“Abundance” makes a gesture toward the housing crisis without addressing the structural cause - wealth inequality. It’s appealing to its billionaire supporters for exactly this reason. We need effective public housing that the wealthy finance through their taxes.
The point of tax and spend/redistribute is to provide services and goods, not eliminate inequality. Inequality in itself is a moot point.
> Slightly lower prices cannot house the growing homeless population for example - slightly lower prices can never house people without money.
Homelessness scales directly with housing affordability. The data makes this clear. Not with drug-use rates or inequality. A large portion of the homeless population is transient and temporary, 80%+. Lower prices will lower the homeless population, full stop.
For the chronically homeless you can weave in other interventions and try to offer geared-to-income or free spots (this is already a thing), but you can't force them to do anything. You can't force them to take medication, you can't force them to show up to appointments. If your big solution is to introduce involuntary confinement, that has nothing to do with housing, but conversely I don't think assigning a bedroom apt in itself addresses the core problems that ail them. Covered at length here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-inc....
> The best effect that YIMBY can have on housing is to put a slight downward pressure on prices.
Real-world examples suggest it's anything but "slight". See: housing affordability disparity between red and blue cities just for example.
The last estimate for the total homeless population in Japan in 2024 was just 2820 people, in the country. That's 0.2 per 10k, the best rate in the world, in a country that is anything but equal.
If your metric for an effective housing policy is decimating the rate of homelessness, clearly sound zoning and regulation is the first place to look. This is NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE with having special interventions reserved for the chronically homeless who will never work, but these represent a fraction of the homeless.
At a high level, reducing inequality reduces relative power differential among members of society. Wealth inequality is its own evil. In the housing market this can takes forms like investor pricing power and intensification of rentier capitalism, (furthering the parasitism of the working class by increasing cash outflows from workers to banks and rentiers).
> Homelessness scales directly with housing affordability…not inequality.
Housing is less affordable when people have less money to pay for housing.
I get that slightly lower prices are can cause fewer people to succumb to homelessness. But again, how is someone without money supposed to buy a house - even at a lower price?
> A large portion of the homeless population is transient and temporary, 80%+.
Source? The closest thing I could find was one study - from the 1990s - for two cities only - limiting its study to the population of homeless people living in shelters only.
> See: housing affordability disparity between red and blue cities just for example.
Many factors feed in to different housing rates between red and blue cities such as typically wealthier workforces in blue cities.
Look at YIMBYism’s adopters. Oregon’s statewide upzoning hasn’t reversed rising homelessness. Despite California’s ADU and zoning laws, affordability is near record lows. Even Austin’s rent drop hasn’t halted its homelessness growth.
YIMBYism can have positive effects, sure. Yet often these effects are dwarfed by other factors. That’s because NIMBYism is a one fish in the sea of causation.
Zooming out, the big picture is wealth inequality, the distribution of assets. More people can’t afford housing; those that can pay more for it. Meanwhile wealth of the wealthiest continues to grow, including investor housing stockpiles, instead of shifting assets into the hands of those who need it.
YIMBYist supply tweaking is a bandaid for this.
> The last estimate for the total homeless population in Japan in 2024 was just 2820 people, in the country.
Right, and they have superior public housing policies for the homeless, tax-financed, providing the kind of effective safety net we need and lack.
> I get that slightly lower prices are can cause fewer people to succumb to homelessness. But again, how is someone without money supposed to buy a house - even at a lower price?
Relativity to pricing matters.
Americans are among the richest citizens in the world. Wealth is not zero sum and inequality != "less money" as-in absolutely diminishing. Real wages are growing. Compare with countries with the lowest Gini Coefficient and you won't say they have "more money" than average Americans (that said, GDP-per-Capita is a good target to have).
There are policies and wealth transfer schemes to support those with nil income and less income. These can be expanded, but it's a thing.
What you're proposing through "public housing" is not gifting single family homes either, it's just subsidized rent footed by taxpayers. On the one hand you seem to decry the fact that people rent, but on the other you want to replace it with rent.
> Source?
Some I came across:
17% are chronically homeless, necessitating that 83% aren't - https://www.comicrelief.org/posts/what-are-the-four-types-of...
"Most unhoused individuals experience relatively short-term homelessness (64%)" - worse rates in california - https://calbudgetcenter.org/resources/who-is-experiencing-ho...
This source puts the chronic rate at 30% - https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/united-states-homeless-s...
> Many factors feed in to different housing rates between red and blue cities such as typically wealthier workforces in blue cities.
The key one being that it's easier to build.
> Look at YIMBYism’s adopters.
These areas have hardly embraced it, they're precisely poster-childs for NIMBYism. The war is ongoing and the reforms are a pittance. California and Oregon also start with the worst affordability in the country.
The data is clear that homelessness rates correlate with housing affordability, and the hardest places to build are worse-off: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...
> Even Austin’s rent drop hasn’t halted its homelessness growth.
The rents didn't drop that significantly. The city is growing fairly fast it was 4% in 2024.
Increasing supply has to catch up to the demand, the popularity of these cities is high especially as professionals are fleeing NY and SF or LA. Small victories are not enough.
> Right, and they have superior public housing policies for the homeless, tax-financed, providing the kind of effective safety net we need and lack.
Japan's supply of public-operated housing has plummeted since the '60s - https://www.cbl.or.jp/slc/file/english.pdf . It's only like 5% of stock. In the U.S., something like less than 3% of the US population lives in section 8 housing - https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/public-housing-stat... . That is not a huge difference.
They don't spend much on this at all, even low-income earners can afford a place on their own dime. Plus the societal norms and pressures protect against some pitfalls that could lead to chronic homelessness (like addiction).
Social housing has it's place, but it's not the significant mover. What I'm proposing is that housing be made broadly more affordable through sensible policy reform and supplement with public housing as needed; focusing only on social housing is a race to the bottom. It
This is my point. YIMBY laws are only one part of a larger picture of causation. They do not have a significant enough effect on housing to be the basis for sound housing policy.
Similarly looking at regulations in blue vs red cities (ignoring the presence of higher paid workers in blue cities for example) or looking at public housing as a percentage of housing in Japan - public housing needs to meet the housing demand needs not sit at a portion of supply. We need more public housing in the US.
You acknowledge the role of wealth redistribution programs. That is my argument - these programs should be expanded, and financed by taxes on the wealthy. We should provide direct assistance to those who need it, rather than tweaking NIMBY laws and hoping for the best.