Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data
laxmena.com
laxmena.com
The single lever he points out is itself a ton of local, regional, and federal regulations and laws that all need modernizing or abolishing, which is far from a simple, single lever at all.
But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist".
Nathan J. Robinson actually said the quiet part out loud a couple years ago, when he wrote in Current Affairs (a relatively high-profile American leftist periodical) a long defense of suburban NIMBYism.
To be slightly glib: the left has no greater enemy than someone who agrees with them 95% of the time.
I think a lot of these activists were originally fighting gentrification. Then, over time, the gentrifiers won anyway, and now most housing in hcol areas is occupied by wealthy professionals. But the activists never updated their politics (people have a hard time admitting—or, sometimes, realizing—that they lost), and now they advocate policies that shut out the people they originally set out to protect.
There’s also a failure to see second or third order effects. Yes, up zoning means that new homes will be expensive at first, but over time prices fall as demand and supply reach equilibrium. Similarly rent control is a feel good policy to screw the young and newcomers in favour of incumbent renters.
Worth adding that "public housing" isn't the only or even the most common form of subsidized housing. There's no Faircloth limit at all to public-private subsidized housing with AMI-calibrated eligibility and rent, and that's a much more common form of subsidized housing than a "housing project". But it can't get built in meaningful numbers either, because it's simply too expensive.
Also, if municipal governments "fixed that" by making it possible for more housing to be built and more people to move into neighborhoods served by those currently-good school districts, the odds are good that the influx of new students would make the school district worse. And the people currently living in single-family zoned residences know this - one motivation for NIMBYism is that it helps maintain the high quality of the local school district where your kids currently attend school.
I'm personally in favor of abolishing public school districts, precisely so that the location of a house is no longer a major deciding factor in where any children in that household attend school. This reduces the incentive for people who live in a house in a good public school district to resist building any more houses in that school district, lest the inhabitants of that house make the school district less good.
Setting aside the inevitable transportation issues this is an excellent policy that I would love to see implemented, but I think too many suburbs built their identity around “having the (property tax base necessary to create the) good school district.”
That's the real dirty problem of the suburb + school district marriage: You turn parents just thinking of the school district of their children into raging NIMBYs that end up wanting just rich people that speak perfect english nearby.
However, the popularity of cars, highways, and general mobility all over the place, has caused many bishops, particularly in the United States, to sort of supersede these territorial rules. Now in my diocese, a Catholic can go attend any parish they want to, and register in that parish, and for all legal purposes they are an official member of that parish, as if they lived within the territory. There have always been parishes like this, called "personal parishes" but they were often defined by certain ethnolinguistic qualities, like everyone from Poland, or Vietnam or something.
So now this leads to some crazy situations. For example, my friend was received into the Church from Lutheranism, and when this happened, he lived in a particular place. But he's moved away--far, far away--twice, and yet he still "commutes" to that parish where he became attached and still loves, and still has commitments and responsibilities there, which he upholds.
There are also people who, for liturgical or doctrinal reasons, will drive for hours on Sundays just to reach a church that agrees with their personal beliefs and preferences.
I am not sure this is sustainable or realistic. If eventually you have Catholics driving all over creation, literally, to get to their preferred parish, then some parishes are going to languish, if they cannot attract or retain people who are willing to volunteer there, support their material needs, and send their kids to the parochial school. That means schools are going to close. There are also independent schools popping up, that are not parochial, but approved, and Catholics send their kids there. Failing that, they get homeschooled.
I think this extreme mobility thing is absurd. I can't keep up, obviously, having no vehicle. It was actually easier for me to commute to a parish I didn't "territorially" belong to because of the way public transit works, but eventually I decided to stop commuting, and be honest, and live up to responsibilities of the parish where I belong, territorially, even if that is now a de jure thing of the past.
As I understand stuff, "abundance" is perceived as a threat to, a means to neuter, YIMBY urbanism advocacy (a la , Strong Towns, Sightline, War on Cars, etc).
Criticisms I've read are:
1) guilt by association
2) exasperation with neoliberal faith in markets, to the exclusion of other strategies
3) punching left, while ignoring the perfidy and obstructionism of the right, as though only "the left" has agency
4) being anti-democratic, by ignoring (or underplaying) the necessity of rebuilding state administrative capacity
Wanting a lot more housing, I'm pro "abundance" by default.
Even so, I've been hurt before. So I try to remain cognizant of "the left's" criticisms. Being confused by the food fight over abundance, I'd describe "the left" as being wary.
(Strong Towns and YIMBYism aren't totally aligned.)
If we’re thinking about the same essay it’s a criticism of capitalist YIMBYs who are only interested in building McMansions and the like. It is both anti-NIMBY and anti-some-YIMBYs, which seems reasonable to me.
EDIT: Historically, some YIMBYs have not opposed—I guess we’ll call it instead—unaffordable housing. So-called “capitalist” or “libertarian” YIMBYs in particular. Robinson’s article describes this. Leftists are skeptical of “all housing construction makes housing more affordable” arguments, and there’s evidence presented in the article to that effect.
Understand: there isn't regulation against large single family homes. You can build a McMansion anywhere you want already. Your analysis makes no sense: nobody needs to organize anything to allow McMansions; they're the regulatory default. But suburban progressives genuinely believe stuff like this! It's a real problem.
More like a straw army.
Austin is surrounded by empty flat land. San Francisco is surrounded by water and was built out many decades ago.
London suffers from being the main city in Britain. The UK is overcentralized. Most of the money and power are in London. Some countries are centralized like that, with all the good stuff around the national capital. France, Japan, and Russia are; the US, Canada, and China are not. (China, maybe; too much is near Beijing, but there are lots of other big cities.)
This^^^. The idea that housing starts are solely (or even substantially) impacted by regulation is a case of control bias, attributing disproportionate influence to minor factors we can control (like regulation) over major factors we cannot (land, labor and material costs).
Your comment is more addressed at affordability, which is largely a function of wealth disparity: as the wealthy get richer with respect to the lower percentiles, they absorb an increasing share of the home market and drive prices up.
"It's not the permits, it's the demand shock" (the last image in the blog post). The "demand shock", was the economy growing...quickly. And that statement is left hanging in the air like we're supposed to do something about it.
The economic growth is a good thing, we should have a housing system that reacts to it like surge pricing but instead we get a lot of hand-wringing then rezoning 5-10 years too late, so instead of temporary surge pricing, we get permanent ultra-heavy-high-surge pricing.
If the model is just a rough rule of thumb then spot checking 4 cities in completely different legal frameworks, cultures and economic situations doesn't give us a lot of data. Economies are very complicated and any effect can be overruled by something unrelated but more impactful happening.
Additionally, the Vienna housing that this article touched on is a way deeper rabbit hole that is absolutely worth looking into. They have a completely different housing paradigm than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
In general, the Vienna model is very difficult to copy without being in extreme conditions: https://www.threads.com/@__smiz/post/Cxpz28CIkT6
Like Berlin, Vienna had occupation zones, but there was never a wall between them.
You just made it up.
I can take out my copy and explain better later today, if it’s interesting.
Austin rent decreases happened because of its stagnant population, not because of new construction. It's barely growing _at_ _best_, and I predict that it's actually _shrinking_.
You can play around with the ACS dataset yourself: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDP1Y2024.DP05
The 1-year estimate for 2024 is 993771, barely up from 979263 for 2019 (there is no 1-year estimate for 2020).
This is a lot of what Abundance is actually about. Part of it is saying “yeah, let’s take the time and build state capacity to be able to do some of these things”. Vienna is able to build social housing because it’s been doing it consistently for decades and has all the right systems in place to do it. It’s not a libertarian book that just says “get rid of the rules and let capitalism sort everything out”. It’s about figuring out the right set of rules and incentives that allow governments to sustainably build things, or else facilitate the market to build them.
This is just so defeatist and annoying. Building houses isnt inherently hard. we've intentionally made it hard for no good reason.
The housing market dwarfs the Interstate Highway System, by the way. It's like comparing Europa to Jupiter. But the defeatism thing you're saying here: that too is an Abundance argument. It's a thing we're pissed about: that the government can't just go build things anymore.
It sounds like you're already one of us. Come on in! We have a conference and everything.
If you’re going to build three new subway stops, or a single housing complex, you’re not going to keep any of that expertise. You hire some consultants and contractors and then they move on to something completely different at the end of the project.
I fundamentally don't believe this is true. This shit isnt hard at all. its a fucking building. Creating EUV lithography machines is hard, creating cutting edge vaccines is hard. Building a building is not hard.
That's true if we're talking residential structures using load bearing masonry in America. Modern timber-framed houses? Nope.
> It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night.
If this is true for your locale, the reasoning always boils down to the slow pace of bureaucracy. Needing this permit cleared, then this one, need this plan signed off on, need this approved, etc. Of course, you can absolutely expedite the process by throwing money at the problem. The wealthy do that in LA all the time, to shorten a 5-year bureaucratic lead time into a matter of months. Sometimes it's to build where local regulation would outright forbid it, rather than expedite the process.
The thing is that this bureaucratic lead-time is entirely manufactured. It's not actually a natural law. The state can bypass it anytime it pleases and and pass the buck to pick up the mess. The obvious contemporary example is just how quickly data centers have been built, but it's a truism in general. Never underestimate the power of the state deciding to ignore its own laws, and its natural god-given right to do so at any time.