LargeWu

Captialism is really good at efficiency. But it is not so good at allocation, specifically for essential goods, and that's the problem here.

Only possible thing I can think of is they won't be able to just pull down data that is "not aligned with the current administration". I'm not sure that would be an intended side effect, though.

85,000 new H1B's. But there are multiples of that already in the US who already hold visas. So, the actual number is in the hundreds of thousands, enough to make a serious impact on supply of labor in the tech sector.

>> Want a playground or dog park? That's the government's responsibility? Maybe

Yes, this is how it works pretty much everywhere else. Even my rural hometown with <1500 people has an elected park board that is responsible for parks, the swimming pool, tennis courts, summer rec programs, etc.

25 years is wild. No wonder HOA's have a reputation for boards with power trips.

In the absence of an HOA, what you're describing as "shared facilities for a group of private individuals" would be commonly considered a private club. The difference is most private clubs that are not HOA's are not tied to owning specific property. For example, my sister belongs to a private pool club in their neighborhood. They pay membership dues to the club which provides operating revenue for the pool facilities, but it's not tied to any property ownership.

If the house is covered by an HOA, it's typically not optional.

And in some areas it's very difficult to find housing not part of an HOA. I think somebody mentioned elsewhere in this thread that all new housing in Phoenix requires an HOA.

"someone needs to assess and allocate costs which isn't always obvious"

In most places, this is called the city government.

Ultimately this feels like the "low tax area" myth is getting exposed. You still need to pay for all the same things your taxes would otherwise pay for, but for some reason it's different as long as it's not called a tax.

HOA's are ultimately run by the homeowners themselves. It's right there in the name. If the HOA is such a problem, elect different people to the board and change the rules.

I know you're kidding, but the TPM I work with is basically a stenographer. If we ask him "why" on a requirement, 60% chance the answer is "I don't know, but the customer wants it"

AccuWeather has lobbied hard to privatize weather data. However, I'm not sure who would be collecting that data if the government stopped collecting it for them.

It was a surge of demand, driven by the availability of cheap money.

Sure, because demand went through the roof. And demand is currently high again. So either we need fewer people, or more dwellings.

IDK, I think there's clearly arguments to be made against so-called "late stage capitalism", where capital is directed towards efforts that extract value rather than create it, and shareholder theory that prioritizes short term gains and creates externalities at the expense of other stakeholders.

But at the end of the day, everything is subject to market forces and it's folly to deny that.

It seems to be driving largely by anti-capitalist sentiment rather than understanding of economic fundamentals.

I think that what they're saying is because inflation numbers are typically presented as an annual number (3.3%), when you hear a number like 0.9% it sounds lower to somebody who is not economically literate.

"Prices increased 0.9% in July, which would translate to an annual inflation rate of 11.3%" is one way to say it with more clarity.

Also, Trump has a habit of picking numbers out of context when they suit his personal narrative. For example, not long ago he said something like "The price of gas is down to $1.98 per gallon" when in fact that that number was something along of the lines of the wholesale price. So it's no wonder people are misinformed when they get misleading economic information.

He was also a cheater, taking bespoke steroid cocktails, so there's that.

I don't disagree with that. I think economic power getting concentrated in a relatively small number of hands is unequivocally bad.

That said, the Abundance argument for building more housing is that in many local housing markets, the pendulum has swung too far the other way in ways that are well-meaning but ultimately counterproductive. This very article makes the case that oligopolistic economic power is not the reason for unaffordable housing.

Nothing in your assertion addresses the actual merits of the abundance mindset as described in Klein and Thompson's book.

If you want to argue that Andreesen is co-opting or manipulating those ideas for his own ends, that's something else.

Maybe I'm missing context but this would be the exact opposite of the Abundance agenda.

If your point is that Andreesen advocates for abundance policies, but then also opposes them in classic NIMBY fashion when it affects him, well, that's an indictment of Marc Andreesen, not Abundance mentality. In fact, your point inadvertently seems to say "Marc Andreesen is not Abundance enough!" since he is engaged in anti-Abundance activity in lobbying against multi-family housing.

This is a purely ad-hominem attack.

Unfortunately this is the type of magical thinking that gets passed off as serious policy analysis based on nothing but anti-capitalist dogma. There is no evidence to support these conclusions, and in fact plenty of evidence that it would worsen the housing crisis.

Increasingly, we're seeing home services companies like plumbing and HVAC owned by private equity. This is how you end up paying $300 an hour for the plumber (plus a $300 service fee just for showing up). The technician isn't getting the majority of that money.

Good rule of thumb is that if you see a home services company with billboards, or branded vehicles, they are going to be super expensive.

The main reasons that international cash comes in is either speculation or offshoring money.

If the housing supply actually matched demand, the housing market becomes unattractive for speculation.

If foreigners are buying houses just to park their money, building more housing to meet the demand helps to alleviate that. This situation feels like a case where regulations designed to prevent housing supply from sitting empty can make sense but I have no evidence or story on how would need to be implemented to achieve that goal without negative unintended consequences.

You seem to be guilty of Fish Tank Thinking here yourself.

Housing costs are not divorced from the laws of supply and demand. Raising wages creates increased demand for housing, but you still need the supply! Raising wages without increasing housing supply will just make housing more expensive.

It's dogmatic among the left that "market based solutions are bad". And because Abundance embraces market solutions, it must therefore be bad too.

Basically, all the arguments I've seen against Abundance tend either towards the ideological, or irrelevant. I tend to see very little empirical arguments.

I like to say the market is undefeated thoughout history.

You can add regulations or limitations that incentivize the market one way or another to achieve social goals, but these distortions add up. And when there are too many distortions in the market, it stops acting how you want it to act, and starts acting how it will. And usually, that means negative unintended consequences.

"Abundance" directly addresses climate change in the book. The scenario it describes is that we need to electrify at a pace far beyond what we're doing today in order to find off climate change, but large scale clean energy projects are often stymied by red tape and legal challenges. Also lack of government investment in scientific research.

This is a bad-faith description of the abundance movement.

The central thesis of the abundance movement is this: Every time we make a regulation, we are making a tradeoff. In the case of housing, an example would be "zoning only for single family housing". It's trading off affordability for quieter neighborhoods. Another might be "public housing contracts must favor minority-owned contractors". It trades off affordability for the development of a disadvantaged constituency.

Over time, many of these such regulations accumulate. Environmental reviews. Impact studies. Public comment periods. And while every individual regulation might be well meaning, the totality of them creates market distortions that disincentivize or even utterly prevent the very thing we're trying to accomplish.

So, the abundance movement looks at these and says we need to think about these in terms of tradeoffs, and pare back the regulations that have bad tradeoffs. This is often derided by critics as deregulation which makes developers more profitable. While that might be a side effect, it's not the main reason. It's deregulation to remove market distortions that, in the case of housing, constrain supply and therefore drive up housing costs.

"Upzoning increases land value. Developers build profitable market rate houses there"

Unless you are upzoning ONLY in low-income neighborhoods, this doesn't add up. The assumption is that upzoning makes development more attractive. But this would apply to the entire city, and would therefore increase housing supply outside those low-income neighborhoods as well, which actually reduces the propensity for displacement.