This analysis, for whatever it's worth, is wrestling with a straw man. Klein and Thompson never claim that permitting reform is the only lever available. The housing strategy Abundance documents is that of the YIMBY movement, and YIMBYs are all-of-the-above advocates. If you can get subsidized housing built, you get it built. Meanwhile, you fix exclusionary zoning and clear a path for the market (which produced virtually all the homes we live in) to function as well.
I'm hugely in favour of adding non-market housing anywhere it can be added, but the author declaring it a different fix to the housing crisis from zoning is naive at best. Non-market housing is subject to the exact same complex local regulations as market housing, plus all the complexity of government projects, a patchwork of subsidies, grants, and loans to get funding, and even more intense public scrutiny. Trying to get social housing done is playing an exceptionally hard game on nightmare mode.
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.
Worth mentioning here that appeals to social housing have over the last 20 years been absolutely classic NIMBY arguments. People raise it because they know significant amounts of social housing won't get built, but if you fix the gating factors for the market, it will.
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.
> 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".
To be slightly glib: the left has no greater enemy than someone who agrees with them 95% of the time.
> 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".
I think in opposition to gentrification. Then, over time, the gentrifiers won anyway and now most housing in hcol areas is occupied by wealthy professionals. But the politics were never updated and now lock out the people they were originally designed to protect.
The old school granola hippie left (anti nuclear types who love coal and gas) seem to think that “making things people want and selling them for money” is fine until it’s homes, when it suddenly becomes evil.
There’s also a failure to see second or third order effects. Yes, upcoming 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.
> 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.
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.
(I’m not interested in relitigating the article or the arguments made therein.)
Capitalist YIMBYs oppose McMansions. They're like the central thing we oppose. The whole point of the movement is replacing large-lot-coverage single-family-homes with multifamily. The whole point of YIMBYism is multifamily housing.
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.
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.
Yes, plus, all these meta-studies always seemed to ignore the reasons for the demand shock.
"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.
> This analysis, for whatever it's worth, is wrestling with a straw man. Klein and Thompson never claim that permitting reform is the only lever available.
The housing claims in the book are basically unfalsifiable as written. It might be a straw man, but at least it’s a concrete result.
> This analysis, for whatever it's worth, is wrestling with a straw man.
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.)
>Austin is surrounded by empty flat land. San Francisco is surrounded by water and was built out many decades ago.
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).
I've read this like 5 times and I still can't make sense of it. Is this a variant of the "5-bedroom houses in Cairo Illinois only cost $40,000, there is no housing shortage" argument?
No---did you read the original article? The comment and the parent will make more sense. Basically the article compares Austin and San Fransisco and attributes the difference in building rates entirely to disparities in regulation. Which is obviously not an accurate framing, for the reasons mentioned in our respective comments.
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.
I did; the top comment on this thread is my response to the article. I don't think you fully get the argument: San Francisco needs to upzone and do large amounts of infill development. Most of the most important areas of economic opportunity in this country are landlocked; San Francisco's challenge isn't unique.
I think you're making the same mistake the article did, focusing on the regulatory environment. My argument is that the zoning and other regulation is not the main reason Austin has more housing starts than San Francisco. The main reason is that land, labor, and materials are cheaper there. SF can upzone and infill to it's heart's content, it won't make land, labor and materials cheaper than Austin.
Your argument is conclusory. The whole question is the extent to which the regulatory environment is preventing upzoning. If you think San Francisco should remain zoned the way it is, say that, and say why.
I have no opinion one way or another how SF should be zoned. I'm just saying that how it is zoned is a second- or third-order effect on the rate of home-building. Land, labor and materials are the first-order effects. Now, maybe SF is saturated, and every square foot that could have a home on it already has one. Then you'd have to rezone other areas in order to increase the supply of land. But even if you did that, as long as the land was a lot more expensive than Austin's, the rate of home construction would still be slower. And I think it would be physically impossible for SF to zone its way to a land supply comparable to Austin. Hope that clarifies.
This is interesting analysis, but I don't think it necessarily counteracts what the book is saying. To build state-affiliated housing also involved "clearing the pipes" as the article put it.
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.
(For the uninitiated, the government [and sponsored co-ops] owns almost half the housing in Vienna, and eligibility for social housing, which is seen as desirable, extends deep into the middle class.)
Many people also don't know that Vienna was isolated and divided for nearly 50 years during the cold war. A significant amount of the available housing is due to Vienna having a bad economy for almost a century.
I am also reminded of (former-?) rival Hong Kong, where the government either runs or subsidizes at least half the housing. (This in turn relies on other idiosyncrasies, like the government owning all the land, a massive sovereign-wealth fund, etc.)
I'm not learned enough on the topic to really comment on it but I appreciated the diagrams and the simple fluid prose. Overall the meta lesson reminds me of the building adage "measure twice cut once".
People can write what they like on their blog, but this article seems to be missing key details - we don't find out what the model is or the coefficients he's using and the model apparently immediately produces unrealistic results. Hopefully it is made clear in the book, but unless someone has read Abundance it is hard to follow.
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.
I like how they're using real numbers and theorizing around that. An interesting next step would to dive in deeper, to see up close where it's bottlenecking.
Progressives and Democratic Socialists like to pretend that the government can pass a law which would allow it to build lots of social housing/provide health care for everyone/build a lot of green energy/etc and it would just go and do that easy peasy. But building housing and infrastructure is not something you can just snap your fingers and it happens. It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night. Governments have to spend years and decades building systems and institutional knowledge around these things. The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out.
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.
It’s always fascinating to see when “this is hard and expensive to do, so we shouldn’t even try” is considered a compelling argument (housing, health care) vs. when it isn’t (defense, policing, the modern panopticon).
We spend way less on policing than people think we do. A generation of progressives got turned around on this because people don't understand how overlapping taxing bodies work.
> The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out.
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.
Yes, with exclusive zoning and permitting rules. That's the entire point of Abundance.
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.
I don’t think you finished reading my comment. If you want the government to build lots of housing, fine. But you just have to really commit to doing so and expect it to be a perpetual project. Building out the highway system worked because we never stopped building it. China was able to build out its high speed rail system because it planned on connecting the whole country (and it’s still building, to its own detriment).
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.
Hint: if you see "Austin" bandied around as a good example, then you know shit about housing.
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_.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 54.2 ms ] threadThe 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 in opposition to gentrification. Then, over time, the gentrifiers won anyway and now most housing in hcol areas is occupied by wealthy professionals. But the politics were never updated and now lock out the people they were originally designed to protect.
There’s also a failure to see second or third order effects. Yes, upcoming 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.
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.
(I’m not interested in relitigating the article or the arguments made therein.)
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.
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.
(Strong Towns and YIMBYism aren't totally aligned.)
"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.
The housing claims in the book are basically unfalsifiable as written. It might be a straw man, but at least it’s a concrete result.
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria
Like Berlin, Vienna had occupation zones, but there was never a wall between them.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).