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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 49.6 ms ] threadAdditionally, 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.
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.
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.
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).