This is completely true, I recently heard exactly this set of arguments from people in my municipality in Montgomery County, MD, where, as I’m sure you know better than me, there’s a lot of local opposition to Wes Moore’s starter and silver homes bill. One outright claimed that I had been duped by developers.
The problem I always want to point out is if the housing reform won’t actually cause more housing to be built, then why are you opposing it?
This doesn't make any sense to me. The state can build as much housing as it wants! The problems there are entirely political, why wouldn't they be able to satisfy demand?
There’s a lot of financial constraints on the state! It’s private developers who can build as much as the state will let them, but state built housing needs to get both regulatory approval *and* public funding.
To be fair, the financial constraints are also on the developers, no? It isn't like the costs go away for them. And a cost that many people love to ignore are all of the costs from dealing with many buyers. Is a big part of the reason small builders focus on a few buildings at a time. Or setup an HOA to push off some of the liabilities onto someone else.
That's right. But if you make it easier to get permissions, then it's not so unlikely that *someone* will have those financial resources relevant to make use of them. While if you try to do it from the state side, then you need the state itself to have those financial resources.
I confess this feels less likely to me. A big component of the abundance message that I resonated with was that expensive things pretty much require government spending. Granted, the rise of cronyism in our current admin isn't making that look too promising.
Specifically, I look at the actually expensive things that have happened and it is dominated by public funds. Operation Warp Speed being an obvious cost in recent memory. You can go back to the interstate system. Amounts of money that are just unheard of.
Even staying with successful "private" operations like SpaceX, you find a company that is dominated by public spending.
I think this can get tricky because people don't acknowledge the reality that the big cities would, themselves, be impressively large companies. LA has a budget of 14 billion. NYC, 114 billion!
Doing a brief scan online, the largest private housing development is Hudson Yards. Where I note that the city has supplied 6 of the 25 billion that is being spent there. I would expect you won't find any other build that doesn't get at least that much of a mix from public funds.
It's just not true that "expensive things" are dominated by public spending.
There is FAR more private capital in the world than government capital. And most of the government's capital investments are tied up in the stuff that _doesn't_ make sense for a single private operator to build and own, like roads and utilities. (If I had my druthers, _even more_ utility assets would be owned by the government. PG&E delenda est.)
Now granted, the government _could_ just print money to fund an investment spree in housing. But doing so results in either a decline of private investment ("crowding out"), or spiralling inflation, neither of which is a great outcome.
If something has very large positive externalities, and it's hard for a private actor to capture them, then it will make sense to spend government money on it. That's the Operation Warp Speed case.
But there are _lots_ of cases where it's better for government to shape the market to provide the right incentives for private capital, then step back and let entrepreneurs compete to deliver socially-beneficial results. You tend to get faster responsiveness to what the end-users of the relevant goods and services actually want.
The diverse range of restaurants and grocery stores provide better food, at a lower price, than what a planned economy could do, with everyone just eating whatever the government cafeteria provides.
Similarly, while I am totally onboard for large investments in "social housing" (and have contributed to Asm. Alex Lee's campaigns in part because he's a leader in our state on that issue), I don't think this is going to be a large percentage of all housing in my region any time soon. If you arrange things so it's profitable for private actors to deliver homes, they will do so, and that will benefit everyone.
Maybe I just need more precision to know what you're actually talking about then. Is your objection that the US government is not capable of running a house-building enterprise at the needed level due to resource or capacity constraints? Is it just "Public housing is too communist so you can't get enough people to press their representatives to support it"?
I can understand how regulatory reforms have a natural cap on how much they'll help, because developers will still only build in places / ways they can make a profit, and regulations are only one piece of that. Removing every regulation won't magically make every project profitable. But the binding constraint on public housing seems to be purely the lack of will from government to do it.
We're talking about focusing exclusively on public housing, right?
My point is closer to your second proposition, though the problem with isn't that it's "too communist", it's that demand for cheap housing in places people want to live is between a hundred and a thousand times higher than our current public capacity.*
That's across all levels of government: federal, state, county, and municipal actors working together in conjunction with non-profits. Scaling up to meet the level of demand would require unprecedented budgetary shifts or unprecedented new tax hikes.
The chance of bringing either of those to fruition is not literally zero, but it's very close. So the anti-abundance "we must think big" approach is a self-flattering con and a pointless waste. Worse, because of zero-sum competition for attention (plus potential backlash), it actually impedes progress!
[Edit]
I don't mean to discourage anyone from promoting ambitious visions of the future. It's possible that the budgetary or tax environment changes in the future, or voters preferences will change.
But the time spent should be proportional to viability and it cannot turn into posturing or factional infighting that denigrates realistic goals in favor of uncertain rewards. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and all that.
* Rough numbers, based on standing familiarity with waiting lists in MA and a quick look at other states CA.
My gripe in the housing discourse is basically this. And I assert it applies to public and private building. The density requirements needed to even approach the demand that people point at in the major cities is just something that isn't on the table.
People love the idea that if you build more, it will shift down costs. But to get the shifts that they want, "more" is, as you say, several orders of magnitude more than we are looking at.
I also agree that I don't mean to discourage folks from trying. Quite the contrary, I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
I don't think we should focus exclusively on public housing. I'm generally in the camp that we need more supply and we should get there my whatever means necessary.
But I don't really believe that the political constraints are as binding as politicians seem to believe they are, because outside of Zohran I don't recall the last time any major national politician earnestly proposed a plan to dramatically increase public housing. (And I'm only kinda assuming Zohran did; I don't live in NY so I didn't pay much attention to the particulars).
What your message indicates to me is that there is TONS of demand for housing, including public housing. And it also seems like the only constraint is budgeting - needing either tax hikes, budget shifts, or deficit spending (all of which we do all the time for all kinds of projects). I personally believe that a lot more people would be more open to higher taxes if they felt like they got anything out of it, but we don't have a political party that actually proposes ambitious left-leaning policy (one of the reasons I'm softer on abundance than a lot of socialists are - anyone who thinks the government can DO things is an improvement over *most* of the politics of my lifetime). But I see the main obstacle as being one of ambition and values, not of actual public support. But I understand that that's opinion and many don't agree.
I’m as much a fan of Red Vienna and Singapore as the next guy. I enthusiastically support Alex Lee here in CA. I also don’t think there’s appetite outside of quite left-leaning precincts for the level of public investment required to solve the housing crisis through this channel alone. We should do it — and if it proves out maybe it can expand over time — but we need to Do All The Things, not wait until “after the Revolution”, because if we don’t deliver lower housing costs, there won’t be any revolution, there will be a swing back to right-wing populism.
Government regulates itself extensively here and has to follow permitting rules and a million more miles of red tape. This isn't a resource issue.
China is informative as a communist state that actually build things (a very right wing communist state, but we can leave that aside for a moment). The reason that China can build things is not because they spend more than we do, and their spending is actually lower than ours. But China can just decide to do something and there are zero barriers in the way.
Obviously liberty has some value so I'm not advocating the Chinese approach, but socialist states that actually build are not tying their own hands. When California spends $800k to build a toilet, the problem is not a lack of resources. Surely there is something we can learn from China without abolishing liberty wholesale.
My I suggest taking a step and perhaps several steps back and ask what impels a large segment of public intellectuals to desire regulation of nearly every aspect of US economic life and to entrust management of that regulatory scheme to people who seem, as time goes by, less and less capable of functioning effectively.
Ms. Demas favors some deregulation in local housing. She speaks of the regulatory cost load as if it were universal. In fact, as she notes almost parenthetically, the red state regulatory load is markedly less than the blue state and this is reflected in comparative housing costs.
Really, what Abundance advocates are saying is: we blue stater's have over-regulated ourselves and it's making life very difficult and very expensive for us on the housing front.
Well, actually, over-regulation makes a lot more than housing very difficult and more expensive.
Before I retired, I owned several relatively small businesses, between 15 and 40 employees at any given time. The basic benefit package included health insurance and 401K. In order to put a 401K into place, I had to sign, as a fiduciary, a 350 page document. I put it to my provider, "what the hell is all of this and why is this necessary?" The answer: Dept of Treasury regulations.
The hell of it all is, this might have been literally true or simply the financial industry's attempt to stay fully within whatever regulatory scheme Treasury was imposing. No one can actually answer that question because no one knows. The regulatory miasma we live in, having developed over decades, is now so ubiquitous that we are--sorry for the over-used metaphor--frogs in water that is getting warmer and warmer.
Where we are today is the product of a mindset, a world view, that human activity, economic and otherwise, requires government control. Problematically, while the principle is valid up to a point,that is, yes, we do need some degree of imposed order so that we can function freely but with due regard for others, there is a mindset one usually associates with Progressivism that, really, we need a lot more than just enough to keep us all from running over one another.
This impulse to control, to regulate, is unhealthy beyond a certain point. Entrusting enforcement to an unaccountable, usually faceless, bureaucracy not only stifles new housing, it stifles or increases the cost of many other things, e.g. my very small business' 401K.
Abundance Democrats have their work cut out for them. Their party's intellectual bent is programmed against them. A not insignificant number of modern Progressives distrust private enterprise. The regulatory state, in their eyes, is the only thing that stands between "the people" and economic exploitation.
The end result is that "the people" can't get a decent home in CA because the regulatory prison in which they live. This won't be fixed by a couple of tweaks. Progressives need a mental reset, which will never happen IMO.
The more complex a system is, the more complex the regulation will need to be to maintain an orderly society. This is the price you pay for living in the era of the highest living standards humans have ever had.
Does this mean all regulation is good? Absolutely not, a lot of regulation, designed decades or in some cases a century ago when systems were VASTLY less complex than they are today. Like any tool, it must be designed to task, and use correctly by those skilled in wielding it to have the greatest effect.
You will not escape "faceless, bureaucracy". Every major company of any appreciable size is a faceless bureaucracy. Nor will you escape 350 page documents. Do you think Goldman Sachs, Lockheed Martin, Google, the list goes on sign ANY agreement between themselves and another major corporation without months or years of legal negotiation by dozens if not hundreds of lawyers?
The reason the government is important is because the kind of small scale business you ran, and exist all over the country can only exist because there is a government that can take on the burden of making sure the bigger fish does not take you for everything you own because they can hire 300 lawyers when you can hire 2.
There are underpaid and extremely smart people in the federal government working very long hours (or at least, were until they all quit or were fired with the recent change in administration) making sure there isn't pig shit in your food, that your insurance company actually helps you, and that your material suppliers aren't scamming you.
And no, I'm not defending nor will ever defend the absolutely braindead regulation around the building of housing. The idea of all regulation, regardless of circumstance or context is bad is equally dumb.
You're right about the mindset shift that needs to happen. I personally think that the direction a lot of leftists need to think about is outcomes: what is the outcome we want this regulation to accomplish, and does having it actually help accomplish it within the whole context?
Leftists get this when they see work requirements for Medicaid, they should be able to understand it in other areas.
“focus on the accusation that abundance is a front for building data centers across the country.”
A good response is “Nothing wrong with data centers!”
The recent leftist inveighing against data centers and AI just shows how they’re the other side of the coin of traditionalist morons that idolize the “smallholder”, similar to many conservatives/MAGA. Jeffersonianism is such a curse upon the American body politic.
The backlash against data centers isn't a left or right thing, and it's growing! In large part due to how AI is being pitched to the public and lack of accommodating infrastructure build out to handle them.
If your the average citizen of the United States, not an employee of an engineering firm this is your interaction with the world of AI:
-AI slop videos
-CEO's saying your job won't exist in 2 years
-0 Promises to redistribute wealth gained from it
-Perverts using it to generate images of your daughter in a bikini
-Your power bill going up 30%
None of these things HAD to happen. And it's a cautionary tale of what the lack of dynamic regulation can do to hamper peoples acceptance of new technologies. I'm an engineer who uses AI every day and I legit think it's a revolutionary technology, so I'd like to avoid turning the public against it by pretending all of it's external costs are fake.
Pointing and laughing at the idiots on social media spreading falsehoods about data center water use while the greater public becomes more and more angry is doing the exact same narrow band coping progressives did during the biden admin by focusing on right wing commentators lying about discrete events while the greater public got more and more pissed about crime and immigration.
Today’s progressives have two problems, both of which are leading to these kind of accusations.
One is that they don’t understand how systemic change happens. They have “scarcity” view of public moral concern. They think
—there’s only so much that the public can care about as a moral priority,
therefore
— any focus of moral concern on the wrong priority distracts it from the true culprit
Therefore
— it slows real change
This is an intuitive belief because there is some truth to the scarcity of public concern part. We can’t care for everything (as per Nell Noddings).
BUT, this view is flawed because that’s not how change happens. Change doesn’t happen because the majority of people have a radically clear eyed “reckoning” with a moral problem. Change happens because a small minority of people identify a morally tractable failure, and solutions are found, and then _everyone else jumps on a (somewhat) thoughtless bandwagon_.
There’s a great story in Kirstin Downey’s biography of Francis Perkins. After the Triangle Fire, Francis went to Albany to negotiate better working conditions for laborers. Despite a conspiracy against her, she got a deal, but it required cutting out cannery workers. Her progressive allies were incensed and said she couldn’t accept this deal. They had a scarcity of moral concern mindsets. IN their view, this was THE chance to get worker protections, and so to leave out some workers was to abandon them. And also, what an arbitrary carve out to “capitulate” to. Nonetheless, Francis agreed to it.
As Downey reports, within a year, the cannery workers were included.
WHY? Because politicians saw that this kind of legislation was popular and got on the bandwagon. Businesses who had concerns probably also saw that their fears were not realized. But not a lot of this is rational. It’s just imitation.
The second is that they do not have an understanding of quantitative system change. Small differences in rates at a lower level can induce systemic change at a higher level. You see this in sports all the time. In the NBA, the difference between someone being a 30% 3point shooter and a 40% 3 point shooter is ENORMOUS. That’s 1 make out of 10 shots, usually for a player who takes 5 shots per game. So 1 make every 2 games. But it changes a lot. Because when a guy is at 30%, you don’t guard him on the perimeter. That’s chokes off so many other things for the offense. When he is at 40%, you glue yourself to him. Now there’s lots of space.
The economy is just like this. A small change in available housing would shift lots of behaviors a little bit that interact with each other. People moving more, choosing to have kids a bit earlier, feeling less anxious and so taking more economic risk etc.
The one thing that taking a rational approach to social change doesn’t give you, though, is “credit” for being moral. Seeing who the “true” bad guy is doesn’t make anything better, but today’s progressives have honed this skill so. It’s tough to give it up.
I find it frustrating that a lot of anti-YIMBY types seem to do a motte and bailey critique, where they acknowledge that “to be sure”, land use regulations matter, but YIMBYs are pretending they’re the ONLY thing that matters and “one weird trick” will solve the housing crisis, when in fact what most YIMBYs are saying is that land use reform and permitting reform are necssary but insufficient actions, which unblock everything else that needs to happen. Like if you want to build a lot of Social Housing in California, prior to the last few years, you would’ve faced even steeper CEQA hurdles than doing privately-built housing, because fundamentally CEQA and NEPA apply to government actions.
Government overregulating itself is so massively underrated as a cause of our problems in the US. I just want a leftist to seriously study China or any other socialist state that actually build things (since in my experience most leftists hate America and love the word "communist" even when it masks an actually right wing patriarchal militaristic regime, making China very attractive). China has lower tax burden than the US and a lot of its spending goes to subsidizing private industry, so I would not be surprised if their share of government spending on public works was similar to the US and the entire difference is just that China can just do things.
Yep. This is why _Why Nothing Works_ by Marc Dunkelman and _Public Citizens_ by Paul Sabin are important contributions to the Abundance Canon. (The latter arrived a few years too early to catch the wave of interest that started with Klein and Thompson's manifesto.)
I think you are leaving out some important points such as:
-Direction of private enterprise allows for lower tax burdens by coordinating private spending to achieve state goals that would be less efficiently accomplished by tax and spend
-Government sets clear limits on what it considers useful development and not-useful development. China cracked down extremely hard on crypto because they, correctly, identified it as a waste of resources that could be better utilized elsewhere.
-Subsidize inputs, coordinate outputs.
These pillars are what makes Chinese industry so powerful and competitive. The last part is extra important because when you make the core inputs to industry cheaper and more accessible every time down the chain from them can accelerate and build out MUCH faster.
There is no reason the United States couldn't do any of these things.
Not having a welfare state is the main reason tax burden is lower. If we eliminated social security for low wage workers we could do the same as China regarding tax burden
Not having unions is helpful, as is the lack of meaningful environmental regulations (except in ultra wealthy tier 1 cities like Beijing or Shanghai) which also makes it a lot easier to build
There are things to learn but it starts from realizing the PRC is basically an optimized right wing technocracy.
Anyway I agree with you that subsidizing inputs is super important, it's just that not all "subsidy" is spending. China also coordinates its regulatory state to build, and the poorly regulated US wastes a huge amount of money on even obvious/necessary projects like subway lines in NYC. Having been to China, red states like TX or FL with saner regulatory structures feel a lot more like China than any US blue state, because people build things in red states.
THANK YOU!!! I work in multi-family construction in five states and all of them are killing the industry with the permitting process and never ending regulations. Every year things get slower and more expensive. I would say the anti-abundance goons are using the 'every accusation is a confession' playbook to make the truth nefarious. As long as building departments are allowed to ruin little fiefdoms that can change rules at will with no real appeal process I don't know how things can change. Every county in the country needs a whole new commission appointing reform minded officials.
I think one reason for this disconnect is a fundamental disagreement about what the problem is. On one account, reducing the price of new homes in LA county by 150k is a huge improvement. But for many abundance critics, the entire post-Reagan urban Renaissance and the accompanying increase in home prices has been a bad thing and so the task is to roll it all back to the world of not paying rent in Alphabet City in the 80s. And Abundance can't do that, because nothing can.
Thank you for fighting the good fight. In the case of Teachout and much of the Left, a sufficient reason to forcefully reject abundance / Abundance is that it does not map cleanly to their Manichaean theory of everything: concentrated corporate power rules America and the graduate degree / Bluesky / DSA-friendly Left resistance are our only hope for fighting it. Abundance (and Liberals, with which they overlap) might be dupes or might be enemies, but that distinction is less important than the simple fact that they clutter the field of battle (blogs and tweets, er, skies or whatever) with wrong ideas that sap the strength of the forces of good. When one argues that deregulation (especially of rents) will make us richer, you are attacking their core identity, the backbone of their sense of themselves as heroes. They cannot afford to entertain the possibility that you are correct, because you must be wrong.
I recently started looking into old Sanborn fire insurance maps from 1909ish for my area (most of which hadn't even been built yet!) and discovered that the last apartment I lived in was, at the time the maps were made, not just not in existence but a mansion. A whole city block, including part of the current street, was a mansion. Today it's 10 apartment buildings (and a street!) yet I can't help but think that, if that mansion hadn't been demolished, the city would fight for it to keep it standing with everything they have, like they do many of the still extant mansions. And I wouldn't have a place to live.
There are maybe even deeper reasons not to call these regulations "small bore". I watched these (weirdly produced) videos of economist Roberto Unger critizing Keynes from the left: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMosGm2ze3k
Something he observes is that capitalism requires mass purchasing power in order to function. One way to do this is to progressively redistribute wealth and opportunity. But in recent decades the US failed to do this, instead instituting policies that were very regressive, concentrating wealth and opportunity into fewer and fewer hands. So mass purchasing power was generated instead by massive credit, largely held by the general population in the form of overvalued housing stock. A society of property owners was in this way replaced with a society of debt holders.
To whatever extent this picture is true, housing regulations--and their goal of reducing the price of the housing stock--strikes at the core of what enables the system to be broadly regressive. In this reading, reducing the price of housing is the *most* leftist/progressive thing you can possibly do.
Surely AI can help manage long lists of requirements. I’d rather have 2 staircases because an AI reminded me early than 1 staircase to save the cost of a staircase
AI can’t change the geometry required for a 2 staircase building. It’s not just the cost of the steps - it’s all the housing units you lose to the area of the steps, and the windows each unit loses because they have to be separated by a hallway rather than just around a central stairway.
It's really not overplayed, staircases take up space. That's the thing that people who don't work in design don't get, building footprints are smaller than they seem. It doesn't seem like requiring two staircases and a parking space, (with a minimum drive aisle and backing distance) would be such a big deal but they completely change what you can build. Entire homes end up being built around that required parking space, which is the size of a bedroom by itself, nevermind the driveway. Double stairs have the same effect on small apartment buildings, they crowd out space for actually livable apartment design while adding expense to build.
There are multistory big box stores near me that seem huge from the outside, but then you realize that the store itself is only 1-2 floors, with the rest going to parking and it just gets depressing.
Realistically speaking, the benefits drop off pretty rapidly. You can shrink the footprint of a 3 story, 12 apartment building somewhat, but it's not going to be staggering. Add more floors, or more apartments per floor, and the need for additional staircases rises.
It's why I compared it to missing middle housing. Having lived in that kind of housing (in my case, the third floor of a 1 staircase, 12 unit building), and had a lot of experiences in areas using it...it sucks. I got out as fast as I could.
I just...don't think you, or most urbanist thinkers, understand how much value I, and a lot of other people, put towards not sharing either a housing complex or a transit option with Methew.
Dude, with regard to stairs I don't think you are understanding what 'single stair' means. I means that each apartment is only required to have access to one stairway, so that you can have floor plans that aren't set up around a long central hallway. It lets apartments have multiple sides with windows instead of the deep, skinny apartments that only have one window on the end that are so unfortunately prevalent in new builds.
As far as preferring to live in a detached house yourself, what has that got to do with anything? I don't see why your preference for a single family house should mean that other people's preference for a nice 3 bedroom apartment should remain illegal to build. If nobody wants these apartments then why do they need to be illegal exactly?
That's why I mentioned that I lived in a building with that floorplan. 1 stairwell, 3 floors, each floor having four apartments. Bottom floor located about half a story below ground level. Each landing located on one wall of the building, two apartments one either side. Compared to the same 4 units per floor, with two units on each side flanking a single hallway with stairs on either end.
Like I said, I lived in missing middle housing, and a lot of my job is spent applying figurative oil to the social friction that comes from living in the city. No thanks.
This is completely true, I recently heard exactly this set of arguments from people in my municipality in Montgomery County, MD, where, as I’m sure you know better than me, there’s a lot of local opposition to Wes Moore’s starter and silver homes bill. One outright claimed that I had been duped by developers.
The problem I always want to point out is if the housing reform won’t actually cause more housing to be built, then why are you opposing it?
Outstanding. The real small-bore strategy is focusing exclusively on public housing, when that can barely satisfy 1/100th of the demand.
(No shade on public housing as a last resort.)
This doesn't make any sense to me. The state can build as much housing as it wants! The problems there are entirely political, why wouldn't they be able to satisfy demand?
There’s a lot of financial constraints on the state! It’s private developers who can build as much as the state will let them, but state built housing needs to get both regulatory approval *and* public funding.
To be fair, the financial constraints are also on the developers, no? It isn't like the costs go away for them. And a cost that many people love to ignore are all of the costs from dealing with many buyers. Is a big part of the reason small builders focus on a few buildings at a time. Or setup an HOA to push off some of the liabilities onto someone else.
That's right. But if you make it easier to get permissions, then it's not so unlikely that *someone* will have those financial resources relevant to make use of them. While if you try to do it from the state side, then you need the state itself to have those financial resources.
I confess this feels less likely to me. A big component of the abundance message that I resonated with was that expensive things pretty much require government spending. Granted, the rise of cronyism in our current admin isn't making that look too promising.
Specifically, I look at the actually expensive things that have happened and it is dominated by public funds. Operation Warp Speed being an obvious cost in recent memory. You can go back to the interstate system. Amounts of money that are just unheard of.
Even staying with successful "private" operations like SpaceX, you find a company that is dominated by public spending.
I think this can get tricky because people don't acknowledge the reality that the big cities would, themselves, be impressively large companies. LA has a budget of 14 billion. NYC, 114 billion!
Doing a brief scan online, the largest private housing development is Hudson Yards. Where I note that the city has supplied 6 of the 25 billion that is being spent there. I would expect you won't find any other build that doesn't get at least that much of a mix from public funds.
It's just not true that "expensive things" are dominated by public spending.
There is FAR more private capital in the world than government capital. And most of the government's capital investments are tied up in the stuff that _doesn't_ make sense for a single private operator to build and own, like roads and utilities. (If I had my druthers, _even more_ utility assets would be owned by the government. PG&E delenda est.)
Now granted, the government _could_ just print money to fund an investment spree in housing. But doing so results in either a decline of private investment ("crowding out"), or spiralling inflation, neither of which is a great outcome.
If something has very large positive externalities, and it's hard for a private actor to capture them, then it will make sense to spend government money on it. That's the Operation Warp Speed case.
But there are _lots_ of cases where it's better for government to shape the market to provide the right incentives for private capital, then step back and let entrepreneurs compete to deliver socially-beneficial results. You tend to get faster responsiveness to what the end-users of the relevant goods and services actually want.
The diverse range of restaurants and grocery stores provide better food, at a lower price, than what a planned economy could do, with everyone just eating whatever the government cafeteria provides.
Similarly, while I am totally onboard for large investments in "social housing" (and have contributed to Asm. Alex Lee's campaigns in part because he's a leader in our state on that issue), I don't think this is going to be a large percentage of all housing in my region any time soon. If you arrange things so it's profitable for private actors to deliver homes, they will do so, and that will benefit everyone.
You can't just dismiss problems because they're "entirely political".
Until there's significant progress on changing the consensus that stands in the way, public housing is not an actual solution.
Maybe I just need more precision to know what you're actually talking about then. Is your objection that the US government is not capable of running a house-building enterprise at the needed level due to resource or capacity constraints? Is it just "Public housing is too communist so you can't get enough people to press their representatives to support it"?
I can understand how regulatory reforms have a natural cap on how much they'll help, because developers will still only build in places / ways they can make a profit, and regulations are only one piece of that. Removing every regulation won't magically make every project profitable. But the binding constraint on public housing seems to be purely the lack of will from government to do it.
We're talking about focusing exclusively on public housing, right?
My point is closer to your second proposition, though the problem with isn't that it's "too communist", it's that demand for cheap housing in places people want to live is between a hundred and a thousand times higher than our current public capacity.*
That's across all levels of government: federal, state, county, and municipal actors working together in conjunction with non-profits. Scaling up to meet the level of demand would require unprecedented budgetary shifts or unprecedented new tax hikes.
The chance of bringing either of those to fruition is not literally zero, but it's very close. So the anti-abundance "we must think big" approach is a self-flattering con and a pointless waste. Worse, because of zero-sum competition for attention (plus potential backlash), it actually impedes progress!
[Edit]
I don't mean to discourage anyone from promoting ambitious visions of the future. It's possible that the budgetary or tax environment changes in the future, or voters preferences will change.
But the time spent should be proportional to viability and it cannot turn into posturing or factional infighting that denigrates realistic goals in favor of uncertain rewards. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and all that.
* Rough numbers, based on standing familiarity with waiting lists in MA and a quick look at other states CA.
My gripe in the housing discourse is basically this. And I assert it applies to public and private building. The density requirements needed to even approach the demand that people point at in the major cities is just something that isn't on the table.
People love the idea that if you build more, it will shift down costs. But to get the shifts that they want, "more" is, as you say, several orders of magnitude more than we are looking at.
I also agree that I don't mean to discourage folks from trying. Quite the contrary, I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
I don't think we should focus exclusively on public housing. I'm generally in the camp that we need more supply and we should get there my whatever means necessary.
But I don't really believe that the political constraints are as binding as politicians seem to believe they are, because outside of Zohran I don't recall the last time any major national politician earnestly proposed a plan to dramatically increase public housing. (And I'm only kinda assuming Zohran did; I don't live in NY so I didn't pay much attention to the particulars).
What your message indicates to me is that there is TONS of demand for housing, including public housing. And it also seems like the only constraint is budgeting - needing either tax hikes, budget shifts, or deficit spending (all of which we do all the time for all kinds of projects). I personally believe that a lot more people would be more open to higher taxes if they felt like they got anything out of it, but we don't have a political party that actually proposes ambitious left-leaning policy (one of the reasons I'm softer on abundance than a lot of socialists are - anyone who thinks the government can DO things is an improvement over *most* of the politics of my lifetime). But I see the main obstacle as being one of ambition and values, not of actual public support. But I understand that that's opinion and many don't agree.
I’m as much a fan of Red Vienna and Singapore as the next guy. I enthusiastically support Alex Lee here in CA. I also don’t think there’s appetite outside of quite left-leaning precincts for the level of public investment required to solve the housing crisis through this channel alone. We should do it — and if it proves out maybe it can expand over time — but we need to Do All The Things, not wait until “after the Revolution”, because if we don’t deliver lower housing costs, there won’t be any revolution, there will be a swing back to right-wing populism.
Government regulates itself extensively here and has to follow permitting rules and a million more miles of red tape. This isn't a resource issue.
China is informative as a communist state that actually build things (a very right wing communist state, but we can leave that aside for a moment). The reason that China can build things is not because they spend more than we do, and their spending is actually lower than ours. But China can just decide to do something and there are zero barriers in the way.
Obviously liberty has some value so I'm not advocating the Chinese approach, but socialist states that actually build are not tying their own hands. When California spends $800k to build a toilet, the problem is not a lack of resources. Surely there is something we can learn from China without abolishing liberty wholesale.
My objection to the public housing is the public part.
I think we should build a lot more housing.But I would still oppose public housing near me
Public housing reads as crime infested and gangang infested
My I suggest taking a step and perhaps several steps back and ask what impels a large segment of public intellectuals to desire regulation of nearly every aspect of US economic life and to entrust management of that regulatory scheme to people who seem, as time goes by, less and less capable of functioning effectively.
Ms. Demas favors some deregulation in local housing. She speaks of the regulatory cost load as if it were universal. In fact, as she notes almost parenthetically, the red state regulatory load is markedly less than the blue state and this is reflected in comparative housing costs.
Really, what Abundance advocates are saying is: we blue stater's have over-regulated ourselves and it's making life very difficult and very expensive for us on the housing front.
Well, actually, over-regulation makes a lot more than housing very difficult and more expensive.
Before I retired, I owned several relatively small businesses, between 15 and 40 employees at any given time. The basic benefit package included health insurance and 401K. In order to put a 401K into place, I had to sign, as a fiduciary, a 350 page document. I put it to my provider, "what the hell is all of this and why is this necessary?" The answer: Dept of Treasury regulations.
The hell of it all is, this might have been literally true or simply the financial industry's attempt to stay fully within whatever regulatory scheme Treasury was imposing. No one can actually answer that question because no one knows. The regulatory miasma we live in, having developed over decades, is now so ubiquitous that we are--sorry for the over-used metaphor--frogs in water that is getting warmer and warmer.
Where we are today is the product of a mindset, a world view, that human activity, economic and otherwise, requires government control. Problematically, while the principle is valid up to a point,that is, yes, we do need some degree of imposed order so that we can function freely but with due regard for others, there is a mindset one usually associates with Progressivism that, really, we need a lot more than just enough to keep us all from running over one another.
This impulse to control, to regulate, is unhealthy beyond a certain point. Entrusting enforcement to an unaccountable, usually faceless, bureaucracy not only stifles new housing, it stifles or increases the cost of many other things, e.g. my very small business' 401K.
Abundance Democrats have their work cut out for them. Their party's intellectual bent is programmed against them. A not insignificant number of modern Progressives distrust private enterprise. The regulatory state, in their eyes, is the only thing that stands between "the people" and economic exploitation.
The end result is that "the people" can't get a decent home in CA because the regulatory prison in which they live. This won't be fixed by a couple of tweaks. Progressives need a mental reset, which will never happen IMO.
The more complex a system is, the more complex the regulation will need to be to maintain an orderly society. This is the price you pay for living in the era of the highest living standards humans have ever had.
Does this mean all regulation is good? Absolutely not, a lot of regulation, designed decades or in some cases a century ago when systems were VASTLY less complex than they are today. Like any tool, it must be designed to task, and use correctly by those skilled in wielding it to have the greatest effect.
You will not escape "faceless, bureaucracy". Every major company of any appreciable size is a faceless bureaucracy. Nor will you escape 350 page documents. Do you think Goldman Sachs, Lockheed Martin, Google, the list goes on sign ANY agreement between themselves and another major corporation without months or years of legal negotiation by dozens if not hundreds of lawyers?
The reason the government is important is because the kind of small scale business you ran, and exist all over the country can only exist because there is a government that can take on the burden of making sure the bigger fish does not take you for everything you own because they can hire 300 lawyers when you can hire 2.
There are underpaid and extremely smart people in the federal government working very long hours (or at least, were until they all quit or were fired with the recent change in administration) making sure there isn't pig shit in your food, that your insurance company actually helps you, and that your material suppliers aren't scamming you.
And no, I'm not defending nor will ever defend the absolutely braindead regulation around the building of housing. The idea of all regulation, regardless of circumstance or context is bad is equally dumb.
You're right about the mindset shift that needs to happen. I personally think that the direction a lot of leftists need to think about is outcomes: what is the outcome we want this regulation to accomplish, and does having it actually help accomplish it within the whole context?
Leftists get this when they see work requirements for Medicaid, they should be able to understand it in other areas.
“focus on the accusation that abundance is a front for building data centers across the country.”
A good response is “Nothing wrong with data centers!”
The recent leftist inveighing against data centers and AI just shows how they’re the other side of the coin of traditionalist morons that idolize the “smallholder”, similar to many conservatives/MAGA. Jeffersonianism is such a curse upon the American body politic.
The backlash against data centers isn't a left or right thing, and it's growing! In large part due to how AI is being pitched to the public and lack of accommodating infrastructure build out to handle them.
If your the average citizen of the United States, not an employee of an engineering firm this is your interaction with the world of AI:
-AI slop videos
-CEO's saying your job won't exist in 2 years
-0 Promises to redistribute wealth gained from it
-Perverts using it to generate images of your daughter in a bikini
-Your power bill going up 30%
None of these things HAD to happen. And it's a cautionary tale of what the lack of dynamic regulation can do to hamper peoples acceptance of new technologies. I'm an engineer who uses AI every day and I legit think it's a revolutionary technology, so I'd like to avoid turning the public against it by pretending all of it's external costs are fake.
Pointing and laughing at the idiots on social media spreading falsehoods about data center water use while the greater public becomes more and more angry is doing the exact same narrow band coping progressives did during the biden admin by focusing on right wing commentators lying about discrete events while the greater public got more and more pissed about crime and immigration.
Ironically, Hamilton's greatest mistake was he should have endorsed Aaron Burr.
Today’s progressives have two problems, both of which are leading to these kind of accusations.
One is that they don’t understand how systemic change happens. They have “scarcity” view of public moral concern. They think
—there’s only so much that the public can care about as a moral priority,
therefore
— any focus of moral concern on the wrong priority distracts it from the true culprit
Therefore
— it slows real change
This is an intuitive belief because there is some truth to the scarcity of public concern part. We can’t care for everything (as per Nell Noddings).
BUT, this view is flawed because that’s not how change happens. Change doesn’t happen because the majority of people have a radically clear eyed “reckoning” with a moral problem. Change happens because a small minority of people identify a morally tractable failure, and solutions are found, and then _everyone else jumps on a (somewhat) thoughtless bandwagon_.
There’s a great story in Kirstin Downey’s biography of Francis Perkins. After the Triangle Fire, Francis went to Albany to negotiate better working conditions for laborers. Despite a conspiracy against her, she got a deal, but it required cutting out cannery workers. Her progressive allies were incensed and said she couldn’t accept this deal. They had a scarcity of moral concern mindsets. IN their view, this was THE chance to get worker protections, and so to leave out some workers was to abandon them. And also, what an arbitrary carve out to “capitulate” to. Nonetheless, Francis agreed to it.
As Downey reports, within a year, the cannery workers were included.
WHY? Because politicians saw that this kind of legislation was popular and got on the bandwagon. Businesses who had concerns probably also saw that their fears were not realized. But not a lot of this is rational. It’s just imitation.
The second is that they do not have an understanding of quantitative system change. Small differences in rates at a lower level can induce systemic change at a higher level. You see this in sports all the time. In the NBA, the difference between someone being a 30% 3point shooter and a 40% 3 point shooter is ENORMOUS. That’s 1 make out of 10 shots, usually for a player who takes 5 shots per game. So 1 make every 2 games. But it changes a lot. Because when a guy is at 30%, you don’t guard him on the perimeter. That’s chokes off so many other things for the offense. When he is at 40%, you glue yourself to him. Now there’s lots of space.
The economy is just like this. A small change in available housing would shift lots of behaviors a little bit that interact with each other. People moving more, choosing to have kids a bit earlier, feeling less anxious and so taking more economic risk etc.
The one thing that taking a rational approach to social change doesn’t give you, though, is “credit” for being moral. Seeing who the “true” bad guy is doesn’t make anything better, but today’s progressives have honed this skill so. It’s tough to give it up.
I find it frustrating that a lot of anti-YIMBY types seem to do a motte and bailey critique, where they acknowledge that “to be sure”, land use regulations matter, but YIMBYs are pretending they’re the ONLY thing that matters and “one weird trick” will solve the housing crisis, when in fact what most YIMBYs are saying is that land use reform and permitting reform are necssary but insufficient actions, which unblock everything else that needs to happen. Like if you want to build a lot of Social Housing in California, prior to the last few years, you would’ve faced even steeper CEQA hurdles than doing privately-built housing, because fundamentally CEQA and NEPA apply to government actions.
Government overregulating itself is so massively underrated as a cause of our problems in the US. I just want a leftist to seriously study China or any other socialist state that actually build things (since in my experience most leftists hate America and love the word "communist" even when it masks an actually right wing patriarchal militaristic regime, making China very attractive). China has lower tax burden than the US and a lot of its spending goes to subsidizing private industry, so I would not be surprised if their share of government spending on public works was similar to the US and the entire difference is just that China can just do things.
Yep. This is why _Why Nothing Works_ by Marc Dunkelman and _Public Citizens_ by Paul Sabin are important contributions to the Abundance Canon. (The latter arrived a few years too early to catch the wave of interest that started with Klein and Thompson's manifesto.)
I think you are leaving out some important points such as:
-Direction of private enterprise allows for lower tax burdens by coordinating private spending to achieve state goals that would be less efficiently accomplished by tax and spend
-Government sets clear limits on what it considers useful development and not-useful development. China cracked down extremely hard on crypto because they, correctly, identified it as a waste of resources that could be better utilized elsewhere.
-Subsidize inputs, coordinate outputs.
These pillars are what makes Chinese industry so powerful and competitive. The last part is extra important because when you make the core inputs to industry cheaper and more accessible every time down the chain from them can accelerate and build out MUCH faster.
There is no reason the United States couldn't do any of these things.
Not having a welfare state is the main reason tax burden is lower. If we eliminated social security for low wage workers we could do the same as China regarding tax burden
Not having unions is helpful, as is the lack of meaningful environmental regulations (except in ultra wealthy tier 1 cities like Beijing or Shanghai) which also makes it a lot easier to build
There are things to learn but it starts from realizing the PRC is basically an optimized right wing technocracy.
Anyway I agree with you that subsidizing inputs is super important, it's just that not all "subsidy" is spending. China also coordinates its regulatory state to build, and the poorly regulated US wastes a huge amount of money on even obvious/necessary projects like subway lines in NYC. Having been to China, red states like TX or FL with saner regulatory structures feel a lot more like China than any US blue state, because people build things in red states.
THANK YOU!!! I work in multi-family construction in five states and all of them are killing the industry with the permitting process and never ending regulations. Every year things get slower and more expensive. I would say the anti-abundance goons are using the 'every accusation is a confession' playbook to make the truth nefarious. As long as building departments are allowed to ruin little fiefdoms that can change rules at will with no real appeal process I don't know how things can change. Every county in the country needs a whole new commission appointing reform minded officials.
I think one reason for this disconnect is a fundamental disagreement about what the problem is. On one account, reducing the price of new homes in LA county by 150k is a huge improvement. But for many abundance critics, the entire post-Reagan urban Renaissance and the accompanying increase in home prices has been a bad thing and so the task is to roll it all back to the world of not paying rent in Alphabet City in the 80s. And Abundance can't do that, because nothing can.
strongly agreed with all of this.
Given how large of a component housing costs are for our monthly expenses, There are few things more important than bringing down the cost of housing.
If there are twelve people and ten chairs, the only way to move, make sure that everybody gets a chair is to build two more chairs
If you don't, those ten chairs are going to be expensive, and they're going to go to the ten people with the most money
Housing is exactly the same. Just build it.
And for that matter, the same also applies to other major infrastructure projects
Thank you for fighting the good fight. In the case of Teachout and much of the Left, a sufficient reason to forcefully reject abundance / Abundance is that it does not map cleanly to their Manichaean theory of everything: concentrated corporate power rules America and the graduate degree / Bluesky / DSA-friendly Left resistance are our only hope for fighting it. Abundance (and Liberals, with which they overlap) might be dupes or might be enemies, but that distinction is less important than the simple fact that they clutter the field of battle (blogs and tweets, er, skies or whatever) with wrong ideas that sap the strength of the forces of good. When one argues that deregulation (especially of rents) will make us richer, you are attacking their core identity, the backbone of their sense of themselves as heroes. They cannot afford to entertain the possibility that you are correct, because you must be wrong.
I recently started looking into old Sanborn fire insurance maps from 1909ish for my area (most of which hadn't even been built yet!) and discovered that the last apartment I lived in was, at the time the maps were made, not just not in existence but a mansion. A whole city block, including part of the current street, was a mansion. Today it's 10 apartment buildings (and a street!) yet I can't help but think that, if that mansion hadn't been demolished, the city would fight for it to keep it standing with everything they have, like they do many of the still extant mansions. And I wouldn't have a place to live.
Just came by to say hell yeah!
There are maybe even deeper reasons not to call these regulations "small bore". I watched these (weirdly produced) videos of economist Roberto Unger critizing Keynes from the left: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMosGm2ze3k
Something he observes is that capitalism requires mass purchasing power in order to function. One way to do this is to progressively redistribute wealth and opportunity. But in recent decades the US failed to do this, instead instituting policies that were very regressive, concentrating wealth and opportunity into fewer and fewer hands. So mass purchasing power was generated instead by massive credit, largely held by the general population in the form of overvalued housing stock. A society of property owners was in this way replaced with a society of debt holders.
To whatever extent this picture is true, housing regulations--and their goal of reducing the price of the housing stock--strikes at the core of what enables the system to be broadly regressive. In this reading, reducing the price of housing is the *most* leftist/progressive thing you can possibly do.
Surely AI can help manage long lists of requirements. I’d rather have 2 staircases because an AI reminded me early than 1 staircase to save the cost of a staircase
AI can’t change the geometry required for a 2 staircase building. It’s not just the cost of the steps - it’s all the housing units you lose to the area of the steps, and the windows each unit loses because they have to be separated by a hallway rather than just around a central stairway.
The whole 1 staircase vs 2 staircase thing feels very overplayed. It's a little like comparing missing middle housing theory to practice.
It's really not overplayed, staircases take up space. That's the thing that people who don't work in design don't get, building footprints are smaller than they seem. It doesn't seem like requiring two staircases and a parking space, (with a minimum drive aisle and backing distance) would be such a big deal but they completely change what you can build. Entire homes end up being built around that required parking space, which is the size of a bedroom by itself, nevermind the driveway. Double stairs have the same effect on small apartment buildings, they crowd out space for actually livable apartment design while adding expense to build.
There are multistory big box stores near me that seem huge from the outside, but then you realize that the store itself is only 1-2 floors, with the rest going to parking and it just gets depressing.
Realistically speaking, the benefits drop off pretty rapidly. You can shrink the footprint of a 3 story, 12 apartment building somewhat, but it's not going to be staggering. Add more floors, or more apartments per floor, and the need for additional staircases rises.
It's why I compared it to missing middle housing. Having lived in that kind of housing (in my case, the third floor of a 1 staircase, 12 unit building), and had a lot of experiences in areas using it...it sucks. I got out as fast as I could.
I just...don't think you, or most urbanist thinkers, understand how much value I, and a lot of other people, put towards not sharing either a housing complex or a transit option with Methew.
Dude, with regard to stairs I don't think you are understanding what 'single stair' means. I means that each apartment is only required to have access to one stairway, so that you can have floor plans that aren't set up around a long central hallway. It lets apartments have multiple sides with windows instead of the deep, skinny apartments that only have one window on the end that are so unfortunately prevalent in new builds.
As far as preferring to live in a detached house yourself, what has that got to do with anything? I don't see why your preference for a single family house should mean that other people's preference for a nice 3 bedroom apartment should remain illegal to build. If nobody wants these apartments then why do they need to be illegal exactly?
That's why I mentioned that I lived in a building with that floorplan. 1 stairwell, 3 floors, each floor having four apartments. Bottom floor located about half a story below ground level. Each landing located on one wall of the building, two apartments one either side. Compared to the same 4 units per floor, with two units on each side flanking a single hallway with stairs on either end.
Like I said, I lived in missing middle housing, and a lot of my job is spent applying figurative oil to the social friction that comes from living in the city. No thanks.