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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“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.
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.