Warren’s reputational as a policy wonk was always paper thin. She has the zeal of a convert on her economic worldview, but it is telling that she and her intellectual associates- most notably Lina Khan - are lawyers without economics background.
The whole “institutional investors are buying up all the houses” myth is just a myth. It’s a dumb populist myth.
It seems like there is a mental real estate accounting going on. Somehow it’s fine to rent apartments, but houses must be owner occupied…for reasons. Of course, if there wasn’t demand for rentals, people wouldn’t offer single family homes for rent. There are many reasons a person might rent - perhaps they are in a small town for work for a few years, but aren’t going to stay. Not a lot of places like that have apartments, nor would pure YIMBY policies turn every place into Manhattan…so where are renters going to go?
I agree with your right to contract, but I also think the pro-housing movement is in danger of veering towards inappropriately relying on BTR to ease the crisis.
I don’t want to wake up in 20 years and have half of the homes in the country be BTR.
Good news! Per Halina's article, there are 92 million homes. In order for BTR to be half of homes in 20 years, we would need to build 90ish million homes over the next two decades and every single new built would need to be BTR. Alternatively, we could destroy 49% of all housing and only allow BTR to be built to replace it.
I think we are more likely to be hit by an asteroid than either of those, so you can put that worry behind you.
But once the Yglesias-Beutler Administration is in charge and merrily on its way to instituting the OBA agenda while purging MAGA from the body politic, I don’t want the ranks of Slow Boring commissars to waste our time boring 90M new BTR SFH unless we also built double or triple of that in apartments, condos, and missing middle.
“The policy is to block private equity from taking over the single family home, and that is quite deliberate. There are some folks in private equity who don't like that, but it's a very deliberate choice that is supported on a bipartisan basis by 90 senators.”
Of course I COULD just check the actual quote, but it's exactly the kind of braindead maximum-government value-below-replacement-congresscritter Masshole shit I've come to associate with the Elizabeth Warren of the last decade. So rather than check, I'm just going to be mad.
(in semi-seriousness, if it's even remotely possible for a good-faith reading of a quote like yours to be THAT incorrect, then we'd only be arguing whether Warren is evil or incompetent/stupid.)
Today’s Iran war news is… really grim. The Iranians managed to hit at least five commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. They or their Houthi allies somehow managed to hit and paralyze Salalah on the south coast of Oman— the only big deep water transshipment port between the Indian Subcontinent and the Cape of Good Hope that’s not blocked by the Bab Al Mandeb or Strait of Hormuz chokepoints. They also have started to mine the Strait. After a sharp uptick in interception failures yesterday, the UAE defense ministry suddenly stopped publishing interception stats. The US Navy is reportedly turning down escort requests because they currently deem it too risky to send large combat vessels into the Persian Gulf (before the start of the war the Fifth Fleet retreated from Bahrain to the Arabian Sea.) Small and cheap SAM systems in Iran have prevented the US from achieving complete air supremacy there as expected.
Overall, it seems increasingly likely that the US is not capable of protecting shipping through Hormuz and has no clear and actionable plan for making it safe, and that the air defense of the Gulf States’ fragile and economically important infrastructure is failing. The current moment feels a bit like the explosive spread of COVID outside of China in February 2020– the brutal constraints of the situation are very clear to people paying sufficient attention, things are potentially going to get very rough for much of the world very quickly, and the reality hasn’t sunk in.
Clavicular for Supreme Leader. It'll be a marked improvement for all parties—the IRGC will be too busy bonesmashing to repress anyone and the dress code is gonna be... pretty different, anyway.
The only thing short of ground troops that “we” can really do is just keep hammering their short range weapons, but that’s a game of whack-a-mole.
I would never root for harm to our armed forces.
But an embarrassing, bloodless-as-possible strategic defeat in the illest-advised war since Operation Barbarossa just so happening to be the thing that breaks Trump’s cult and makes America safe for democracy again? It’s a stretch. But I am no longer just going to assume that Trump can TACO, declare fake victory, and wriggle out of this one again.
The sooner the Hamburger From Heaven sends him to join his friend Khamenei in Hell, the better we’ll all be.
I think this is likely to be “Afghanistan withdrawal, but worse” damaging to Trump’s political standing, but a lot of people in the Middle East have already paid with their lives, and the downstream economic damage is going to affect a lot of the world’s population. And as an American I also don’t want to see us take a serious strategic defeat.
IMO we took a serious strategic defeat when a buffoon got elected on the back of a previous strategic defeat.
That defeat is going to resonate for centuries after we’re dead.
I just want things to be as good as they can be for the rest of the time before I myself die. Which means this fucking buffoon suffering a strategic defeat that is so embarrassing that our nation either pulls its head out of its ass or finally gives me a good reason to become a Brazilian.
If this were actually true it would mean that anyone sensible should be applauding the attack as, on net, reducing the loss of life inherent in Republican misgovernance. (E.g. the OBBB alone will kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans by the inexorable logic of depriving them of healthcare.)
Regrettably, I do not believe that it will be anything like that damaging to Trump or Republicans, because American voters have the memories of goldfish when it comes to Republican misadventures.
I am pretty concerned that Trump won't be willing to go through that and will instead drop a nuke. I think the probability of that happening is very low - but it isn't zero, and the horribleness of the outcome is so bad that it's worth being concerned about.
None of this should have surprised the administration. When I was working on the Iran problem in the 1990's, the SOH scenarios were well known, and Iran's capabilities were much lower than they are today.
Iran has now come out and laid out its strategy - it sees its path to victory in terms of economic pressure on the global economy by interdicting petroleum supplies. That's why they are attacking neighbors, including Oman (which hosts no US forces and is one of the Gulf states most friendly to Iran) and civilian shipping.
So this conflict now hinges on our ability to prevent Iran from keeping the SOH closed against the mounting pressure of the economic effects of its closure. Iran is also allowing some ships to pass unmolested from countries that meet their demands, knowing that we won't do what they do and attack civilian merchant ships (a war crime), or otherwise prevent that from happening.
Again, not surprising. The only way the US can stop this (short of a diplomatic agreement terminating the war, which Iran doesn't want right now), is to further attrit Iran's drones (both air and sea drones), and fleet of small boats that can carry out attacks, plus any remaining shore-based missile/artillery assets.
Re: surprise— my mental model of how DC works makes me think that some smart people at the Pentagon who spend a lot of time thinking about the problem brought the issue up but got steamrolled by political appointees engaging in motivated reasoning (sort of like what happened with Eric Shinseki before the Iraq War). Is that consistent with your view as a former insider?
I was more a "cog in the machine" than an insider - a mainline analyst who rose to lead small and medium-sized teams, but without any real influence.
But yes, I think steamrolling is part of it. The other two parts related to interagency coordination, and we've seen good evidence that they aren't working well. There is DNI Gabbard, who no one respects, and it seems Trumps and others on the cabinet deliberately cut her out on some things - not good when you need the intelligence and military components working together for a major war.
The final piece is just skilled bureaucratic management. The DoD and the intel community, even leaving aside the other parts of government, are huge, complex bureaucracies with many moving parts, and it takes someone skilled at the top to understand that and ensure all the pieces are rowing together. Based on what I see from the outside, and what my friends still working tell me, this is not something Hegseth and Gabbard are good at.
I had always assumed that Hegseth and Gabbard were “for TV purposes” appointees who each had some competent subordinate who was actually in charge. Concerning that they’re allowed to actually make decisions.
Interesting overall commentary split: macro and equity market generalists are still sanguine, but the energy and logistics specialists are freaking out.
When this started, I went back and looked at the course of the events in Gaza from the perspective of how long they kept going. While I think the beat down has been significant, the idea that the Iranians are somehow close to losing the asymmetric ability to inflict significant losses is a complete misread. The lack of a real recession has made them believe that line always goes up.
I aesthetically and spiritually loathe Dubai and think the rulers of the Gulf monarchies are evil, but a lot of the people who are going to directly suffer there are poor migrant workers who just wanted to make a buck for their families back in South Asia.
And of course, there are big negative consequences for everyone who consumes oil, natural gas, fertilizer, helium, aluminum, chemicals, etc.
The Saudis seeded Salafist militancy globally, the UAE sponsors the RSF in Sudan, and all of these states’ elites routinely trick South Asian economic migrants into de facto slavery, so yes, I feel pretty comfortable saying this.
They’re evil bc they have a higher standard of living than Americans do and we shouldn’t tolerate anyone living better than us (I’m also for getting rid of the Swiss while we’re at it)
Here's my thing- why don't the Israelis just go in themselves? It's their neighborhood, they were the ones who were so gung-ho about attacking Iran. They have a fairly competent military. We can provide the air support, intelligence, and maybe even transportation to the the battlefield if they don't have the capabilities. They can do the fighting & dying of seizing key objectives, nuclear sites, etc.
Sounds like a great job for the country who apparently really, really wanted this!
Israel lacks any real logistics to be able to put anything besides a small raid into Iran. There's no way they could get more than a thousand or so troops in the country and keep them supplied and even that is doubtful.
The thing that America does impressively well more than any other country is military logistics.
There's a substantial evidence that the Israelis were planning to attack again later this year, but it was either going to be relatively ineffective against the overall BMD program, just like their surprise attack in 2025 (and, if we didn't support, with a higher risk of casualties), partly because this time it would be much less surprising, or else we'd be deeply implicated if we provided aerial refueling support and/or billions of dollars worth of IAMD coverage (like in 2025 and twice in 2024). In the latter scenario, Rubio's argument (loathsome, vicious, and dishonest as he is) about risks to American personnel would very likely have proven correct (albeit probably with much more targeted strikes against a subset of US assets in the region).
BLUF, if you're almost completely unwilling to conduct (and subsequently honor) meaningful negotiations with the Iranian regime, then it could be "logical" to attack while they're weak, but in that case you should make an effort to get domestic and international allies on board (and at least fucking coordinate/prepare across your own government thru the interagency process), plus coordinate minesweeping assets for the SoH. Or just stop spending tens of billions annually to defend the corrupt, brutal, racist regime of an apartheid state...but who am I kidding? Forget it, Jake, it's [the mostly self-inflicted and self-destructive US attachment to] the Middle East
So, Israel decides it's going to attack, we could have drawn down our forces to a minimum, and then devoted all our air defense weaponry to protecting them. We would then have not shot off billions of high tech weapons we now need to replace at 2026 prices, and there's at least some chance the Iranians decide this is mostly between them and Israel, don't drag in their neighbors, and don't close the Strait.
There's gotta be a middle ground between 'occupying a whole country of 90 million people' and 'zero boots on the ground whatsoever'. Can't some special forces teams seize nuclear sites? Can't they take out leadership posts and engage Guard forces where they're massed? Seizing & holding Kharg Island?
Don't get me wrong- I'm strongly against this whole war. I'm just saying, to the extent that ground troops are needed at all- that sounds like a great job for the warmongering country behind this idea. Are there going to be some heavy casualties for the Israelis? Sure- that's the price they need to pay if they wanted to change the Iranian regime
To give the Israelis some credit, they have taken real risks putting their SOF on the ground in Lebanon, Syria, probably Yemen and Iraq, but to do something like this (https://www.twz.com/nuclear/special-operations-raid-to-secure-irans-enriched-uranium-may-become-a-very-risky-necessity) in central Iran, especially unilaterally, would be orders of magnitude more dangerous, and could plausibly end with 100+ Israeli SOF captured or killed (hence why they didn't do it last year, and focused on getting Trump to bomb instead). So yes, I would have been literally breaking out the popcorn if Bibi had decided to bring the 12 Day War Part 2 to theaters near you this summer, PROVIDED that the US stayed completely out of it.
But in that scenario I doubt Bibi would have rolled the dice, let alone with a major ground operation and, apparently thanks to Lady Graham's openly treasonous collusion and our cottage-cheese brained sundowner in chief, he was able to get us to do most of his dirty work instead.
That's just not plausible. The US has nowhere near enough manpower to try to occupy any meaningful part of Iran and where/how would they be marshalled and deployed to the country even if the US did have enough? And a draft isn't happening -- even if it was officially announced starting today, there's no real infrastructure in place to implement it and would take months at least before the first draftees could plausibly be deployed overseas. (People forget that in WW2, the first lottery for the US draft was actually held in October ***1940***.)
True though the spr releases “only” need to cover 20m or so barrels going through the strait. However there seem to be some limits on how fast they can draw the various sprs that mean full strait closure probably cannot be mitigated.
YMMV but it is really sad to see her maybe basically torpedo our chance and solid housing reform over populist slop ideas that just don't hold up under any sort of examination.
I'd consider Warren's position the opposite of "populist slop." If existing homeowners don't want their town accessible to (poorer) renters, making it possible to build owner-occupied houses there and rental houses somewhere else is a win. Encouraging everyone in a "nice" town to fight to the death to keep it from becoming like the run-down slum in the next city over, at the cost of not building any housing at all, is how we got here.
They’re lucky that *I* believe in a YIMBYtopian free market solution, because otherwise they’d be the first ones on the list going into the Soviet-style gray apartment blocks they fear so much. It would be a fitting punishment for them robbing me of any hope of paying off a fucking house before I’m retired.
"We need to stop individual owner-occupants from deploying the private equity playbook of buying homes with subsidized leverage, saddling them with debt, and then using the payments to get a tax break."
"Once commonly found amongst the mucky, dreary swamps of the eastern seaboard of North America, the Conference Committee has, in recent times, all but vanished from its natural habitat. However, now hearing the calls of its old companion Secret Congress, it is looking to make a long-awaited return along the banks of the Potomac River, signaling that what was believed to be forgotten is never truly lost."
While I agree it's a dumb rule, I am very skeptical that the US has a lot of developers building single family homes explicitly for renting. And then we're narrowing that down even further to 'investors owning 350 or more single-family homes' who are now not allowed to do so? What's the actual number of BTR homes built by institutional investors annually? Seems notable that no one has mentioned a specific figure, which makes me doubt this is a real issue. Yes it's a dumb rule, but hard to see that it really matters much
It matters because of zoning. Most municipalities ban multifamily housing outright. Only the largest (and oldest of cities) have multifamily zones and even many of those (like L.A.) are working to strangle apartments.
The problem, is that there are many people who do not qualify for a mortgage. They are too young, or their income is too volatile, or they went through a bankruptcy, whatever. Since they can't get a mortgage, they must rent. Since they can't rent an apartment, they must rent a single family home.
Single family build to rent is going to become a huge segment of the housing market if YIMBYs fail to eliminate anti-apartment zoning nationwide as there's simply nowhere else for renters to live.
> Most municipalities ban multifamily housing outright.
This seems like... a really strong statement? Unless we're playing statistical sleight-of-hand by counting Cow's Ass, Nebraska, population 34 and a goat, 1:1 with the city of Los Angeles.
Yes, we're counting Cow's Ass, Nebraska. There are plenty of folks outside of the big cities that can't qualify for mortgages too. If they can't rent a single family home, then they can't legally live anywhere but the few big cities where apartments are legal to build.
And besides, American metropolitan areas are weird. Most people who live in, say, the L.A. metropolitan area live *outside* the city of L.A. For example, 70% of the people in the L.A. metropolitan area live *outside* the city of L.A. L.A. is already pretty maximally anti-apartment and the suburban cities making up the rest of the metro area are worse.
Well, land doesn't vote, so I don't really give a hoot what is the number count of municipalities that do or don't allow multi-family housing, if they represent a tiny fraction of the actual human population. They can fix their problem or disappear. My anecdata is nothing more than that, but I've lived in four time zones and at least 15 City Of's, from 20k in scale to Phoenix, and exactly zero of them have banned apartment construction.
Your original statements were "most municipalities ban multifamily housing outright" and "Only the largest (and oldest of cities) have multifamily zones". You seem to be backtracking from those statements to the completely different question of whether a municipality allows multifamily housing *anywhere* in the city limits.
I assume you're doing that because you think I'm not paying attention. I *hate* this stolen-base bullshit. Don't waste my time if you move goalposts like this.
Is it maybe a matter of financing? If you're an institutional investor are your borrowing costs so significantly lower than an individual homeowner that you can arbitrage the difference between rent and mortgage?
"institutional investor are your borrowing costs so significantly lower than an individual homeowner"
Hum let me look - Microsoft has the highest possible credit rating and their 2056 non callable bonds are paying 5.6%. Considering the prepayment risk of MBSs I can't imaging any corporate borrower getting a better deal than a conforming loan regular buyer. Keeping in mind 30 year fixed rate mortgages with no prepayment penalty do not exist in the rest of the world - they only exist in the US because the government wills it.
Agreed, I had no idea BTR was even a thing before this all kicked off. I wonder if the developers maybe sell to landlords immediately and then those guys rent them out? I dunno
It also doesn't make sense to me why developers making apartment buildings with rental units is inherently good, but making houses for rent is inherently bad. Zoning restrictions are what they are.
Thank you, Halina! I had seen objections to the BTR restrictions on Twitter, but I hadn't had enough time to figure out what exactly was going on. This is the summary I wanted! Continued great work on your part.
From a technical standpoint, if investors owning more than 350 homes are 1% of the single-family home market (and less when including the multi-unit market), why would this have a major impact? Are BTR investors much more than 1% of the homes being built?
I do feel like BTR is the wrong tree to be barking up anyways. Like, I don’t WANT to ban it, but I also don’t think it’s REMOTELY appropriate to serve as even the sort of “stopgap-that-becomes-permanent” sort of solution to the actual housing crisis.
I’d be happy to be definitively proven wrong on this, but BTR smacks of the same dunderheaded slopulism to me as the 50-year mortgage: People advocating for it think that it’s helping mitigate symptoms, but the ever-cynical NIMBYs will use it as an excuse to continue blocking housing, and if half the SFH market is BTR in 20 years, the same moronic rubes who bitched about egg prices and institutional investors are gonna be whining about all the BTR.
Is there really that big a conceptual difference between BTR SFH vs apartment buildings where 'BTR' is so ubiquitous we don't even really use a special term to describe it? Even so, there are certainly subtler ways to put a thumb on the scale against SFH BTR without a blanket ban. No one is suggesting subsidizing it, I don't think.
I think the conceptual difference is that BTR SFH faces barely any legal hurdles to getting built, while “BTR” apartments remain the most widely hated forms of housing.
Spending political capital to defend the one seems kind of silly and a case of bad prioritization when we mostly need the other right now.
ESPECIALLY when it’s the one big part of the bill that the public REALLY supports. YIMBYs are already up against a very loud, highly motivated NIMBY plurality, and we’re lucky enough that both parties are willing to get crosswise with them — this practically NEVER happens for DOZENS of other MAJOR issues like gun control or the health insurance companies or big pharma.
So maybe we shouldn’t push our luck to save an industry segment that’s barely helping our cause and is doubly-half-odious** on its own merits?
** As in, on two separate points, it’s not the WORST, but certainly not GREAT:
1. Imagine that in 20 years, BTR is half of the SFH market. Do you think that’d be a GOOD thing? Or a reflection that we’ve at all solved the housing crisis with something better than today?
2. BTR SFH is by definition new greenfield construction AKA suburban and exurban sprawl. Although I deeply and utterly DESPISE those development patterns, I call it only half-odious because BTR SFH is barely contributing to it at the moment. If that changes and BTR SFH picks up the slack of the rest of the market, that will likely mean (1) densification and urbanism failed, which would be a tragedy, and (2) worse than its mere base cultural hellishness, sprawl came back with a vengeance, which is an ecological and economic disaster.
Imagine that in 20 years, BTR is half of the SFH market. Do you think that’d be a GOOD thing?
Yes. While I desperately hope that YIMBYs win and we get apartment construction back, Single Family rentals are the *only* form of housing that's broadly legal to build for renters. We *need* that to be a legal plan B.
If YIMBYs don't succeed in building apartments and single family rentals are banned, we've effectively condemned most renters to homelessness. That would be unimaginably bad.
Spending political capital we need for Plan A, on Plan B, is a great way to make sure we get STUCK with Plan B.
You don’t spend your condom budget stocking up on Plan B, because it’s a 3-day slog of PMS, when you could’ve just worn the damn condoms.
20 years without BTR isn’t going to magically put 20 years of population growth out into homelessness like you fear with zero other political implications. But 20 years of ONLY BTR SFH construction would be a hellhole I don’t care for.
So don’t rope me in to your Plan B. I’ll be busy fighting for Plan A.
In your analogy, condoms are literally illegal and politicians are talking about making Plan B illegal as well.
If we were all like Houston (no zoning), I wouldn't care at all about single family rentals. But we're not and I'm not willing to make the last legal form of rental housing illegal for, let's face it, extremely marginal wins in the federal bill. It's not worth the tradeoff.
We can't make Plan B illegal while condoms are still illegal.
My theory is that as our legislators increasingly focus on comms and fundraising, they are giving short shrift to professional staff legislative experts. And the result is flawed bills with errors that should have been caught.
How important is build-to-rent financed by large investors for single-family home development? It would be helpful to have an idea of how much impact this restriction actually has.
Kevin Erdmann (https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/) believes that NIMBY induced rent increases have finally caused rents to rise to a place high enough that single family rentals are now cost competitive with apartments.
He therefore believes that *all* new single family housing construction starts will go into single family rentals. This will moderate apartment rents in places that have the ability to sprawl.
We'll need YIMBY reforms to bring rents *down* again for renters, but single family rentals should at least stop the relentless increase in rents.
One! Something is clearly going on (a magic trick?), don’t get cute. What works is a better guide than assuming the situation is exactly as the weirdos running this say it is. At least for a 1% gain. If the monetary values were flipped go for it I say.
I still haven’t watched the final video! Somehow the youtube algorithm didn’t push it to me yet. But I did watch the draft (before animations were added) and get a bunch of texts from friends.
For what it’s worth, my official view is that rational people are one-boxers but the rational act is two-boxing. Just like in the prisoners dilemma, a rational community is full of cooperators but a rational person defects. The different levels of evaluation that usually line up don’t do so in these cases.
You're told that the supercomputer has successfully predicted thousands of people, that's it's right almost all the time. That means it predicts 1-boxers 1-box, and 2-boxers 2-box.
Do you think you are one of the very very few that outsmart it?
You have a chance at a million dollars, and you are risking it for $1000.
No, I'll say it again, it doesn't matter. Presumably, based on the description, you only find out about this when presented with the choice. You can't have spent your whole life preparing for it; the supercomputer already evaluated you before you even knew a choice would be offered.
If we were in the room being asked the question, I could maybe agree. Planning ahead of time, though? Seems best to be the type of person that would only take the mystery box.
And, of course, the only way something could predict your behavior ahead of time is to always abide by that way of living. Otherwise, would be a trivial task to predict that you would calculate the odds at the spot and take both.
That was my opinion for many years! But I eventually realized that we are engaged in this kind of situation quite often (basically in any prisoner’s dilemma with a stranger).
For all of Trump's idiotic decision-making in the last few weeks, Iran of early 2026 is Bad Actually, and the US of 1941 was flawed but at least making a good faith effort. We smile when bad things happen to bad people.
I don't find that answer super duper satisfying, but there it is.
That's a good distinction but the argument for it being a date which will live in infamy wasn't 'they dared attack us' it was 'they launched a sneak attack without declaring war!'
Like, maybe I'm overdrawing from a single source, but hearing whatshernane explain to Ezra Klein that we couldn't declare war or talk to Congress/the American people beforehand because it would have warned the Iranians we were coming...well, doesn't seem great?
I don’t even understand which side is supposed to be which. Is October 7 supposed to be Pearl Harbor? Or us bombing their nuclear sites a few months back? Or is killing Khamanei supposed to be analogous to destroying aircraft carriers?
Or you could go back to Praying Mantis, or any number of events. The key difference is that Iran has been deliberately hostile for 45 years and the relationship has been far different than it was with Japan prior to their attack.
If you only look at the similarities and ignore the differences, then I can see how one might find them comparable. But only comparing similarities gives a pretty incomplete picture.
The analogy is, we launched an unannounced attack on their military and nation under our own colors, not using proxies, aspparently intended to destroy their navy...without, you know, declaring war?
You're making a fair point. Of course, the whole point of being on the far right is that you reject questions like these as meaningless because we don't owe any moral obligations to anyone outside our tribe/nation/community/gemeinschaft. If we decide we're at odds with some other people, then no holds are barred. So it's not like they would even accept the terms of a debate on this question. By what set of rules or principles do you purport to judge their conduct? International law? The brotherhood of man? All humanity being created in God's image? They think all that is fake.
Today’s episode of the Politix podcast was maddening. Brian Beutler really needs to put up or shut up when it comes to criticizing commodities traders. “I can’t Google it,” oh my god, just ask Claude how to do it if you feel so passionately about that they’re wrong. In the 37 minutes you spent talking about it you could have set up an account on Interactive Brokers and submitted an application to trade options and you’d hear back in a couple of days. Or if not, at least do what Matt said and write about what you would buy/sell at the current market price.
It will be a very notable and consequential example of anti-bigness resulting in bad outcomes if it scuttles this bill.
Elizabeth Warren saying rental SFH shouldn’t happen is a real “I can’t believe I used to go out with you” moment for me.
I don’t think Warren understands how much she sounds like this: “I own a house and don’t understand how renting works”
Warren’s reputational as a policy wonk was always paper thin. She has the zeal of a convert on her economic worldview, but it is telling that she and her intellectual associates- most notably Lina Khan - are lawyers without economics background.
The whole “institutional investors are buying up all the houses” myth is just a myth. It’s a dumb populist myth.
It seems like there is a mental real estate accounting going on. Somehow it’s fine to rent apartments, but houses must be owner occupied…for reasons. Of course, if there wasn’t demand for rentals, people wouldn’t offer single family homes for rent. There are many reasons a person might rent - perhaps they are in a small town for work for a few years, but aren’t going to stay. Not a lot of places like that have apartments, nor would pure YIMBY policies turn every place into Manhattan…so where are renters going to go?
What??? Eff her. I'll live where the hell a landlord and I can agree.
https://i.imgur.com/WuYe8ea.jpeg
I agree with your right to contract, but I also think the pro-housing movement is in danger of veering towards inappropriately relying on BTR to ease the crisis.
I don’t want to wake up in 20 years and have half of the homes in the country be BTR.
Good news! Per Halina's article, there are 92 million homes. In order for BTR to be half of homes in 20 years, we would need to build 90ish million homes over the next two decades and every single new built would need to be BTR. Alternatively, we could destroy 49% of all housing and only allow BTR to be built to replace it.
I think we are more likely to be hit by an asteroid than either of those, so you can put that worry behind you.
To be fair, I was being hyperbolic.
But once the Yglesias-Beutler Administration is in charge and merrily on its way to instituting the OBA agenda while purging MAGA from the body politic, I don’t want the ranks of Slow Boring commissars to waste our time boring 90M new BTR SFH unless we also built double or triple of that in apartments, condos, and missing middle.
Check the quote to make sure I’m not libeling her, but that’s what I got from it.
Is this the quote?
“The policy is to block private equity from taking over the single family home, and that is quite deliberate. There are some folks in private equity who don't like that, but it's a very deliberate choice that is supported on a bipartisan basis by 90 senators.”
https://x.com/igorbobic/status/2031781150994075751
Of course I COULD just check the actual quote, but it's exactly the kind of braindead maximum-government value-below-replacement-congresscritter Masshole shit I've come to associate with the Elizabeth Warren of the last decade. So rather than check, I'm just going to be mad.
(in semi-seriousness, if it's even remotely possible for a good-faith reading of a quote like yours to be THAT incorrect, then we'd only be arguing whether Warren is evil or incompetent/stupid.)
I think this is what Tom Hitchner is referring to: https://x.com/igorbobic/status/2031781150994075751
I would very simply allow all of the good institutional investors, and ban all of the bad institutional investors.
Anybody building new housing is a good institutional investor
I bet there are some shitbags out there, but basically I think this is a good heuristic!
The investors who donate to my reelection campaign are the good ones, those who donate to my opponents are the bad ones.
Today’s Iran war news is… really grim. The Iranians managed to hit at least five commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. They or their Houthi allies somehow managed to hit and paralyze Salalah on the south coast of Oman— the only big deep water transshipment port between the Indian Subcontinent and the Cape of Good Hope that’s not blocked by the Bab Al Mandeb or Strait of Hormuz chokepoints. They also have started to mine the Strait. After a sharp uptick in interception failures yesterday, the UAE defense ministry suddenly stopped publishing interception stats. The US Navy is reportedly turning down escort requests because they currently deem it too risky to send large combat vessels into the Persian Gulf (before the start of the war the Fifth Fleet retreated from Bahrain to the Arabian Sea.) Small and cheap SAM systems in Iran have prevented the US from achieving complete air supremacy there as expected.
Overall, it seems increasingly likely that the US is not capable of protecting shipping through Hormuz and has no clear and actionable plan for making it safe, and that the air defense of the Gulf States’ fragile and economically important infrastructure is failing. The current moment feels a bit like the explosive spread of COVID outside of China in February 2020– the brutal constraints of the situation are very clear to people paying sufficient attention, things are potentially going to get very rough for much of the world very quickly, and the reality hasn’t sunk in.
Drunken Pete and his dipshit boss have “no clear and actionable plan”? I’m shocked, shocked!
Hey, pete has only had a few drinks to steady his thinking. He’ll sort this one out
It’s only a matter of time until Pete Hegseth deploys the ASU Frat Leader to frame mog Mojtaba Khamenei into submission
Clavicular for Supreme Leader. It'll be a marked improvement for all parties—the IRGC will be too busy bonesmashing to repress anyone and the dress code is gonna be... pretty different, anyway.
The only thing short of ground troops that “we” can really do is just keep hammering their short range weapons, but that’s a game of whack-a-mole.
I would never root for harm to our armed forces.
But an embarrassing, bloodless-as-possible strategic defeat in the illest-advised war since Operation Barbarossa just so happening to be the thing that breaks Trump’s cult and makes America safe for democracy again? It’s a stretch. But I am no longer just going to assume that Trump can TACO, declare fake victory, and wriggle out of this one again.
The sooner the Hamburger From Heaven sends him to join his friend Khamenei in Hell, the better we’ll all be.
I think this is likely to be “Afghanistan withdrawal, but worse” damaging to Trump’s political standing, but a lot of people in the Middle East have already paid with their lives, and the downstream economic damage is going to affect a lot of the world’s population. And as an American I also don’t want to see us take a serious strategic defeat.
IMO we took a serious strategic defeat when a buffoon got elected on the back of a previous strategic defeat.
That defeat is going to resonate for centuries after we’re dead.
I just want things to be as good as they can be for the rest of the time before I myself die. Which means this fucking buffoon suffering a strategic defeat that is so embarrassing that our nation either pulls its head out of its ass or finally gives me a good reason to become a Brazilian.
If this were actually true it would mean that anyone sensible should be applauding the attack as, on net, reducing the loss of life inherent in Republican misgovernance. (E.g. the OBBB alone will kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans by the inexorable logic of depriving them of healthcare.)
Regrettably, I do not believe that it will be anything like that damaging to Trump or Republicans, because American voters have the memories of goldfish when it comes to Republican misadventures.
I am pretty concerned that Trump won't be willing to go through that and will instead drop a nuke. I think the probability of that happening is very low - but it isn't zero, and the horribleness of the outcome is so bad that it's worth being concerned about.
The problem there is what could you plausibly nuke that would even temporarily pause the remnants of the regime from taking counteractions?
If you're telling me you don't think it would be a smart plan, then we are in agreement on that.
Well, yes . . . .
It’d be kinda hard to nuke his way to forcing them into submission.
At least Bibi's happy!
As the old military expression goes, "the enemy gets a vote."
Main character syndrome hits hard.
None of this should have surprised the administration. When I was working on the Iran problem in the 1990's, the SOH scenarios were well known, and Iran's capabilities were much lower than they are today.
Iran has now come out and laid out its strategy - it sees its path to victory in terms of economic pressure on the global economy by interdicting petroleum supplies. That's why they are attacking neighbors, including Oman (which hosts no US forces and is one of the Gulf states most friendly to Iran) and civilian shipping.
So this conflict now hinges on our ability to prevent Iran from keeping the SOH closed against the mounting pressure of the economic effects of its closure. Iran is also allowing some ships to pass unmolested from countries that meet their demands, knowing that we won't do what they do and attack civilian merchant ships (a war crime), or otherwise prevent that from happening.
Again, not surprising. The only way the US can stop this (short of a diplomatic agreement terminating the war, which Iran doesn't want right now), is to further attrit Iran's drones (both air and sea drones), and fleet of small boats that can carry out attacks, plus any remaining shore-based missile/artillery assets.
Re: surprise— my mental model of how DC works makes me think that some smart people at the Pentagon who spend a lot of time thinking about the problem brought the issue up but got steamrolled by political appointees engaging in motivated reasoning (sort of like what happened with Eric Shinseki before the Iraq War). Is that consistent with your view as a former insider?
I was more a "cog in the machine" than an insider - a mainline analyst who rose to lead small and medium-sized teams, but without any real influence.
But yes, I think steamrolling is part of it. The other two parts related to interagency coordination, and we've seen good evidence that they aren't working well. There is DNI Gabbard, who no one respects, and it seems Trumps and others on the cabinet deliberately cut her out on some things - not good when you need the intelligence and military components working together for a major war.
The final piece is just skilled bureaucratic management. The DoD and the intel community, even leaving aside the other parts of government, are huge, complex bureaucracies with many moving parts, and it takes someone skilled at the top to understand that and ensure all the pieces are rowing together. Based on what I see from the outside, and what my friends still working tell me, this is not something Hegseth and Gabbard are good at.
I had always assumed that Hegseth and Gabbard were “for TV purposes” appointees who each had some competent subordinate who was actually in charge. Concerning that they’re allowed to actually make decisions.
Interesting overall commentary split: macro and equity market generalists are still sanguine, but the energy and logistics specialists are freaking out.
When this started, I went back and looked at the course of the events in Gaza from the perspective of how long they kept going. While I think the beat down has been significant, the idea that the Iranians are somehow close to losing the asymmetric ability to inflict significant losses is a complete misread. The lack of a real recession has made them believe that line always goes up.
It is good to see the Gulf States suffer, at least. Sucks that has to be Pyrrhic
I aesthetically and spiritually loathe Dubai and think the rulers of the Gulf monarchies are evil, but a lot of the people who are going to directly suffer there are poor migrant workers who just wanted to make a buck for their families back in South Asia.
And of course, there are big negative consequences for everyone who consumes oil, natural gas, fertilizer, helium, aluminum, chemicals, etc.
"Gulf monarchies are evil,"
Their citizens live in lavish glittering luxury with the government providing the best of everything - and that's evil?
The Saudis seeded Salafist militancy globally, the UAE sponsors the RSF in Sudan, and all of these states’ elites routinely trick South Asian economic migrants into de facto slavery, so yes, I feel pretty comfortable saying this.
Can't say I was expecting to see pro-Gulf-monarch discourse in the comments today.
These fucking bingo cards are getting worse every year.
Their citizens are, what, 10% of the population?
(I'm not looking it up; it's just a small percentage.)
I believe so. Most countries in Europe also don't have birth right citizenship. Are they evil as well?
No.
I didn't say they were evil.
I just said that basing your take on the quality of life of *citizens* there misestimates the quality of life of the *population.*
Non-citizens' lives are far less pampered.
I don’t see what that has to do with anything. They are pushing genocide in Sudan after many decades of pushing Islamist terrorism everywhere.
They’re evil bc they have a higher standard of living than Americans do and we shouldn’t tolerate anyone living better than us (I’m also for getting rid of the Swiss while we’re at it)
Also they’re supporting the war in Sudan, etc
Are you Richard Hanania?
And I just saw gas at $5.29/gal
I can see the ads now, "A small price to pay."
Simple solution the other gulf states should band together and send ground troops in against iran
Ground troops? Is the answer ground troop?
Here's my thing- why don't the Israelis just go in themselves? It's their neighborhood, they were the ones who were so gung-ho about attacking Iran. They have a fairly competent military. We can provide the air support, intelligence, and maybe even transportation to the the battlefield if they don't have the capabilities. They can do the fighting & dying of seizing key objectives, nuclear sites, etc.
Sounds like a great job for the country who apparently really, really wanted this!
Israel lacks any real logistics to be able to put anything besides a small raid into Iran. There's no way they could get more than a thousand or so troops in the country and keep them supplied and even that is doubtful.
The thing that America does impressively well more than any other country is military logistics.
There's a substantial evidence that the Israelis were planning to attack again later this year, but it was either going to be relatively ineffective against the overall BMD program, just like their surprise attack in 2025 (and, if we didn't support, with a higher risk of casualties), partly because this time it would be much less surprising, or else we'd be deeply implicated if we provided aerial refueling support and/or billions of dollars worth of IAMD coverage (like in 2025 and twice in 2024). In the latter scenario, Rubio's argument (loathsome, vicious, and dishonest as he is) about risks to American personnel would very likely have proven correct (albeit probably with much more targeted strikes against a subset of US assets in the region).
BLUF, if you're almost completely unwilling to conduct (and subsequently honor) meaningful negotiations with the Iranian regime, then it could be "logical" to attack while they're weak, but in that case you should make an effort to get domestic and international allies on board (and at least fucking coordinate/prepare across your own government thru the interagency process), plus coordinate minesweeping assets for the SoH. Or just stop spending tens of billions annually to defend the corrupt, brutal, racist regime of an apartheid state...but who am I kidding? Forget it, Jake, it's [the mostly self-inflicted and self-destructive US attachment to] the Middle East
To be clear, do you mean there was evidence they were going to invade, or just do the air war?
Mostly air war, probably SOF and Mossad on the ground in Syria/Iraq and Iran, respectively, just like last time.
Potentially re-invade Lebanon (even more, that is, since they never withdrew after the last "ceasefire") like they're doing now
So, Israel decides it's going to attack, we could have drawn down our forces to a minimum, and then devoted all our air defense weaponry to protecting them. We would then have not shot off billions of high tech weapons we now need to replace at 2026 prices, and there's at least some chance the Iranians decide this is mostly between them and Israel, don't drag in their neighbors, and don't close the Strait.
Tell me why this plan is better?
A serious occupation of Iran would likely require over a million troops, which would be… about a tenth of Israel’s whole population.
There's gotta be a middle ground between 'occupying a whole country of 90 million people' and 'zero boots on the ground whatsoever'. Can't some special forces teams seize nuclear sites? Can't they take out leadership posts and engage Guard forces where they're massed? Seizing & holding Kharg Island?
Don't get me wrong- I'm strongly against this whole war. I'm just saying, to the extent that ground troops are needed at all- that sounds like a great job for the warmongering country behind this idea. Are there going to be some heavy casualties for the Israelis? Sure- that's the price they need to pay if they wanted to change the Iranian regime
To give the Israelis some credit, they have taken real risks putting their SOF on the ground in Lebanon, Syria, probably Yemen and Iraq, but to do something like this (https://www.twz.com/nuclear/special-operations-raid-to-secure-irans-enriched-uranium-may-become-a-very-risky-necessity) in central Iran, especially unilaterally, would be orders of magnitude more dangerous, and could plausibly end with 100+ Israeli SOF captured or killed (hence why they didn't do it last year, and focused on getting Trump to bomb instead). So yes, I would have been literally breaking out the popcorn if Bibi had decided to bring the 12 Day War Part 2 to theaters near you this summer, PROVIDED that the US stayed completely out of it.
But in that scenario I doubt Bibi would have rolled the dice, let alone with a major ground operation and, apparently thanks to Lady Graham's openly treasonous collusion and our cottage-cheese brained sundowner in chief, he was able to get us to do most of his dirty work instead.
It almost certainly is... Explaining that to fathers and mothers might be "fun".
That's just not plausible. The US has nowhere near enough manpower to try to occupy any meaningful part of Iran and where/how would they be marshalled and deployed to the country even if the US did have enough? And a draft isn't happening -- even if it was officially announced starting today, there's no real infrastructure in place to implement it and would take months at least before the first draftees could plausibly be deployed overseas. (People forget that in WW2, the first lottery for the US draft was actually held in October ***1940***.)
Not saying it's plausible, just what's necessary if the objective is anything other than "blow shit up".
I mean, that could work, but at like, incredible cost
TIL that releasing 400m barrels covers just four days of global demand. It's crazy how big the global economy is.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/11/iea-proposes-release-of-400m-barrels-of-oil-from-strategic-reserves
Also how much oil there is! That’s an unfathomable amount of oil to me.
More oil then I’ve ever seen in person
True though the spr releases “only” need to cover 20m or so barrels going through the strait. However there seem to be some limits on how fast they can draw the various sprs that mean full strait closure probably cannot be mitigated.
20 million barrels per day. So 400 million barrels is just 20 days worth.
Kelsey Piper https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/2031803502452969869 and Eric Levitz https://x.com/EricLevitz/status/2031789723744694345 had real Lisa Simpson moments with Warren over this today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7aLK9OMbfY
YMMV but it is really sad to see her maybe basically torpedo our chance and solid housing reform over populist slop ideas that just don't hold up under any sort of examination.
We should pass a “Ban Slopulism Act” instead, amirite?!?
I'd consider Warren's position the opposite of "populist slop." If existing homeowners don't want their town accessible to (poorer) renters, making it possible to build owner-occupied houses there and rental houses somewhere else is a win. Encouraging everyone in a "nice" town to fight to the death to keep it from becoming like the run-down slum in the next city over, at the cost of not building any housing at all, is how we got here.
Pfft. This is based on the fundamentally wrong assumption that building for poor people is what turns places into rundown slums.
Empirical evidence may disagree, but it is indisputably a belief held by many *many* people that live in "nice" towns.
They’re lucky that *I* believe in a YIMBYtopian free market solution, because otherwise they’d be the first ones on the list going into the Soviet-style gray apartment blocks they fear so much. It would be a fitting punishment for them robbing me of any hope of paying off a fucking house before I’m retired.
Populist measures often have elitist effects.
I would argue that allowing neighborhoods to say “I’m all in favor of more housing, it just can’t be *here*” is how we got here
I made reference to a different Lisa moment in a comment above. Or there’s this: https://youtu.be/kUZiUORi3uQ?si=kqD0zNBKLaRIIrig
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2031878278324051982
"We need to stop individual owner-occupants from deploying the private equity playbook of buying homes with subsidized leverage, saddling them with debt, and then using the payments to get a tax break."
Matt was trolling Twitter so hard today that I think he crossed over into gillnetting.
The millionaire's tax thing is going to drop property values on the Vancouver waterfront quite a bit lol
I foresee this tax going swimmingly with no apparent downsides whatsoever.
We're killing the one distinction we had as a blue state 🤦
I wonder how much the sale price of the Seahawks is going to decrease?
"Hooray, we made it past the date to when we'd have to give 10% of the sale to Washington!"
*monkey's paw curls...*
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/housing-affordability-2026-election.html.
In a David Attenborough voice:
"Once commonly found amongst the mucky, dreary swamps of the eastern seaboard of North America, the Conference Committee has, in recent times, all but vanished from its natural habitat. However, now hearing the calls of its old companion Secret Congress, it is looking to make a long-awaited return along the banks of the Potomac River, signaling that what was believed to be forgotten is never truly lost."
I hear he’s about turn the big 100 soon
While I agree it's a dumb rule, I am very skeptical that the US has a lot of developers building single family homes explicitly for renting. And then we're narrowing that down even further to 'investors owning 350 or more single-family homes' who are now not allowed to do so? What's the actual number of BTR homes built by institutional investors annually? Seems notable that no one has mentioned a specific figure, which makes me doubt this is a real issue. Yes it's a dumb rule, but hard to see that it really matters much
It matters because of zoning. Most municipalities ban multifamily housing outright. Only the largest (and oldest of cities) have multifamily zones and even many of those (like L.A.) are working to strangle apartments.
The problem, is that there are many people who do not qualify for a mortgage. They are too young, or their income is too volatile, or they went through a bankruptcy, whatever. Since they can't get a mortgage, they must rent. Since they can't rent an apartment, they must rent a single family home.
Single family build to rent is going to become a huge segment of the housing market if YIMBYs fail to eliminate anti-apartment zoning nationwide as there's simply nowhere else for renters to live.
> Most municipalities ban multifamily housing outright.
This seems like... a really strong statement? Unless we're playing statistical sleight-of-hand by counting Cow's Ass, Nebraska, population 34 and a goat, 1:1 with the city of Los Angeles.
Yes, we're counting Cow's Ass, Nebraska. There are plenty of folks outside of the big cities that can't qualify for mortgages too. If they can't rent a single family home, then they can't legally live anywhere but the few big cities where apartments are legal to build.
And besides, American metropolitan areas are weird. Most people who live in, say, the L.A. metropolitan area live *outside* the city of L.A. For example, 70% of the people in the L.A. metropolitan area live *outside* the city of L.A. L.A. is already pretty maximally anti-apartment and the suburban cities making up the rest of the metro area are worse.
City of Los Angeles 3,878,704
LA Metro Area 12,927,614
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/losangelescitycalifornia
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNAPOP
Well, land doesn't vote, so I don't really give a hoot what is the number count of municipalities that do or don't allow multi-family housing, if they represent a tiny fraction of the actual human population. They can fix their problem or disappear. My anecdata is nothing more than that, but I've lived in four time zones and at least 15 City Of's, from 20k in scale to Phoenix, and exactly zero of them have banned apartment construction.
In how many of those cities was it legal, like in Houston, to build an apartment on any plot of land?
Your original statements were "most municipalities ban multifamily housing outright" and "Only the largest (and oldest of cities) have multifamily zones". You seem to be backtracking from those statements to the completely different question of whether a municipality allows multifamily housing *anywhere* in the city limits.
I assume you're doing that because you think I'm not paying attention. I *hate* this stolen-base bullshit. Don't waste my time if you move goalposts like this.
Being a landlord has so much overhead, chances for months of no tenants, damages, evictions etc etc.
I can't believe that SFHs aren't much more profitable to just sell.
Is it maybe a matter of financing? If you're an institutional investor are your borrowing costs so significantly lower than an individual homeowner that you can arbitrage the difference between rent and mortgage?
"institutional investor are your borrowing costs so significantly lower than an individual homeowner"
Hum let me look - Microsoft has the highest possible credit rating and their 2056 non callable bonds are paying 5.6%. Considering the prepayment risk of MBSs I can't imaging any corporate borrower getting a better deal than a conforming loan regular buyer. Keeping in mind 30 year fixed rate mortgages with no prepayment penalty do not exist in the rest of the world - they only exist in the US because the government wills it.
Agreed, I had no idea BTR was even a thing before this all kicked off. I wonder if the developers maybe sell to landlords immediately and then those guys rent them out? I dunno
It also doesn't make sense to me why developers making apartment buildings with rental units is inherently good, but making houses for rent is inherently bad. Zoning restrictions are what they are.
Thank you, Halina! I had seen objections to the BTR restrictions on Twitter, but I hadn't had enough time to figure out what exactly was going on. This is the summary I wanted! Continued great work on your part.
From a technical standpoint, if investors owning more than 350 homes are 1% of the single-family home market (and less when including the multi-unit market), why would this have a major impact? Are BTR investors much more than 1% of the homes being built?
I do feel like BTR is the wrong tree to be barking up anyways. Like, I don’t WANT to ban it, but I also don’t think it’s REMOTELY appropriate to serve as even the sort of “stopgap-that-becomes-permanent” sort of solution to the actual housing crisis.
I’d be happy to be definitively proven wrong on this, but BTR smacks of the same dunderheaded slopulism to me as the 50-year mortgage: People advocating for it think that it’s helping mitigate symptoms, but the ever-cynical NIMBYs will use it as an excuse to continue blocking housing, and if half the SFH market is BTR in 20 years, the same moronic rubes who bitched about egg prices and institutional investors are gonna be whining about all the BTR.
Is there really that big a conceptual difference between BTR SFH vs apartment buildings where 'BTR' is so ubiquitous we don't even really use a special term to describe it? Even so, there are certainly subtler ways to put a thumb on the scale against SFH BTR without a blanket ban. No one is suggesting subsidizing it, I don't think.
I think the conceptual difference is that BTR SFH faces barely any legal hurdles to getting built, while “BTR” apartments remain the most widely hated forms of housing.
Spending political capital to defend the one seems kind of silly and a case of bad prioritization when we mostly need the other right now.
ESPECIALLY when it’s the one big part of the bill that the public REALLY supports. YIMBYs are already up against a very loud, highly motivated NIMBY plurality, and we’re lucky enough that both parties are willing to get crosswise with them — this practically NEVER happens for DOZENS of other MAJOR issues like gun control or the health insurance companies or big pharma.
So maybe we shouldn’t push our luck to save an industry segment that’s barely helping our cause and is doubly-half-odious** on its own merits?
** As in, on two separate points, it’s not the WORST, but certainly not GREAT:
1. Imagine that in 20 years, BTR is half of the SFH market. Do you think that’d be a GOOD thing? Or a reflection that we’ve at all solved the housing crisis with something better than today?
2. BTR SFH is by definition new greenfield construction AKA suburban and exurban sprawl. Although I deeply and utterly DESPISE those development patterns, I call it only half-odious because BTR SFH is barely contributing to it at the moment. If that changes and BTR SFH picks up the slack of the rest of the market, that will likely mean (1) densification and urbanism failed, which would be a tragedy, and (2) worse than its mere base cultural hellishness, sprawl came back with a vengeance, which is an ecological and economic disaster.
Imagine that in 20 years, BTR is half of the SFH market. Do you think that’d be a GOOD thing?
Yes. While I desperately hope that YIMBYs win and we get apartment construction back, Single Family rentals are the *only* form of housing that's broadly legal to build for renters. We *need* that to be a legal plan B.
If YIMBYs don't succeed in building apartments and single family rentals are banned, we've effectively condemned most renters to homelessness. That would be unimaginably bad.
Spending political capital we need for Plan A, on Plan B, is a great way to make sure we get STUCK with Plan B.
You don’t spend your condom budget stocking up on Plan B, because it’s a 3-day slog of PMS, when you could’ve just worn the damn condoms.
20 years without BTR isn’t going to magically put 20 years of population growth out into homelessness like you fear with zero other political implications. But 20 years of ONLY BTR SFH construction would be a hellhole I don’t care for.
So don’t rope me in to your Plan B. I’ll be busy fighting for Plan A.
In your analogy, condoms are literally illegal and politicians are talking about making Plan B illegal as well.
If we were all like Houston (no zoning), I wouldn't care at all about single family rentals. But we're not and I'm not willing to make the last legal form of rental housing illegal for, let's face it, extremely marginal wins in the federal bill. It's not worth the tradeoff.
We can't make Plan B illegal while condoms are still illegal.
"Dunderheaded Slopulism" would be a great name for a rock band.
A quick google says BTR is 7-10% of new SFHs, so pretty material.
My theory is that as our legislators increasingly focus on comms and fundraising, they are giving short shrift to professional staff legislative experts. And the result is flawed bills with errors that should have been caught.
RE my criticism from last week, I think this is much improved! Cheers.
How important is build-to-rent financed by large investors for single-family home development? It would be helpful to have an idea of how much impact this restriction actually has.
Kevin Erdmann (https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/) believes that NIMBY induced rent increases have finally caused rents to rise to a place high enough that single family rentals are now cost competitive with apartments.
He therefore believes that *all* new single family housing construction starts will go into single family rentals. This will moderate apartment rents in places that have the ability to sprawl.
We'll need YIMBY reforms to bring rents *down* again for renters, but single family rentals should at least stop the relentless increase in rents.
I googled it for another comment, looks like 7-10% of new home starts. Something that has grown a lot recently apparently.
Hey Kenny Easwaran,
One box or two?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol18JoeXlVI at 14:45
One! Something is clearly going on (a magic trick?), don’t get cute. What works is a better guide than assuming the situation is exactly as the weirdos running this say it is. At least for a 1% gain. If the monetary values were flipped go for it I say.
I still haven’t watched the final video! Somehow the youtube algorithm didn’t push it to me yet. But I did watch the draft (before animations were added) and get a bunch of texts from friends.
For what it’s worth, my official view is that rational people are one-boxers but the rational act is two-boxing. Just like in the prisoners dilemma, a rational community is full of cooperators but a rational person defects. The different levels of evaluation that usually line up don’t do so in these cases.
Seems obvious that you take both. Now to see why others apparently disagree.
Edit: yes, I am right and others are wrong.
My opinion of you has fallen immeasurably ;)
You're told that the supercomputer has successfully predicted thousands of people, that's it's right almost all the time. That means it predicts 1-boxers 1-box, and 2-boxers 2-box.
Do you think you are one of the very very few that outsmart it?
You have a chance at a million dollars, and you are risking it for $1000.
No, it doesn't matter. It's already decided and set up the boxes before you make your choice.
So you do think you are one of the very very few that outsmart it.
No, I'll say it again, it doesn't matter. Presumably, based on the description, you only find out about this when presented with the choice. You can't have spent your whole life preparing for it; the supercomputer already evaluated you before you even knew a choice would be offered.
So it makes an incorrect prediction about you.
If we were in the room being asked the question, I could maybe agree. Planning ahead of time, though? Seems best to be the type of person that would only take the mystery box.
And, of course, the only way something could predict your behavior ahead of time is to always abide by that way of living. Otherwise, would be a trivial task to predict that you would calculate the odds at the spot and take both.
While I enjoyed the video (as is almost always the case with Veritasium content), I find philosophical questions like this to be tedious and dumb.
I am an *excellent* engineer.
That was my opinion for many years! But I eventually realized that we are engaged in this kind of situation quite often (basically in any prisoner’s dilemma with a stranger).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgNBsCI4EA&start=8s
Dumb question...what distinguishes what we're doing in Iran from 'a date which will live in infamy'?
The opposite disparity in relative military and economic might.
Japan could hope we'd quit in the face of a quick early victory, they couldn't expect to win in an full effort war.
Okay, but that makes it...worse, right?
Japan had a more plausible cassus belli
The OG war for oil.
The taxation of trade routes was in dispute!
Now there’s a quote I’ve not heard in a long time… a long time.
...and scrap metal.
For all of Trump's idiotic decision-making in the last few weeks, Iran of early 2026 is Bad Actually, and the US of 1941 was flawed but at least making a good faith effort. We smile when bad things happen to bad people.
I don't find that answer super duper satisfying, but there it is.
That's a good distinction but the argument for it being a date which will live in infamy wasn't 'they dared attack us' it was 'they launched a sneak attack without declaring war!'
Like, maybe I'm overdrawing from a single source, but hearing whatshernane explain to Ezra Klein that we couldn't declare war or talk to Congress/the American people beforehand because it would have warned the Iranians we were coming...well, doesn't seem great?
I think it is a bad war!
I guess if we forget about all the previous kinetic actions between us and Iran over the last few decades, and you squint, there's a comparison.
I don’t even understand which side is supposed to be which. Is October 7 supposed to be Pearl Harbor? Or us bombing their nuclear sites a few months back? Or is killing Khamanei supposed to be analogous to destroying aircraft carriers?
Or you could go back to Praying Mantis, or any number of events. The key difference is that Iran has been deliberately hostile for 45 years and the relationship has been far different than it was with Japan prior to their attack.
I mean, we had an oil embargo and we're sending arms and men to a party they were at war with?
If you only look at the similarities and ignore the differences, then I can see how one might find them comparable. But only comparing similarities gives a pretty incomplete picture.
The analogy is, we launched an unannounced attack on their military and nation under our own colors, not using proxies, aspparently intended to destroy their navy...without, you know, declaring war?
I mean, we also did this with Venezuela a few weeks back. That's just a surprise attack; the Pearl Harbor analogy adds nothing.
You're making a fair point. Of course, the whole point of being on the far right is that you reject questions like these as meaningless because we don't owe any moral obligations to anyone outside our tribe/nation/community/gemeinschaft. If we decide we're at odds with some other people, then no holds are barred. So it's not like they would even accept the terms of a debate on this question. By what set of rules or principles do you purport to judge their conduct? International law? The brotherhood of man? All humanity being created in God's image? They think all that is fake.
Today’s episode of the Politix podcast was maddening. Brian Beutler really needs to put up or shut up when it comes to criticizing commodities traders. “I can’t Google it,” oh my god, just ask Claude how to do it if you feel so passionately about that they’re wrong. In the 37 minutes you spent talking about it you could have set up an account on Interactive Brokers and submitted an application to trade options and you’d hear back in a couple of days. Or if not, at least do what Matt said and write about what you would buy/sell at the current market price.