I read through the White House document you referenced, admittedly expecting it to be infused with DEI language and written in a manner that was hostile to developers and landlords. IT WASN'T! It was balanced and measured and focused on the problem at hand. I'm impressed.
Though I still remember the eviction moratorium lasting far, far longer than it should have, I am encouraged the administration is approaching this issue with tangible solutions that could garner bi-partisan support. I hope they are successful.
If it holds promise of being an actual solution, you can be sure that for that reason alone, it will NOT garner bi-partisan support. This is not, of course a reason not to put forward the best possible bill, so good for this initiative.
Chicago has one difference from other cities. Their labor movement is stronger than their NIMBY movement. This has up and downsides. Downside is that property taxes are high AF to pay for public sector pensions. Upside is that stuff gets built because no local person mad about parking is going to have the political muscle to stop a housing construction project.
This is why when going through the loop, you see *residential construction* happening, and you've seen it for 5 years. Same in nearly every other area close to their urban core.
This combination makes home ownership less profitable due to the higher tax burden + no limit on inventory. It also makes politicians less prone to block housing, because housing drives local tax revenue in.IL in a way that it never will in CA with prop 13. Net result is condo rents have barely moved up since 2012 at the high end, maybe 10-20% or so over that span.
I lived there for 20 years, and the nice parts where the housing is being built are not dissimilar from the nice parts of Brooklyn. I'd still live there if the weather wasn't terrible for 5 winter months and 3 summer months.
Housing costs are one of the areas where the normie consensus is just wrong - everyone remembers 2008 and the normie consensus seems to be that house prices go up and down at random. But if you think about it for even a moment, it’s obvious that houses are more valuable in 2022 than they are in 2019 due to remote and hybrid work. Gyms are less pleasant than pre-Covid too (I’m 90% sure I caught my recent Covid infection at a gym, and exercise sucks enough without masking), as are probably a few other activities which would also increase demand for house space.
Bigger/better kitchens & dining rooms instead of restaurants & bars, having a TV/media room instead of going to movies/theatre, more space in general for those who used to be out of the house everyday for work or travel but now are home. Finally, the kids! More of them and more at home plus home/remote schooling...
Remote work plays a role but lack of supply, driven by restrictive zoning and post -2008 anemic builder interest in development, is the real driving force. Not to mention that many Millennials graduated into recession and had stunted earnings potential, meaning they're just now able to afford to buy, so we've got a "double generation" of first time buyers, juicing demand.
Only about 15% of Americans work remotely, though it was higher 12-18 months ago. This matters and helped accelerate price growth but structural factors are the real drivers here.
The Discourse Class seems certain that most Americans are white-collar professionals, and that of those, the overwhelming majority is still working remotely. Drives me bonkers.
I’ll sort of defend it as being important in the housing story because the 15% is probably overrepresented among people who can afford to put way too much down on a house, and because 15+% being willing to way overpay is pretty significant in any market.
But the majority of Covid-related writing that assumes nobody has gone outside their house in 2+ years is completely insane. Even among my very liberal and educated social network, I was an outlier just by quarantining my covid-positive self from social events until I had a negative rapid test, vs just going out for a beer on day 6 after testing positive
To the latter: allowing infection to take on a moral framing, you got sick during a pandemic because you didn't care/weren't careful enough/want to kill grandma was a pretty big mistake in retrospect.
I didn't do my part to shout that down loudly enough when it was still nascent. Now I think some sub-communities will never let go of it.
The moralizing about covid drives me bananas. One of the things that we were supposed to have learned from HIV was that moralizing about contracting an infectious disease was counterproductive. What makes it worse is that some of the people who were the worst about moralizing about the virus were at extremely low risk of infection because they were affluent professionals who were working from home and ordering groceries
Is it wrong for it to take on a moral framing... or _that much_ moral framing?
I mean, the basic idea of "you should try not to get covid and you should wear a good mask so that you don't infect others" seems like the kind of thing we want to encourage, no? Making it all just about getting it yourself makes it much easier to decide not to get vaxxed.
Making everyone feel super guilty about getting grandma sick is going too far - but isn't a "ask what you can do for your country" sort of moralizing at least a _bit_ good?
EDIT:
Maybe it's the difference between "morally, you do your best not to get sick and pass it on - but not everything is possible" and "being sick means you definitely failed to do the Right Thing (tm)"
Agree entirely, I would characterize remote work as kindling added to the already blazing fire. It has probably disproportionately affected certain markets though, and certain suburbs within those suburbs. Personally I work mostly in person, but my recent house purchase is still partly covid-related as I live more of my non-work life at home now
I'm a bit of a hipster in this regard in that I saw the WFH benefits a good decade ago or so. The main thing I wanted to avoid, though, was wasting hours of my life stuck in a car, and I also targeted being close to fun activities that weren't exactly pandemic friendly.
As a night owl, one of the things about WFH that I love is that I can get up later in the morning. I'm almost entirely at the office now and getting up earlier is the worst part of working in the office
The "normie" (i.e. Boomer and Xer) consensus is and has always been that housing prices will increase forever, so housing is always a good investment. Millennials learned from the 2008 crash that this is not always true. The older generations are bound and determined to make sure it's always true by pulling up the ladder behind them via zoning and other assorted NIMBYism.
All that said, I agree that WFH inherently makes housing more valuable.
I mean, it's pulling up the ladder one way or another given that space is not an unlimited good, right? The YIMBY acronym is literally about sacrificing open space (e.g., one's back yard--which I don't think is intended solely as a metaphor when it comes to the kind of zoning reform YIMBYs favor and certainly isn't when it comes to ADUs) in favor of cramming more humans on top of one another in the multifamily housing, which is not only going to involve the sacrifice of amenities like yardspace but also by definition increase the intensiveness of use of the commons like parks. (Also, of course, there's no way to share walls and floors with other people and not run into more problems with externalities than you have with SFHes.)
YIMBY is about endorsing one side of the tradeoff of "more, individually worse housing" versus "less, individually better housing." This doesn't make its proponents crazy if they take increasing population sizes as an immutable constraint (which, to be clear, in the short term at least is in fact the overwhelming politico-moral consensus, so again, not a crazy thing to do) or, as Matt does in "One Billion Americans," an overarching good--but in a world of limited land area further constrained by the agglomeration effects of cities pulling everyone towards them, it does run into the basic problem that "same amount of stuff divided by more people with a claim on that stuff = less stuff per person."
A person's stance on zoning can't actually change that calculus, it just affects whether they think the "more people" versus the "more stuff per person" side is more important to accommodate. Or, put another way, there's no zoning regime the Boomers and Xers could have adopted even hypothetically that wouldn't have resulted in more-numerous millennials making sacrifices in the quality of housing on offer.
Your argument (which, to me, comes off as thinly-disguised anti-YIMBY FUD; nobody is coming to take people's backyards) is quantitatively incorrect. Increasing the availability of housing by any means increases everyone's chance to get the kind of house they want, which has been shown by economic studies. It's pointless to compare to an impossible standard like "everyone has as much space as they could possibly want". Of our two realistic options, one is clearly better than the other.
Allow me to respond your characterization of my comment as "thinly-disguised anti-YIMBY FUD" by saying that I find your own response to be a combination of an unwarrantedly uncivil tone, bad-faith mischaracterization of what I was talking about, and frankly kind of a bizarre set of claims on a factual level (you are literally claiming "nobody is coming to take people's backyards" in the context of a discussion about a movement entitled "Yes, in My Backyard.")
If you want to split hairs about market-dominant housing arrangements versus some kind of strawman hypothetical about hostile real estate takeovers (which, sure, outside of the highly specialized and not immediately relevant context of eminent domain and adverse possession is Not a Thing) because you somehow interpreted my allusion to ADUs -- which, again, literally intended to be built in people's backyards -- as about that, then knock yourself out I guess. But I think it's clear we're done here.
I sometimes wonder if declining populations in Europe and most of Asia will eventually mean that housing will start to be seen as less of a sure-thing investment in those parts of the world. And then I wonder whether that would begin to filter through to the US some way.
Here’s how it’s going to go. When the next recession hits the first to go will be remote workers - their positions either eliminated or outsourced to India. As a result the family from SF that paid $250k over asking for a place in Boise is going to get laid off. And then they will find that all else being equal employers prefer folks who can be in the office a few days a week. Fine they think, we can just sell. But millions are on the same boat and prices have plunged (and they paid $250k over). They can’t sell and what few jobs are in Boise pay a lot less than they were making. So foreclosure here they come.
Over the next several years, I strongly suspect that currently ‘hybrid’ companies will decide it doesn’t make sense to pay Bay Area salaries to workers in Boise. Moreover, remote workers will be perceived as off-the-fast-track, insufficiently loyal, and poor team players.
For awhile I thought I was just old and out-of-touch, but now it is our straight of school employees who are lobbying most strongly for a full 5 days in the office. I’d go with 3 or 4, because in my view managing geographically distributed teams is a huge PITA that is not worth the headache in most cases, and is burning out management at a truly alarming rate.
As far as India, it’s even more of a PITA, especially from the West Coast, but it has one clear advantage - it’s cheaper. So some will do it.
In addition to all of the above, I think holding together team culture will start to bite even harder as more companies bring in new remote-from-day-one workers, and longer-tenured employees drift away from the water cooler.
Thankfully, we only went full-remote for about three months and this was merely a speedbump.
I'm worried about this with us - our company has been full remote for 2 years now - the culture still works with the people I've been working with for years - but my bonds with people that I don't work with directly and haven't pre-established are super weak.
OTOH I'm pretty settled in to remote here and it makes my schedule super easy.
I don't really understand why folks see everything as one-size-fits-all... some companies like and are doing well with remote/distributed models, others don't like it.
You can say that someone who moved from SF to Boise relying on a remote job offer will be screwed when their company needs to cut costs. But on the other hand there are tons of people who liked remote work and those folks will be available talent for companies that are able to make remote work out...
As you say office work has some advantages for sure. And you are right that work from home can actually be harder on more junior folks, who kind of rely on proximity to get attention/work/social interaction in the office.
But remote also has advantages and there are a lot of people already bought in on remote.
I think what the big companies do will impact the housing market more, both because they’re bigger, and because if all those employees live locally it continues to drive agglomeration effects for start-ups and mid tiers. Remote may be a competitive advantage for some of those start-ups and mid-tiers, but many of them would like to be big companies themselves one day.
My other point is really more basic - in a recession it’s easier for employers to make demands and FAANG leadership hasn’t exactly made it a secret that they want employees to live locally and come back at least a few days a week. They haven’t gotten much traction in implementing it yet, due to the pandemic and attrition fears. But with a lot of these companies losing 25%+ of their value this year and going into cost-cutting mode, the vibe shift is happening fast.
It's pretty customary, at least at the big FAANG-type companies, to do a salary adjustment if you move out of the expensive areas. A buddy of mine moved to another state to work remote and took a 10% pay cut to do so because of the cost of living differential. This might make it not as attractive to lay those people off.
The culture of tech work at least has shifted. Many companies focused on measuring productivity during the pandemic, and most concluded that productivity did not appreciably dip, or even increased. Mostly because when people work from home they are available at all hours. Coming into work to take a 9pm meeting is onerous; walking to the other room to put on your headset is no big deal.
The idea that you need to be in a physical place to be good at your job is a ship that has sailed. Will there be a slight backlash? Maybe. But laying off all the remote employees is just not going to happen.
I think they will do what Yahoo did when it needed to reduce staff. Tell everyone that they need to be in the office forcing the remote workers to quit.
“Many companies focused on measuring productivity during the pandemic, and most concluded that productivity did not appreciably dip, or even increased.”
I’m just not seeing it. Everyone says that and I’m like - then why is everything taking twice as long?
As an aside, I’m 95% sure my new fully remote coworker is working 2 jobs.
It depends on the specific job, specific management and specific workers. For some combinations of the above it can work out fine, for others it can't.
That’s a good point. I would add that in terms of office politics and morale it’s hard to have some employees in the office and some remote. If there are delays in the work at home group then the office is, right or wrong, going to blame WFH.
I am at a big FAANG type company and I making a prediction that the wind is changing fast and in two years the FAANGs will be in a very different place than they are right now.
Company leaders at all the FAANGs (and adjacent) have been quite open that they believe productivity is down (people are working more hours to do the same work), and remote work is bad for company culture. No one at any FAANG was going into the office to take a 9PM meeting pre-pandemic, so that’s a non-change.
A 10% salary adjustment is nothing, and they will let remote work scale back gradually through attrition and by marginalizing folks who do it, not through mass layoffs or outsourcing to India, because neither of those will happen at the FAANGs.
Before the pandemic, I spent at least 85% of my time alone in my cube. I don't see how that hurts or helps company culture. We don't get free massages and dry cleaning where I'm at. No parties with Bruno Mars.
I think the culture is still shifting. 2 or 3 days in person seems easily sustainable to me for the long haul. If the focus is put on actually developing the culture as opposed to having the VP just talk to a thousand people on Zoom, I think full remote is very doable. And that will be extremely attractive to people.
2 or 3 in person isn't really remote though, right?
It would make the suburbs more attractive and still put a dent in the demand for office space and business district amenities, but it's pretty far from working in Boise.
People live in the city because there is tons of stuff to do. I'm not sure a 25 year old who is working at home is going to have more desire to live out in the suburbs with nothing to do. Also keep in mind only about 1/3 of workers have minor children at home.
They typical internet commenter tends to be more introverted and the thought of more time at home is appealing. That's far from universal.
What part of that contradicts the statement that suburbs would be more attractive?
It should go without saying that we're discussing relative attractiveness here. No one claims that every person's first choice is suburban living. But all else equal with a 2 or 3 day work week a greater share of people will tolerate a given commute, and hence the relative demand for suburbs will increase. That's not a very bold statement or one that requires a leap of faith.
"Also keep in mind only about 1/3 of workers have minor children at home." 1/3 is plenty large enough to influence relative demand. Not everyone is an introverted parent of young children, but nor is every worker 25 years old.
100%. Switching to 2-4 days in the office is wildly different than having half the team in one location and the other half dispersed across all the locations, working different hours, never meeting their team, etc.
I didn't make the point very well, but IMHO a 2-day in-person week will work immediately with zero effort. It's not at all clear to me that a full remote situation couldn't work for many people with a little effort.
For instance, you could fly in remote workers one week a quarter, or one week every six months to keep the team cohesive. You could actually make an attempt to foster those so-called "hallway conversations" that upper management seem to be obsessed with. I talked to many people I'm friendly with at my company over the past couple of years and learned new stuff over Slack or Zoom. Was it a tiny bit less natural? Sure. Is it a unmovable obstacle? Hardly.
I think there's an argument to be made that things got too loose during the pandemic, although I'm not sure by how much. Going back to 2018 is, to me, just a lack of imagination.
There's nothing I hate more than management promoting "hallway conversations". Except possibly getting stuck in a hallway conversation when I'm on the way back to my desk or office.
I think they mean it’s harder to instill habits and ways of working that are consistent across the board and therefore build trust and reduce friction. What do you think they mean?
Boise was growing very rapidly and had a pretty tight housing market well before Covid, I would think the same trends would continue. Maybe if there are layoffs of remote work the pace of growth would slow somewhat but what you are talking about really seems like an extreme possible case. Boise's housing prices did rise quite a bit faster than trend the 2 years, so there might be a correction, but i really doubt we see a wave of foreclosures in boise. Especially since a lot of people who moved would have been cashing out San Francisco properties for cheaper boise houses, so they probably have some fairly decent savings or home equity to lean back on before they get foreclosed.
more broadly household balance sheets are still pretty strong IIRC which is one of the things that is driving inflation. This will change at some point since people will spend down their savings or have them inflated away, but imminent crisis doesn't seem likely for most.
It is so immensely depressing this obvious and unassailably correct statement was so viscerally destroyed. So many people really believe that America is fully irredeemable and not worth putting forth the hard work required to make improvements. Even worse the vast majority of people with this sentiment seem to be the ones who are most involved in politics on my side. If you genuinely believe 2022 America is a horrible place to live by current and historic global standards, I would strongly advise detaching yourself from politics entirely for your own mental health. But we need to crush this sentiment if we are ever going to make the progress these same doomsayers claim to want achieve. The much fabled non-college white woman in her 50s in the suburbs of Grand Rapids MI that we Slowboring heads all know to be the median voter probably does not think America is a sh*thole country. She is probably also horrified by shootings at elementary schools. Shepherding those two sentiments into policy is the hard boards we all know and love. But Idk how that can ever be achieved if so many people think the project itself is morally bankrupt because everything they desire has yet to be achieved already. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1529234787579355136?s=20&t=7GIPmw5b_ilPobBwoUj23g
I agree with MY's overall sentiment, but JFC. It's the day of a horrific event. Just let people be sad and angry without whatever effect he was trying to achieve with a "well, actually..." tweet.
Something I appreciate about Matt is that he typically finds the right balance been rationality and emotion--a balance that's never easy to accomplish, as this event demonstrated. Someone like the typical commenter on a rationality-centered blog goes too far in one direction, while someone like the typical outraged Twitter user goes too far in the other direction. Thanks as always for striving to build a place for a happy medium!
I know I’m in the minority here but I have a ten-year-old and don’t own a firearm and thought the tweet was fine. Gun control is the deadest of political dead ends and all the histrionic gnashing of teeth over these tragic but statistically insignificant events accomplishes is make people either despair or ignore the fact that Americans just really fucking love guns and fundamentally don’t support the kinds of measures that would be required to stop these shootings. I don’t get it and I don’t like it, but as a problem in American life it doesn’t even crack the top ten. If I could choose between America’s irrational love of firearms and their irrational love of oversized vehicles I would get rid of the latter, because my kid is more likely to get struck by a vehicle than shot.
Not the main point, but I hate it when people use the term "statistically insignificant" to mean "rare". In statistics, "statistically insignificant" means "we can't establish that this is different from the null effect (usually 0)."
But the usage is accurate both ways. Someone dying is never insignificant, but if you modify it with the adverb 'statistically' then you get that while every life matters, if you look at the statistics of dying from X vs. other ways to die, people dying from X is not something to be concerned about.
I think that carefully tailored reform aiming at preventing interstate movement of the most dangerous kinds of weapons getting into the hands of the most dangerous kinds of people could work to start separating gun safety from the guns as symbol issue.
I personally would not be the best person to ask. I don't know anything about the gun market. But from my FB friends, I never hear opposition to specific safety measures, but talk about their rights to own guns and use them to defend themselves against home invasions. So there OUGHT to be a way.
The problem is that we already restrict the most dangerous types of guns (machine guns have extremely strict laws about ownership) and there are already laws on the books that are supposed to stop the most dangerous kinds of people from getting any guns. (Possession of a gun by a felon is pretty severely penalized in the law, though that law is not always enforced to the extreme).
I still think that there are probably more identifiable weapons that might be restricted. [I am always disappointed by the "why did he do it" aspect of these tragedies and not on the "how did he do it."]
Really wish Matt hadn’t made that tweet. It wasn’t only insensitive; it also makes it harder for people like me to send Matt’s writing to friends in the policy world. Consequentialists should understand that reputation matters.
1) Matt rightly tries to get Democrats to stay on message, to say things that are popular, hold their tongue on things that aren't, and make exceptions only if absolutely necessary. I'm not sure why this wouldn't apply to Matt too since he's also trying to advocate for a policy agenda and relies on his reputation and popularity to do so.
2) Insensitive or not, the tweet is easily demagogued by his opponents as "Matt's response to the shooting was 'America's a great country!'"
3) Setting aside impact, the tweet was actually insensitive. Imagine a parent tells someone their kid just died and that person's response is "don't forget that your life is actually pretty great otherwise!" Insensitive. As a rationalist weirdo, Matt's tweet didn't bother me, but part of being kind person is considering what may or may not bother other people.
The tweet is definitely insensitive, but I read it as a response to the tendency among some to basically say people should leave the United States in response to things like this. Which I think is very bad advice and frankly not a serious proposal.
I'm not on Twitter and don't know what happened, but this hits upon something that I think is really important --
If you're goal is to try to get left-wing people to move from a mobilization mindset to a persuasion mindset, then you need to apply this mindset to persuading progressives. It's no different than being careful and respectful when speaking to conservatives.
Matt's usually very good about this, and I really admire him for that.
Cool, now let's get all those progressives who have spent the last two years saying that cities breaking murder records all across the country is no big deal to do the same. I'm deeply confused about why I should care so much about these mass shootings while ignoring the much larger increase in "normal murders" that is sweeping the country.
I’m not making any argument about how much you should care about mass shootings relative to murder rates.
I’m making an argument that you shouldn’t tell people “but overall, things are still pretty good” as an immediate response to a bunch of kids getting murdered, then respond with sarcasm and glibness when people get offended.
But Matt made a very sincere apology this morning, which I was glad to see.
Hi Ken, I consider myself a liberal and I am appalled both by the horrific mass murders in Buffalo and Texas *and* by the rising crime/homicide rate in major cities. It is possible to do both!
I am as well. That doesn't change the fact that there has been a disturbing number of progressive activists and politicians who have openly stated that being concerned about the significant increase in murders is fear-mongering and trying to claim there is no problem with increasing crime because purse snatchings are down.
I noticed him pointing out most gun fatalities are suicides and isolated homicides was not deemed insensitive, although it was just as much a distraction from the tragedy of the moment. Of course this is bc that is an accepted left talking point on gun violence, while America being a nice place that lots of folks want to live in is not.
And if your friends in the policy world make decisions about what info to consume in the way you describe a proper consequentialist would be dedicated to removing them from positions of influence.
A consequentialist can’t remove all non-consequentialists from power anymore than they can make all voters have their policy preferences or eliminate scarcity. That’s why popularism and the field of economics exist, and that’s why EA people tend be be very willing to talk about reputation costs.
Re the suicides/homicides point, I think most people would consider publicly proclaiming that fact immediately following such a tragic mass shooting to be insensitive. To the degree lefty twitter users don’t, I think it’s they who are out of touch.
Perhaps it is instrumentally better for all individuals, as individuals, to just say ‘this is terrible’ and be quiet. You will piss off very few this way and that in itself is clearly minimizing disutility considering the uncertainty of all second order and higher effects. Personally I think this shows some of the limits of consequentialism but ymmv.
Yes in fact we cannot make sure influential people are perfect but we can strongly state that it is not ok to be a close minded policy maker. I believe that, and I state it, and others should too. and to whatever extent you think your associates wield power over others and plug their ears to good information you should tell them they are doing it wrong.
We all to varying degrees shape the pool of policy makers in a way we do not shape the mass public. We would be wise to select for people who will listen to unrelated policy arguments despite Twitter outrage. It’s hard to do that but it’s a hard task to govern. It should be done by people who can take in information and decide it’s value in context.
It's funny, when I heard Matt was getting dragged on Twitter, I thought it was for that set of tweets instead of the "America is great!" set. I didn't have a problem with either set of tweets, but I think that if I showed people those tweets in isolation, more people would get angry at the "most gun deaths are suicides" set.
I'm curious how conservatives think about mass shootings. I understand they don't want gun restrictions. Are they passionately advocating for more armed guards? Are they just resigned to them?
I checked Breitbart, the top comment there on this story is "They will quickly bury this story because the perp is not a white dude." So for them stopping shootings doesn't seem to be a priority. I'm not sure if that's a good place to get a sense of what conservatives are thinking.
I think they are a tragedy. And I don't know what to do about them. I think most conservatives support increased security for schools. I've yet to see a proposed solution that would have prevented Sandy Hook. We don't know enough about this one to know if a policy would have made a difference.
Related to guns, specifically: I do wish we enforced existing gun laws much more strictly. Mandatory prison sentences for carrying (not just using) illegal guns would be a good start. Major enforcement actions against straw-buyers, and the gun dealers who allow them. These are things that the left has called racist, though, and are actively moving away from.
I agree with you, except for the mandatory prison sentences. The level of killing has increased dramatically since George Floyd and the victims of that violence are disproportionally Black Americans. I think those killings are tragic, and the use of illegally obtained weapons is a contributing factor.
Note that I separated out my gun-related comments from the school shooting comments. Most commonly proposed policies (background checks, magazine size restrictions, etc.) wouldn't have prevented either shooter from obtaining a weapon, though the age restriction might be the first one. I think it would be a good change.
I think Josh Marshall has his finger pretty close to the pulse on this. He's got more behind a paywall, but this part is public:
> The inability of the U.S. to do literally anything about the scourge of mass shootings is itself one of their greatest draws, the magnetic heart of their attraction. Mass shootings are fundamentally about losers, rage and the draw of total power. For a few minutes a school shooter holds the power of life and death. That power speaks for itself.
It seemed like a few years ago we had started to recognize this and stopped widely publishing the names of mass shooters. But as soon as one comes along that people find politically useful, they give the shooters exactly the publicity that they want.
I think this misses an important distinction between attention and power, although it was probably helpful on its own merits to give these individual losers as little attention as possible.
I really like the under 25 idea - I think it’d be interesting to see how something like that polled. I imagine it would run into 2nd amendment issues though
This is the most callous comment I have seen on this Substack, ever.
Have you no empathy for the parents and grandparents of the innocent children who were slaughtered in Texas, or the friends and family members of the Black people slaughtered in Buffalo? You expect them to be OK with what happened, because objectively, it wasn't very many people? FFS.
Because our outrage is a function of moral condemnation as well as utility.
If someone swerves to avoid an animal in the road, loses control of their vehicle, crashes into another vehicle, and kills someone, we do not have the same level of outrage as if that person plans to kill someone, gathers materials and then kills that person with premeditation. Yet the utility function ("the victim is very dead") is the same.
So - you are right that from some pure utilitarian calculus, mass shootings are rare and dedicating a ton of resources to trying to prevent them would be inefficient.
And perhaps it is a moral failing for our society if we go after mass shootings with lots of resources and (due to limited attention) let thousands die due to people texting while driving.
But outrage isn't just that, it's tied to _what_ the event is as well as its consequences.
The word "big" is being used too loosely but I think I know what Jonathan means.
Today the Uvalde school shooting is the biggest of big problems to the people living in Uvalde, Texas, and I'm sure Jonathan would agree with that. But in a country of 330 million people mass shootings that kill, on average, 100-150 people a year don't rank in the top 100 of problems. So in that context it's not a big problem compared to many other things that are more likely to impact any given person.
I also feel pretty strongly that attention is part of the motivation and inspiration for the shooters, so making this headlines news has the unfortunate side effect of making additional shootings more likely.
Plane crashes are rare. Yet we have an entire federal agency devoted to investigating them when they happen, finding the cause, and promulgating regulatory measures to prevent a recurrence. We do this because civic confidence in air travel is economically beneficial, and because we feel a moral compulsion to minimize needless death. Mass shootings are no different. As for the attention paid to these events, you're talking about human nature. Gun control is difficult, but it's easier than changing human nature.
Another way of looking at it is which would you prefer if you could wave a magic wand: reduce homicides by 10% or cut mass shootings in half by 50%? The former would save more than 10 times as many lives as the latter, because there are 20-25,000 murders annually versus 100-150 mass shooting deaths.
So in a world of limited resources, limited political capital and limited attention, we should probably focus more on the former than the latter. Or maybe focus even more on drug overdoses, which claim over 100,000 lives just as tragically but with even less attention per death.
But like everyone else here, I'm all for ideas that would move the needle in any of these areas.
Plane crashes are rare because we have entire federal agencies devoted to reducing the risk. That works because the costs are relatively low and mostly hidden. As Jonathan asks below, I'd love to hear any ideas you or others have that would meet that criteria regarding gun violence.
If you have a way to actually reduce gun deaths - not just stir up a losing political fight - then that sounds great to me. Gun deaths broadly (not just mass shootings) are a really big issue! But I don’t have a way to solve them, so I don’t see the point of getting outraged about mass shootings.
Gun deaths- all gun deaths - are attributable to three phenomena: the number of guns we have, the types of guns we have, and the gun culture we have.
The number of guns can be reduced by funding large-scale buybacks and requiring background checks for all private sales.
The types of guns can be changed by regulation: ban all long guns with semi-auto actions and/or high-capacity magazines. Limit magazine sizes for handguns. Offer large buybacks for anyone who voluntarily surrenders such a gun. If you're caught possessing one that's registered to you, it's seized and you receive lesser compensation, no charges. If it's not registered to you, no compensation, no charges. If you're selling or buying one, criminal charges.
The final piece is gun culture. No legislation can change that.
It will take years to change how Americans think about guns. Right now, too many think of guns as either toys, like jet skis, or as a cure for their crippling insecurity. We need a healthy gun culture that views publically available guns as tools for hunting first, and as a method of self-defense last. We need to take the fun and the machismo out of gun ownership. It's a generational project.
I'm not really sure what the single neighborhood homicide stat is really saying. A peaceful random neighborhood with 8 homicides in a night will jump up the murder rankings quickly. To me that statistic speaks to the horrific level of violence that occurs regularly in "bad" city neighborhoods.
There were roughly 25,000 murders in 2020. Since 2009, 1,500 people have died in mass shootings. That's about 1 in 200 homicides. and statistically speaking a rare event.
What if we compare to all cause mortality rather than other shootings? Even if you want to look at young healthy people I’m sure car crashes have killed many more. (I bet gun suicides is higher too tbh)
Guns and cars both kill around 30,000 Americans per year. I think a lot more should be done about car deaths than currently is, but I think that there’s less low-hanging fruit with cars than with guns (eg, universal background checks).
It looks like there are 10 states that ban the transfer of firearms other than through licensed dealers required to conduct background checks, 3 states have methods for people other than licensed dealers to have background checks conducted, and 2 states require background checks for all sales but not for gifts or loans of firearms.
I don't have statistics on whether gun violence in those states is more likely to involve guns acquired out-of-state, but all of these states are below-average in gun fatalities per capita, other than New Mexico (which is one of the two with loopholes for gifts and loans) and Nevada.
Democrats have expended huge resources in pushing for gun control, and the result is not much gun control and it’s a big politically liability. Why keep pushing?
People probably want to change the fact that we are the only nation that routinely sees school children slaughtered by men with firearms.
You can try to convince people we should just accept the occassional slaughter of kids and work on other things, but I think as long as people have hearts and emotions they are probably going to care about this problem and try to do something about it.
Enforce existing gun laws, get the ATF and FBI to actually care about making the background check system work, and pass and enforce red flag laws.
Also conservatives do care a lot about mass shootings, except in their minds caring does not automatically equal implementing incredibly strict gun control policies.
We are collectively turning MattY's thread on housing into a thread on guns! Sorry, MattY!
I don't know what conservatives think, but here's what I think: I want the assault weapons ban back. The AR-15, which was used by both the Buffalo and Texas murderers, was illegal under the 1994 assault weapons ban.
Warning: gruesomeness
After the Parkland, FL mass shooting, I read an article in The Atlantic on what makes the AR-15 so deadly. Suppose you're shot in the liver. If the shot came from a handgun, you have a decent chance of survival if you're immediately rushed to an ER, unless you're very unlucky and the bullet severed a major blood vessel.
If you're shot in the liver with an AR-15, YOU HAVE NO LIVER. Your liver has exploded into little tiny bits. It doesn't matter if the shooting occurred on the doorstep of a state-of-the-art ER; no liver = certain death. This means that a person with an AR-15 can be a really crappy marksman and still kill a lot of people in a very short time.
Also, if you're a civilian, what the heck do you need an AR-15 for?
If you're hunting for food, you don't want a weapon that will pulverize the animal you're shooting at. You want a hunting rifle. (If you hunt for "sport," you are a bad person and you should feel bad.)
If you want to protect yourself from a home invasion or suchlike, you can have a handgun, or a rifle if you're in a rural area.
Why would you need a weapon that is capable of *pulverizing* a person's liver in one shot? To protect yourself from a zombie invasion?
One reasons many gun owners are skeptical of gun control is that many gun control proponents know very little about guns, raising doubts as to whether they actual understand them well enough to effectively regulate them.
For example, basically everything you've said about being shot with an AR15 versus a handgun is incorrect.
Hi Ken, I admit to knowing very little about guns, mostly what I've learned from online comment threads and movies.
My handgun vs AR-15 comparison was based on The Atlantic article, so blame them not me :)
Would you educate me? Are there weapons that are useful for pointing at a home invader and saying "get the f*** out of here" but not quite as effective at killing many people quickly as an AR-15?
"Are there weapons that are useful for pointing at a home invader and saying "get the f*** out of here" but not quite as effective at killing many people quickly as an AR-15?"
My dude, if you don't know about shotguns, you are in for a treat..... :) They are exactly what you describe
Depends on the mass shooting. If you include "shootout between gang members leaves 3 dead," then you're likely correct. And that is the official definition of a mass shooting: >1 victim at a time.
But for the horrific mass shootings of the "man guns down umpteen schoolchildren/worshipers/grocery store shoppers" variety, the AR-15 keeps coming up again and again and again.
Without looking for hard numbers I could be convinced that the all-consumed, angry-at-society-and-I-will-make-them-pay shooters who brood and fantasize for months or years on end probably, yes, use a lot of AR-15 type rifles. But some of that is surely due to media accounts that play them up as being particularly deadly as well as the shooters studying details of past killings they find inspiring.
The definition of mass shooting varies widely. This page has a comparison of different tracking methodologies. There's no official agreed upon definition.
If we're talking about shootings where more than 3 or 4 people were shot then pistols are by far the majority. There are close to 100 of those types of incidents every year. But if we're talking about pre-meditated spree killings which terrorize the broader public than assault weapons are more commonly used. But these are much rarer and only happen 1-3 times a year.
"Also, if you're a civilian, what the heck do you need an AR-15 for?
If you're hunting for food, you don't want a weapon that will pulverize the animal you're shooting at. You want a hunting rifle"
Just about everything in your comment is incorrect, but I'll just address this bit.
In Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Washington, and West Virginia (and perhaps some other states) it is illegal to hunt deer using a .223 caliber round (or a 5.56mm NATO round, which is very slightly different). That is the bullet that the AR-15 uses.
Even in states where it is legal, many hunters look down on people who use AR-15s for deer hunting, because it is *not* *powerful* *enough* and may cause unnecessary suffering before the deer dies.
A typical hunting rifle will use a .308 or heavier round. A .308 round will have about double the muzzle energy as a .223 round.
Ok, this is genuinely surprising. You want a gun that is *twice* as powerful as an AR-15 for hunting deer? Why? Are deer that anatomically different from humans? Aren't you trying to not damage the meat?
It's considered unethical to wound the animal, or have it die slowly. If you hit a deer with 5.56 round, there's a good chance it would bound off into the woods, wounded, and slowly bleed to death while you track it. Hunters actually take ethics pretty seriously. Even in the most redneck part of the US fathers will teach their sons that unnecessary suffering on the part of the animal is wrong.
The military uses .223/5.56 ammo because it's smaller, so it's easier to stock up & haul around large quantities of it. It's just more practical. Also you can still control a 5.56 rifle in fully automatic mode, whereas a larger round like the 7.62 in automatic is basically uncontrollable unless like you're like college lineman size. Basically if you're a soldier it's better to have a bunch of smaller bullets, than less larger ones. Militaries actually used to use larger rounds in say the WW2 era, but afterwards the Soviets figured that smaller rounds are more practical, and the West eventually followed suit
"The AR-15, which was used by both the Buffalo and Texas murderers, was illegal under the 1994 assault weapons ban."
I think a real challenge to be addressed is that "assault weapons" only became really popular after the assault weapons ban in 1994. Making them taboo made them popular. And every time there is a surge in support for banning their sale, there is a counter surge in purchases.
Nonsense, they've always been popular, inasmuch as we're discussing AR-15 type rifles. They just got cheaper starting in 1977 when Colt's AR-15 patent expired and more and more manufacturers started offering their own models. Then they got even cheaper with the advent of increasingly inexpensive CAD/CAM that allowed large numbers of small manufacturers to offer parts kits for DIY folks.
Making them taboo didn't make them popular, because they were never taboo.
The truth is that guns don’t really kill Americans equally. Suicides are about half of it, but I suppose we put that problem to one side. As to homicides, these disproportionately affect the poor. Mass shootings are rare, but even they disproportionately target minorities (Blacks, Jews etc.). School shootings are really the only event that truly rattles the mainstream, and in the past, when politics were less polarized, appeared closer to moving the needle a bit on gun laws, yet failed. Currently in our polarized craze republicans will fight tooth and nail even against regulations that will make it more difficult for people on terrorist watch lists from acquiring guns while some democrats appear to be moving towards decriminalizing the possession of illegal guns…
And an additional point: while mass shooting in schools probably are considered the most despicable to most Americans, and add a personal concern to the considerable minority of voters who are parents, they don’t actually personally threaten the majority of voters. We should note that thus far mass shootings seem to occur either at places of worship or other centers of minorities or at schools, I.e. not at places where the median voter actually is likely to be personally. They thus evoke a sense of repulsion at the acts, sympathy for the victims, but not personal fear for personal safety that drives one to demand drastic political action.
I don't know that the data support those assertions on who is disproportionately impacted by mass shootings. If you do have the data, I'd love to see it.
What's more likely going on is that shootings that target places of worship, schools or specific racial categories get more attention because they are extra-horrifying and noteworthy as news. If they target random "median voters" they don't get as much attention. So you're hearing disproportionately more about the former and less about the latter.
In my area, I can recall: a guy who killed 4 women at an exercise class, a guy who ambushed and killed 4 police officers who he called to his house, a guy who killed his parents and shot some police a block over from me, 8 people killed at a bbq party and the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. Of all these the last had the most national attention and seems to be the only one still remembered.
This is the best source of statistics I can find on the topic, and I don't see anything on the victims being disproportionately different from any cross-section of America.
I grant that it’s a possibility too. However I would note that in your anecdata you point mainly to police being shot at (a well-known fact, their job is very risky), and what seems to be a case of domestic violence. Neither of these qualifies as “senseless” mass shooting. Not sure about the BBQ party (was the shooting by a random stranger or among people who know each other?). The exercise class does seem to qualify.
I'm not sure what type of line you're attempting to draw with senseless versus however you'd describe other mass shootings.
If it's related back to what would motivate typical Americans to be for stricter gun control, there is probably some distinction between the terror invoked by these various events, but not so great a distinction that it would really change the politics.
A guy who murders his parents, calls the police, shoots them when they answer the door, and then leads them on a car chase before flipping his car over is scary to median voters. It's not just domestic violence. That's a guy who could have easily chosen a different moment to snap and shot some strangers. Same with the guy who ambushed police officers who his mother had called. He planned that out. It wasn't a shootout following a bank robbery. And again the BBQ - the shooters did have an issue with a couple of the victims but decided to kill as many of the primary targets friends and family as they could.
That's terrifying in a way that "killed in a drug deal gone bad" isn't. These aren't events a typical voter can just shrug off with a "well it could never be me or anyone I care about so I don't care".
I partially disagree. I do think that high levels of *crime* can drive change in perception of gun control, as is in fact seen empirically in the 90s, and some of your examples fall to that category. But that’s because high levels of crime, especially when it gets to city centers where the media people are at, terrifies the median voter who easily imagines themselves as a victim. At high enough levels the median voter would indeed start knowing people who were personally victimized (not necessarily murdered). Terror attacks that target the mainstream work the same way. By contrast so long as crime is at low enough levels to hurt mostly the poor and the cops, and therefore be underreported in MSM, and so long as mass shooting events target mainly minorities and, unfortunately, the odd school, the median voter may be disgusted, but isn’t scared for their personal safety as they go about their daily life.
Re: domestic violence. I was skimming the link below and apparently domestic violence related mass shootings account for almost half of the 1,500 mass shooting fatalities recorded in their data set. 3/4 of the 362 under age 18 mass shooting victims were killed in a domestic violence incident. Furthermore 79% of domestic mass shooting occurred entirely in a home.
Yes, not surprising. Still doesn’t answer our question though. Of the attacks that can be defined as acts of terror, I.e. not based on any personal familiarity with the victims nor on criminal activity, how many are neither targeting minorities nor schools? How many target the median voter ?
I don't have any ideas that are realistic within the US political system. I meant what I wrote sincerely. I saw a video of Steve Kerr tearing up about lack of gun restrictions, and was curious if conservatives are upset about inaction on school security, or any other solutions they might have.
I'm not Binya. I think that messaging is key and the left should not be calling out for gun control. However, I would love to see some investigation into what works and what doesn't. This could be followed by an offer to repeal inconvenient and ineffective gun control laws in exchange for bipartisan support of laws which were expected to work. Potentially even with a sunset on the new legislation if it failed to meet some metric of effectiveness.
Switzerland is proof it's possible to have a country awash in guns, including military weapons, without the kind of problems we have here. I think fundamentally it's a question of making sure gun owners have sufficient social connections and ties to others in some community to weed out the lone wolf shooters and criminals. So some kind of better vetting of who is a trustworthy, law-abiding person able to handle a gun responsibly seems key, and then trust them to police themselves and their peers. Perhaps vetting could be delegated to private groups -- so require membership in some type of accredited gun clubs. And make it easy for any group of citizens that wants to to form their own group. That would ensure some type of social accountability without a lot of direct state control.
"The gunman bought his weapons immediately after his 18th birthday"
Your idea is interesting, but I see one fairly large problem: Who gets to determine criteria for, and regulation of, accredited gun clubs? New Jersey would probably just hand it over to local chiefs of police, who would use it to severely constrain licenses.
In order to be issued a conceal carry permit in Florida, one must attend an approved training course. I have heard that too many of those are fairly low-quality, but it occurred to me that a really good one could also serve as a mechanism to screen people socially - perhaps for the sole purpose of identifying potential problems to the proper authorities.
Florida also accepts proof of military service with an honorable discharge in lieu of the mandatory training. That serves not only to ensure that the applicant has experience in the safe handling of firearms and basic marksmanship skills, but as a fortunate side-effect will "weed out the lone wolf shooters and criminals." (Maybe our Republic should just go full-Starship Troopers where citizenship, and therefore the right to arms, was restricted to veterans.)
Finally, I don't know anything about mental health care in Switzerland, but I'd wager it's better than in the US.
The biggest source of gun crime in America comes from people who have very strong ties to their community, to the extent that they even form clubs to represent the neighborhoods where they come from.
More seriously, I'm not sure how you could ever implement a system like this without also discriminating against minorities. What if you're a gay, black leftists in rural Alabama and all the local clubs are full of white conservatives?
"I have called for rifle clubs that I think negroes should, in areas where the police, whether it be federal state or city have proven their inability or their own willingness to defend Negroes, the lives and property of Negroes, then it’s only intelligent and it’s only right that Negroes protect themselves. And I have encouraged them to buy a rifle and a shotgun, which according to the Constitution is legal."
Totally off topic: Are you 2 different people with similar names or using 2 accounts. I've always found this confusing. Totally honest question, no wider implications.
If you mean am I different than Ken from Minneapolis, then yes. Most obviously he is from Minneapolis, where it is cold, and I live in Miami, where it is warm.
While I think it may be instructive to look at Switzerland, doesn't proposing this kind of delegation seem like it's likely to immediately create an adverse selection situation in which "Al's Totally Aboveboard Gun Club for Legitimate Businessmen" and equivalents spring up whenever there's a concentrated demand for both guns and extremely lax rule enforcement?
FWIW, the number of people who drive without insurance is non-trivial (the insurance industry, who are certainly not unbiased on this, estimate it's about 1/8 drivers https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsured-motorists). Even if you get caught, the fine runs about $200 in California. The fact that you can buy insurance coverage for collisions with uninsured drivers says something about how well it works for cars.
That said, make possessing a gun without adequate insurance (which presumably could come with discounts for safety training or appropriate storage) a crime and actually visibly enforce it, and maybe that's a different story....
In America, dying in a mass shooting now seems to be like dying in a traffic accident - a tragedy, but not one that anyone can seriously stop from happening.
Can I make a distinction? There's not caring politically, and there's not caring about the risk of kids getting murdered. I accept that politically people have stopped caring. But I believe action is being taken to reduce 'active shooter' risk. For example, schools are now routinely running active shooter drills.
Is it plausible that those drills do more good than harm? Seems to me they are likely to traumatize children with minimal benefit (since active shooters are very rare and even if there is one the drill probably doesn’t help too much)
I've always felt like these kind of drills were about lawsuit prevention- much like DEI trainings. They might/probably are counterproductive, but they provide some semblance of liability defense.
Drills like this aren't new. I did intruder lockdown drills in elementary school in the early 2000s. I don't know if active shooter drills are different though.
What point are you making there? To me, the fact people react in counter-productive ways to mass shootings is a reason to restrict gun ownership. But if you're a conservative who opposes that, you have to accept that as part of the cost of having guns around.
We are at the highest level of multi-unit construction in almost 50 years -- and that previous peak was from a time when the huge Baby Boom generation was first forming households. Single family construction is also higher than it has been in close to 50 years, except for the egregious housing bubble of the oughts when we were building tons of homes which we oughtn't have.
And I'd say this has been driven overwhelmingly by market forces and not policy. It seems that, despite so much land being SFH-only, developers are still finding plenty of places to build multi-family homes. And, I'd argue, that upzoning -- greatly to be desired -- will at best ever be a lagging contributor to new construction, as most places coming on market in SFH neighborhoods will stay just the way they are -- because it's a choice, not a mandate.
So, sure, pursue denser development because over time it will make our cities better places to live. But it's not going to be how we drive lower prices in the short run.
(I'd also like to comment on the chart on lags in construction completion in Matt's post. First, don't compare current construction to the bubble years, when we were busily building worthless single family homes outside Las Vegas and the like, and also don't combine SFH and multi-unit. Nonetheless, I'm not sure how much policy would help relax supply constraints in actual construction, but sure let's pursue that.)
(Oh, and lastly, a bleg: Milan, please don't use very similar colors and lack of markers when chart building (e.g., the rents in the 5 largest metro areas chart). I especially advise the use of different markers to help the reader distinguish which line is which.)
"The Great Recession really did involve prolonged mass unemployment, so I understand this line of thinking, to an extent."
The mis diagnosis of the Great Recession as anything but a colossal failure of the Fed to maintain NGDP growth or even price level growth did enormous damage to Progressives' agenda. They moved away from supply side policies -- greater immigration, freer trade, lower deficits. [Paradoxically, the one place they have moved toward supply side policies -- restricting fossil fuel production -- is exactly where demand side policies, especially a tax on net CO2 and methane emissions -- is appropriate.]
AND it wrong footed them in letting Republicans pin inflation on the COVID relief and infrastructure bills rather than on the Fed.
What's kind of ironic about how Boise is mentioned in this article is that I’ll soon be leaving it for a few days and doing remote work at a smaller town in the state that has its own unique housing boom/supply problems.
Home values in Boise have gone up so much that it appears that Rory Hester can now afford to decamp to the swankier and more expensive Substack subscriptions where all the celebrities hang out.
(This will not mean anything to the new generation of Slow Boring subscribers.)
What’s behind kids no longer with their parents? Slow wage growth under Obama and Trump, and quicker growth under COVID, plus government transfers? Or what?
If a 50 year old two income couple has a 25 year old kid who has graduated college and gotten a job nearby, and a 3 bedroom house, the kid might move in with them to save on housing costs. But if all three of them start working from home, they might decide the kid should get a 1 bedroom apartment nearby so that everyone can have their own home workspace. And pre-vaccination, if the kid wants to see their friends occasionally but the parents don’t like the COVID risk, that might give an extra incentive for the kid to get their own place nearby and meet up with their parents for outdoor meals every weekend.
“ during Barack Obama’s presidency when it was common to attribute economic problems to an alleged overbuilding of houses during the price boom of the mid-aughts.”
No need to have characterized this as a “Biden Obama” difference.
There was “overbuilding” in the narrow sense that some part of the demand for houses resulted from financial institutions making micro-prudentially bad loans. This was part of what triggered the 2008 crash. That the crash led to a decade of under target inflation and slow growth in real income was the Fed’s fault, not that of the people who made liars’ loans.
Thank you for writing about federal housing policy. You are being way to kind, however, to the lack of scale in this plan to increase supply, particularly vis the GSEs support for manufactured housing. Unfortunately, this isn't going to do much to move the needle.
I read through the White House document you referenced, admittedly expecting it to be infused with DEI language and written in a manner that was hostile to developers and landlords. IT WASN'T! It was balanced and measured and focused on the problem at hand. I'm impressed.
Though I still remember the eviction moratorium lasting far, far longer than it should have, I am encouraged the administration is approaching this issue with tangible solutions that could garner bi-partisan support. I hope they are successful.
If it holds promise of being an actual solution, you can be sure that for that reason alone, it will NOT garner bi-partisan support. This is not, of course a reason not to put forward the best possible bill, so good for this initiative.
Chicago has one difference from other cities. Their labor movement is stronger than their NIMBY movement. This has up and downsides. Downside is that property taxes are high AF to pay for public sector pensions. Upside is that stuff gets built because no local person mad about parking is going to have the political muscle to stop a housing construction project.
This is why when going through the loop, you see *residential construction* happening, and you've seen it for 5 years. Same in nearly every other area close to their urban core.
This combination makes home ownership less profitable due to the higher tax burden + no limit on inventory. It also makes politicians less prone to block housing, because housing drives local tax revenue in.IL in a way that it never will in CA with prop 13. Net result is condo rents have barely moved up since 2012 at the high end, maybe 10-20% or so over that span.
I lived there for 20 years, and the nice parts where the housing is being built are not dissimilar from the nice parts of Brooklyn. I'd still live there if the weather wasn't terrible for 5 winter months and 3 summer months.
Housing costs are one of the areas where the normie consensus is just wrong - everyone remembers 2008 and the normie consensus seems to be that house prices go up and down at random. But if you think about it for even a moment, it’s obvious that houses are more valuable in 2022 than they are in 2019 due to remote and hybrid work. Gyms are less pleasant than pre-Covid too (I’m 90% sure I caught my recent Covid infection at a gym, and exercise sucks enough without masking), as are probably a few other activities which would also increase demand for house space.
Bigger/better kitchens & dining rooms instead of restaurants & bars, having a TV/media room instead of going to movies/theatre, more space in general for those who used to be out of the house everyday for work or travel but now are home. Finally, the kids! More of them and more at home plus home/remote schooling...
Remote work plays a role but lack of supply, driven by restrictive zoning and post -2008 anemic builder interest in development, is the real driving force. Not to mention that many Millennials graduated into recession and had stunted earnings potential, meaning they're just now able to afford to buy, so we've got a "double generation" of first time buyers, juicing demand.
Only about 15% of Americans work remotely, though it was higher 12-18 months ago. This matters and helped accelerate price growth but structural factors are the real drivers here.
The Discourse Class seems certain that most Americans are white-collar professionals, and that of those, the overwhelming majority is still working remotely. Drives me bonkers.
I’ll sort of defend it as being important in the housing story because the 15% is probably overrepresented among people who can afford to put way too much down on a house, and because 15+% being willing to way overpay is pretty significant in any market.
But the majority of Covid-related writing that assumes nobody has gone outside their house in 2+ years is completely insane. Even among my very liberal and educated social network, I was an outlier just by quarantining my covid-positive self from social events until I had a negative rapid test, vs just going out for a beer on day 6 after testing positive
To the latter: allowing infection to take on a moral framing, you got sick during a pandemic because you didn't care/weren't careful enough/want to kill grandma was a pretty big mistake in retrospect.
I didn't do my part to shout that down loudly enough when it was still nascent. Now I think some sub-communities will never let go of it.
The moralizing about covid drives me bananas. One of the things that we were supposed to have learned from HIV was that moralizing about contracting an infectious disease was counterproductive. What makes it worse is that some of the people who were the worst about moralizing about the virus were at extremely low risk of infection because they were affluent professionals who were working from home and ordering groceries
Is it wrong for it to take on a moral framing... or _that much_ moral framing?
I mean, the basic idea of "you should try not to get covid and you should wear a good mask so that you don't infect others" seems like the kind of thing we want to encourage, no? Making it all just about getting it yourself makes it much easier to decide not to get vaxxed.
Making everyone feel super guilty about getting grandma sick is going too far - but isn't a "ask what you can do for your country" sort of moralizing at least a _bit_ good?
EDIT:
Maybe it's the difference between "morally, you do your best not to get sick and pass it on - but not everything is possible" and "being sick means you definitely failed to do the Right Thing (tm)"
That mostly works for me upon edit, although "do your best" and "take reasonable precaution" mean very different things if read literally.
I am a white collar professional.
I have had exactly 1 day of official pandemic-associated work from home (which was only when I had covid myself around the holidays).
Agree entirely, I would characterize remote work as kindling added to the already blazing fire. It has probably disproportionately affected certain markets though, and certain suburbs within those suburbs. Personally I work mostly in person, but my recent house purchase is still partly covid-related as I live more of my non-work life at home now
I'm a bit of a hipster in this regard in that I saw the WFH benefits a good decade ago or so. The main thing I wanted to avoid, though, was wasting hours of my life stuck in a car, and I also targeted being close to fun activities that weren't exactly pandemic friendly.
As a night owl, one of the things about WFH that I love is that I can get up later in the morning. I'm almost entirely at the office now and getting up earlier is the worst part of working in the office
The "normie" (i.e. Boomer and Xer) consensus is and has always been that housing prices will increase forever, so housing is always a good investment. Millennials learned from the 2008 crash that this is not always true. The older generations are bound and determined to make sure it's always true by pulling up the ladder behind them via zoning and other assorted NIMBYism.
All that said, I agree that WFH inherently makes housing more valuable.
I mean, it's pulling up the ladder one way or another given that space is not an unlimited good, right? The YIMBY acronym is literally about sacrificing open space (e.g., one's back yard--which I don't think is intended solely as a metaphor when it comes to the kind of zoning reform YIMBYs favor and certainly isn't when it comes to ADUs) in favor of cramming more humans on top of one another in the multifamily housing, which is not only going to involve the sacrifice of amenities like yardspace but also by definition increase the intensiveness of use of the commons like parks. (Also, of course, there's no way to share walls and floors with other people and not run into more problems with externalities than you have with SFHes.)
YIMBY is about endorsing one side of the tradeoff of "more, individually worse housing" versus "less, individually better housing." This doesn't make its proponents crazy if they take increasing population sizes as an immutable constraint (which, to be clear, in the short term at least is in fact the overwhelming politico-moral consensus, so again, not a crazy thing to do) or, as Matt does in "One Billion Americans," an overarching good--but in a world of limited land area further constrained by the agglomeration effects of cities pulling everyone towards them, it does run into the basic problem that "same amount of stuff divided by more people with a claim on that stuff = less stuff per person."
A person's stance on zoning can't actually change that calculus, it just affects whether they think the "more people" versus the "more stuff per person" side is more important to accommodate. Or, put another way, there's no zoning regime the Boomers and Xers could have adopted even hypothetically that wouldn't have resulted in more-numerous millennials making sacrifices in the quality of housing on offer.
Your argument (which, to me, comes off as thinly-disguised anti-YIMBY FUD; nobody is coming to take people's backyards) is quantitatively incorrect. Increasing the availability of housing by any means increases everyone's chance to get the kind of house they want, which has been shown by economic studies. It's pointless to compare to an impossible standard like "everyone has as much space as they could possibly want". Of our two realistic options, one is clearly better than the other.
Allow me to respond your characterization of my comment as "thinly-disguised anti-YIMBY FUD" by saying that I find your own response to be a combination of an unwarrantedly uncivil tone, bad-faith mischaracterization of what I was talking about, and frankly kind of a bizarre set of claims on a factual level (you are literally claiming "nobody is coming to take people's backyards" in the context of a discussion about a movement entitled "Yes, in My Backyard.")
If you want to split hairs about market-dominant housing arrangements versus some kind of strawman hypothetical about hostile real estate takeovers (which, sure, outside of the highly specialized and not immediately relevant context of eminent domain and adverse possession is Not a Thing) because you somehow interpreted my allusion to ADUs -- which, again, literally intended to be built in people's backyards -- as about that, then knock yourself out I guess. But I think it's clear we're done here.
Yes in *my* backyard, not yes in *your* backyard. (Clearly.)
I sometimes wonder if declining populations in Europe and most of Asia will eventually mean that housing will start to be seen as less of a sure-thing investment in those parts of the world. And then I wonder whether that would begin to filter through to the US some way.
Here’s how it’s going to go. When the next recession hits the first to go will be remote workers - their positions either eliminated or outsourced to India. As a result the family from SF that paid $250k over asking for a place in Boise is going to get laid off. And then they will find that all else being equal employers prefer folks who can be in the office a few days a week. Fine they think, we can just sell. But millions are on the same boat and prices have plunged (and they paid $250k over). They can’t sell and what few jobs are in Boise pay a lot less than they were making. So foreclosure here they come.
The first to go will be remote workers, to be replaced by even more remote workers in India?
With unemployment so low, now would already be the time to start outsourcing for new hires and new teams. Is that what's happening?
Cost cutting hadn’t been a focus, but now it is.
Over the next several years, I strongly suspect that currently ‘hybrid’ companies will decide it doesn’t make sense to pay Bay Area salaries to workers in Boise. Moreover, remote workers will be perceived as off-the-fast-track, insufficiently loyal, and poor team players.
For awhile I thought I was just old and out-of-touch, but now it is our straight of school employees who are lobbying most strongly for a full 5 days in the office. I’d go with 3 or 4, because in my view managing geographically distributed teams is a huge PITA that is not worth the headache in most cases, and is burning out management at a truly alarming rate.
As far as India, it’s even more of a PITA, especially from the West Coast, but it has one clear advantage - it’s cheaper. So some will do it.
In addition to all of the above, I think holding together team culture will start to bite even harder as more companies bring in new remote-from-day-one workers, and longer-tenured employees drift away from the water cooler.
Thankfully, we only went full-remote for about three months and this was merely a speedbump.
I'm worried about this with us - our company has been full remote for 2 years now - the culture still works with the people I've been working with for years - but my bonds with people that I don't work with directly and haven't pre-established are super weak.
OTOH I'm pretty settled in to remote here and it makes my schedule super easy.
I don't really understand why folks see everything as one-size-fits-all... some companies like and are doing well with remote/distributed models, others don't like it.
You can say that someone who moved from SF to Boise relying on a remote job offer will be screwed when their company needs to cut costs. But on the other hand there are tons of people who liked remote work and those folks will be available talent for companies that are able to make remote work out...
As you say office work has some advantages for sure. And you are right that work from home can actually be harder on more junior folks, who kind of rely on proximity to get attention/work/social interaction in the office.
But remote also has advantages and there are a lot of people already bought in on remote.
I think what the big companies do will impact the housing market more, both because they’re bigger, and because if all those employees live locally it continues to drive agglomeration effects for start-ups and mid tiers. Remote may be a competitive advantage for some of those start-ups and mid-tiers, but many of them would like to be big companies themselves one day.
My other point is really more basic - in a recession it’s easier for employers to make demands and FAANG leadership hasn’t exactly made it a secret that they want employees to live locally and come back at least a few days a week. They haven’t gotten much traction in implementing it yet, due to the pandemic and attrition fears. But with a lot of these companies losing 25%+ of their value this year and going into cost-cutting mode, the vibe shift is happening fast.
I agree with everything you're saying here, but I'd add that managing positions are also especially hard when it comes to remote work.
No. Remote workers will mostly be replaced by folks who can be in the office 3 days a week. And some outsourcing.
Couple of counter-points here.
It's pretty customary, at least at the big FAANG-type companies, to do a salary adjustment if you move out of the expensive areas. A buddy of mine moved to another state to work remote and took a 10% pay cut to do so because of the cost of living differential. This might make it not as attractive to lay those people off.
The culture of tech work at least has shifted. Many companies focused on measuring productivity during the pandemic, and most concluded that productivity did not appreciably dip, or even increased. Mostly because when people work from home they are available at all hours. Coming into work to take a 9pm meeting is onerous; walking to the other room to put on your headset is no big deal.
The idea that you need to be in a physical place to be good at your job is a ship that has sailed. Will there be a slight backlash? Maybe. But laying off all the remote employees is just not going to happen.
I think they will do what Yahoo did when it needed to reduce staff. Tell everyone that they need to be in the office forcing the remote workers to quit.
“Many companies focused on measuring productivity during the pandemic, and most concluded that productivity did not appreciably dip, or even increased.”
I’m just not seeing it. Everyone says that and I’m like - then why is everything taking twice as long?
As an aside, I’m 95% sure my new fully remote coworker is working 2 jobs.
It depends on the specific job, specific management and specific workers. For some combinations of the above it can work out fine, for others it can't.
That’s a good point. I would add that in terms of office politics and morale it’s hard to have some employees in the office and some remote. If there are delays in the work at home group then the office is, right or wrong, going to blame WFH.
@BronxZooCobra What industry & size company do you work for? Just curious
IT about 90,000 employees.
I am at a big FAANG type company and I making a prediction that the wind is changing fast and in two years the FAANGs will be in a very different place than they are right now.
Company leaders at all the FAANGs (and adjacent) have been quite open that they believe productivity is down (people are working more hours to do the same work), and remote work is bad for company culture. No one at any FAANG was going into the office to take a 9PM meeting pre-pandemic, so that’s a non-change.
A 10% salary adjustment is nothing, and they will let remote work scale back gradually through attrition and by marginalizing folks who do it, not through mass layoffs or outsourcing to India, because neither of those will happen at the FAANGs.
Before the pandemic, I spent at least 85% of my time alone in my cube. I don't see how that hurts or helps company culture. We don't get free massages and dry cleaning where I'm at. No parties with Bruno Mars.
I think the culture is still shifting. 2 or 3 days in person seems easily sustainable to me for the long haul. If the focus is put on actually developing the culture as opposed to having the VP just talk to a thousand people on Zoom, I think full remote is very doable. And that will be extremely attractive to people.
2 or 3 in person isn't really remote though, right?
It would make the suburbs more attractive and still put a dent in the demand for office space and business district amenities, but it's pretty far from working in Boise.
"It would make the suburbs more attractive"
People live in the city because there is tons of stuff to do. I'm not sure a 25 year old who is working at home is going to have more desire to live out in the suburbs with nothing to do. Also keep in mind only about 1/3 of workers have minor children at home.
They typical internet commenter tends to be more introverted and the thought of more time at home is appealing. That's far from universal.
What part of that contradicts the statement that suburbs would be more attractive?
It should go without saying that we're discussing relative attractiveness here. No one claims that every person's first choice is suburban living. But all else equal with a 2 or 3 day work week a greater share of people will tolerate a given commute, and hence the relative demand for suburbs will increase. That's not a very bold statement or one that requires a leap of faith.
"Also keep in mind only about 1/3 of workers have minor children at home." 1/3 is plenty large enough to influence relative demand. Not everyone is an introverted parent of young children, but nor is every worker 25 years old.
100%. Switching to 2-4 days in the office is wildly different than having half the team in one location and the other half dispersed across all the locations, working different hours, never meeting their team, etc.
I didn't make the point very well, but IMHO a 2-day in-person week will work immediately with zero effort. It's not at all clear to me that a full remote situation couldn't work for many people with a little effort.
For instance, you could fly in remote workers one week a quarter, or one week every six months to keep the team cohesive. You could actually make an attempt to foster those so-called "hallway conversations" that upper management seem to be obsessed with. I talked to many people I'm friendly with at my company over the past couple of years and learned new stuff over Slack or Zoom. Was it a tiny bit less natural? Sure. Is it a unmovable obstacle? Hardly.
I think there's an argument to be made that things got too loose during the pandemic, although I'm not sure by how much. Going back to 2018 is, to me, just a lack of imagination.
There's nothing I hate more than management promoting "hallway conversations". Except possibly getting stuck in a hallway conversation when I'm on the way back to my desk or office.
What do you think they mean by "bad for company culture?"
Mentoring younger employees is really, really hard to do fully remote.
I think they mean it’s harder to instill habits and ways of working that are consistent across the board and therefore build trust and reduce friction. What do you think they mean?
It's vague enough that I'm not sure.
The whiplash in company mood between ‘great resignation’ and ‘impending recession’ has been intense.
And I agree. It’ll take a few years to unwind it all though.
Boise was growing very rapidly and had a pretty tight housing market well before Covid, I would think the same trends would continue. Maybe if there are layoffs of remote work the pace of growth would slow somewhat but what you are talking about really seems like an extreme possible case. Boise's housing prices did rise quite a bit faster than trend the 2 years, so there might be a correction, but i really doubt we see a wave of foreclosures in boise. Especially since a lot of people who moved would have been cashing out San Francisco properties for cheaper boise houses, so they probably have some fairly decent savings or home equity to lean back on before they get foreclosed.
more broadly household balance sheets are still pretty strong IIRC which is one of the things that is driving inflation. This will change at some point since people will spend down their savings or have them inflated away, but imminent crisis doesn't seem likely for most.
Certainly not for most - but those stretching to pay $250k over asking who lose their jobs will be in a world of hurt.
And also keep in mind the layoff trigger will be a recession. So the market is going to be soft for anyone forced to sell.
The San Francisco company will open a small office in Boise, if it hasn't already.
A small office doesn’t solve anything. They end up working remotely in an office - that’s the worst of both worlds.
Companies have been opening up smaller satellite offices for decades.
That may be but it’s clearly the worst of both worlds.
LOL. There is no house available for 250,000. You might be able to get a piece of shit house for 350.
Reading comprehension my boy! I said $250,000 over asking.
You got me. Apologies
It is so immensely depressing this obvious and unassailably correct statement was so viscerally destroyed. So many people really believe that America is fully irredeemable and not worth putting forth the hard work required to make improvements. Even worse the vast majority of people with this sentiment seem to be the ones who are most involved in politics on my side. If you genuinely believe 2022 America is a horrible place to live by current and historic global standards, I would strongly advise detaching yourself from politics entirely for your own mental health. But we need to crush this sentiment if we are ever going to make the progress these same doomsayers claim to want achieve. The much fabled non-college white woman in her 50s in the suburbs of Grand Rapids MI that we Slowboring heads all know to be the median voter probably does not think America is a sh*thole country. She is probably also horrified by shootings at elementary schools. Shepherding those two sentiments into policy is the hard boards we all know and love. But Idk how that can ever be achieved if so many people think the project itself is morally bankrupt because everything they desire has yet to be achieved already. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1529234787579355136?s=20&t=7GIPmw5b_ilPobBwoUj23g
I agree with MY's overall sentiment, but JFC. It's the day of a horrific event. Just let people be sad and angry without whatever effect he was trying to achieve with a "well, actually..." tweet.
I suspect very few people think the project itself is morally bankrupt. But those few are over-represented by orders of magnitude on politics Twitter.
I wrote this on the comment thread from yesterday, Matt, but thanks for the tweets this morning.
The world would be a better place if more people could show some humility and embrace genuine apology. We all screw up.
Something I appreciate about Matt is that he typically finds the right balance been rationality and emotion--a balance that's never easy to accomplish, as this event demonstrated. Someone like the typical commenter on a rationality-centered blog goes too far in one direction, while someone like the typical outraged Twitter user goes too far in the other direction. Thanks as always for striving to build a place for a happy medium!
Nice tweet last night lol
I know I’m in the minority here but I have a ten-year-old and don’t own a firearm and thought the tweet was fine. Gun control is the deadest of political dead ends and all the histrionic gnashing of teeth over these tragic but statistically insignificant events accomplishes is make people either despair or ignore the fact that Americans just really fucking love guns and fundamentally don’t support the kinds of measures that would be required to stop these shootings. I don’t get it and I don’t like it, but as a problem in American life it doesn’t even crack the top ten. If I could choose between America’s irrational love of firearms and their irrational love of oversized vehicles I would get rid of the latter, because my kid is more likely to get struck by a vehicle than shot.
I didn't think it was that bad either. Matt, don't be too hard on yourself (this time at least).
Not the main point, but I hate it when people use the term "statistically insignificant" to mean "rare". In statistics, "statistically insignificant" means "we can't establish that this is different from the null effect (usually 0)."
Plus, rare is a nice four letter, one syllable descriptor, as opposed to the 27 letter, 9 syllable alternative.
But the usage is accurate both ways. Someone dying is never insignificant, but if you modify it with the adverb 'statistically' then you get that while every life matters, if you look at the statistics of dying from X vs. other ways to die, people dying from X is not something to be concerned about.
I think that carefully tailored reform aiming at preventing interstate movement of the most dangerous kinds of weapons getting into the hands of the most dangerous kinds of people could work to start separating gun safety from the guns as symbol issue.
What would that look like?
It would look like lots of determined detectives and prosecutors.
I personally would not be the best person to ask. I don't know anything about the gun market. But from my FB friends, I never hear opposition to specific safety measures, but talk about their rights to own guns and use them to defend themselves against home invasions. So there OUGHT to be a way.
The problem is that we already restrict the most dangerous types of guns (machine guns have extremely strict laws about ownership) and there are already laws on the books that are supposed to stop the most dangerous kinds of people from getting any guns. (Possession of a gun by a felon is pretty severely penalized in the law, though that law is not always enforced to the extreme).
I still think that there are probably more identifiable weapons that might be restricted. [I am always disappointed by the "why did he do it" aspect of these tragedies and not on the "how did he do it."]
Really wish Matt hadn’t made that tweet. It wasn’t only insensitive; it also makes it harder for people like me to send Matt’s writing to friends in the policy world. Consequentialists should understand that reputation matters.
Edit: I appreciate the public apology, Matt.
Agreed:
1) Matt rightly tries to get Democrats to stay on message, to say things that are popular, hold their tongue on things that aren't, and make exceptions only if absolutely necessary. I'm not sure why this wouldn't apply to Matt too since he's also trying to advocate for a policy agenda and relies on his reputation and popularity to do so.
2) Insensitive or not, the tweet is easily demagogued by his opponents as "Matt's response to the shooting was 'America's a great country!'"
3) Setting aside impact, the tweet was actually insensitive. Imagine a parent tells someone their kid just died and that person's response is "don't forget that your life is actually pretty great otherwise!" Insensitive. As a rationalist weirdo, Matt's tweet didn't bother me, but part of being kind person is considering what may or may not bother other people.
The tweet is definitely insensitive, but I read it as a response to the tendency among some to basically say people should leave the United States in response to things like this. Which I think is very bad advice and frankly not a serious proposal.
I'm not on Twitter and don't know what happened, but this hits upon something that I think is really important --
If you're goal is to try to get left-wing people to move from a mobilization mindset to a persuasion mindset, then you need to apply this mindset to persuading progressives. It's no different than being careful and respectful when speaking to conservatives.
Matt's usually very good about this, and I really admire him for that.
Just saw that Matt tweeted a sincere, thoughtful apology. He goofed but handled it well.
Cool, now let's get all those progressives who have spent the last two years saying that cities breaking murder records all across the country is no big deal to do the same. I'm deeply confused about why I should care so much about these mass shootings while ignoring the much larger increase in "normal murders" that is sweeping the country.
I’m not making any argument about how much you should care about mass shootings relative to murder rates.
I’m making an argument that you shouldn’t tell people “but overall, things are still pretty good” as an immediate response to a bunch of kids getting murdered, then respond with sarcasm and glibness when people get offended.
But Matt made a very sincere apology this morning, which I was glad to see.
Hi Ken, I consider myself a liberal and I am appalled both by the horrific mass murders in Buffalo and Texas *and* by the rising crime/homicide rate in major cities. It is possible to do both!
I am as well. That doesn't change the fact that there has been a disturbing number of progressive activists and politicians who have openly stated that being concerned about the significant increase in murders is fear-mongering and trying to claim there is no problem with increasing crime because purse snatchings are down.
Reports of purse snatchings are down. Whether less purses are being snatched or not is a different question.
I noticed him pointing out most gun fatalities are suicides and isolated homicides was not deemed insensitive, although it was just as much a distraction from the tragedy of the moment. Of course this is bc that is an accepted left talking point on gun violence, while America being a nice place that lots of folks want to live in is not.
And if your friends in the policy world make decisions about what info to consume in the way you describe a proper consequentialist would be dedicated to removing them from positions of influence.
A consequentialist can’t remove all non-consequentialists from power anymore than they can make all voters have their policy preferences or eliminate scarcity. That’s why popularism and the field of economics exist, and that’s why EA people tend be be very willing to talk about reputation costs.
Re the suicides/homicides point, I think most people would consider publicly proclaiming that fact immediately following such a tragic mass shooting to be insensitive. To the degree lefty twitter users don’t, I think it’s they who are out of touch.
Perhaps it is instrumentally better for all individuals, as individuals, to just say ‘this is terrible’ and be quiet. You will piss off very few this way and that in itself is clearly minimizing disutility considering the uncertainty of all second order and higher effects. Personally I think this shows some of the limits of consequentialism but ymmv.
Yes in fact we cannot make sure influential people are perfect but we can strongly state that it is not ok to be a close minded policy maker. I believe that, and I state it, and others should too. and to whatever extent you think your associates wield power over others and plug their ears to good information you should tell them they are doing it wrong.
We all to varying degrees shape the pool of policy makers in a way we do not shape the mass public. We would be wise to select for people who will listen to unrelated policy arguments despite Twitter outrage. It’s hard to do that but it’s a hard task to govern. It should be done by people who can take in information and decide it’s value in context.
It's funny, when I heard Matt was getting dragged on Twitter, I thought it was for that set of tweets instead of the "America is great!" set. I didn't have a problem with either set of tweets, but I think that if I showed people those tweets in isolation, more people would get angry at the "most gun deaths are suicides" set.
What’d he do now? Lol.
Wow. Impressively bad timing. This is why Twitter is bad.
Am I going to have to start following Matt on Twitter?
A true message that bears repeating at any time except the one he chose.
A "What's great about America will defeat what's wrong with America" framing would have been less incendiary while delivering the a similar message.
An old article by Kristof, but I just read it and it seemed on point: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/06/opinion/how-to-reduce-shootings.html
TLDR - less focus on the kind of gun, more on who has access to it
I'm curious how conservatives think about mass shootings. I understand they don't want gun restrictions. Are they passionately advocating for more armed guards? Are they just resigned to them?
I checked Breitbart, the top comment there on this story is "They will quickly bury this story because the perp is not a white dude." So for them stopping shootings doesn't seem to be a priority. I'm not sure if that's a good place to get a sense of what conservatives are thinking.
I think they are a tragedy. And I don't know what to do about them. I think most conservatives support increased security for schools. I've yet to see a proposed solution that would have prevented Sandy Hook. We don't know enough about this one to know if a policy would have made a difference.
Related to guns, specifically: I do wish we enforced existing gun laws much more strictly. Mandatory prison sentences for carrying (not just using) illegal guns would be a good start. Major enforcement actions against straw-buyers, and the gun dealers who allow them. These are things that the left has called racist, though, and are actively moving away from.
I agree with you, except for the mandatory prison sentences. The level of killing has increased dramatically since George Floyd and the victims of that violence are disproportionally Black Americans. I think those killings are tragic, and the use of illegally obtained weapons is a contributing factor.
Note that I separated out my gun-related comments from the school shooting comments. Most commonly proposed policies (background checks, magazine size restrictions, etc.) wouldn't have prevented either shooter from obtaining a weapon, though the age restriction might be the first one. I think it would be a good change.
I think Josh Marshall has his finger pretty close to the pulse on this. He's got more behind a paywall, but this part is public:
> The inability of the U.S. to do literally anything about the scourge of mass shootings is itself one of their greatest draws, the magnetic heart of their attraction. Mass shootings are fundamentally about losers, rage and the draw of total power. For a few minutes a school shooter holds the power of life and death. That power speaks for itself.
It seemed like a few years ago we had started to recognize this and stopped widely publishing the names of mass shooters. But as soon as one comes along that people find politically useful, they give the shooters exactly the publicity that they want.
I think this misses an important distinction between attention and power, although it was probably helpful on its own merits to give these individual losers as little attention as possible.
I refuse to refer to mass shooters by name for this reason. I just call them "the Sandy Hook murderer," "the Parkland high school murderer" and so on.
I really like the under 25 idea - I think it’d be interesting to see how something like that polled. I imagine it would run into 2nd amendment issues though
Objectively mass shoutings do not kill very many people. So if everyone just avoided freaking out over them they wouldn’t be a big problem.
The attention they get is also part of the inspiration and appeal to the shooters themselves.
This is the most callous comment I have seen on this Substack, ever.
Have you no empathy for the parents and grandparents of the innocent children who were slaughtered in Texas, or the friends and family members of the Black people slaughtered in Buffalo? You expect them to be OK with what happened, because objectively, it wasn't very many people? FFS.
No they should be very upset! But that doesn’t mean you should be very upset.
Many bad things are happening every day around the world. Why should this one inspire national outrage?
Because our outrage is a function of moral condemnation as well as utility.
If someone swerves to avoid an animal in the road, loses control of their vehicle, crashes into another vehicle, and kills someone, we do not have the same level of outrage as if that person plans to kill someone, gathers materials and then kills that person with premeditation. Yet the utility function ("the victim is very dead") is the same.
So - you are right that from some pure utilitarian calculus, mass shootings are rare and dedicating a ton of resources to trying to prevent them would be inefficient.
And perhaps it is a moral failing for our society if we go after mass shootings with lots of resources and (due to limited attention) let thousands die due to people texting while driving.
But outrage isn't just that, it's tied to _what_ the event is as well as its consequences.
Please tell me you're being sarcastic.
The word "big" is being used too loosely but I think I know what Jonathan means.
Today the Uvalde school shooting is the biggest of big problems to the people living in Uvalde, Texas, and I'm sure Jonathan would agree with that. But in a country of 330 million people mass shootings that kill, on average, 100-150 people a year don't rank in the top 100 of problems. So in that context it's not a big problem compared to many other things that are more likely to impact any given person.
I also feel pretty strongly that attention is part of the motivation and inspiration for the shooters, so making this headlines news has the unfortunate side effect of making additional shootings more likely.
No, this is what I actually think. It’s bad that people are biased towards these sensational events instead of looking at the actual numbers.
Plane crashes are rare. Yet we have an entire federal agency devoted to investigating them when they happen, finding the cause, and promulgating regulatory measures to prevent a recurrence. We do this because civic confidence in air travel is economically beneficial, and because we feel a moral compulsion to minimize needless death. Mass shootings are no different. As for the attention paid to these events, you're talking about human nature. Gun control is difficult, but it's easier than changing human nature.
Another way of looking at it is which would you prefer if you could wave a magic wand: reduce homicides by 10% or cut mass shootings in half by 50%? The former would save more than 10 times as many lives as the latter, because there are 20-25,000 murders annually versus 100-150 mass shooting deaths.
So in a world of limited resources, limited political capital and limited attention, we should probably focus more on the former than the latter. Or maybe focus even more on drug overdoses, which claim over 100,000 lives just as tragically but with even less attention per death.
But like everyone else here, I'm all for ideas that would move the needle in any of these areas.
Plane crashes are rare because we have entire federal agencies devoted to reducing the risk. That works because the costs are relatively low and mostly hidden. As Jonathan asks below, I'd love to hear any ideas you or others have that would meet that criteria regarding gun violence.
If you have a way to actually reduce gun deaths - not just stir up a losing political fight - then that sounds great to me. Gun deaths broadly (not just mass shootings) are a really big issue! But I don’t have a way to solve them, so I don’t see the point of getting outraged about mass shootings.
Gun deaths- all gun deaths - are attributable to three phenomena: the number of guns we have, the types of guns we have, and the gun culture we have.
The number of guns can be reduced by funding large-scale buybacks and requiring background checks for all private sales.
The types of guns can be changed by regulation: ban all long guns with semi-auto actions and/or high-capacity magazines. Limit magazine sizes for handguns. Offer large buybacks for anyone who voluntarily surrenders such a gun. If you're caught possessing one that's registered to you, it's seized and you receive lesser compensation, no charges. If it's not registered to you, no compensation, no charges. If you're selling or buying one, criminal charges.
The final piece is gun culture. No legislation can change that.
It will take years to change how Americans think about guns. Right now, too many think of guns as either toys, like jet skis, or as a cure for their crippling insecurity. We need a healthy gun culture that views publically available guns as tools for hunting first, and as a method of self-defense last. We need to take the fun and the machismo out of gun ownership. It's a generational project.
I'm not really sure what the single neighborhood homicide stat is really saying. A peaceful random neighborhood with 8 homicides in a night will jump up the murder rankings quickly. To me that statistic speaks to the horrific level of violence that occurs regularly in "bad" city neighborhoods.
There were roughly 25,000 murders in 2020. Since 2009, 1,500 people have died in mass shootings. That's about 1 in 200 homicides. and statistically speaking a rare event.
https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/
What if we compare to all cause mortality rather than other shootings? Even if you want to look at young healthy people I’m sure car crashes have killed many more. (I bet gun suicides is higher too tbh)
Guns and cars both kill around 30,000 Americans per year. I think a lot more should be done about car deaths than currently is, but I think that there’s less low-hanging fruit with cars than with guns (eg, universal background checks).
Physically/objectively there’s more low-hanging fruit with guns but the politics are so bad I’m not sure it’s any easier on the margin…
We could stop driving while we're on our phones...
Do you know of any evidence that universal background checks would have an impact here? Is there a state that has introduce this requirement?
It looks like there are 10 states that ban the transfer of firearms other than through licensed dealers required to conduct background checks, 3 states have methods for people other than licensed dealers to have background checks conducted, and 2 states require background checks for all sales but not for gifts or loans of firearms.
I don't have statistics on whether gun violence in those states is more likely to involve guns acquired out-of-state, but all of these states are below-average in gun fatalities per capita, other than New Mexico (which is one of the two with loopholes for gifts and loans) and Nevada.
https://giffords.org/lawcenter/gun-laws/policy-areas/background-checks/universal-background-checks/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_United_States_by_state
There's huge investment in reducing deaths from car crashes, in a reasonably non-partisan manner.
Democrats have expended huge resources in pushing for gun control, and the result is not much gun control and it’s a big politically liability. Why keep pushing?
I thought Matt’s post a while ago analogizing guns and alcohol was insightful. https://www.slowboring.com/p/national-democrats-misguided-re-embrace?s=r
People probably want to change the fact that we are the only nation that routinely sees school children slaughtered by men with firearms.
You can try to convince people we should just accept the occassional slaughter of kids and work on other things, but I think as long as people have hearts and emotions they are probably going to care about this problem and try to do something about it.
Enforce existing gun laws, get the ATF and FBI to actually care about making the background check system work, and pass and enforce red flag laws.
Also conservatives do care a lot about mass shootings, except in their minds caring does not automatically equal implementing incredibly strict gun control policies.
We are collectively turning MattY's thread on housing into a thread on guns! Sorry, MattY!
I don't know what conservatives think, but here's what I think: I want the assault weapons ban back. The AR-15, which was used by both the Buffalo and Texas murderers, was illegal under the 1994 assault weapons ban.
Warning: gruesomeness
After the Parkland, FL mass shooting, I read an article in The Atlantic on what makes the AR-15 so deadly. Suppose you're shot in the liver. If the shot came from a handgun, you have a decent chance of survival if you're immediately rushed to an ER, unless you're very unlucky and the bullet severed a major blood vessel.
If you're shot in the liver with an AR-15, YOU HAVE NO LIVER. Your liver has exploded into little tiny bits. It doesn't matter if the shooting occurred on the doorstep of a state-of-the-art ER; no liver = certain death. This means that a person with an AR-15 can be a really crappy marksman and still kill a lot of people in a very short time.
Also, if you're a civilian, what the heck do you need an AR-15 for?
If you're hunting for food, you don't want a weapon that will pulverize the animal you're shooting at. You want a hunting rifle. (If you hunt for "sport," you are a bad person and you should feel bad.)
If you want to protect yourself from a home invasion or suchlike, you can have a handgun, or a rifle if you're in a rural area.
Why would you need a weapon that is capable of *pulverizing* a person's liver in one shot? To protect yourself from a zombie invasion?
One reasons many gun owners are skeptical of gun control is that many gun control proponents know very little about guns, raising doubts as to whether they actual understand them well enough to effectively regulate them.
For example, basically everything you've said about being shot with an AR15 versus a handgun is incorrect.
Hi Ken, I admit to knowing very little about guns, mostly what I've learned from online comment threads and movies.
My handgun vs AR-15 comparison was based on The Atlantic article, so blame them not me :)
Would you educate me? Are there weapons that are useful for pointing at a home invader and saying "get the f*** out of here" but not quite as effective at killing many people quickly as an AR-15?
"Are there weapons that are useful for pointing at a home invader and saying "get the f*** out of here" but not quite as effective at killing many people quickly as an AR-15?"
My dude, if you don't know about shotguns, you are in for a treat..... :) They are exactly what you describe
Most mass shootings are done with pistols.
Depends on the mass shooting. If you include "shootout between gang members leaves 3 dead," then you're likely correct. And that is the official definition of a mass shooting: >1 victim at a time.
But for the horrific mass shootings of the "man guns down umpteen schoolchildren/worshipers/grocery store shoppers" variety, the AR-15 keeps coming up again and again and again.
Without looking for hard numbers I could be convinced that the all-consumed, angry-at-society-and-I-will-make-them-pay shooters who brood and fantasize for months or years on end probably, yes, use a lot of AR-15 type rifles. But some of that is surely due to media accounts that play them up as being particularly deadly as well as the shooters studying details of past killings they find inspiring.
The definition of mass shooting varies widely. This page has a comparison of different tracking methodologies. There's no official agreed upon definition.
https://maps.everytownresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Everytown-mass-shootings-report-2009-2018_Methodology.pdf?_gl=1*1yjf7kb*_ga*NDQxNjA0MzUyLjE2NTM0ODg2OTE.*_ga_LT0FWV3EK3*MTY1MzUwNjgwMS41LjAuMTY1MzUwNjgwMS4w
If we're talking about shootings where more than 3 or 4 people were shot then pistols are by far the majority. There are close to 100 of those types of incidents every year. But if we're talking about pre-meditated spree killings which terrorize the broader public than assault weapons are more commonly used. But these are much rarer and only happen 1-3 times a year.
PS I'm using "AR-15" as a shorthand for other firearms of its type, because it shows up with such depressing regularity in mass shootings in America.
"Also, if you're a civilian, what the heck do you need an AR-15 for?
If you're hunting for food, you don't want a weapon that will pulverize the animal you're shooting at. You want a hunting rifle"
Just about everything in your comment is incorrect, but I'll just address this bit.
In Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Washington, and West Virginia (and perhaps some other states) it is illegal to hunt deer using a .223 caliber round (or a 5.56mm NATO round, which is very slightly different). That is the bullet that the AR-15 uses.
Even in states where it is legal, many hunters look down on people who use AR-15s for deer hunting, because it is *not* *powerful* *enough* and may cause unnecessary suffering before the deer dies.
A typical hunting rifle will use a .308 or heavier round. A .308 round will have about double the muzzle energy as a .223 round.
Yep. Also, I own a gun that shoots the same bullets as an AR15, has 95% of the same functionality, and was completely legal when the AWB was in place.
Ok, this is genuinely surprising. You want a gun that is *twice* as powerful as an AR-15 for hunting deer? Why? Are deer that anatomically different from humans? Aren't you trying to not damage the meat?
"Ok, this is genuinely surprising"
Only because you have no idea what you're talking about.
"Aren't you trying to not damage the meat?"
You are trying to damage it enough that the prey dies quickly from a single shot.
A 0.308 may be big but it's not a canon ball. There's plenty of meat left.
It's considered unethical to wound the animal, or have it die slowly. If you hit a deer with 5.56 round, there's a good chance it would bound off into the woods, wounded, and slowly bleed to death while you track it. Hunters actually take ethics pretty seriously. Even in the most redneck part of the US fathers will teach their sons that unnecessary suffering on the part of the animal is wrong.
The military uses .223/5.56 ammo because it's smaller, so it's easier to stock up & haul around large quantities of it. It's just more practical. Also you can still control a 5.56 rifle in fully automatic mode, whereas a larger round like the 7.62 in automatic is basically uncontrollable unless like you're like college lineman size. Basically if you're a soldier it's better to have a bunch of smaller bullets, than less larger ones. Militaries actually used to use larger rounds in say the WW2 era, but afterwards the Soviets figured that smaller rounds are more practical, and the West eventually followed suit
"The AR-15, which was used by both the Buffalo and Texas murderers, was illegal under the 1994 assault weapons ban."
I think a real challenge to be addressed is that "assault weapons" only became really popular after the assault weapons ban in 1994. Making them taboo made them popular. And every time there is a surge in support for banning their sale, there is a counter surge in purchases.
Nonsense, they've always been popular, inasmuch as we're discussing AR-15 type rifles. They just got cheaper starting in 1977 when Colt's AR-15 patent expired and more and more manufacturers started offering their own models. Then they got even cheaper with the advent of increasingly inexpensive CAD/CAM that allowed large numbers of small manufacturers to offer parts kits for DIY folks.
Making them taboo didn't make them popular, because they were never taboo.
The truth is that guns don’t really kill Americans equally. Suicides are about half of it, but I suppose we put that problem to one side. As to homicides, these disproportionately affect the poor. Mass shootings are rare, but even they disproportionately target minorities (Blacks, Jews etc.). School shootings are really the only event that truly rattles the mainstream, and in the past, when politics were less polarized, appeared closer to moving the needle a bit on gun laws, yet failed. Currently in our polarized craze republicans will fight tooth and nail even against regulations that will make it more difficult for people on terrorist watch lists from acquiring guns while some democrats appear to be moving towards decriminalizing the possession of illegal guns…
And an additional point: while mass shooting in schools probably are considered the most despicable to most Americans, and add a personal concern to the considerable minority of voters who are parents, they don’t actually personally threaten the majority of voters. We should note that thus far mass shootings seem to occur either at places of worship or other centers of minorities or at schools, I.e. not at places where the median voter actually is likely to be personally. They thus evoke a sense of repulsion at the acts, sympathy for the victims, but not personal fear for personal safety that drives one to demand drastic political action.
I don't know that the data support those assertions on who is disproportionately impacted by mass shootings. If you do have the data, I'd love to see it.
What's more likely going on is that shootings that target places of worship, schools or specific racial categories get more attention because they are extra-horrifying and noteworthy as news. If they target random "median voters" they don't get as much attention. So you're hearing disproportionately more about the former and less about the latter.
In my area, I can recall: a guy who killed 4 women at an exercise class, a guy who ambushed and killed 4 police officers who he called to his house, a guy who killed his parents and shot some police a block over from me, 8 people killed at a bbq party and the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. Of all these the last had the most national attention and seems to be the only one still remembered.
This is the best source of statistics I can find on the topic, and I don't see anything on the victims being disproportionately different from any cross-section of America.
Edit: forgot link
https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/
I grant that it’s a possibility too. However I would note that in your anecdata you point mainly to police being shot at (a well-known fact, their job is very risky), and what seems to be a case of domestic violence. Neither of these qualifies as “senseless” mass shooting. Not sure about the BBQ party (was the shooting by a random stranger or among people who know each other?). The exercise class does seem to qualify.
I'm not sure what type of line you're attempting to draw with senseless versus however you'd describe other mass shootings.
If it's related back to what would motivate typical Americans to be for stricter gun control, there is probably some distinction between the terror invoked by these various events, but not so great a distinction that it would really change the politics.
A guy who murders his parents, calls the police, shoots them when they answer the door, and then leads them on a car chase before flipping his car over is scary to median voters. It's not just domestic violence. That's a guy who could have easily chosen a different moment to snap and shot some strangers. Same with the guy who ambushed police officers who his mother had called. He planned that out. It wasn't a shootout following a bank robbery. And again the BBQ - the shooters did have an issue with a couple of the victims but decided to kill as many of the primary targets friends and family as they could.
That's terrifying in a way that "killed in a drug deal gone bad" isn't. These aren't events a typical voter can just shrug off with a "well it could never be me or anyone I care about so I don't care".
I partially disagree. I do think that high levels of *crime* can drive change in perception of gun control, as is in fact seen empirically in the 90s, and some of your examples fall to that category. But that’s because high levels of crime, especially when it gets to city centers where the media people are at, terrifies the median voter who easily imagines themselves as a victim. At high enough levels the median voter would indeed start knowing people who were personally victimized (not necessarily murdered). Terror attacks that target the mainstream work the same way. By contrast so long as crime is at low enough levels to hurt mostly the poor and the cops, and therefore be underreported in MSM, and so long as mass shooting events target mainly minorities and, unfortunately, the odd school, the median voter may be disgusted, but isn’t scared for their personal safety as they go about their daily life.
Re: domestic violence. I was skimming the link below and apparently domestic violence related mass shootings account for almost half of the 1,500 mass shooting fatalities recorded in their data set. 3/4 of the 362 under age 18 mass shooting victims were killed in a domestic violence incident. Furthermore 79% of domestic mass shooting occurred entirely in a home.
https://everytownresearch.org/maps/mass-shootings-in-america/#many-mass-shooters-were-prohibited-from-possessing-firearms
Yes, not surprising. Still doesn’t answer our question though. Of the attacks that can be defined as acts of terror, I.e. not based on any personal familiarity with the victims nor on criminal activity, how many are neither targeting minorities nor schools? How many target the median voter ?
Binya, what policies do you support that would address mass shootings?
I don't have any ideas that are realistic within the US political system. I meant what I wrote sincerely. I saw a video of Steve Kerr tearing up about lack of gun restrictions, and was curious if conservatives are upset about inaction on school security, or any other solutions they might have.
I'm not Binya. I think that messaging is key and the left should not be calling out for gun control. However, I would love to see some investigation into what works and what doesn't. This could be followed by an offer to repeal inconvenient and ineffective gun control laws in exchange for bipartisan support of laws which were expected to work. Potentially even with a sunset on the new legislation if it failed to meet some metric of effectiveness.
What policies would you implement if absolutely everything was on the table?
Switzerland is proof it's possible to have a country awash in guns, including military weapons, without the kind of problems we have here. I think fundamentally it's a question of making sure gun owners have sufficient social connections and ties to others in some community to weed out the lone wolf shooters and criminals. So some kind of better vetting of who is a trustworthy, law-abiding person able to handle a gun responsibly seems key, and then trust them to police themselves and their peers. Perhaps vetting could be delegated to private groups -- so require membership in some type of accredited gun clubs. And make it easy for any group of citizens that wants to to form their own group. That would ensure some type of social accountability without a lot of direct state control.
There's also this, per WaPo:
"The gunman bought his weapons immediately after his 18th birthday"
Your idea is interesting, but I see one fairly large problem: Who gets to determine criteria for, and regulation of, accredited gun clubs? New Jersey would probably just hand it over to local chiefs of police, who would use it to severely constrain licenses.
In order to be issued a conceal carry permit in Florida, one must attend an approved training course. I have heard that too many of those are fairly low-quality, but it occurred to me that a really good one could also serve as a mechanism to screen people socially - perhaps for the sole purpose of identifying potential problems to the proper authorities.
Florida also accepts proof of military service with an honorable discharge in lieu of the mandatory training. That serves not only to ensure that the applicant has experience in the safe handling of firearms and basic marksmanship skills, but as a fortunate side-effect will "weed out the lone wolf shooters and criminals." (Maybe our Republic should just go full-Starship Troopers where citizenship, and therefore the right to arms, was restricted to veterans.)
Finally, I don't know anything about mental health care in Switzerland, but I'd wager it's better than in the US.
The biggest source of gun crime in America comes from people who have very strong ties to their community, to the extent that they even form clubs to represent the neighborhoods where they come from.
More seriously, I'm not sure how you could ever implement a system like this without also discriminating against minorities. What if you're a gay, black leftists in rural Alabama and all the local clubs are full of white conservatives?
"I have called for rifle clubs that I think negroes should, in areas where the police, whether it be federal state or city have proven their inability or their own willingness to defend Negroes, the lives and property of Negroes, then it’s only intelligent and it’s only right that Negroes protect themselves. And I have encouraged them to buy a rifle and a shotgun, which according to the Constitution is legal."
- Malcolm X
Totally off topic: Are you 2 different people with similar names or using 2 accounts. I've always found this confusing. Totally honest question, no wider implications.
If you mean am I different than Ken from Minneapolis, then yes. Most obviously he is from Minneapolis, where it is cold, and I live in Miami, where it is warm.
Also, I wouldn't worry too much about being off-topic. We're supposed to be discussing housing.
While I think it may be instructive to look at Switzerland, doesn't proposing this kind of delegation seem like it's likely to immediately create an adverse selection situation in which "Al's Totally Aboveboard Gun Club for Legitimate Businessmen" and equivalents spring up whenever there's a concentrated demand for both guns and extremely lax rule enforcement?
FWIW, the number of people who drive without insurance is non-trivial (the insurance industry, who are certainly not unbiased on this, estimate it's about 1/8 drivers https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsured-motorists). Even if you get caught, the fine runs about $200 in California. The fact that you can buy insurance coverage for collisions with uninsured drivers says something about how well it works for cars.
That said, make possessing a gun without adequate insurance (which presumably could come with discounts for safety training or appropriate storage) a crime and actually visibly enforce it, and maybe that's a different story....
In America, dying in a mass shooting now seems to be like dying in a traffic accident - a tragedy, but not one that anyone can seriously stop from happening.
Which is equally sad, because those can also be reduced with public policy.
There is a numbing effect. It's understandable. We've seen this so many times that it's no longer news, at least not to the same extent. Pretty sad.
Can I make a distinction? There's not caring politically, and there's not caring about the risk of kids getting murdered. I accept that politically people have stopped caring. But I believe action is being taken to reduce 'active shooter' risk. For example, schools are now routinely running active shooter drills.
Is it plausible that those drills do more good than harm? Seems to me they are likely to traumatize children with minimal benefit (since active shooters are very rare and even if there is one the drill probably doesn’t help too much)
I've always felt like these kind of drills were about lawsuit prevention- much like DEI trainings. They might/probably are counterproductive, but they provide some semblance of liability defense.
That plus 1) "we must do something" 2) "this is something"
"Do more harm than good" seems almost obvious on its face.
Drills like this aren't new. I did intruder lockdown drills in elementary school in the early 2000s. I don't know if active shooter drills are different though.
What point are you making there? To me, the fact people react in counter-productive ways to mass shootings is a reason to restrict gun ownership. But if you're a conservative who opposes that, you have to accept that as part of the cost of having guns around.
For housing, should the goal of policy to be to address an immediate crisis or to lay the foundation for improved forms of living in the longer term?
The thrust of this post, and many other things I read, is that both are great but we really need better policy to address the first.
Do we? Or is this a place where really market forces are going to do 95% of the work?
I'm struck by this chart from calculatedrisk.blog: https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2022/05/april-housing-starts-all-time-record.html
We are at the highest level of multi-unit construction in almost 50 years -- and that previous peak was from a time when the huge Baby Boom generation was first forming households. Single family construction is also higher than it has been in close to 50 years, except for the egregious housing bubble of the oughts when we were building tons of homes which we oughtn't have.
And I'd say this has been driven overwhelmingly by market forces and not policy. It seems that, despite so much land being SFH-only, developers are still finding plenty of places to build multi-family homes. And, I'd argue, that upzoning -- greatly to be desired -- will at best ever be a lagging contributor to new construction, as most places coming on market in SFH neighborhoods will stay just the way they are -- because it's a choice, not a mandate.
So, sure, pursue denser development because over time it will make our cities better places to live. But it's not going to be how we drive lower prices in the short run.
(I'd also like to comment on the chart on lags in construction completion in Matt's post. First, don't compare current construction to the bubble years, when we were busily building worthless single family homes outside Las Vegas and the like, and also don't combine SFH and multi-unit. Nonetheless, I'm not sure how much policy would help relax supply constraints in actual construction, but sure let's pursue that.)
(Oh, and lastly, a bleg: Milan, please don't use very similar colors and lack of markers when chart building (e.g., the rents in the 5 largest metro areas chart). I especially advise the use of different markers to help the reader distinguish which line is which.)
"The Great Recession really did involve prolonged mass unemployment, so I understand this line of thinking, to an extent."
The mis diagnosis of the Great Recession as anything but a colossal failure of the Fed to maintain NGDP growth or even price level growth did enormous damage to Progressives' agenda. They moved away from supply side policies -- greater immigration, freer trade, lower deficits. [Paradoxically, the one place they have moved toward supply side policies -- restricting fossil fuel production -- is exactly where demand side policies, especially a tax on net CO2 and methane emissions -- is appropriate.]
AND it wrong footed them in letting Republicans pin inflation on the COVID relief and infrastructure bills rather than on the Fed.
“I’ve never been to Boise.“
Then you should visit here some time!
What's kind of ironic about how Boise is mentioned in this article is that I’ll soon be leaving it for a few days and doing remote work at a smaller town in the state that has its own unique housing boom/supply problems.
I feel like I hear about Boise every other day in these comment sections. It's like Slow Boring Western HQ.
Home values in Boise have gone up so much that it appears that Rory Hester can now afford to decamp to the swankier and more expensive Substack subscriptions where all the celebrities hang out.
(This will not mean anything to the new generation of Slow Boring subscribers.)
Oh yeah, where did he go?
I’m still here. I was just having a very very busy travel work season. Plus none of that supposed to really inspired me recently.
I've been seeing his comments on Noah Smith's Substack.
Ingrate. (JK, Rory.)
But I love Noah Smith. He’s really good about engaging people on Twitter.
I’m still here
I thought this was the swankiest sub stack? If there’s a better one and I am missing out I’m gonna be pissed off
By definition, it's wherever you are, Rory.
What’s behind kids no longer with their parents? Slow wage growth under Obama and Trump, and quicker growth under COVID, plus government transfers? Or what?
If a 50 year old two income couple has a 25 year old kid who has graduated college and gotten a job nearby, and a 3 bedroom house, the kid might move in with them to save on housing costs. But if all three of them start working from home, they might decide the kid should get a 1 bedroom apartment nearby so that everyone can have their own home workspace. And pre-vaccination, if the kid wants to see their friends occasionally but the parents don’t like the COVID risk, that might give an extra incentive for the kid to get their own place nearby and meet up with their parents for outdoor meals every weekend.
There also was a lot of moving back home to quarantine early in the pandemic. When that started to unwind you had a lot of household formation.
Red-green color blind people are extremely disappointed in those line graphs.
um, guys, different shades of the same color isn't super easy to read in a line chart.
“ during Barack Obama’s presidency when it was common to attribute economic problems to an alleged overbuilding of houses during the price boom of the mid-aughts.”
No need to have characterized this as a “Biden Obama” difference.
There was “overbuilding” in the narrow sense that some part of the demand for houses resulted from financial institutions making micro-prudentially bad loans. This was part of what triggered the 2008 crash. That the crash led to a decade of under target inflation and slow growth in real income was the Fed’s fault, not that of the people who made liars’ loans.
Thank you for writing about federal housing policy. You are being way to kind, however, to the lack of scale in this plan to increase supply, particularly vis the GSEs support for manufactured housing. Unfortunately, this isn't going to do much to move the needle.