Let me see if I understand what's going on in DC. The city told the folks living in the camps that they had to go to a shelter or they risked arrest during federal raids. The city said they have adequate shelter capacity.
Um...why didn't they do that 20 years ago and every night since?
This is not uncommon? Before major events like foreign state visits, sports tournaments and so on cities usually clean up their act including by transferring homeless camping out on streets. This is a common occurrence in almost every country with concentrated pockets of poverty in big cities. DC seems to be treating Cheetolini's takeover stunt as a foreign visit.
Most cities have some spare resources they can call upon at relatively short notice but if the kind of criticism levied here were valid, one time clean up efforts would lead to permanent solutions to homelessness in other places where "woke Democrats" are no where to be found. But that does not happen even where wokeness is unheard of and people are extremely bigoted towards each other.
“Loomer claimed Spear is laying the groundwork for a 2028 presidential run by Kennedy, potentially undermining Trump’s third campaign.” What does this mean? Trump’s third campaign was 2024. It ended in a victory that precludes another term.
In other intra-administration gossip, what do people think about the Noem-Lewandowski affair and the total lack of reaction in the media/officialdom? Given that practically every other piece of drama becomes a site of an internal MAGA power struggle, why has this gotten so little attention? I think this is especially relevant given that Homan is obviously the only real power behind immigration policy. Yet I’m not aware of any efforts to have him replace Noem.
I realize I’m proving your point, but what happened with Noem and Lewandowski? You mean affair as in, they slept together? If that’s all it is, then yeah, I’m not surprised that “two members of Mr. Pussygrabber’s administration had extramarital sex” is not considered big news.
"Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol chief who is leading the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Southern California, says, “We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that. We do that ourselves.”"
Actually wild a civil servant would dare to say something so political to the press, but the admin is concerned about museum curators. Curious.
I'm so relieved we have that adult in the room Susie Wiles. Imagine what perilous shape the nation would be in without her steady hand at the wheel, bringing common sense and judiciousness to the administration.
And because Substack comments don't allow anyone to see my facial expression, allow me to add . . . /s
We might genuinely be better off in the long run with Chief of Staff Loomer. Sort of like how epidemiologists say ebola is not that dangerous precisely because it's too deadly so it burns itself out
I'll believe that Susie Wiles is Chief of Staff when someone presents evidence of that. Has any CoS been more invisible than her? Reince Priebus had a dramatically greater impact on the nation than she has.
PPI print today providing pretty strong confirmation that tariff and mass deportation* price impacts are serious but lagged. At this point, we’re kind of at a fork where either firms pass prices on to consumers (driving further CPI acceleration) or their margins compress (causing some combination of small business deaths, decreased investment, and large layoffs— and definitely reduced stock buybacks). Bad situation.
*This one is particularly visible in the “vegetables” line item
A lot of firms seemed to have eaten the tariffs and taken a wait and see approach, hoping that Trump would TACO. Now, it's pretty clear from the "deals" that even the "successful" ones feature tariffs that Wall Street would've called fearmongering a year ago. That isn't going to last.
Well, also, large American firms front-ran the tariffs by enormously increasing their imports in the first quarter, so they have a significant inventory of pre-tariff goods to work through before they’re truly forced to pass on costs— and if they raise prices gradually, there will be a period when they’re depleting inventory booked at pre-tariff prices at a somewhat increased retail level, so it will look like their margins are okay or expanding for a few quarters. But they’ll burn through that backlog and be forced to either pass through prices or take the margin hit.
(Identifying “First in first out inventory accounting masking weakness” situations is one of the ways that hedge fund analysts traditionally populate their short books.)
Well, I’m pleased to announce that all y’all will be seeing less of me, as I start a new job tomorrow! About damn time and I’m ready for this new chapter.
*Social /network/, not social /media/. We're not broadcasting all our crap out at and into the masses; instead, we're conversing among people we know (or "know").
I actually think this is a most important distinction!
Well, I had quit pharmacy during Covid bc of the hiring frenzy in tech and thought I’d try my hand at that. Went for a masters in CS and got it, but a little too slowly and also realized I didn’t have much of a talent for it. Like I can code, but not as well as someone half my age. But I’ve applied for healthcare IT jobs since graduation, thinking that’s where I would bring my best strengths, but without any interviews. The market fell out on the entry levels. So I’ve gone back to pharmacy. I feel lucky because a lot of people are losing their jobs right now that Rite Aid went out of business!
Turns out Bernie Sanders is right, conservatives would totally become socialists if there were just enough government programs. you guys won me over, Mamdani for president!
(Also I think "Literally no single person in America works in the solar industry" proves my "post-material" point, it's not about jobs, it's about the identity politics of energy creation etc I'm going to stop now as I think this thread has gotten out of hand and Ben is about go all Major on me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ANufwUPFm8)
It doesn't sound like they even got from announcements about planning to ribbon cutting, let alone hiring anyone.
And there's this:
"...During the four years from January 2021 to January 2025 — the years of Biden’s presidency — the unemployment rate in the Texarkana metropolitan area fell to 4.2 percent from 6.8 percent..."
No shit, Sherlock, that was the end of the pandemic. You want to attribute that to Biden, knock yourself out, but the citizens of Texarkana don't seem to be that foolish.
But from the article, it doesn't sound like anything has actually been built there or that any construction has even started on anything.
One of the stereotypes about the "tax-and-spend liberals" for a long time is that they burn through taxpayer money and don't produce anything and it's a reason many don't vote Democrat and I'm not sure how any of this contradicts that stereotype.
"“Renewable energy projects in the area have seen such a significant boom that Texarkana College now offers dedicated courses in solar panel installation,” Zikai Li, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, writes in a paper that was published last month, “Unrequited Love: Estimating the Electoral Effect of a Place-Based Green Subsidy with a 2D Regression Discontinuity Design.”"
I wonder if firms actually making a legit* profit on solar installations actually value course completion other than as a signal that a person has a modest and inchoate desire to do the job.
It's going to be Direct TV installation jobs all over again. You're a independent contractor, provide your own vehicle, insurance, and tools, buy your materials from the firm, they sell you 'leads', and you quit on 6 weeks with less money than you started with.
I think Newsom is a bad general election candidate, but I also think he's less bad than all existing data would suggest he is. He has three things going for him.
(1) He's genuinely a good debater. That only goes so far considering that Kamala Harris tore Trump a new one in their debate last year. But it does count for something. (Matt's always going on about how great Pete Buttigieg is as a communicator on TV. I like Buttigieg too, but Newsom in my opinion is the better TV performer.)
(2) He's ruthless in the sense that he's willing to say whatever he thinks he needs to say to win. A lot of people claim to hate politicians who do this, but revealed preferences show that usually, what people actually hate is just politicians who do this without full commitment to the bit. If a politician's face betrays that he's a little embarrassed and ashamed by what he's saying, then that proves he's consciously willing to violate his own principles and shouldn't be trusted, whereas paradoxically, if you have no shame at all, then you aren't untrue to yourself. Newsom is capable of committing to the bit.
(3) He comes across as a bit of an a-hole, which is a good thing for a Democrat in a general election. Many of the reasons why swing voters distrust Democrats boil down to their feeling that Democrats are too nice and therefore can't play bad cop and protect them. But Newsom does not come across as compassionate. Whether he's taking progressive positions or not, he has the affect of someone who would knife you. That's good.
That's what we desperately need and have a shortage of in politics: ruthless assholes who say whatever it takes to win.
Thank you for yet another object lesson in "drosophilist is utterly out of touch with what The Median Swing Voter wants out of their elected officials."
Man, Newsom is a slick and slimy politician but the ALL CAPS tweets are a great start! He can win me over if he actually fights and wins the CA Gerrymander fight.
Talk is cheap, but this is his opportunity, if he doesn't win the Gerrymander fight, he has zero chance.
Trump has always strategically aligned himself with right-wing influencers he wants to keep on side but may not personally like. He was never a fan of Tucker Carlson, for instance. But Trump was clever enough to know he needed to keep him in the fold.
The same dynamic went into his choice of Mike Pence in 2016. Trump knew he had to signal to evangelicals he was really one of them or at least would be on their side. The choice of Pence also signaled to the Republican establishment (at a crucial moment) that Trump would play ball and not go too outside the anti-government orthodoxy of the GOP coalition. Up until that point, Trump had run an outsider campaign railing against the Bush family and vowing to defend Medicare and social security. So Trump cozying up to Loomer is likely part of his zero sum mentality although he may be overestimating Loomer's influence.
I found this on the Ezra Klein subreddit a paper showing a lot of people don’t believe adding housing makes the price go down. I feel like there’s an intuitiveness to this that I have to really fight to make myself unbelieve it. In part because there’s no place in America with cheap good housing and in part because of like the seen and the unseen. Yes I see the new luxury homes but I don’t see the filtering down of older stock and we don’t see population trends only the new construction somewhere.
It seems to me if there was a way to make thinking like an economist and skeptical of our zero sum intuitions the default setting it would be really good but may as well wish to fly.
I know Austin showed some decline over the last couple years, but my instinct is that barring a massive increase in building the best you'll see is nominal stabilization and decline with respect to inflation, not actual retrenchment.
Yeah typically builders will not knowingly build themselves into like a 15% rent drop. What happened in Austin was there were a bunch of apartments already under construction as builders anticiapted a continuation of the 1-2% population growth that had been happening from 2005-2019.
But with high interest rates going up a lot of people decided not to move--Austin is only marginally more populous than it was in 2019--you end up with a bunch of supply coming online and a reduction in demand, and therefore a large rent drop.
It would help if you're house hunting in an area where a lot of new units are going up. Before the new units the realtor takes you to some real shitholes and sweet Jebus they are asking top dollar. Then the new units go up and suddenly the sellers of the dated poorly maintained units are forced to cut prices.
I’m reading (and from Zillow stalking this feels correct) that in Seattle townhouses and condos are about to decline in price due to a glut. I’m hoping so due to wanting to move my MIL up here into a condo soon
"It doesn't make the price go down, it makes people move to where the prices are lower" seems to be an efficient explanation. (Efficient isn't the word I want, someone help me, it's on the tip of my tongue...)
Unless you're building in areas that won't be gentrified immediately because of their proximity to desirable locales, it's not going to actually drive effective cost down in a way that people notice. Richer people will simply take advantage to make a move that's in their price range. If you keep adding housing in expensive areas, they just notice that you have to move to an even worse place to find affordable housing. And people hate being forced to move.
I mean, our inability to see counterfactuals makes it hard to bear witness. I’ve lived in a place that’s built a metric fuckton of new housing while rents and prices have increased rapidly. And I’ve lived in a place with no housing shortage and fairly stagnant wages where rents and prices have doubled in 15 years for no real reason. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that it’s greed or monopoly when you don’t see the counterfactual
In Florida, sure. Not really in Seattle (where the tech boom prevailed over the housing crisis) or Memphis (where prices stagnated for a while but didn’t drop significantly). You could use 2005 as the baseline if you wanted
"The average sales price for homes in the combined Puget Sound metropolitan areas (including Seattle) declined by 14% to $361,800 in 2009. This represents a 21% decrease from the peak average sales price recorded in the 12 months leading up to February 2008,"
Really? I didn’t know that and hadn’t even visited at that point in my life, but had read it was pretty much unscathed from the crisis. That being said, the median sales price 361800×1.14 = 437778 (I know that’s not technically the way to calculate it, but I’m in an airport sans pen/paper and it’s close enough), and it’s more than double that now despite being as close to yimbytopia as anywhere else in the US besides maybe Houston
How do rents double when there's significant amounts of vacant housing available? Don't the owners of those vacant units try to undercut things? Or do they just lose money altruistically?
In Memphis, I wouldn’t be surprised if to some extent there are landlords that would rather let places stay empty than lower rent out of fear they’d get the criminal element or destructive people. But then I also know a guy that’s part of a slum lord private equity company (a classmate of mine’s husband that’s a piece of shit)
You tell me! I think that in Memphis it really does have to do with cartel-ish behavior. There are still dirt cheap places but they’re straight up dangerous, as in nothing in Seattle or Tacoma comparable.
I mean, your $9/hour job in 2012 probably makes $13 now, but rents have doubled. All of the wage increases are captured by rent. My old apartment ($375/month in 2011) is $1150/month now. I paid $125k for my first house in 2011, its current zestimate is $240k. There are no new good white collar jobs - FedEx has been laying off rather than hiring - and there’s been a continuous population exodus from the city.
I mean some increases in rent are justified by inflation due to increased maintenance costs, but not a doubling.
And then Seattle, JFC. It’s the Yimbiest city in the US. The cityscape has tremendously changed even since I’ve lived there. 5 over 1s and townhouses and ADUs oh my. Population and median income and rent and home prices have gone up by a ton in just 7 years. But looking at the changed cityscape it’s no wonder people are looking for someone to blame because the YIMBY promise of more affordable housing just hasn’t materialized *relative to baseline, not counterfactual*
Yeah, it seems like Seattle is the one of the big superstar cities that has done the most to keep price increases down - but it's mainly been keeping increases down, not actually causing decreases.
In 2000, the median existing single-family home price in the West (which includes the Seattle MSA) was $177,800. The average price was $205,700.
By 2010, the median home price in Seattle had risen to $409,172.
In 2020, the median home price in Seattle reached $749,417, an 83.2% increase since 2010.
In 2024, Seattle's median home price was $831,457.
Whether those are accurate is anyone’s guess, but I can’t do a deep dive rn. They feel about right. Of course population and AMI and minimum wages increased a lot over that time too.
My point is that people don’t exist in a Schrodinger’s superposition with the counterfactual, they experience the change relative to baseline, nominally. I’m as YIMBY as Matt or the median slow borer. But I do get why people say it’s not enough. People are like my wage doubled, but I still can’t buy a house and still have a roommate, etc. And they’ve built so much in my neighborhood and now it sucks! (Really they’re nostalgic for an old Seattle that never really existed or was only cool bc they were 17, but whatever lol)
This actually gets at something that YIMBYs overlook which is there is a pretty significant preference for SFRs among most buyers for a variety of reasons... and Seattle can't build more SFRs since there's no space. Seattle building a lot of apartments has succeeded in keeping the rent in apartments a lot more reasonable than SF despite comparable salaries. But single family homes in close-in neighborhoods--you can't really make more of those with upzoning. So the price of those will go up as the population increases and salaries go up.
I actually you overrate how much people understand it generally - it's just people not understanding supply 'n' demand about say, Playstation's don't massively effect politics.
I mean yes this kind of thought experiment and reading broadly were what got to me. But like I can't remember any time in my life where the price of housing has ever gone down. It feels genuinely hard to believe it would actually really in real life happen.
No, they probably lived in an expensive coastal city and were renting at the time. The crash was concentrated in owner-occupied homes in sunbelt suburbs, and took time to percolate to rents and superstar cities - enough time that in many of these places it was completely obscured by the longer term increase.
Oddly I was quite grown but I left the country in 2009-2014 to be a foreign English teacher and I didn't really experience any of the Great Recession first hand even if I was kind of a refugee from its effects.
The mercurial nature of Trump's doings comes from his having no real politics to ground him, just a n impulse to exercise power.
I think the Trump-Putin summit is going to go like this https://youtu.be/flY5nEphdSs?t=19
Let me see if I understand what's going on in DC. The city told the folks living in the camps that they had to go to a shelter or they risked arrest during federal raids. The city said they have adequate shelter capacity.
Um...why didn't they do that 20 years ago and every night since?
This is not uncommon? Before major events like foreign state visits, sports tournaments and so on cities usually clean up their act including by transferring homeless camping out on streets. This is a common occurrence in almost every country with concentrated pockets of poverty in big cities. DC seems to be treating Cheetolini's takeover stunt as a foreign visit.
Most cities have some spare resources they can call upon at relatively short notice but if the kind of criticism levied here were valid, one time clean up efforts would lead to permanent solutions to homelessness in other places where "woke Democrats" are no where to be found. But that does not happen even where wokeness is unheard of and people are extremely bigoted towards each other.
So the problem seems structural.
This is bad look for blue cities. Real bad
“Loomer claimed Spear is laying the groundwork for a 2028 presidential run by Kennedy, potentially undermining Trump’s third campaign.” What does this mean? Trump’s third campaign was 2024. It ended in a victory that precludes another term.
In other intra-administration gossip, what do people think about the Noem-Lewandowski affair and the total lack of reaction in the media/officialdom? Given that practically every other piece of drama becomes a site of an internal MAGA power struggle, why has this gotten so little attention? I think this is especially relevant given that Homan is obviously the only real power behind immigration policy. Yet I’m not aware of any efforts to have him replace Noem.
I realize I’m proving your point, but what happened with Noem and Lewandowski? You mean affair as in, they slept together? If that’s all it is, then yeah, I’m not surprised that “two members of Mr. Pussygrabber’s administration had extramarital sex” is not considered big news.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/krist-noems-alleged-lover-corey-lewandowski-probed-by-white-house-over-cheating-suspicions/ Appears to be getting a little traction and supposedly Trump took notice of it when he blocked Lewandowski from becoming Noem’s chief of staff
This was well-known years ago, and Republicans are immune to political consequences from scandals.
Right, but why has no one even attempted to weaponize it against Noem? It’s the lowest of low-hanging fruit.
I mean, the president is a rapist. Kind of hard to go after Noem for something as boring as cheating.
While I appreciate Halina's work here, I also want to know how I can completely unlearn everything about it
You will need to become Person without Internet Access.
"Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol chief who is leading the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Southern California, says, “We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that. We do that ourselves.”"
Actually wild a civil servant would dare to say something so political to the press, but the admin is concerned about museum curators. Curious.
I'm so relieved we have that adult in the room Susie Wiles. Imagine what perilous shape the nation would be in without her steady hand at the wheel, bringing common sense and judiciousness to the administration.
And because Substack comments don't allow anyone to see my facial expression, allow me to add . . . /s
Given she was key in keeping him "disciplined" during the campaign she definitely deserves a spot in the fantasy Nuremberg trials.
We might genuinely be better off in the long run with Chief of Staff Loomer. Sort of like how epidemiologists say ebola is not that dangerous precisely because it's too deadly so it burns itself out
I'll believe that Susie Wiles is Chief of Staff when someone presents evidence of that. Has any CoS been more invisible than her? Reince Priebus had a dramatically greater impact on the nation than she has.
> potentially undermining Trump’s third campaign
The third campaign that is in the past (i.e. 2024)? How does one undermine a campaign that is in the past?
A future campaign for a third term?
A future campaign for a house seat to become the Speaker and sideline the P+VP? Because is the constitution even constitutional?
It’s alarming how matter of fact that was and how I had to scroll down here to see the first mention of that
Why bother quoting an old politico article calling Susie Wiles the de facto chief of staff when she is now the actual chief of staff?
PPI print today providing pretty strong confirmation that tariff and mass deportation* price impacts are serious but lagged. At this point, we’re kind of at a fork where either firms pass prices on to consumers (driving further CPI acceleration) or their margins compress (causing some combination of small business deaths, decreased investment, and large layoffs— and definitely reduced stock buybacks). Bad situation.
*This one is particularly visible in the “vegetables” line item
A lot of firms seemed to have eaten the tariffs and taken a wait and see approach, hoping that Trump would TACO. Now, it's pretty clear from the "deals" that even the "successful" ones feature tariffs that Wall Street would've called fearmongering a year ago. That isn't going to last.
Well, also, large American firms front-ran the tariffs by enormously increasing their imports in the first quarter, so they have a significant inventory of pre-tariff goods to work through before they’re truly forced to pass on costs— and if they raise prices gradually, there will be a period when they’re depleting inventory booked at pre-tariff prices at a somewhat increased retail level, so it will look like their margins are okay or expanding for a few quarters. But they’ll burn through that backlog and be forced to either pass through prices or take the margin hit.
(Identifying “First in first out inventory accounting masking weakness” situations is one of the ways that hedge fund analysts traditionally populate their short books.)
Well, I’m pleased to announce that all y’all will be seeing less of me, as I start a new job tomorrow! About damn time and I’m ready for this new chapter.
Did you get that medivac job? Ir are you going back to traffic coptering?
It’s classified top secret
Never has a “like” been more ambiguous.
Aw thanks
Congratulations!
Thank you!
Liking for your new job, not for seeing less of you. Go Helikitty! Make us all proud!
Thank you!
I said AMBIGUOUS dammit! As in “How can we miss you if you won’t go away?” :-)
Congratulations! And how dare you make us your second priority!
Oh I’m sure y’all will still see me, Slow Boring comments are my high brow social media addiction
*Social /network/, not social /media/. We're not broadcasting all our crap out at and into the masses; instead, we're conversing among people we know (or "know").
I actually think this is a most important distinction!
I at least learn new things here. I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything actually new and useful from other social media
10,001 variations of "Thanks, I hate it".
You're not alone.
Remember to win a fight on the first day so they know not to mess with you.
I find it’s best to have this conversation with each co-worker, individually:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HDsx71XE544&pp=ygUpU2NhcmZhY2UgcmVtZW1iZXIgdG9ueSBuZXZlciBmdWNrIHdpdGggbWU%3D
Of course. Must establish dominance.🤪
Congratulation!
Thank you sir
Good luck and Godspeed.
I’ve been out of the workforce in my field for a fairly long while, so I’m a little bit anxious. But I’m ready and grateful.
Congrats! Can you drop a hint about what your general field is?
Well, I had quit pharmacy during Covid bc of the hiring frenzy in tech and thought I’d try my hand at that. Went for a masters in CS and got it, but a little too slowly and also realized I didn’t have much of a talent for it. Like I can code, but not as well as someone half my age. But I’ve applied for healthcare IT jobs since graduation, thinking that’s where I would bring my best strengths, but without any interviews. The market fell out on the entry levels. So I’ve gone back to pharmacy. I feel lucky because a lot of people are losing their jobs right now that Rite Aid went out of business!
Deliveryism RIP: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/opinion/liberalism-texarkana-economy-democracy.html
[Turns Lisa C and sings] Cause we're livin' in a post-material world, and I'm a post-material girl
Turns out Bernie Sanders is right, conservatives would totally become socialists if there were just enough government programs. you guys won me over, Mamdani for president!
(Also I think "Literally no single person in America works in the solar industry" proves my "post-material" point, it's not about jobs, it's about the identity politics of energy creation etc I'm going to stop now as I think this thread has gotten out of hand and Ben is about go all Major on me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ANufwUPFm8)
It doesn't sound like they even got from announcements about planning to ribbon cutting, let alone hiring anyone.
And there's this:
"...During the four years from January 2021 to January 2025 — the years of Biden’s presidency — the unemployment rate in the Texarkana metropolitan area fell to 4.2 percent from 6.8 percent..."
No shit, Sherlock, that was the end of the pandemic. You want to attribute that to Biden, knock yourself out, but the citizens of Texarkana don't seem to be that foolish.
But from the article, it doesn't sound like anything has actually been built there or that any construction has even started on anything.
One of the stereotypes about the "tax-and-spend liberals" for a long time is that they burn through taxpayer money and don't produce anything and it's a reason many don't vote Democrat and I'm not sure how any of this contradicts that stereotype.
"“Renewable energy projects in the area have seen such a significant boom that Texarkana College now offers dedicated courses in solar panel installation,” Zikai Li, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, writes in a paper that was published last month, “Unrequited Love: Estimating the Electoral Effect of a Place-Based Green Subsidy with a 2D Regression Discontinuity Design.”"
True Deliverism has never been tried!
So I guess Biden delivered 1-2 jobs in the area: one for the instructor for these solar panel installation courses and maybe a second for a TA.
I wonder if firms actually making a legit* profit on solar installations actually value course completion other than as a signal that a person has a modest and inchoate desire to do the job.
.
*Sans subsidies.
It's going to be Direct TV installation jobs all over again. You're a independent contractor, provide your own vehicle, insurance, and tools, buy your materials from the firm, they sell you 'leads', and you quit on 6 weeks with less money than you started with.
But with life experience!
I got an all caps Act Blue text from Gavin Newsom that had a lot of quotation marks, including around "BEAUTIFUL MAPS".
The man is shameless, handsome, and is 57. I think he's gonna win the nomination.
“SADLY - BUT NO SURPRISE - DONALD WAS TOO WEAK (LITTLE HANDS) TO EVEN WRITE ME BACK.”
Classic!
I still think Newsom running for POTUS would be a disaster, but I applaud him for the first-class trolling of the Orange Lord! Well done, Governor!
I think Newsom is a bad general election candidate, but I also think he's less bad than all existing data would suggest he is. He has three things going for him.
(1) He's genuinely a good debater. That only goes so far considering that Kamala Harris tore Trump a new one in their debate last year. But it does count for something. (Matt's always going on about how great Pete Buttigieg is as a communicator on TV. I like Buttigieg too, but Newsom in my opinion is the better TV performer.)
(2) He's ruthless in the sense that he's willing to say whatever he thinks he needs to say to win. A lot of people claim to hate politicians who do this, but revealed preferences show that usually, what people actually hate is just politicians who do this without full commitment to the bit. If a politician's face betrays that he's a little embarrassed and ashamed by what he's saying, then that proves he's consciously willing to violate his own principles and shouldn't be trusted, whereas paradoxically, if you have no shame at all, then you aren't untrue to yourself. Newsom is capable of committing to the bit.
(3) He comes across as a bit of an a-hole, which is a good thing for a Democrat in a general election. Many of the reasons why swing voters distrust Democrats boil down to their feeling that Democrats are too nice and therefore can't play bad cop and protect them. But Newsom does not come across as compassionate. Whether he's taking progressive positions or not, he has the affect of someone who would knife you. That's good.
Still a bad candidate overall though.
That's what we desperately need and have a shortage of in politics: ruthless assholes who say whatever it takes to win.
Thank you for yet another object lesson in "drosophilist is utterly out of touch with what The Median Swing Voter wants out of their elected officials."
I'm going to go curl up in a corner now.
Boring technocrats who just want what's best for their country just aren't gonna cut it.
Man, Newsom is a slick and slimy politician but the ALL CAPS tweets are a great start! He can win me over if he actually fights and wins the CA Gerrymander fight.
Talk is cheap, but this is his opportunity, if he doesn't win the Gerrymander fight, he has zero chance.
57? Maybe in 20 years he’ll be competitive. I think Bernie’s got the Democratic nom in the bag.
That is what this country needs! Young blood!
Bernie has too much vigor to win a Democratic primary.
Trump has always strategically aligned himself with right-wing influencers he wants to keep on side but may not personally like. He was never a fan of Tucker Carlson, for instance. But Trump was clever enough to know he needed to keep him in the fold.
The same dynamic went into his choice of Mike Pence in 2016. Trump knew he had to signal to evangelicals he was really one of them or at least would be on their side. The choice of Pence also signaled to the Republican establishment (at a crucial moment) that Trump would play ball and not go too outside the anti-government orthodoxy of the GOP coalition. Up until that point, Trump had run an outsider campaign railing against the Bush family and vowing to defend Medicare and social security. So Trump cozying up to Loomer is likely part of his zero sum mentality although he may be overestimating Loomer's influence.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.20241428
I found this on the Ezra Klein subreddit a paper showing a lot of people don’t believe adding housing makes the price go down. I feel like there’s an intuitiveness to this that I have to really fight to make myself unbelieve it. In part because there’s no place in America with cheap good housing and in part because of like the seen and the unseen. Yes I see the new luxury homes but I don’t see the filtering down of older stock and we don’t see population trends only the new construction somewhere.
It seems to me if there was a way to make thinking like an economist and skeptical of our zero sum intuitions the default setting it would be really good but may as well wish to fly.
I know Austin showed some decline over the last couple years, but my instinct is that barring a massive increase in building the best you'll see is nominal stabilization and decline with respect to inflation, not actual retrenchment.
Yeah typically builders will not knowingly build themselves into like a 15% rent drop. What happened in Austin was there were a bunch of apartments already under construction as builders anticiapted a continuation of the 1-2% population growth that had been happening from 2005-2019.
But with high interest rates going up a lot of people decided not to move--Austin is only marginally more populous than it was in 2019--you end up with a bunch of supply coming online and a reduction in demand, and therefore a large rent drop.
It would help if you're house hunting in an area where a lot of new units are going up. Before the new units the realtor takes you to some real shitholes and sweet Jebus they are asking top dollar. Then the new units go up and suddenly the sellers of the dated poorly maintained units are forced to cut prices.
I’m reading (and from Zillow stalking this feels correct) that in Seattle townhouses and condos are about to decline in price due to a glut. I’m hoping so due to wanting to move my MIL up here into a condo soon
value of condos has declined way off 2022 peaks in seattle and possibly below 2019 levels. https://www.zillow.com/home-values/99615/seattle-wa-98181/
"It doesn't make the price go down, it makes people move to where the prices are lower" seems to be an efficient explanation. (Efficient isn't the word I want, someone help me, it's on the tip of my tongue...)
Unless you're building in areas that won't be gentrified immediately because of their proximity to desirable locales, it's not going to actually drive effective cost down in a way that people notice. Richer people will simply take advantage to make a move that's in their price range. If you keep adding housing in expensive areas, they just notice that you have to move to an even worse place to find affordable housing. And people hate being forced to move.
If the nearest word was "efficient", my first guess is that you're reaching for "parsimonious".
YES
I mean, our inability to see counterfactuals makes it hard to bear witness. I’ve lived in a place that’s built a metric fuckton of new housing while rents and prices have increased rapidly. And I’ve lived in a place with no housing shortage and fairly stagnant wages where rents and prices have doubled in 15 years for no real reason. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that it’s greed or monopoly when you don’t see the counterfactual
"prices have doubled in 15 years for no real reason."
Prices collapse by 30-50% 17 years ago.
In Florida, sure. Not really in Seattle (where the tech boom prevailed over the housing crisis) or Memphis (where prices stagnated for a while but didn’t drop significantly). You could use 2005 as the baseline if you wanted
"The average sales price for homes in the combined Puget Sound metropolitan areas (including Seattle) declined by 14% to $361,800 in 2009. This represents a 21% decrease from the peak average sales price recorded in the 12 months leading up to February 2008,"
21% is a decent drop.
Really? I didn’t know that and hadn’t even visited at that point in my life, but had read it was pretty much unscathed from the crisis. That being said, the median sales price 361800×1.14 = 437778 (I know that’s not technically the way to calculate it, but I’m in an airport sans pen/paper and it’s close enough), and it’s more than double that now despite being as close to yimbytopia as anywhere else in the US besides maybe Houston
The counterpoint would be Austin where they built and prices and rents recently dropped by 15-20%.
How do rents double when there's significant amounts of vacant housing available? Don't the owners of those vacant units try to undercut things? Or do they just lose money altruistically?
In Memphis, I wouldn’t be surprised if to some extent there are landlords that would rather let places stay empty than lower rent out of fear they’d get the criminal element or destructive people. But then I also know a guy that’s part of a slum lord private equity company (a classmate of mine’s husband that’s a piece of shit)
You tell me! I think that in Memphis it really does have to do with cartel-ish behavior. There are still dirt cheap places but they’re straight up dangerous, as in nothing in Seattle or Tacoma comparable.
I mean, your $9/hour job in 2012 probably makes $13 now, but rents have doubled. All of the wage increases are captured by rent. My old apartment ($375/month in 2011) is $1150/month now. I paid $125k for my first house in 2011, its current zestimate is $240k. There are no new good white collar jobs - FedEx has been laying off rather than hiring - and there’s been a continuous population exodus from the city.
I mean some increases in rent are justified by inflation due to increased maintenance costs, but not a doubling.
And then Seattle, JFC. It’s the Yimbiest city in the US. The cityscape has tremendously changed even since I’ve lived there. 5 over 1s and townhouses and ADUs oh my. Population and median income and rent and home prices have gone up by a ton in just 7 years. But looking at the changed cityscape it’s no wonder people are looking for someone to blame because the YIMBY promise of more affordable housing just hasn’t materialized *relative to baseline, not counterfactual*
Yeah, it seems like Seattle is the one of the big superstar cities that has done the most to keep price increases down - but it's mainly been keeping increases down, not actually causing decreases.
If Seattle built less you think prices would be lower?
Of course not. But that’s kind of my point.
per Google AI:
In 2000, the median existing single-family home price in the West (which includes the Seattle MSA) was $177,800. The average price was $205,700.
By 2010, the median home price in Seattle had risen to $409,172.
In 2020, the median home price in Seattle reached $749,417, an 83.2% increase since 2010.
In 2024, Seattle's median home price was $831,457.
Whether those are accurate is anyone’s guess, but I can’t do a deep dive rn. They feel about right. Of course population and AMI and minimum wages increased a lot over that time too.
My point is that people don’t exist in a Schrodinger’s superposition with the counterfactual, they experience the change relative to baseline, nominally. I’m as YIMBY as Matt or the median slow borer. But I do get why people say it’s not enough. People are like my wage doubled, but I still can’t buy a house and still have a roommate, etc. And they’ve built so much in my neighborhood and now it sucks! (Really they’re nostalgic for an old Seattle that never really existed or was only cool bc they were 17, but whatever lol)
This actually gets at something that YIMBYs overlook which is there is a pretty significant preference for SFRs among most buyers for a variety of reasons... and Seattle can't build more SFRs since there's no space. Seattle building a lot of apartments has succeeded in keeping the rent in apartments a lot more reasonable than SF despite comparable salaries. But single family homes in close-in neighborhoods--you can't really make more of those with upzoning. So the price of those will go up as the population increases and salaries go up.
It's amazing that people will intuitively understand supply and demand for literally other good except this.
I actually you overrate how much people understand it generally - it's just people not understanding supply 'n' demand about say, Playstation's don't massively effect politics.
I find the easiest way to explain it is to ask people what they would do.
"What would you do if when you were looking for houses, your current house cost $250,000 more than it actually did?"
"I'd move to a smaller house or a less desirable town"
"Okay, and imagine that house...where would the person who actually lives in it instead of you go?"
And on down the line
I mean yes this kind of thought experiment and reading broadly were what got to me. But like I can't remember any time in my life where the price of housing has ever gone down. It feels genuinely hard to believe it would actually really in real life happen.
"I can't remember any time in my life where the price of housing has ever gone down. "
I assume you were a kid in 2008 when housing fell by 30-50% nationwide?
No, they probably lived in an expensive coastal city and were renting at the time. The crash was concentrated in owner-occupied homes in sunbelt suburbs, and took time to percolate to rents and superstar cities - enough time that in many of these places it was completely obscured by the longer term increase.
"For example, the median home price in Southern California dropped from $415,000 in January 2008 to $278,000 by the end of 2008."
If that includes the inland empire, that’s the sunbelt. If you restricted that to LA county the results would be very different.
My experience was in Boston, but prices did not drop even a little. My rent increased from $500 to $800 from 2007-2011.
Oddly I was quite grown but I left the country in 2009-2014 to be a foreign English teacher and I didn't really experience any of the Great Recession first hand even if I was kind of a refugee from its effects.