“supply has no bearing on rental price because supply is unknown by the landlord as they set their rental price”
I’m sorry, I realize it’s not the point of this article to dunk on this guy but this was so breathtakingly stupid that I had to take a moment to breathe deeply and calm myself. People are literally standing in multi-block lines to view apartment openings in some cities. I’m pretty sure that landlords pay close attention to that sort of thing.
Why bother going to Starfleet Academy when there is holodeck abundance? Who would want to deal with actual humans when such a technology exists? I for one would spend my entire life having deeply meaningful and intellectually rich trists with absolutely stunning holograms that would play chess just poorly enough to let me win occasionally and turn the entire process into a compelling erotic game. Said holograms would also love all of my SB comments and would help me launch my own “substack” where fawning subscribers would cheer me on and offer up their nubile charms.
There is a category of leftist that thinks trade-offs are something that will be abolished when capitalism is abolished. End capitalism and the horn of plenty will be unleashed. You tend to see a lot of this nonsense when talking about global warming and agriculture.
Funnily enough it seems like it would be even harder to get more housing built in MY's Trek world. At least in a market system, homeowners benefit from upzoning due to the land they sit on becoming more valuable. In socialist utopia, it is pure loss, no gain. Market incentives matter!
I applaud the point that zoning matters even in utopia. However you sure went to extremes to appeal to the Star Wars socialists in the room. I imagine you are sensitive to the increasing tension within the housing movement between the Left YIMBYs and the mkt YIMBYs. My concern is by turning apologist to the Left camp and bending over backwards to squeeze abundant housing into a Lefty alignment, we risk the effectiveness and potential of abundant housing at large. Take California's AB 2011 which you recently cheered, which allows increased density along commercial corridors. The fine print is the required use of union labor (as if zoning operates independent of construction costs) and the requirement to subsidize 15% of the constructed units at below market rents. Both of these measures blunt the upzoning upside such that it will not bring the change YIMBYs of all flavors would like to see. Politics is a compromise, and up to this point unions have been fighting housing for their self interested (state mandated) seat at the table. Zoning is important, and coalition building across the galaxy is great, but we can't lose sight of the non-zoning factors at play, nor of the power of econ 101 argument at large when applied to housing, neither of which we should shy away from or tip toe around if we want real change. Construction costs (and regulatory time to approval) matter too.
Left NIMBYism makes a lot of sense if you don’t think people’s desires to relocate are important. Price controls or public housing avoid the cost burden and displacement problems for incumbents, which are what “the housing crisis” means to them.
There might be some concern for children born and raised somewhere to eventually get their own households, but organic population growth is a smaller and less disruptive demand pressure to meet than what is actually happening on desirable and/or “tech” regions over the last decade.
I really want to have a "dislike" button on substack. I would press it repeatedly for this post for the sole reason of linking to that poorly-written, poorly-argued, economically illiterate post by Kevin Rogan.
I read it [ed: the post by Rogan], then read it again, desperately searching for a thread of logic I could follow from sentence to sentence. Instead, I stumbled blindly (along with the author, it appears) to the predetermined conclusion that supply doesn't matter to housing prices. A tiring journey for so early in the morning.
Matt, something I don’t hear you dig into much is the history of how we got here. Up until the Great Depression, US cities boomed and tearing down or moving small buildings to put up bigger ones was seen as a sign of progress and generally lauded. It happened everywhere all the time.
FDR went to great lengths to remake the housing and development market, specifically with a Marxist view that the goal was to equitably distribute people across the landscape. The Great Depression was so bad it killed off nearly all developers and construction practice from pre-1930, the planners spent the 1930s writing all these new rules with minimal testing (as so little was built). Finally, after the war we basically re-started with an entirely new operating system for how we make places.
The problem today is in large part: post-war development doesn’t scale well! “Modern” city planning and urban design looked nice on paper, but in practice when everyone has to get everywhere by car, every new building just makes everyone’s traffic worse. Also, the attempt to commodify development succeeded to a large degree, and as a result most buildings are financial products designed to be cheap, trendy, and only last only the duration of the financing. So more suburbanization just creates ever-increasing congestion and rolling blight.
But just as important, because this new development culture does not make good places, we are stuck with a fixed supply of pre-war places built on a different operating system which are generally occupying the best locations - and those places don’t like new development because it’s so often very low quality compared to the old stuff they live in!
So there is actually a lot of subtle rationality to the NIMBY movement, and while I think that creating housing abundance is more important than re-learning how to make nice places that can scale up, re-learning how to make nice places could help a lot.
One part of Picard that didn't make sense to me was how the family Picard managed retain their chalet even through the Revolution. Presumably, it should have been redistributed and the Picards chased out by people wearing the WWIII uniforms from Encounter at Farpoint.
Left NIMBYism strikes me as a purity problem. The only type of housing that's acceptable to them is public housing, or at the very worst rent controlled housing. Anything else in their mind risks evil, rapacious developers swooping in to gentrify entire neighborhoods. Other forms of NIMBYism can at least make sense in their selfishness, but this type of obstinacy is mind numbing. I am decidedly not a Star Trek expert, so I have no idea how to continue that analogy, anyone who is can take a shot at it.
Thanks for writing something that is (hopefully) likely to appeal to someone who doesn't share many core assumptions with you. The slow boring of hard boards and all that.
“supply has no bearing on rental price because supply is unknown by the landlord as they set their rental price”
I’m sorry, I realize it’s not the point of this article to dunk on this guy but this was so breathtakingly stupid that I had to take a moment to breathe deeply and calm myself. People are literally standing in multi-block lines to view apartment openings in some cities. I’m pretty sure that landlords pay close attention to that sort of thing.
Why bother going to Starfleet Academy when there is holodeck abundance? Who would want to deal with actual humans when such a technology exists? I for one would spend my entire life having deeply meaningful and intellectually rich trists with absolutely stunning holograms that would play chess just poorly enough to let me win occasionally and turn the entire process into a compelling erotic game. Said holograms would also love all of my SB comments and would help me launch my own “substack” where fawning subscribers would cheer me on and offer up their nubile charms.
There is a category of leftist that thinks trade-offs are something that will be abolished when capitalism is abolished. End capitalism and the horn of plenty will be unleashed. You tend to see a lot of this nonsense when talking about global warming and agriculture.
I really appreciate the effort to bring YIMBY nerds and Star Trek nerds together. Who knows what power such a mighty coalition could yield!
Funnily enough it seems like it would be even harder to get more housing built in MY's Trek world. At least in a market system, homeowners benefit from upzoning due to the land they sit on becoming more valuable. In socialist utopia, it is pure loss, no gain. Market incentives matter!
12 “builders remedy” projects on the docket in Santa Monica, which get ministerial approval under new rules in CA. https://twitter.com/emily_sawicki/status/1580360066300928002?s=46&t=cunpjqGu_NKMldriZ4dG1g
SF has to submit a compliant housing element by next Jan, or else we get to build over NIMBY objections there.
Love to see it.
I applaud the point that zoning matters even in utopia. However you sure went to extremes to appeal to the Star Wars socialists in the room. I imagine you are sensitive to the increasing tension within the housing movement between the Left YIMBYs and the mkt YIMBYs. My concern is by turning apologist to the Left camp and bending over backwards to squeeze abundant housing into a Lefty alignment, we risk the effectiveness and potential of abundant housing at large. Take California's AB 2011 which you recently cheered, which allows increased density along commercial corridors. The fine print is the required use of union labor (as if zoning operates independent of construction costs) and the requirement to subsidize 15% of the constructed units at below market rents. Both of these measures blunt the upzoning upside such that it will not bring the change YIMBYs of all flavors would like to see. Politics is a compromise, and up to this point unions have been fighting housing for their self interested (state mandated) seat at the table. Zoning is important, and coalition building across the galaxy is great, but we can't lose sight of the non-zoning factors at play, nor of the power of econ 101 argument at large when applied to housing, neither of which we should shy away from or tip toe around if we want real change. Construction costs (and regulatory time to approval) matter too.
Left NIMBYism makes a lot of sense if you don’t think people’s desires to relocate are important. Price controls or public housing avoid the cost burden and displacement problems for incumbents, which are what “the housing crisis” means to them.
There might be some concern for children born and raised somewhere to eventually get their own households, but organic population growth is a smaller and less disruptive demand pressure to meet than what is actually happening on desirable and/or “tech” regions over the last decade.
I really want to have a "dislike" button on substack. I would press it repeatedly for this post for the sole reason of linking to that poorly-written, poorly-argued, economically illiterate post by Kevin Rogan.
I read it [ed: the post by Rogan], then read it again, desperately searching for a thread of logic I could follow from sentence to sentence. Instead, I stumbled blindly (along with the author, it appears) to the predetermined conclusion that supply doesn't matter to housing prices. A tiring journey for so early in the morning.
Good use of sci-fi lite to make a polemical point in a vivid way. Like Le Guin, and that's high praise.
I look forward to your sci-fi alt history of 2016, "The Ones Who Walk Away from O'Malley."
Matt, something I don’t hear you dig into much is the history of how we got here. Up until the Great Depression, US cities boomed and tearing down or moving small buildings to put up bigger ones was seen as a sign of progress and generally lauded. It happened everywhere all the time.
FDR went to great lengths to remake the housing and development market, specifically with a Marxist view that the goal was to equitably distribute people across the landscape. The Great Depression was so bad it killed off nearly all developers and construction practice from pre-1930, the planners spent the 1930s writing all these new rules with minimal testing (as so little was built). Finally, after the war we basically re-started with an entirely new operating system for how we make places.
The problem today is in large part: post-war development doesn’t scale well! “Modern” city planning and urban design looked nice on paper, but in practice when everyone has to get everywhere by car, every new building just makes everyone’s traffic worse. Also, the attempt to commodify development succeeded to a large degree, and as a result most buildings are financial products designed to be cheap, trendy, and only last only the duration of the financing. So more suburbanization just creates ever-increasing congestion and rolling blight.
But just as important, because this new development culture does not make good places, we are stuck with a fixed supply of pre-war places built on a different operating system which are generally occupying the best locations - and those places don’t like new development because it’s so often very low quality compared to the old stuff they live in!
So there is actually a lot of subtle rationality to the NIMBY movement, and while I think that creating housing abundance is more important than re-learning how to make nice places that can scale up, re-learning how to make nice places could help a lot.
One part of Picard that didn't make sense to me was how the family Picard managed retain their chalet even through the Revolution. Presumably, it should have been redistributed and the Picards chased out by people wearing the WWIII uniforms from Encounter at Farpoint.
Left NIMBYism strikes me as a purity problem. The only type of housing that's acceptable to them is public housing, or at the very worst rent controlled housing. Anything else in their mind risks evil, rapacious developers swooping in to gentrify entire neighborhoods. Other forms of NIMBYism can at least make sense in their selfishness, but this type of obstinacy is mind numbing. I am decidedly not a Star Trek expert, so I have no idea how to continue that analogy, anyone who is can take a shot at it.
I fear that "rationalist Star Trek analogy substack post" isn't the ideal genre for getting through to NIMBY types
Thanks for writing something that is (hopefully) likely to appeal to someone who doesn't share many core assumptions with you. The slow boring of hard boards and all that.
Maybe the French wine country is still sparsely populated in utopia, but at least they were able to overcome enough local objections to build out Marin County a bit: https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/jkvb09/screenshot_of_final_scene_from_star_trek/