The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

All I know is I moved to the Dallas area 4 years ago, and I'm still shocked at the housing affordability compared to where I moved from. Both in terms of absolute price and general overall cost of living.

I know this isn't how our political system works, but if I were king of America I'd try to solve the problem of expensive housing like this:

-Confirm housing is too expensive (for whom, where)

-Ask people why they think housing is too expensive and read some books on the topic

-Come up with a list of a few reasonable reasons from said reading

-try addressing those reasons with experiments in different locations to see what works (or check if someone has already done this)

-apply learnings broadly.

Instead our system is more like: -try to get elected and win points by criticizing others' ideas

-do nothing or spend a trillion dollars trying to solve it based on an idea a lobbying group told me is the reason housing is expensive

-be replaced by someone who disagree with me completely in 2 or 4 years

The bigger problem, at least in my neck of the woods, is they're not building affordable housing. By-and-large they are building luxury apartments and luxury homes. We've torn down half the city to build luxury apartments that sit at 20-30% occupancy.

Building luxury housing won't help the housing crisis until the sellers are on the brink of bankruptcy and forced to sell their properties at a reasonable price.

This is one of the funniest articles I’ve read in a a long time. I’m not sure what is better, the “I quite literally set out to find support for my narrative and find exactly one (1) guy that’s both willing to call himself an expert and give me my desired answer for each of my individual points” thing or the lazy neocon virtue signaling

> The antitrust left

I love this phrasing. Derek Thompson has done some Serious Journalism and has discovered that if you support competition between homebuilders you are a Leftist.

Also there isn’t a concentration of homebuilders (in Dallas) but even if there was it doesn’t affect prices (in Dallas). Well there may be a concentration of homebuilders nationally, but Thomson spoke to a guy that doesn’t care about that. Anyway, wasn’t the takeaway from the Great Recession that monopolies are good?

But then I’m not sure he knows what a monopoly is

> If a homebuilding monopoly purposefully made crappy new homes, they’d be out-competed quickly

Or what is a good outcome or a bad outcome

> Can big companies hurt subcontractors by forcing them to accept lower prices?

> “Maybe, but if big homebuilders can offer trades longer guaranteed contracts”

Hmm… they can force subcontractors to accept lower rates, but that’s not that big of a deal because they can force them to accept lower rates for a longer period of time. Like for example it would suck to have your paycheck cut in half but knowing that there’s no chance of it going back up for several years would take the sting out of it. This is the reasoning of somebody that took a Hat Man dose of Benadryl