6 ms·

Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data

47 points by laxmena 2mo ago

tptacek 2mo ago
This analysis, for whatever it's worth, is wrestling with a straw man. Klein and Thompson never claim that permitting reform is the only lever available. The housing strategy Abundance documents is that of the YIMBY movement, and YIMBYs are all-of-the-above advocates. If you can get subsidized housing built, you get it built. Meanwhile, you fix exclusionary zoning and clear a path for the market (which produced virtually all the homes we live in) to function as well.
- theluketaylor 2mo ago
  I'm hugely in favour of adding non-market housing anywhere it can be added, but the author declaring it a different fix to the housing crisis from zoning is naive at best. Non-market housing is subject to the exact same complex local regulations as market housing, plus all the complexity of government projects, a patchwork of subsidies, grants, and loans to get funding, and even more intense public scrutiny. Trying to get social housing done is playing an exceptionally hard game on nightmare mode. The single lever he points out is itself a ton of local, regional, and federal regulations and laws that all need modernizing or abolishing, which is far from a simple, single lever at all.
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    Worth mentioning here that appeals to social housing have over the last 20 years been absolutely classic NIMBY arguments. People raise it because they know significant amounts of social housing won't get built, but if you fix the gating factors for the market, it will. But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist". Nathan J. Robinson actually said the quiet part out loud a couple years ago, when he wrote in Current Affairs (a relatively high-profile American leftist periodical) a long defense of suburban NIMBYism.
    - Avshalom 2mo ago
      Of course one of the reasons social housing won't get built is the faircloth limit from 20 years ago.
      - tptacek 2mo ago
        That's like 4-5 principal components back from the first principal component, which is that the places that need housing market vitality the most could not reasonably afford to acquire the housing to support it. The best school systems in Chicagoland are in the inner-ring suburbs, locked up for SFZ residents. Even if their municipal governments wanted to go all-out to fix that, they couldn't conceivably acquire the land and arrange the development. Worth adding that "public housing" isn't the only or even the most common form of subsidized housing. There's no Faircloth limit at all to public-private subsidized housing with AMI-calibrated eligibility and rent, and that's a much more common form of subsidized housing than a "housing project". But it can't get built in meaningful numbers either, because it's simply too expensive.
        JuniperMesos 2mo ago
        > The best school systems in Chicagoland are in the inner-ring suburbs, locked up for SFZ residents. Even if their municipal governments wanted to go all-out to fix that, they couldn't conceivably acquire the land and arrange the development. Also, if municipal governments "fixed that" by making it possible for more housing to be built and more people to move into neighborhoods served by those currently-good school districts, the odds are good that the influx of new students would make the school district worse. And the people currently living in single-family zoned residences know this - one motivation for NIMBYism is that it helps maintain the high quality of the local school district where your kids currently attend school. I'm personally in favor of abolishing public school districts, precisely so that the location of a house is no longer a major deciding factor in where any children in that household attend school. This reduces the incentive for people who live in a house in a good public school district to resist building any more houses in that school district, lest the inhabitants of that house make the school district less good.
- pj_mukh 2mo ago
  Yes, plus, all these meta-studies always seemed to ignore the reasons for the demand shock. "It's not the permits, it's the demand shock" (the last image in the blog post). The "demand shock", was the economy growing...quickly. And that statement is left hanging in the air like we're supposed to do something about it. The economic growth is a good thing, we should have a housing system that reacts to it like surge pricing but instead we get a lot of hand-wringing then rezoning 5-10 years too late, so instead of temporary surge pricing, we get permanent ultra-heavy-high-surge pricing.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 2mo ago
  > This analysis, for whatever it's worth, is wrestling with a straw man. More like a straw army. Austin is surrounded by empty flat land. San Francisco is surrounded by water and was built out many decades ago. London suffers from being the main city in Britain. The UK is overcentralized. Most of the money and power are in London. Some countries are centralized like that, with all the good stuff around the national capital. France, Japan, and Russia are; the US, Canada, and China are not. (China, maybe; too much is near Beijing, but there are lots of other big cities.)
  - CalRobert 2mo ago
    SF still has lots of low density that could be demolished in favour of higher density housing though.
  - vannevar 2mo ago
    >Austin is surrounded by empty flat land. San Francisco is surrounded by water and was built out many decades ago. This^^^. The idea that housing starts are solely (or even substantially) impacted by regulation is a case of control bias, attributing disproportionate influence to minor factors we can control (like regulation) over major factors we cannot (land, labor and material costs).
    - tptacek 2mo ago
      I've read this like 5 times and I still can't make sense of it. Is this a variant of the "5-bedroom houses in Cairo Illinois only cost $40,000, there is no housing shortage" argument?
      - vannevar 2mo ago
        No---did you read the original article? The comment and the parent will make more sense. Basically the article compares Austin and San Fransisco and attributes the difference in building rates entirely to disparities in regulation. Which is obviously not an accurate framing, for the reasons mentioned in our respective comments. Your comment is more addressed at affordability, which is largely a function of wealth disparity: as the wealthy get richer with respect to the lower percentiles, they absorb an increasing share of the home market and drive prices up.
hingler36 2mo ago
This is interesting analysis, but I don't think it necessarily counteracts what the book is saying. To build state-affiliated housing also involved "clearing the pipes" as the article put it. Additionally, the Vienna housing that this article touched on is a way deeper rabbit hole that is absolutely worth looking into. They have a completely different housing paradigm than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
- tptacek 2mo ago
  (For the uninitiated, the government [and sponsored co-ops] owns almost half the housing in Vienna, and eligibility for social housing, which is seen as desirable, extends deep into the middle class.)
  - shay_ker 2mo ago
    There's no free lunch. Housing costs are effectively carried by immigrants and transplants: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Setting-the-record-straight-on-the-Vienna-Social-Housing-Model-final.pdf?x91208 https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Setting-the-r... In general, the Vienna model is very difficult to copy without being in extreme conditions: https://www.threads.com/@__smiz/post/Cxpz28CIkT6 https://www.threads.com/@__smiz/post/Cxpz28CIkT6
    - Plasmoid 2mo ago
      Many people also don't know that Vienna was isolated and divided for nearly 50 years during the cold war. A significant amount of the available housing is due to Vienna having a bad economy for almost a century.
      - tomjakubowski 2mo ago
        Huh? I thought that Vienna's partition period following WWII lasted more like ten years than sixty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria
hankbond 2mo ago
I'm not learned enough on the topic to really comment on it but I appreciated the diagrams and the simple fluid prose. Overall the meta lesson reminds me of the building adage "measure twice cut once".
roenxi 2mo ago
People can write what they like on their blog, but this article seems to be missing key details - we don't find out what the model is or the coefficients he's using and the model apparently immediately produces unrealistic results. Hopefully it is made clear in the book, but unless someone has read Abundance it is hard to follow. If the model is just a rough rule of thumb then spot checking 4 cities in completely different legal frameworks, cultures and economic situations doesn't give us a lot of data. Economies are very complicated and any effect can be overruled by something unrelated but more impactful happening.
edg5000 2mo ago
I like how they're using real numbers and theorizing around that. An interesting next step would to dive in deeper, to see up close where it's bottlenecking.
baron816 2mo ago
Progressives and Democratic Socialists like to pretend that the government can pass a law which would allow it to build lots of social housing/provide health care for everyone/build a lot of green energy/etc and it would just go and do that easy peasy. But building housing and infrastructure is not something you can just snap your fingers and it happens. It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night. Governments have to spend years and decades building systems and institutional knowledge around these things. The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out. This is a lot of what Abundance is actually about. Part of it is saying “yeah, let’s take the time and build state capacity to be able to do some of these things”. Vienna is able to build social housing because it’s been doing it consistently for decades and has all the right systems in place to do it. It’s not a libertarian book that just says “get rid of the rules and let capitalism sort everything out”. It’s about figuring out the right set of rules and incentives that allow governments to sustainably build things, or else facilitate the market to build them.
- lux-lux-lux 2mo ago
  It’s always fascinating to see when “this is hard and expensive to do, so we shouldn’t even try” is considered a compelling argument (housing, health care) vs. when it isn’t (defense, policing, the modern panopticon).
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    We spend way less on policing than people think we do. A generation of progressives got turned around on this because people don't understand how overlapping taxing bodies work.
    - lux-lux-lux 2mo ago
      [dead]
- ux266478 2mo ago
  > The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out. That's true if we're talking residential structures using load bearing masonry in America. Modern timber-framed houses? Nope. > It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night. If this is true for your locale, the reasoning always boils down to the slow pace of bureaucracy. Needing this permit cleared, then this one, need this plan signed off on, need this approved, etc. Of course, you can absolutely expedite the process by throwing money at the problem. The wealthy do that in LA all the time, to shorten a 5-year bureaucratic lead time into a matter of months. Sometimes it's to build where local regulation would outright forbid it, rather than expedite the process. The thing is that this bureaucratic lead-time is entirely manufactured. It's not actually a natural law. The state can bypass it anytime it pleases and and pass the buck to pick up the mess. The obvious contemporary example is just how quickly data centers have been built, but it's a truism in general. Never underestimate the power of the state deciding to ignore its own laws, and its natural god-given right to do so at any time.
joenot443 2mo ago
I get the impression the author may not have made it to the end of the book where a lot of these positions are better addressed. I can take out my copy and explain better later today, if it’s interesting.
cyberax 2mo ago
Hint: if you see "Austin" bandied around as a good example, then you know shit about housing. Austin rent decreases happened because of its stagnant population, not because of new construction. It's barely growing _at_ _best_, and I predict that it's actually _shrinking_. You can play around with the ACS dataset yourself: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDP1Y2024.DP05 https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDP1Y2024.DP05 The 1-year estimate for 2024 is 993771, barely up from 979263 for 2019 (there is no 1-year estimate for 2020).

47 points by laxmena 2mo ago

This analysis, for whatever it's worth, is wrestling with a straw man. Klein and Thompson never claim that permitting reform is the only lever available. The housing strategy Abundance documents is that of the YIMBY movement, and YIMBYs are all-of-the-above advocates. If you can get subsidized housing built, you get it built. Meanwhile, you fix exclusionary zoning and clear a path for the market (which produced virtually all the homes we live in) to function as well.

theluketaylor 2mo ago
I'm hugely in favour of adding non-market housing anywhere it can be added, but the author declaring it a different fix to the housing crisis from zoning is naive at best. Non-market housing is subject to the exact same complex local regulations as market housing, plus all the complexity of government projects, a patchwork of subsidies, grants, and loans to get funding, and even more intense public scrutiny. Trying to get social housing done is playing an exceptionally hard game on nightmare mode. The single lever he points out is itself a ton of local, regional, and federal regulations and laws that all need modernizing or abolishing, which is far from a simple, single lever at all.
- tptacek 2mo ago
  Worth mentioning here that appeals to social housing have over the last 20 years been absolutely classic NIMBY arguments. People raise it because they know significant amounts of social housing won't get built, but if you fix the gating factors for the market, it will. But this is also a factional concern; for reasons I don't understand, the Democratic left polarized hard against "abundance" (and thus YIMBYism). So these kinds of arguments now code as "centrist". Nathan J. Robinson actually said the quiet part out loud a couple years ago, when he wrote in Current Affairs (a relatively high-profile American leftist periodical) a long defense of suburban NIMBYism.
  - Avshalom 2mo ago
    Of course one of the reasons social housing won't get built is the faircloth limit from 20 years ago.
    - tptacek 2mo ago
      That's like 4-5 principal components back from the first principal component, which is that the places that need housing market vitality the most could not reasonably afford to acquire the housing to support it. The best school systems in Chicagoland are in the inner-ring suburbs, locked up for SFZ residents. Even if their municipal governments wanted to go all-out to fix that, they couldn't conceivably acquire the land and arrange the development. Worth adding that "public housing" isn't the only or even the most common form of subsidized housing. There's no Faircloth limit at all to public-private subsidized housing with AMI-calibrated eligibility and rent, and that's a much more common form of subsidized housing than a "housing project". But it can't get built in meaningful numbers either, because it's simply too expensive.
      - JuniperMesos 2mo ago
        > The best school systems in Chicagoland are in the inner-ring suburbs, locked up for SFZ residents. Even if their municipal governments wanted to go all-out to fix that, they couldn't conceivably acquire the land and arrange the development. Also, if municipal governments "fixed that" by making it possible for more housing to be built and more people to move into neighborhoods served by those currently-good school districts, the odds are good that the influx of new students would make the school district worse. And the people currently living in single-family zoned residences know this - one motivation for NIMBYism is that it helps maintain the high quality of the local school district where your kids currently attend school. I'm personally in favor of abolishing public school districts, precisely so that the location of a house is no longer a major deciding factor in where any children in that household attend school. This reduces the incentive for people who live in a house in a good public school district to resist building any more houses in that school district, lest the inhabitants of that house make the school district less good.
pj_mukh 2mo ago
Yes, plus, all these meta-studies always seemed to ignore the reasons for the demand shock. "It's not the permits, it's the demand shock" (the last image in the blog post). The "demand shock", was the economy growing...quickly. And that statement is left hanging in the air like we're supposed to do something about it. The economic growth is a good thing, we should have a housing system that reacts to it like surge pricing but instead we get a lot of hand-wringing then rezoning 5-10 years too late, so instead of temporary surge pricing, we get permanent ultra-heavy-high-surge pricing.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
Animats 2mo ago
> This analysis, for whatever it's worth, is wrestling with a straw man. More like a straw army. Austin is surrounded by empty flat land. San Francisco is surrounded by water and was built out many decades ago. London suffers from being the main city in Britain. The UK is overcentralized. Most of the money and power are in London. Some countries are centralized like that, with all the good stuff around the national capital. France, Japan, and Russia are; the US, Canada, and China are not. (China, maybe; too much is near Beijing, but there are lots of other big cities.)
- CalRobert 2mo ago
  SF still has lots of low density that could be demolished in favour of higher density housing though.
- vannevar 2mo ago
  >Austin is surrounded by empty flat land. San Francisco is surrounded by water and was built out many decades ago. This^^^. The idea that housing starts are solely (or even substantially) impacted by regulation is a case of control bias, attributing disproportionate influence to minor factors we can control (like regulation) over major factors we cannot (land, labor and material costs).
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    I've read this like 5 times and I still can't make sense of it. Is this a variant of the "5-bedroom houses in Cairo Illinois only cost $40,000, there is no housing shortage" argument?
    - vannevar 2mo ago
      No---did you read the original article? The comment and the parent will make more sense. Basically the article compares Austin and San Fransisco and attributes the difference in building rates entirely to disparities in regulation. Which is obviously not an accurate framing, for the reasons mentioned in our respective comments. Your comment is more addressed at affordability, which is largely a function of wealth disparity: as the wealthy get richer with respect to the lower percentiles, they absorb an increasing share of the home market and drive prices up.

hingler36 2mo ago

This is interesting analysis, but I don't think it necessarily counteracts what the book is saying. To build state-affiliated housing also involved "clearing the pipes" as the article put it. Additionally, the Vienna housing that this article touched on is a way deeper rabbit hole that is absolutely worth looking into. They have a completely different housing paradigm than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

tptacek 2mo ago
(For the uninitiated, the government [and sponsored co-ops] owns almost half the housing in Vienna, and eligibility for social housing, which is seen as desirable, extends deep into the middle class.)
- shay_ker 2mo ago
  There's no free lunch. Housing costs are effectively carried by immigrants and transplants: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Setting-the-record-straight-on-the-Vienna-Social-Housing-Model-final.pdf?x91208 https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Setting-the-r... In general, the Vienna model is very difficult to copy without being in extreme conditions: https://www.threads.com/@__smiz/post/Cxpz28CIkT6 https://www.threads.com/@__smiz/post/Cxpz28CIkT6
  - Plasmoid 2mo ago
    Many people also don't know that Vienna was isolated and divided for nearly 50 years during the cold war. A significant amount of the available housing is due to Vienna having a bad economy for almost a century.
    - tomjakubowski 2mo ago
      Huh? I thought that Vienna's partition period following WWII lasted more like ten years than sixty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria

hankbond 2mo ago

I'm not learned enough on the topic to really comment on it but I appreciated the diagrams and the simple fluid prose. Overall the meta lesson reminds me of the building adage "measure twice cut once".

roenxi 2mo ago

People can write what they like on their blog, but this article seems to be missing key details - we don't find out what the model is or the coefficients he's using and the model apparently immediately produces unrealistic results. Hopefully it is made clear in the book, but unless someone has read Abundance it is hard to follow. If the model is just a rough rule of thumb then spot checking 4 cities in completely different legal frameworks, cultures and economic situations doesn't give us a lot of data. Economies are very complicated and any effect can be overruled by something unrelated but more impactful happening.

edg5000 2mo ago

I like how they're using real numbers and theorizing around that. An interesting next step would to dive in deeper, to see up close where it's bottlenecking.

baron816 2mo ago

Progressives and Democratic Socialists like to pretend that the government can pass a law which would allow it to build lots of social housing/provide health care for everyone/build a lot of green energy/etc and it would just go and do that easy peasy. But building housing and infrastructure is not something you can just snap your fingers and it happens. It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night. Governments have to spend years and decades building systems and institutional knowledge around these things. The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out. This is a lot of what Abundance is actually about. Part of it is saying “yeah, let’s take the time and build state capacity to be able to do some of these things”. Vienna is able to build social housing because it’s been doing it consistently for decades and has all the right systems in place to do it. It’s not a libertarian book that just says “get rid of the rules and let capitalism sort everything out”. It’s about figuring out the right set of rules and incentives that allow governments to sustainably build things, or else facilitate the market to build them.

lux-lux-lux 2mo ago
It’s always fascinating to see when “this is hard and expensive to do, so we shouldn’t even try” is considered a compelling argument (housing, health care) vs. when it isn’t (defense, policing, the modern panopticon).
- tptacek 2mo ago
  We spend way less on policing than people think we do. A generation of progressives got turned around on this because people don't understand how overlapping taxing bodies work.
  - lux-lux-lux 2mo ago
    [dead]
ux266478 2mo ago
> The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out. That's true if we're talking residential structures using load bearing masonry in America. Modern timber-framed houses? Nope. > It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night. If this is true for your locale, the reasoning always boils down to the slow pace of bureaucracy. Needing this permit cleared, then this one, need this plan signed off on, need this approved, etc. Of course, you can absolutely expedite the process by throwing money at the problem. The wealthy do that in LA all the time, to shorten a 5-year bureaucratic lead time into a matter of months. Sometimes it's to build where local regulation would outright forbid it, rather than expedite the process. The thing is that this bureaucratic lead-time is entirely manufactured. It's not actually a natural law. The state can bypass it anytime it pleases and and pass the buck to pick up the mess. The obvious contemporary example is just how quickly data centers have been built, but it's a truism in general. Never underestimate the power of the state deciding to ignore its own laws, and its natural god-given right to do so at any time.

joenot443 2mo ago

I get the impression the author may not have made it to the end of the book where a lot of these positions are better addressed. I can take out my copy and explain better later today, if it’s interesting.

cyberax 2mo ago

Hint: if you see "Austin" bandied around as a good example, then you know shit about housing. Austin rent decreases happened because of its stagnant population, not because of new construction. It's barely growing _at_ _best_, and I predict that it's actually _shrinking_. You can play around with the ACS dataset yourself: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDP1Y2024.DP05 https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDP1Y2024.DP05 The 1-year estimate for 2024 is 993771, barely up from 979263 for 2019 (there is no 1-year estimate for 2020).