Thank you for proving my point by immediately posting a couple out-of-context paragraphs and implying they say something they don’t. Here’s the actual article if anybody wants to be bothered reading the whole thing, including the end where he celebrates the fact that local governments have a lot of control over land use regulations.
Oh okay. The full article really changes everything and completely validates your point. Boy do I have egg on my face. As as semi-regular reader of his since high school I must have been hallucinating when I have read his opinions on the topic.
He doesn’t consistently rail against rent control https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html and zoning laws. "rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and—among economists, anyway—one of the least controversial”.
“As Jason Furman, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, recently pointed out, national housing prices have risen much faster than construction costs since the 1990s, and land-use restrictions are the most likely culprit. Yes, this is an issue on which you don’t have to be a conservative to believe that we have too much regulation.”
And he even mentions nimbyism in his Tweet praising Warren https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1111302200943435776
“ith incentives for state and local governments to loosen restrictive zoning rules. All solid economics, no gimmicks”
" should add that she’s quite brave in not pandering to NIMBYism. This is the kind of plan that should have broad bipartisan support; it would even have significant effects on economic growth, by helping people move to where the good jobs are"
“I think that zoning laws should be repealed at the federal level” isn’t the same thing as “incentives for state and local governments to loosen restrictive zoning rules.”
He’s also cherry picking again and ignoring the part of the tweet where Krugman praises Warren’s proposal that calls for even moar government involvement in housing.
https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1111302200943435776
NPC, do you support public investment in rental housing?
Yeah price controls generally are never a good answer for any problem. They actually disincentivize people from solving them.
Case and point nyc has had rent control for decades and is still one of the most expensive rental markets in the world.
Real estate is one of the only true supply problems in the world, and as a result rent control actually prevents new development which raises rent on everyone not fortunate enough to live in a rent controlled unit.
You guys know I’m no libertarian. Price controls are what caused the economic problems of the 70s that resulted in the boomers turning to the right. We need to never repeat those mistakes again.
There are lots of better ways to solve this problem. Lots and lots. Starting with preventing rent seekers from blocking larger developments and investing heavily in mass transit.
A better option than rent control would be putting a luxury tax on housing units that cost more than x% of the median income in an area for instance.
Generally I’m not a big fan of subsidies as they tend to result in super wasteful overdevelopment. China has entire empty cities because of top down subsidies for housing development for instance.
This is all well and good, but rent control is less about affordable housing in general and more about letting people stay where they are. For someone who has to keep moving every few years in order to stay in affordable housing, that shit sucks.
I’m sorry but moving every few years is part of living in a major metro. Does it suck? You bet. I’ve moved seven times in the last eleven years so I sympathize… but that doesn’t mean it’s ok to fuck up the entire rental market so that people won’t be inconvenienced. We live in a time where rent is eating an ever larger share of city dwellers incomes. Minimizing that is the priority not providing the incumbents with stability. They don’t have special rights to specific territory just because they were there first.
They do if there’s rent control. That’s what rights are. If there are any tenant protections laws, then they have special rights to that specific territory. Can tenants be evicted with 24 hours notice? 3-days? ‘No Cause’ evictions in Vermont require 60-120 days notice. And the “owners” of that property have special rights to that specific territory solely as the result of real estate law and those laws are already limited in all kinds of ways.
The same sort of debate is pretty hot among people in California on Prop. 13. Prop 13 makes it so older people have not been forced to move out of the houses they have owned for many years. It would be a real hardship for a very large population if there were no Prop 13. On the other hand it has made the tax burden less progressive.
This is true, but there is not a small population of old people who have owned their home for a long time and will never sell it and realize that “wealth”. I think it’s pretty awful to force those people to move because their property has appreciated so much. Much more fair to eliminate the tax free status of the first $5.5M of inheritance. (whether or not that money should go to the feds or state/local is another issue)
Literally all I’m getting from this is that a lot of you are fine with completely fucking up the housing market as long as it benefits you. You guys are just straight wrong on this issue on multiple levels. You have no right to live in a specific spot, and if someone else can use the land better they should compensate you (if you own it) and you should move. If you rent that property the nature of the relationship is short term and the other party to your lease has no legal/moral obligation to renew.
California’s property tax freeze was a terrible choice that literally caused the housing crisis that is forcing people to leave your state entirely. It’s one of the major reasons the property values are so high (because there’s no downside to them rising that high… Texas is 100% correct to raise nearly all city revenues through property taxes as it puts the city on the same page for investment as everyone else). The other major cause of the housing affordability problems in CA is single family zoning regulations that are preventing additional density, which is also borderline criminally negligent public policy.
It kind of blows my mind that you guys are OK with 100’s of thousands of people (probably millions but I don’t want to get nit picked) being put in a position where they literally have to leave the state or become homeless so that you don’t have to move every few years because of rent prices changing.
You guys are being insanely hypocritical here. An awful lot of you are fine with other people paying the price for bad policy when you’re the beneficiaries apparently. Please explain to me why you’re not a smaller scale version of a business that wants to pollute as much as is convenient without paying anything?
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Restrictive zoning regulations and a metric fuck ton of demand are why Boston/Cambridge land is expensive. The reason why you have to invest heavily in mass transit is because the really desirable real estate will never be affordable for normal people and isn’t supposed to be. The more valuable land is the more density it’ll typically support however, so standing in the way of that development basically makes the land even rarer and more expensive which pushes it out of reach of even more people.
You guys are really showing your ass here and it isn’t pretty.
Shut up dude. Your support for capital gains tax rates being low is like their support for terrible real estate policies except instead of only applying to a few highly overpriced (because of supply disruptions they are directly advocating for ITT) it’s the whole country.
You’re literally the broken clock in this thread not them.
Damn has it been 4 months already?
The fact that the use of property is governed by socially created rules doesn’t mean that there are not also moral rights that people have as well, whether or not they are actually respected by the rules society has created. As an uncontroversial example, black people have a moral right to be permitted to rent or acquire property on the same basis as whites, even though there have been times when that right was denied by law (and currently denied de facto all too often).
Generally speaking, it is very good politics to say that the voters in a particular territory are entitled to better treatment than outsiders, but it is pretty hard to sell morally. The best you can do, as far as I can see, is to say that it is an overriding value to preserve existing communities from disruption caused by adding new residents, so it’s justified to infringe on the rights of potential residents. There’s a host of problems with that view though. If community is a club good that’s only available to certain people, why is society subsidizing it for them on our most valuable land? Factually, why can’t you accommodate new residents without displacing the existing community by just building lots of housing? What compensation do you owe the potential residents whose rights you trampled on to protect your community?
Most importantly though, this is literally the same case that “cultural difference” white nationalist types put on immigration restriction. It’s less odious for a bunch of reasons, but the idea that a democratic community has a moral dispensation to infringe on the rights of others to further its own self-interest is actually a pretty dangerous one, because the victims aren’t represented.
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That’s disappointingly bad and I think disingenuous.
I disagree completely about the less odious part. When you sit on extremely valuable land that is desperately needed to accommodate significantly more people you deny the community you live in a significant amount of funding (and you block all those people from moving to a better area and living a better life, which is just incredibly wrong). This in turn starves local public services which impacts the entire community.
Nobody has a right to better treatment than anyone else. That includes incumbent homeowners/renters/etc. If you own the property you’re entitled to pocket the land value appreciation on your property, but you’re not entitled to simply sit tight blocking development without paying the ever increasing property taxes. Those property taxes making that inefficient housing unaffordable is a feature NOT a bug. You’re supposed to move out and make way for the however many families who are now going to live on that land. They have as much right to live in that housing as the incumbent homeowner does to live there, only more because as a group they’ll pay dramatically more taxes than the homeowner, which is necessary for the area to grow in a sustainable way.
Los Angeles and San Fransisco are two of the cities with the worst traffic, the highest land values, and the worst homeless problems in the country because they have been completely captured by local land owners who want to hoard the economic gains (which they generally had zero hand in creating) for themselves (and if you say you did please explain how you’re personally responsible for the weather being perfect, the schools which you aren’t funding as well as you should because of your hoarding, or the tech industry which you’re actively blocking).
It’s disgusting and it’s a great example of why so many of the people you’re thwarting from enjoying the opportunities you’re hoarding have a tendency to hate liberals. This kind of bullshit is a huge part of the reason people mistrust government.
Back in the 70’s before deregulation there was LOTS of stuff like this. The trucking industry was hugely regulated (with a healthy black market that was run by criminals like so much of the economy back then) and it made literally everything cost drastically more than it should have. Price controls are the liberal answer to supply side economics basically. They are obviously bad, totally disproven, and defending them is massively disqualifying if we’re talking about whether someone has an opinion worth taking seriously.
A lot of people on this forum like to pretend like the Boomers didn’t come by their conservatism honestly. That’s simply not true. They grew up in an America where crony capitalists, politicians, and gangsters called the shots… and then they watched that system melt down even more than our current one is today. Those guys weren’t any better than our corporate overlords are today. They made the word liberal into a slur for an entire generation. Trying to pretend like they didn’t is a great way to repeat the mistakes that put them in power. We need to be moving towards a better system than we have today that has learned the lessons of the past. We can start with using better economic metrics, reducing corruption/regulatory capture, and actually taxing rich people at a sane level to fund high quality public services that are run with maximum efficiency in mind. That second point isn’t just aimed at fossil fuel companies getting massively subsidized by the government… it’s also aimed squarely at coastal blue states that have allowed themselves to be completely taken over by powerful local interests who are screwing the many to benefit the few just as surely as anyone in Washington.
I feel like you’re constantly disappointed in my posts, which either means that you’re not appropriately updating your expectations of my post quality or I’m in a death-spiral of constantly worsening posts. If it’s the latter, I’m sorry not to have lived up to your expectations, and generally about the terrible posts. If it’s the former though, that’s on you.
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Maybe it’s just that you’re smart and could do better. Maybe it’s that I would like to reach across the aisle.
The disingenuous part, I think, is that I just don’t think you’re an ancap absolutist and the kind of pure theoretical criticism you’re making could be made against lots of things you’d agree with. If I were arguing in bad faith I could now turn around and say “so you must think such and such” taking the idea that you think communities have no rights to set laws to some extreme.
You suggest that property rights/land rights are a moral right, but that’s just a wild invention (that you try to make sound more solid by equating it to anti-racism). Property rights are where this ancap/right-libertarian thinking becomes inconsistent and has to pretend that they are a moral right handed down by God. It is the people who allow someone to “own” property. The rights come from the people. And which people decide the ownership rights for different land is just not an obvious thing. How do you suggest this work? There are no development rules? Everyone on Earth votes about rules for everywhere on Earth? And it’s hardly clear that the unlimited development would be the result of letting everyone decide. An easy example there is that pretty close to everyone other than developers and billionaires, including local Californians, agree that you can’t own the beach. That’s a model of actually being fair to everyone, including outsiders, the model where land is not ownable at all.
Property rights are a compromise of liberty. So, in the real world, how do you go about making that compromise as fair and consensual as possible? By making everything everywhere equally up to everyone even if they are unlikely to ever be affected? A global democratic totalitarianism? Doesn’t sound good. I think if you’re going to compromise on principles of freedom, which you have to in order to do this building, you should try to be reasonable and compromising and I think the people most directly affected should have more say than people who may never be affected, along with the other compromises in the social contract where the whole larger society agrees on things like not allowing people to exclude someone because of the color of their skin.
They didn’t make the area more desirable though. It’s desirable for a whole host of factors of which the local community is a pretty minor contributor. And they are more than welcome to move into the newly developed multiple dwelling unit down the street. This is a terrible argument for giving one group a huge handout at the expense of a different much larger group of people.
I’m sorry but there’s just no substance at all to what you’re claiming here. Land is valuable primarily because of the weather/schools/economic opportunities/etc.
Again I’m fine with taxing people who are developing the area to make the typical unit more expensive, but I’m not OK with restricting additional density in any way. Rent control and property tax freezes are terrible for the communities that have them in the aggregate and there are millions of very real victims of it. Far more than there are victims of gentrification.
If you buy land while it’s not very valuable and it becomes valuable later you are entitled to the right to sell it at a potentially considerable profit. You are not entitled to just sit on it indefinitely in your massively inefficient single family single story home in an area that should be 15 stories tall. You are literally causing dozens of other people to be very directly harmed so that you don’t face any inconvenience… Unless you’re willing to make up the difference to the community through your new much higher tax assessment.