Chappelle is your racist brother in law’s favorite black comedian for a reason.
Yellow Springs, Ohio is not what you’re probably expecting it is.
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Yea I get that the line between satire and punching down can be pretty thin, and I think it’s even likely that he is going for satire here, but I think you all are being way to generous. It’s a pretty ugly skit. 99.9% of the people watching this skit aren’t laughing at the delusional white people who think this is what black people would do with money. They’re laughing because it’s a black comedian validating their own thoughts about black people, “hahaha they totally would buy fried chicken and liquor, good one Dave!”
How do these things happen?
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That would be Chris Rock.
The issue is that if you just let people fucking build housing would be a lot more affordable. The developers aren’t saints, but the work does good.
In my neighborhood what the developers want to do is tear down houses, combine lots, lower density, and build $10M single family homes.
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Even taking that as 100% true, I don’t see how it’s relevant.
This is zero level free market invisible hand reach around thinking that is quickly disproven by even a cursory look at the thousands of years of urban development history. The only way you’re going to get affordable housing in the places people want to live is with massive government regulation, and even then it would be so corrupt that it still wouldn’t happen.
It’s not an automatic fact that the market and developers want to increase density and that’s what you are supposing will lower housing costs. You seem to take it as a matter of first principles or something that the free market and developers are going to build more and more housing in higher and higher density until it gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. That’s definitely not universally true. And if it’s not universally true, you can’t just waive your hands around and claim that it’s obvious what the net will be.
Rent control is an issue I’ve changed my mind on repeatedly, but regardless of the correct policy I think its a good example of the toxic nature of treating economics as a science.
Every Econ 101 class teaches that rent control is terrible policy because it reduces the quantity supplied. This is plainly bullshit. In places like NYC or SF, it is not possible to build enough housing to make it affordable, the only way is government regulation.
There’s also a demand problem based on income inequality. Even when places let developers build, it is inevitably high end condos, high end single family homes or hilariously unaffordable rentals. That happens because high earners have all the money.
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That’s an awfully important and subjective addition you threw in there regarding ‘in the places people want to live’, which takes your position and makes it completely unfalsifiable.
I’m not even sure how to approach such a statement. Is the fact that there’s massive development in the Central Valley east of the Diablos to accommodate Bay Area housing evidence count because living in the Central Valley and commuting to the Bay fucking sucks, despite tons of people doing it?
It seems like the other issue is that we’re talking about different things. In the Bay Area example, I’d be fine with whatever luxury massive density development in SF because it would allow more families to live closer to their jobs in SF by living in Oakland instead of Stockton. You want government intervention to allow for more lower income housing directly in SF correct?
If you could effectively pull that off, then that would be ideal. The issue is that those types of programs seem to be captured by NIMBYs to prevent further density in their area which drives their property values up, defeating the original purpose.
No one has said remotely otherwise. I’ve posted no such absolute whatsoever, so I’m confused why you’re responding that way.
That’s not necessarily true. You state it like it’s a fact, ie always true. Like you are saying the market and developers want to increase density and that that would make housing more affordable.
Oh come on, we’re better than this. Surely we can understand that something being generally true doesn’t mean it’s true literally every time right?
You say that’s the way it seems. Zikzak knows more about how it actually is. Like he said it makes a good story in Reason.com that a developer wanted to build a big building and the city stopped them, but that’s not how things are in a lot of places and you can’t just draw conclusions about what leads to unaffordability from those anecdotes.
On what basis are you saying it’s true in the aggregate? That’s my point. All you have are first principles here.
So your solution is what? To force the existing owners in SF to give up their property rights so the 2nd densest city in the US can become even more dense? The people who don’t want more development are the ones who already live there. You’re going to twist yourself into knots trying to justify government intervention against private property in the name of free market private property development.
Trying to not be too personal here, but you have some ideas and some first principles from econ 101 and zikzak is a very smart guy who has been building housing for 25 or 30 years.