When it comes to energy the efficiency of a generation system is pretty much meaningless metric. Price per kilowatt hour is what rules the roost. Renewables particularly solar have become the cheapest form of electricity in history. This is driving demand for storage which is driving exponential cost reductions in that field as well.
Grid scale renewable + storage installations are now becoming competitive with natural gas. Coal is an obsolete energy source. That people in this administration are trying to weelend at Bernie's this corpse of an industry gives me serious doubts about the praise you lap on them.
No the whole book is controversial. It's a political argument for dismantling the welfare state disguised as a review of science. They laundered a bunch of work by racial eugenicists along with a bunch of other junk science methodology.
Calling something "controversial" is a total non-argument. The book's science about IQ is solid.
In actuality, the content of the book was simply a collection of mainstream scientific consensus ideas at that time, without specific controversial add-ons. It's only after the book was published, the book unexpectedly was attacked by proto-woke people.
Inventing strawman out of thin air in order to drown discussion, to attack individuals and paint them evil, that's literally what Nazis did. How ironic.
I think you're giving them too much credit. I don't think they care if the numbers are legit. They care about the optics. They're happy to lie about what they believe if it fits the optics they want to project.
Really. If obsessive zoning and building regulations didn't artificially restrict the supply then there would be no reason for anyone to "invest" in houses.
100%. I'm a far left anticapitalist, but facts are facts. Zoning, restrictive building codes, and the death of much of the housing construction industry post 2007. All contribute to housing costs and homelessness.
I'd like to see zoning opened back up for increasing density wherever it's needed, but I would also like to see a strong social housing policy.
That doesn't strike me as true at all. Nationwide, housing has generally been a "good investment", regardless of whether we're talking about an area that restricts supply or one that does not.
The places where it's a good enough investment for investors to buy up real estate are in these high demand markets where housing supply has massively lagged demand. Homeowners may be satisfied that their home values have increased everywhere, but black Rock isn't buying houses in small towns in Idaho and ohio because the ROI isn't as high.
Rents and home prices have repeatedly fallen in places that have authorized large scale new building. In the past, those price pressures were probably offset by large-scale moves from the northeast and midwest into the Sun Belt, but those appear to have mostly equilibrated now.
An unregulated supply will still offer promising investment opportunities to those with enough money to buy them up. Look at crypto or private equity. These markets are lightly regulated. But prices are bid up by big money. Unfortunately just dumping regulation is unlikely to fix housing.
People say this but then never draw the rest of the owl. It costs money, substantial money, to hold on to a house. As soon as you propose that you're going to close that gap by renting the house out, you're competing in the market with everybody else letting out houses, and supply-and-demand kicks in.
Can you explain the mechanism by which accumulating vacant houses would provide the same reward structure as crypto speculation?
Professional property managers can scale the cost of ownership in a way individual owners can’t.
Besides that speculators can also withhold supply, artificially inflating prices. 2008 occurred due to speculation, independent of NIMBY regulation.
As for crypto, housing can actually be more profitable than crypto since investors see rentier income not just speculative appreciation.
Ultimately, this isn't just a supply-and-demand problem in an idealized market. It's a resource allocation issue where investors with significant capital can hoard housing, driving up costs, while many people struggle with homelessness. Simply greasing the market with deregulation won't solve this fundamental imbalance.
I'm sure they can do lots of things homeowners can't, but they can't defy gravity. Again: I'm looking for an explanation for how investors could come out ahead amassing houses they keep vacant in the face of increasing supply.
A portion of the investor class may divest through deregulation as the character of the housing market changes. But the fundamental issue is the presence of the investor class itself. Markets don’t redistribute wealth equitably; they concentrate it. This will continue even if markets acquire new character through deregulation. At best deregulation can change the membership of the investor class. It does not eliminate the investor class.
In other words you are looking at it from a supply side but ignoring the wealth distribution of buyers. Wealth has further concentrated among the richest buyers over the past few years, while the poorest have grown poor, leading to higher prices for everyone. That’s the cause, not NIMBYism, which has been around forever. It’s a wealth redistribution issue not a deregulation issue.
You're not answering the question I'm asking. I'm not looking for a treatise. I'm just asking how investors keeping vacant supply off the market could make money in the face of increasing supply. They have to pay to hold the houses. They're not earning income from the houses (they're vacant). Supply of the houses is increasing. Fill in the "???" before "profit".
If investors keep houses off the market that artificially reduces supply. All they need is for the increased prices to outweigh any price decline that comes from increased supply. This can happen with or without vacancies for example by having pricing power in the rental market.
House vacancies aren’t my central argument however - they are a symptom of the wealth distribution problem causing our housing crisis.
You didn't answer my question, you defined it away. Obviously, the premise of investors driving housing costs up is that they're artificially reducing supply. Allowing new housing construction increases supply. The question: assume steadily increasing supply --- how are investors making money on this scheme?
It's fine if you just don't have an answer. But then my point is: nobody seems to have an answer about how this is supposed to work.
Pretty sure I answered your question. As long as scarcity effects outpace price declines investors are incentivized to retain vacancies, and it’s not just vacancies but pricing control over rent. The real housing market isn’t effectively modeled by your simplistic abstraction. If you look at a YIMBY darling like Austin, for example, investor owned housing has actually grown, as well as homelessness, despite a modest decline in median price.
Your rebuttal here is a market in which prices declined.
You're clearly trying to route around the question and answer some broader question I didn't ask about how the overall housing market works. I'm not interested. I asked: how can investors make money on this? Your answer is: they don't; they lose money, but I guess do it anyways in order to twirl their mustaches.
The investor class increased as did homelessness in Austin. Not only that but mortgage payments on the median priced home have increased in Austin, comparing 2018-2019 . Houses are even less affordable.
Investors can make money on price fluctuations and rent. And supply increases are neither immediate nor endless, despite what a simplistic model would hold.
Sadly we need structural solutions not superficial answers to the housing crisis.
Suppliers can make money by withholding supply in an inelastic market. Supply and demand effects depend on elasticity to work. It’s not just NIMBYism which contributes to housing’s inelasticity. It is a basic need, with no substitute, and a long time horizon (for building and moving). Pricing power is a motivation for keeping houses off the market (besides just speculation). You seem to think NIMBYism is the only contributor to that.
And investors providing rentals contribute to supply also, sure. Yet pricing power among suppliers plays a role here as well.
My argument is not that increasing YIMBYism is bad, but that it is a meager half measure that can at best nudge housing prices, not fix the essential problem.
For example, even with
a completely efficient and housing supply, with housing selling at cost, people would still be homeless, as homeless people lack money to pay for housing at cost. By ignoring the wealth composition of buyers, we can at best make housing more elastic through YIMBYism, applying a bandaid rather than fundamentally addressing the housing problem itself.
I'm sure you're writing this in good faith, but it really seems like you're trying to slip out from under the question I asked at the top of this thread. "Suppliers can make money by withholding supply in an inelastic market" is an answer to some other question; my question is: stipulating that they can't rent their properties out, and that supply is consistently increasing, how do they make money? All your specific answers have attempted to define away one or both of the premises of that question.
Yeah it does seem like we are talking around each other but I will try again to answer your question.
It depends on the circumstances of the market. Imagine an extreme hypothetical example, where one investor owns 90 out of 100 houses. And one new house is built every ten years. That investor has pricing power. They can essentially charge whatever they want even if it’s means some houses they own are empty (withholding supply). So: it depends on how fast new houses enter the market versus how much pricing power the investor possesses.
(In fact YIMBY doesn’t create an endless new supply. The idea is that it deregulates, facilitating a new supply where there wasn’t one before. That doesn’t constitute an endless supply, just a new one-time shift allowing a finite boost of additional supply.)
Another example: consider a speculative bubble. In a speculative bubble an investor can purchase a house, it can stay empty, there can be new supply coming into the market, but the forces of froth can outpace the force of additional supply, for quite some time. If they sell before the bubble pops, they profit.
Both these examples are of investors withholding supply, new supply coming into the market, and still profiting. Whether prices fall comes down to whether the downward force of new supply outstrips other forces that boost prices.
So what you're saying is that the scenarios you're thinking of where investors hold houses, don't rent them, and still make money all require investors to have monopoly control of the housing market that is maintained regardless of the amount of supply added, and that rather than exploiting inelasticity they exploit irrational speculative bubbles.
OK.
This describes zero investors anywhere in the country. There is no significant market in the US where investors owns even a significant percentage of all houses (the total in California is 19%, and that statistic is dominated by mom-and-pop house speculators that can't buy even two more houses, let alone keep up with continuous added supply).
I'm fine with the idea that we've played this out now. Maybe someone else has a better idea of how investors can beat zoning reform, but for now I'm going to go back to assuming that investors are immaterial to housing scarcity.
My point with these examples is not that they represent the current investor market, but to provide straightforward examples of how factors other than supply can benefit an investors (since it seemed that this point was hard for us to get on the same page about). Instead my actual argument is that investors don’t need monopolies, just pricing power, which is what an inelastic market gives them.
The 19% stat & the mom-and-pop claim you are referring to is actually misleading for our discussion.
> This study included properties for short-term or long-term rentals, second homes, and vacation retreats but did not follow condos or build-to-rent single-family-home projects.
So it only refers to a subset of the housing market. For a better idea of the pricing power investors have we need to include other kinds of rentals. Also from the article:
> Census Bureau stats show 45% of households live in a place they don’t own, the third-highest share of tenants nationally.
The vast majority of that 45% is multifamily housing, which is typically owned by institutions.
This shows a broader picture of the housing market in California. There is huge institutional ownership of housing. It’s far from implausible that these investors lack pricing power.
Unfortunately deregulating them will do much the same. BlackRock promotes YIMBY because that will allow it to expand its rental property portfolio, effectively generating new cashflows from the poor and middle class to wealthy asset owners. In fact deregulation/regulation is a false choice. Cashflow should go in the opposite direction by raises taxing on the wealthy (including real estate investments) and building public housing.
I completely agree we need to tax the rich and build public housing, but we do also need to allow for greater density in metropolitan areas. We have to build more housing and if we aren't increasing density then we're creating sprawl.
Sprawl chews up more and more farmland and forest, lengthens commutes, increases congestion. There's enough subdivisions and single family neighborhoods already.
This is naive. The problem is that there are enough people with enough power who want house prices to keep going up. The solution must involve making them upset that they cannot get their way. Anything that doesn't have this shape is a stalling tactic in their favor.
I'm not an economist but if you listen to Gary Stevenson talk about this very issue he discusses it in depth. But, when it comes down to it if EVERYTHING is getting more expensive that looking at on variable in one market can't be the crux of the issue.
When you have large transfers of wealth and the wealth gap grows significantly the only thing for rich people to do is buy up assets. Assets are fixed, so the share of assets owned by rich people are drastically increasing. This is inline with the # of houses owned by private investors and #'s of assets owned by other investors will reveal the same thing.
> But, when it comes down to it if EVERYTHING is getting more expensive that looking at on variable in one market can't be the crux of the issue.
Everything isn't getting more expensive. For example, housing prices and rents have gone down in areas where restrictions on new residential construction have been reduced.
> When you have large transfers of wealth and the wealth gap grows significantly the only thing for rich people to do is buy up assets.
That's not the only thing for rich people to do, but it is something people who make smart financial decisions do.
> Assets are fixed, so the share of assets owned by rich people are drastically increasing.
They aren't fixed in any asset class, so there's no real reason to explore your point here.
> This is inline with the # of houses owned by private investors and #'s of assets owned by other investors will reveal the same thing.
CA actually has a lower than average percentage of homes owned by investors, and I haven't seen any evidence it's increasing by a meaningful amount.
Investors tend to invest where the ROI is good. Which tends to be where demand is outstripping supply, but I don't think investor percentages would track that perfectly. I'd expect there to be confounding variables.
Regulations block new supply. If this cannot be overcome, why not add another regulation that private equity cannot own houses? There's no reason they should not be subject to CAs extensive regulations too.
Private equity owns virtually none of the homes in the municipality I live in, just outside the city of Chicago, adjacent to redlined neighborhoods with abysmal schools full of families who would love a chance at the resources we have. Despite insanely high property taxes that depress housing values, our home prices set new records every year.
Homeowners here would just love to spend a year workshopping regulations to prevent investors from buying homes. They know that those regulations would do nothing at all to address the scarcity that drives their home prices, and wouldn't result in them having to adapt to large numbers of new neighbors.
It's the exact same reason they obsess over inclusionary zoning ordinances (IZOs). Affordability is so important! That's why we need new, toothier regulations to ensure that no new housing projects here can ever pencil out for the developers.
PE is a complete sideshow. The root cause of the housing crisis is exclusionary zoning.
Huh. So, like, maybe if rents were not spiking and people were not bleeding money to predatory landlords, maybe, hear me out, maybe they would instead pay someone to build them a house.
2021 called, it would like its performative talking points back.
Build more housing, and "predatory" landlords will have more competition. The endless restrictions on residential construction are the root cause, not your envy of wealthy individuals.
Side point: There are many people who are in no position to own a home or have one built for them. Where do they live if there aren't any landlords?
Not entirely, the major factor is banks' credit creation. When any person can go and take a loan that was created from nothing (literal digits created by your bank), and sometimes based on another "speculated value" of a house you own, you will flood the market with an exponential rise of demand that will ALWAYS be higher than the supply. To solve the housing issue you have to follow the root cause, and always follow the money: first, halt credit creation, disincentivize it (ban interest), no speculation values. Second, make housing a depreciated asset, like cars, etc. Without these two, housing markets will never be solved. The thing is, the government knows that, but it's in its interest to keep the prices up, because that will mean more paid taxes! Which is why they fought WFH and created this hybrid model, to keep people around urban areas and keep prices up. I think Canada even admitted it later -I remember I read it somewhere. It's a multi-dimensional issue and the only losing party here is the average middle class person.
Contrarian work does fine if it's solid and based in reality. It's just that most contrarian work is crap and it's hard to get funding for junk science. You'd have a hard time finding funding for work on phrenology. Doesn't mean it's being artificially suppressed.
> He later became known as a skeptic on climate change, publishing the book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, which was widely condemned for promoting climate denial.
“Climate Denial” is shorthand for anyone who is contrarian to the consensus, no? Or can you provide a single person who opposes the consensus who isn’t labeled the same?
Regardless. It seems like it's less a detailed breakdown of the science and more a pedantic argument about the meaning of science being settled. There's virtually no expert who would argue we know everything there is to know about climate science so it seems the entire book is a refutation of a straw man.
The disconnect seems to be that the political apparatus seems to characterize these “no expert who would argue we know everything there is to know about climate science” folks as “experts who argue that we know everything there is to know about climate science” folks.
Hence the whole “settled science” BS talking point.
I'd argue the much bigger problem is the those who argue we don't know enough to take serious action on climate change. Uncertainty about how monsoons are going to react or when the east antarctic might begin to shed mass aren't serious enough uncertainties to justify continuing this out of control experiment with the thermal and chemical properties of the atmosphere and oceans.
There's no time to spend dealing with the many, many contrarians out there. Wikipedia is a good smell test. For climate I believe one source: https://www.ipcc.ch/
If a legitimate study finds some results that are contrary to the mainstream it will end up in the ipcc. Like the study that said the antarctic was (until recently) gaining mass. Most studies that are contrarian are just garbage though. Either the product of idealoges or mercenaries working for the fossil fuel industry.
They have a set process. This is reading tea leaves. The numbers were revised up under Biden and down under Trump. "Clearly this is manipulation based on the fact that it makes me look bad". Said the charlatan.
You're repeating the propaganda that is used to put cops on edge and make them trigger happy. There is a long list of jobs that are more dangerous than cop in the US. They hype themselves up that they're in danger all the time and citizens pay the price.
1659447091 did not compare Police Officer’s jobs with other jobs but merely pointed out that traffic stops are dangerous for them. Imagine if part of the job involved a 0.3% possibility of getting killed, how would you approach that part of the job?
But they're not actually that dangerous, I don't think LEO even break like top 10 most dangerous jobs.
The problem is that LEOs have a separate, extremely lenient, set of standards they're judged on. We don't tolerate mistakes at other jobs, much less deadly mistakes or mistakes that cost millions in lawsuits. Hell, the McDonald's cashier is getting insta-fired if their drawer is 1 dollar short.
Grid scale renewable + storage installations are now becoming competitive with natural gas. Coal is an obsolete energy source. That people in this administration are trying to weelend at Bernie's this corpse of an industry gives me serious doubts about the praise you lap on them.
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