Reihan Salam wrote a piece for The Atlantic in which he said, hey, maybe YIMBYs would get more of what they want if they tried to engage in the compromise and coalition-building that are the core of politics.
Presumably because if those terrible-horrible-no good illegals just stayed in their home countries, they would starve-be killed-etc. and decrease the surplus population?
There is a strange logic that lives in the word where the only two options are "ban illegulz, they're taking our jorbs" and "open tha bordurz and let billionz in".
Canada essentially doesn't have illegals. We let in a whole lot of rich and educated immigrants. And when they aren't rich and educated we encourage them to stay in less populated areas for a while.
Why didn't you say that in the first place instead of going on a rant about how illegals automatically get blamed everything the price of sushi goes up?
Pretty sure those illegal aliens would need just as much food if they stay in their home countries as they do in the US. Mexican (and Brazilian and Venezuelan ...) cows also fart methane. You are just shifting the location of the farting cow. And, of course, since edible cow parts are shipped world-wide, the exact location of the farting cow is not so meaningful. It will still exist and fart.
The rise in housing prices is fundamentally due to a mismatch between the number of people seeking housing and the number of houses available. You're correct that if we just stop admitting immigrants that housing prices will eventually go down, as we have a negative birth rate, but this problem can also be solved by just building a lot more housing. Your path leads to economic stagnation as the population slowly grows older, and the economy sags under the weight of it's elderly. I prefer the "build more houses" path.
That's kind of the problem but building more houses is obviously cheaper in rural and exurban areas. Immigration in general tends to be concentrated in already built up urban cores.
Farmland is expensive. How are they going to afford it and the tools to farm. Very few small farmers anymore. We have some go into it in our area, usually to quit when they realize how much work it is.
That's not really the whole story at all though is it?
Lot's of recent market influences have made basic house construction more expensive in the first place (land prices, supply shortages, inflation, labor, etc.). So many developers are simply going bigger and swankier to sell to the demographic that can still afford them: upper-middle class, all upper class, and corporations. New house construction is actually booming right now, but very little of it is affordable to any lower-middle and middle class buyers - which happen to be both the largest buyer demographic, and the ones who need it the most.
It's not nearly as simple as you would suggest it is.
No, of course, like everything it is actually extremely complicated. But in the realm of "too many immigrants causing too much demand" I'm simply stating that there are two ways to solve that issue, fewer immigrants or to meet the demand.
What you're talking about is part of the reason it's difficult to meet the demand, to build enough houses, and is difficult. There's a lot of factors that get in the way of us building enough houses, and everything you mentioned is part of that problem. I'm not saying "just build more houses, it's easy", I guess I'm just trying to say the solution to "we can't build enough houses right now to meet demand" is not to say "then we should limit immigration". There's a lot of other steps you can take in the other direction before you find yourself having to blame it on the immigrants.
Considering the metric crap-ton of apps and features on a smart phone that are becoming more and more ubiquitous to employment and just doing business in general...no.
'Dumb' phones are certainly cheaper, but they are also becoming rather obsolete as time goes by. And I say that as a pseudo-dumb phone owner myself (a few essential apps and no linked accounts). I had to get issued a special Duo token (any replacements at my own expense) just to sign in to everything under the sun at my work...simply because I don't own my own smartphone. Tons of little transactional things that businesses used to cover are now being 'outsourced' to personal smart phones.
So no, I do not think cell phones (in a practical modern sense) are way cheaper than they used to be. The average price of a smart phone in America is ~$800 now, how is in the world is that cheaper than 10 years ago?
Construction costs have increased so dramatically recently that even in a lot of non-blighted (but cheap-land) areas, existing houses sell below replacement cost.
Your path leads to less habitat for everything but humans, more traffic, more smog, less birdsong, more noise, more light pollution, more crowds of people all staring at their phone. I'll take the greying population (a one-time shift and then it's over, once the baby boomers are all gone), over unsustainable attempts at constant growth.
Closing the border for 3 years is ALREADY the one thing that happened in 40 years that actually raised wages at the bottom. Close it another 7 and the wage and housing problem would be solved. At that point, feel free to open it back up, slowly. But it would take at least 7 years of low birth rate, curtailed immigration, and old people dying to just course correct back to a sane supply/demand ratio.
I love how YIMBYs believe in supply and demand and market dynamics for literally everything except the supply of humans. Looking at the chart at the top, it's perfectly clear we have a gross over-supply of people, or asset owners and employers would never be able to get away with raising prices and lowering wages like that.
I don't think I've seen anyone making the argument before that the reason wages are rising now is because of lower immigration. Has immigration really declined so much? I guess I expected it would in 2020 because of COVID, but I'd be interested in seeing the figures.
And I'm fully acknowledging that lowering the population is an option to fix the housing crisis. I'm not denying that at all like you're implying. I'm just saying that the solution has 2 sides, and I think that one is worse for the economy, not better.
As a counter-point, immigration reached a steep low in the 70s-80s without it fixing our wages/housing issues. Why would we expect that to change now? Especially with just 7 years of a pause? Seems wildly optimistic to me, and that's granting it would have any effect at all.
You are very wrong on that -- 1970 was literally the absolute low point of immigration in the US, on both an absolute and relative measure, since the 1800s. Immigrants were 20% of the labor force in the beginning of the 1900s. Then Congress implemented the National Origins Formula, which basically shut down immigration for everyone but western Europeans from 1921-1965. Immigration plummeted so that at the low point, in 1970, only 5% of the labor force were immigrants. This changed because of Lyndon Johnson's sweeping reform opening immigration to everyone, so that after the 70s, it's been steadily growing each year back to almost 1920 levels -- until the Covid shut down.
Do you really think it's a coincidence that it was PRECISELY during that period that the US achieved the only time in its entire history when wages grew and inequality shrank? When labor was at its most powerful? Of course it's not a coincidence -- everything is supply and demand. Less impoverished workers with no bargaining power and limited language skills, more leverage for workers = higher wages.
People don't like to talk about this because it seems mean to immigrants. It isn't their fault. They're great. But they absolutely depress wages and increase inequality, it is unavoidable. The larger the masses of laborers, the less leverage they have and more profit the employers can take from their labor. It has always and everywhere been the case.
So, if you haven't seen anyone make the argument about Covid immigration and the labor shortage, it's because it's now completely taboo to say anything about immigration/population size without being called racist. One would think that tactic to shut down debate might've been something the capitalist class came up with, yet here we have all these young progressives spouting off about it. Bit it doesn't matter what the immigrants look like, all that matters is how many of them there are and how hard they're willing to work at wages below what naturalized citizens would accept.
Anyway, immigration was basically shut down for two years because of Covid. It reduced the working age immigrant population by 2 million. That wasn't the ONLY thing that reduced the size of the labor force, because baby boomers *finally* retiring also did that. But it was a significant factor.
And the reduction in the labor force is the only reason wages actually went up at the bottom, for literally the first time in 40 years.
I understand that you value "the economy" more than the items I mentioned, when deciding whether you come down on the side of demand or supply. That's a legitimate perspective. For me, I will always choose quality of life over GDP, which I believe is a majority opinion, even though you rarely hear it from the governing class.
Well this is certainly compelling! I'm fairly convinced on the wage issue, at least enough to dig in more, but I'm still not sure what the magnitude of the effect on housing would be. I'm sure there's something to the math of "fewer people, fewer buyers, lower prices" but is it going to fix this crazy housing mess we're in or is it going to lower prices by 3% or something?
That's funny because from the Left I always hear that the Biden Administration more-or-less maintained Trump's immigration policies unchanged, which makes a bit of sense to me since I constantly hear about labor shortages in immigrant-dependent sectors.
I quite understand that labor shortages are what drive up wages. That's why I'm happy to hear that unchanged immigration policies from the Trump administration have led to labor shortages. On the other hand, if Biden is letting in all these immigrants, who's finding them to hire?
The biggest issue that YIMBYs have: their "social culture" is twitter. That's it. They will always remain losers as long as this is the case, because twitter turns all of its users into pathetic losers over time.
Yep. Speaking of structural forces, the structural forces of Twitter relentlessly push every discourse community toward smugger, meaner, dumber takes. It doesn't matter what the subject is -- could be anything from rollercoaster fans to Reformed theologians -- Twitter makes the conversation worse.
It's not that there aren't any good, thoughtful comments and comment threads on Twitter. There are! It's just a lot harder and more time consuming to write something like that vs. something mean and snarky, and you get the same amount of engagement anyway
Absolutely! You *can* have good conversations and good political debates on Twitter. Just like humans *can* survive in the frozen wastes of central Antarctica. But in both cases the environment is not working in your favor.
There's only one good Twitter and that's Science Twitter because our literal business is to never actually agree on anything so it's hard to actually get smug.
I live in a city with a serious housing shortage, and the YIMBYs are making serious political progress here under our new mayor. They are a political force in real life, not just twitter.
Madison, Wisconsin. The most prominent issue in last year's mayoral race was housing, with the current mayor running on a fairly aggressive YIMBY platform including some re-zoning and went on to win re-election. The city council is less YIMBY than the mayor, so progress is not as swift as she would like, but even the council just walked back their rejection of a new high-rise building on campus after political pressure from YIMBY activists and went back and approved the building at their next meeting.
I'm not saying the city is a YIMBY haven exactly, but things are definitely trending in that direction. More has been done in the last 4 years under our new mayor for housing than in the couple decades before she was elected.
Thank you for elaborating. I know little about Madison WI, other than it is a deep blue college town. A "new high-rise building on campus" ... so housing for college students (and/or employees) located on the campus grounds is political progress? Or is the building going to house non-university related residents I would think this would be up to the state, since they control the campus, not the city, but I must be wrong, since the city counsel needed to approve.
Well anyone could theoretically live there. It's not a university building, just part of the wider "campus" area I suppose. Not really using it as a technical term. But there is a lot of student objection to this sort of thing, and the council bowed down to it, and then reversed course specifically because of the pro-housing coalition in the city. That's what the YIMBY movement can do on a building-by-building level, and electing YIMBYs to city council seats and a YIMBY mayor.
The new mayor was elected in 2019. Prior to 2020, average new housing units in the city sat at about 2,000 per year for over a decade. In 2021 Madison added 3,500, added around the same in 2022, and is projected to add over 4,000 a year very soon. That's huge progress that is due to some zoning reforms and permitting reforms, and is a major point of the mayor's agenda.
YIMBY-supported legislation in California has been increasingly successful in passing through state government, and the YIMBY movement in general plays a pretty large role in the discourse around housing shortages here in the state.
Again, exactly what I'm critiquing: getting certain legislation or regulatory changes you like is meaningless until the actual cost of housing goes down.
It will take some decades to bring the cost of housing down in the problematic areas because even if all YIMBY policies were passed today to remove policy as the bottleneck, it simply takes time to build housing after a generation or three of being behind the curve.
In fact, that's a common argument by NIMBYs: "all this construction and yet prices don't drop." It worked for eggs and it will work for housing, but the latter takes more time.
The problem with Japan (and Asia in general) is that people want to live in cities. How does that not lead to massive problems with demand outpacing supply?
The movement as a whole may score some victories, and that is a good thing. The individuals themselves will always remain losers until they stop using twitter. That video game is uniquely good at causing people to lose sight of life.
"I don’t understand why that perspective is so often treated as antagonistic to the call for social housing that’s built at taxpayer expense, governed by the state, and distributed on the basis of need rather than through the market mechanism."
You could argue that's the government screwing around in the private sector but of course zoning laws, permitting, etc. is already the government screwing around in the private sector to an extent that reaches far beyond simple regulation.
My concern is always that the government has an unfortunate habit of trying to fix bad regulations by applying even complexity with even more regulations and the results are often suboptimal.
The government did go into building public housing decades ago. I think there should be more public housing, but it should be dispersed and not concentrated in big projects. They used to be synonymous with crime and entrenched poverty. Whatever became of HUD?
It’s interesting that critics of the rising cost and low availability of housing always think that the problem is “not enough housing”, and not “too many people”. Perhaps the problem of too many people is politically intractable, but excessive demand is in fact the problem. Perhaps we should at least stop adding to it. I realize this would impact profits in the construction industry. Oh well…
No, but they are dying on the streets now because our country has no use for them. Is that OK with you? It's supply and demand, and there's no demand for the the oversupply of unwanted children with no skills.
The population density of the US as whole is among the lowest in the world, on par with Kyrgyzstan and less than half the level of Ireland and less than a third of the UK. Even some of the most densely populated states like Connecticut are well below countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. Not New Jersey, though. That place is full.
Well, you have to take into account that vast parts of the western U.S. are more or less uninhabitable due to lack of water, topography, and other issues. Average density is not really representative of resource constraints. Major aquifers in these regions are under immense strain and will one day be depleted. We should begin the transition to a sustainable future now, when we can still attain a pleasant future balance with our environment.
I'm not sure I take your point. Is it that Connecticut needs more people? You know they still have to be fed, and I'm not sure Connecticut could do it on their own. I would like to see some of the natural world left. There's not much of it in the Netherlands, which is pretty carefully curated. To be sure this is not just a U.S. problem.
I don't think that's really a relevant constraint. The Great Lakes region as a whole has enough water for the entire US population and then some I would think. We could just build mega-density cities around them and I think it would be fine, but our cities, outside of a few like New York/Miami/Chicago, are not particularly dense compared to modern standards. There's plenty of room for more people if we just build upward, and I don't think resource constraints are an issue in the US at this point.
Sure, but I just don't think America is anywhere near it's limits in any of these things. We produce tons of food, way more than we need, we're a net exporter, and I don't think we're running out of space to dispose of waste either. I don't see a single relevant resource constraint for America. Maybe some regions like water in the Southwest, but nothing on a national scale.
Please specify what exactly is going to happen to the people you consider excess. I’m pretty sure that’s the issue here, not the construction industry.
Maybe if you view the US as a "closed system", then sure less people = less housing demand. But if 1 million or two people move from, say Central America to the US, then the housing demand in Central America just drops as much as the US demand increases. This presumably decreases housing costs in Central America, which in turn will decrease the amount of people fleeing Central America. Yes, I know, there is more to it than housing costs. Poor governance, leftist political ideology, corruption, etc., but since the topic of the article is housing ....
I don't think Central American refugees are in an economic position to bid up the price of homeownership. If they are, that's a pretty impressive immigrant success story.
In the micro/individual perspective, you are of course correct. But in the collective/macro perspective, they have to live somewhere, and thereby increase the overall demand for housing.
I'm not sure **anything** in particular is going to happen to them. What I am suggesting is merely that we stop thinking we are doing something magical by "growing" the economy by adding more people. It's a Ponzi scheme. The U.S. and other developed e.g. Eurozone countries (and Japan and now China) have already begun reducing their populations simply by having fewer children. These are rational decisions by individuals, not a government mandate. The developing countries could radically improve their standards of living -- and reduce conflict -- by the same process. The people that are whining about this are levered investors, who need ever more growth - however detrimental to the general population's quality of life. Also, labor is subject to the same laws of supply and demand as other commodities. Once the population stops growing, and perhaps even declines a bit, housing availability and costs will gradually come into balance with the needs of the population, but "developers" will have to find a better business model than plopping crappy houses on good farmland -- or in inhospitable deserts.
I am suggesting no such thing. I'm simply saying stop population growth and let housing catch up. Then perhaps we can let the population decline a bit, tear down the crappy shacks and decrepit apartments, upgrade living standards, and improve (rather than continuing to pollute and destroy) the environment. We are not an endangered species, but our population is hardly in optimal condition.
Or you could let people who want to live in cities live there, by building enough high-quality ("luxury") apartments and condos for them in existing neighborhoods, and stop pushing them out onto the exurban and wild fringes where they don't even want to be.
The issue is that admitting less people into your country while it is simultaneously getting older is going to put quite a strain on your economy (See Japan). You need working age people to pay taxes for your welfare state for the elderly.
It wouldn't be a catastrophe, but a slowing of economic growth, for certain.
A slowing of economic growth, sure, if quantity rather than quality is the criterion. I invite you to read some of the work of Herman Daly, in particular "Beyond Growth" for an examination of economics in a "no growth" world. To be sure the transition will be fraught for the financial sector and the highly indebted, but debt is borrowing from the future -- and the future is now arriving. The highly financialized economy we now take for granted is a relatively new creature. Anyhow, Japan is managing to cope and after a few decades of stagnation is finding a new path -- and it involves neither population growth nor immigration. Also, real estate, especially in the countryside, is readily available at modest prices.
You may be right that this transition is the future, but I think the countries that can put it off as long as possible are going to be the strongest in this new world. It's clearly survivable, and perfectly fine to live a life in such an economy, I don't think everyone in Japan or Italy is in misery because of it, but I don't know that it would benefit anyone to try to actively encourage this transition any earlier than necessary. Overall I guess I think it's just better to be in a growing, dynamic country with high housing costs than a stagnant country with more affordable housing, but maybe Herman Daly can convince me otherwise.
I think you conflate a stable population with stagnation. Not the same at all. It is true that many of our social and economic systems will need a rather painful period of adjustment, but putting it off will make it both more painful and less manageable.
Maybe it doesn't have to lead to stagnation, but it seems like for the countries experiencing this transition now that stagnation seems part of it. Is there a counter example of a country with stable/declining population while still experience decent economic growth?
People can get richer (have a higher quality of life) without there being more of them. To be sure, given the debt loads of our current society, the transition period will be a problem as we work off the borrowing. I hope that one day our descendants will look back on today's economic slavery as a weird anomaly. In answer to your question, I think that Japan is now beginning to emerge from its transition period. The Netherlands seem to be doing OK. We should pay attention, because we will indeed have to deal with the same issues -- or worse.
I find it annoying how addicted progressives, broadly defined, are to making moral arguments. Obviously we all have our moral beliefs, and most people involved in politics are doing so at least in part to reshape the world in a way we see as moral. But every argument boils down to, "you're a bad person if you don't support my political position." It can never be, "it's in your self-interest to support this," because if you're prioritizing your self-interest that makes you a bad person.
I place a lot of the blame on the NGO complex. Most professional progressive activists work for NGOs, which exist to make donors feel warm and fuzzy about donating. So NGOs will always prioritize self-righteous moral arguments that make supporters feel morally superior. Contrast that to unions, which exist to win money and benefits for their members. A left that is powered by unions instead of NGOs will be less reliant on moral grandstanding, and I would wager a lot more effective at winning.
What % of Americans would you define as "comfortable"? I find it hard to believe you cannot assemble a majority coalition out of people who would benefit from your policies. As just 1 example, I work in tech and make a very comfortable living, but I have been laid off and gone without health care, and would have much more peace of mind if my health care wasn't tied to my employment. On top of that, I have friends and family members who are not doing as well financially and would very much benefit from guaranteed health care.
I'd also add there's a common good. I pay taxes and they fund parks and pools I get to use. Maybe if I had lower taxes and bought a private pool membership I'd come out slightly ahead financially, but I'm happy to fund pools that I get to use and everyone in my neighborhood gets to use. They make my neighborhood a nicer, happier place. So I think you can talk about a common good that even relatively well-off people can benefit from.
Yeah no argument on housing. I sometimes think we won't see national housing reform until we're a majority renter nation. I would push back that there are a lot of majority-renter cities where you can organize a majority coalition, and a lot of tax-burdened homeowners who don't necessarily benefit in the short-term from spiraling prices who we can find common cause with.
I also would make a common good argument. I would venture there are plenty of SF and LA homeowners who have seen massive price appreciation, but ALSO seen such negative externalities from housing unaffordability their quality of life has declined.
Agreed. If you can’t figure out SOME argument for why your policy preference will ultimately be good for the person you’re trying to convince, even if it’s somewhat attenuated, you don’t deserve their vote and can’t really blame them for withholding it.
This is going to shock you, but messaging matters in politics
Presumably because if those terrible-horrible-no good illegals just stayed in their home countries, they would starve-be killed-etc. and decrease the surplus population?
That's a Humbug take if I ever heard it.
There is a strange logic that lives in the word where the only two options are "ban illegulz, they're taking our jorbs" and "open tha bordurz and let billionz in".
Isn't releasing "asylum seekers" into the country on their own recognizance de facto open borders?
This doesn't address the point being made in the least. It's essentially a cheap ad hominem attack that runs away from the issues.
Canada essentially doesn't have illegals. We let in a whole lot of rich and educated immigrants. And when they aren't rich and educated we encourage them to stay in less populated areas for a while.
Yeah so that's a problem with white-collar immigration who make a lot more than nothing and immediately become competitors for upscale housing.
Oh, so now you want to have a substantive debate?
Why didn't you say that in the first place instead of going on a rant about how illegals automatically get blamed everything the price of sushi goes up?
Pretty sure those illegal aliens would need just as much food if they stay in their home countries as they do in the US. Mexican (and Brazilian and Venezuelan ...) cows also fart methane. You are just shifting the location of the farting cow. And, of course, since edible cow parts are shipped world-wide, the exact location of the farting cow is not so meaningful. It will still exist and fart.
The rise in housing prices is fundamentally due to a mismatch between the number of people seeking housing and the number of houses available. You're correct that if we just stop admitting immigrants that housing prices will eventually go down, as we have a negative birth rate, but this problem can also be solved by just building a lot more housing. Your path leads to economic stagnation as the population slowly grows older, and the economy sags under the weight of it's elderly. I prefer the "build more houses" path.
That's kind of the problem but building more houses is obviously cheaper in rural and exurban areas. Immigration in general tends to be concentrated in already built up urban cores.
Farmland is expensive. How are they going to afford it and the tools to farm. Very few small farmers anymore. We have some go into it in our area, usually to quit when they realize how much work it is.
That's not really the whole story at all though is it?
Lot's of recent market influences have made basic house construction more expensive in the first place (land prices, supply shortages, inflation, labor, etc.). So many developers are simply going bigger and swankier to sell to the demographic that can still afford them: upper-middle class, all upper class, and corporations. New house construction is actually booming right now, but very little of it is affordable to any lower-middle and middle class buyers - which happen to be both the largest buyer demographic, and the ones who need it the most.
It's not nearly as simple as you would suggest it is.
No, of course, like everything it is actually extremely complicated. But in the realm of "too many immigrants causing too much demand" I'm simply stating that there are two ways to solve that issue, fewer immigrants or to meet the demand.
What you're talking about is part of the reason it's difficult to meet the demand, to build enough houses, and is difficult. There's a lot of factors that get in the way of us building enough houses, and everything you mentioned is part of that problem. I'm not saying "just build more houses, it's easy", I guess I'm just trying to say the solution to "we can't build enough houses right now to meet demand" is not to say "then we should limit immigration". There's a lot of other steps you can take in the other direction before you find yourself having to blame it on the immigrants.
It really is as simple as supply and demand.
You build more of it and things will get more affordable. Just like eggs.
Right. Just like cell phones.
You don’t think cell phones are way cheaper than they used to be?
Are you really ignoring how much tech has advanced in the last few decades?
You can get really cheap phones that still do computing miracles compared to 10 years ago.
Considering the metric crap-ton of apps and features on a smart phone that are becoming more and more ubiquitous to employment and just doing business in general...no.
'Dumb' phones are certainly cheaper, but they are also becoming rather obsolete as time goes by. And I say that as a pseudo-dumb phone owner myself (a few essential apps and no linked accounts). I had to get issued a special Duo token (any replacements at my own expense) just to sign in to everything under the sun at my work...simply because I don't own my own smartphone. Tons of little transactional things that businesses used to cover are now being 'outsourced' to personal smart phones.
So no, I do not think cell phones (in a practical modern sense) are way cheaper than they used to be. The average price of a smart phone in America is ~$800 now, how is in the world is that cheaper than 10 years ago?
Construction costs have increased so dramatically recently that even in a lot of non-blighted (but cheap-land) areas, existing houses sell below replacement cost.
I've heard contractors say that building materials have come down lately.
Your path leads to less habitat for everything but humans, more traffic, more smog, less birdsong, more noise, more light pollution, more crowds of people all staring at their phone. I'll take the greying population (a one-time shift and then it's over, once the baby boomers are all gone), over unsustainable attempts at constant growth.
Closing the border for 3 years is ALREADY the one thing that happened in 40 years that actually raised wages at the bottom. Close it another 7 and the wage and housing problem would be solved. At that point, feel free to open it back up, slowly. But it would take at least 7 years of low birth rate, curtailed immigration, and old people dying to just course correct back to a sane supply/demand ratio.
I love how YIMBYs believe in supply and demand and market dynamics for literally everything except the supply of humans. Looking at the chart at the top, it's perfectly clear we have a gross over-supply of people, or asset owners and employers would never be able to get away with raising prices and lowering wages like that.
I don't think I've seen anyone making the argument before that the reason wages are rising now is because of lower immigration. Has immigration really declined so much? I guess I expected it would in 2020 because of COVID, but I'd be interested in seeing the figures.
And I'm fully acknowledging that lowering the population is an option to fix the housing crisis. I'm not denying that at all like you're implying. I'm just saying that the solution has 2 sides, and I think that one is worse for the economy, not better.
As a counter-point, immigration reached a steep low in the 70s-80s without it fixing our wages/housing issues. Why would we expect that to change now? Especially with just 7 years of a pause? Seems wildly optimistic to me, and that's granting it would have any effect at all.
You are very wrong on that -- 1970 was literally the absolute low point of immigration in the US, on both an absolute and relative measure, since the 1800s. Immigrants were 20% of the labor force in the beginning of the 1900s. Then Congress implemented the National Origins Formula, which basically shut down immigration for everyone but western Europeans from 1921-1965. Immigration plummeted so that at the low point, in 1970, only 5% of the labor force were immigrants. This changed because of Lyndon Johnson's sweeping reform opening immigration to everyone, so that after the 70s, it's been steadily growing each year back to almost 1920 levels -- until the Covid shut down.
Please see the chart here, which shows the enormous dip in immigrant population from the 40s-70s: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time
Do you really think it's a coincidence that it was PRECISELY during that period that the US achieved the only time in its entire history when wages grew and inequality shrank? When labor was at its most powerful? Of course it's not a coincidence -- everything is supply and demand. Less impoverished workers with no bargaining power and limited language skills, more leverage for workers = higher wages.
People don't like to talk about this because it seems mean to immigrants. It isn't their fault. They're great. But they absolutely depress wages and increase inequality, it is unavoidable. The larger the masses of laborers, the less leverage they have and more profit the employers can take from their labor. It has always and everywhere been the case.
So, if you haven't seen anyone make the argument about Covid immigration and the labor shortage, it's because it's now completely taboo to say anything about immigration/population size without being called racist. One would think that tactic to shut down debate might've been something the capitalist class came up with, yet here we have all these young progressives spouting off about it. Bit it doesn't matter what the immigrants look like, all that matters is how many of them there are and how hard they're willing to work at wages below what naturalized citizens would accept.
Anyway, immigration was basically shut down for two years because of Covid. It reduced the working age immigrant population by 2 million. That wasn't the ONLY thing that reduced the size of the labor force, because baby boomers *finally* retiring also did that. But it was a significant factor.
And the reduction in the labor force is the only reason wages actually went up at the bottom, for literally the first time in 40 years.
Here are some links, if you're interested:
https://econofact.org/labor-shortages-and-the-immigration-shortfall
https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/blog/what-correlation-between-us-labor-shortages-and-immigration-shortfall
https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/understanding-americas-labor-shortage
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/15/immigration-reform-congress-worker-shortage/
I understand that you value "the economy" more than the items I mentioned, when deciding whether you come down on the side of demand or supply. That's a legitimate perspective. For me, I will always choose quality of life over GDP, which I believe is a majority opinion, even though you rarely hear it from the governing class.
Well this is certainly compelling! I'm fairly convinced on the wage issue, at least enough to dig in more, but I'm still not sure what the magnitude of the effect on housing would be. I'm sure there's something to the math of "fewer people, fewer buyers, lower prices" but is it going to fix this crazy housing mess we're in or is it going to lower prices by 3% or something?
That's funny because from the Left I always hear that the Biden Administration more-or-less maintained Trump's immigration policies unchanged, which makes a bit of sense to me since I constantly hear about labor shortages in immigrant-dependent sectors.
I quite understand that labor shortages are what drive up wages. That's why I'm happy to hear that unchanged immigration policies from the Trump administration have led to labor shortages. On the other hand, if Biden is letting in all these immigrants, who's finding them to hire?
What does coalition building matter when you can lecture people on how they don't need bananas?
Yes, I created a Twitter account and it is a fascinating place.
Very insightful analysis! Makes a lot of sense... though unfortunately making sense isn't always rewarded these days.
The biggest issue that YIMBYs have: their "social culture" is twitter. That's it. They will always remain losers as long as this is the case, because twitter turns all of its users into pathetic losers over time.
Also, fuck Airbnb and the like.
Yep. Speaking of structural forces, the structural forces of Twitter relentlessly push every discourse community toward smugger, meaner, dumber takes. It doesn't matter what the subject is -- could be anything from rollercoaster fans to Reformed theologians -- Twitter makes the conversation worse.
It's not that there aren't any good, thoughtful comments and comment threads on Twitter. There are! It's just a lot harder and more time consuming to write something like that vs. something mean and snarky, and you get the same amount of engagement anyway
Absolutely! You *can* have good conversations and good political debates on Twitter. Just like humans *can* survive in the frozen wastes of central Antarctica. But in both cases the environment is not working in your favor.
There's only one good Twitter and that's Science Twitter because our literal business is to never actually agree on anything so it's hard to actually get smug.
I live in a city with a serious housing shortage, and the YIMBYs are making serious political progress here under our new mayor. They are a political force in real life, not just twitter.
Which city? What serious political progress? Don't be coy.
Madison, Wisconsin. The most prominent issue in last year's mayoral race was housing, with the current mayor running on a fairly aggressive YIMBY platform including some re-zoning and went on to win re-election. The city council is less YIMBY than the mayor, so progress is not as swift as she would like, but even the council just walked back their rejection of a new high-rise building on campus after political pressure from YIMBY activists and went back and approved the building at their next meeting.
I'm not saying the city is a YIMBY haven exactly, but things are definitely trending in that direction. More has been done in the last 4 years under our new mayor for housing than in the couple decades before she was elected.
Thank you for elaborating. I know little about Madison WI, other than it is a deep blue college town. A "new high-rise building on campus" ... so housing for college students (and/or employees) located on the campus grounds is political progress? Or is the building going to house non-university related residents I would think this would be up to the state, since they control the campus, not the city, but I must be wrong, since the city counsel needed to approve.
Well anyone could theoretically live there. It's not a university building, just part of the wider "campus" area I suppose. Not really using it as a technical term. But there is a lot of student objection to this sort of thing, and the council bowed down to it, and then reversed course specifically because of the pro-housing coalition in the city. That's what the YIMBY movement can do on a building-by-building level, and electing YIMBYs to city council seats and a YIMBY mayor.
The new mayor was elected in 2019. Prior to 2020, average new housing units in the city sat at about 2,000 per year for over a decade. In 2021 Madison added 3,500, added around the same in 2022, and is projected to add over 4,000 a year very soon. That's huge progress that is due to some zoning reforms and permitting reforms, and is a major point of the mayor's agenda.
YIMBY-supported legislation in California has been increasingly successful in passing through state government, and the YIMBY movement in general plays a pretty large role in the discourse around housing shortages here in the state.
Ahahaha at "always remain losers"
https://www.google.com/search?q=YIMBY+examples+of+success&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS928US928&oq=YIMBY+examples+of+success&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDQyMzFqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Again, exactly what I'm critiquing: getting certain legislation or regulatory changes you like is meaningless until the actual cost of housing goes down.
It will take some decades to bring the cost of housing down in the problematic areas because even if all YIMBY policies were passed today to remove policy as the bottleneck, it simply takes time to build housing after a generation or three of being behind the curve.
In fact, that's a common argument by NIMBYs: "all this construction and yet prices don't drop." It worked for eggs and it will work for housing, but the latter takes more time.
It only works if demand doesn't also increase.
It always works if supply can rise to meet demand.
“We built more houses and now even more people want to live here; what could we possibly do?”
Build more!
Demand ain’t infinite here. Look at housing prices in Tokyo.
The problem with Japan (and Asia in general) is that people want to live in cities. How does that not lead to massive problems with demand outpacing supply?
It took decades to get us into this crisis, it will take decades to get out.
The movement as a whole may score some victories, and that is a good thing. The individuals themselves will always remain losers until they stop using twitter. That video game is uniquely good at causing people to lose sight of life.
I mean I'm doing pretty well for myself and most YIMBYs I know personally are too.
Not sure why you think YIMBYs are some kind of particular brand of losers relative to the average twitter user but ok.
They're not. All twitter users are losers. The more you use twitter, the more of a loser you become. There's no getting around that.
No more acronym people for me, please.
"I don’t understand why that perspective is so often treated as antagonistic to the call for social housing that’s built at taxpayer expense, governed by the state, and distributed on the basis of need rather than through the market mechanism."
You could argue that's the government screwing around in the private sector but of course zoning laws, permitting, etc. is already the government screwing around in the private sector to an extent that reaches far beyond simple regulation.
My concern is always that the government has an unfortunate habit of trying to fix bad regulations by applying even complexity with even more regulations and the results are often suboptimal.
The government did go into building public housing decades ago. I think there should be more public housing, but it should be dispersed and not concentrated in big projects. They used to be synonymous with crime and entrenched poverty. Whatever became of HUD?
It’s interesting that critics of the rising cost and low availability of housing always think that the problem is “not enough housing”, and not “too many people”. Perhaps the problem of too many people is politically intractable, but excessive demand is in fact the problem. Perhaps we should at least stop adding to it. I realize this would impact profits in the construction industry. Oh well…
No, but they are dying on the streets now because our country has no use for them. Is that OK with you? It's supply and demand, and there's no demand for the the oversupply of unwanted children with no skills.
The population density of the US as whole is among the lowest in the world, on par with Kyrgyzstan and less than half the level of Ireland and less than a third of the UK. Even some of the most densely populated states like Connecticut are well below countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. Not New Jersey, though. That place is full.
Well, you have to take into account that vast parts of the western U.S. are more or less uninhabitable due to lack of water, topography, and other issues. Average density is not really representative of resource constraints. Major aquifers in these regions are under immense strain and will one day be depleted. We should begin the transition to a sustainable future now, when we can still attain a pleasant future balance with our environment.
You realize that I anticipated this response and sought to head it off by including info. for Connecticut, right?
I'm not sure I take your point. Is it that Connecticut needs more people? You know they still have to be fed, and I'm not sure Connecticut could do it on their own. I would like to see some of the natural world left. There's not much of it in the Netherlands, which is pretty carefully curated. To be sure this is not just a U.S. problem.
I don't think that's really a relevant constraint. The Great Lakes region as a whole has enough water for the entire US population and then some I would think. We could just build mega-density cities around them and I think it would be fine, but our cities, outside of a few like New York/Miami/Chicago, are not particularly dense compared to modern standards. There's plenty of room for more people if we just build upward, and I don't think resource constraints are an issue in the US at this point.
I think you neglect that all of these people must be fed and generate waste. It’s not just the space people physically occupy.
Sure, but I just don't think America is anywhere near it's limits in any of these things. We produce tons of food, way more than we need, we're a net exporter, and I don't think we're running out of space to dispose of waste either. I don't see a single relevant resource constraint for America. Maybe some regions like water in the Southwest, but nothing on a national scale.
Why would you want to get to the limit?
Please specify what exactly is going to happen to the people you consider excess. I’m pretty sure that’s the issue here, not the construction industry.
Maybe if you view the US as a "closed system", then sure less people = less housing demand. But if 1 million or two people move from, say Central America to the US, then the housing demand in Central America just drops as much as the US demand increases. This presumably decreases housing costs in Central America, which in turn will decrease the amount of people fleeing Central America. Yes, I know, there is more to it than housing costs. Poor governance, leftist political ideology, corruption, etc., but since the topic of the article is housing ....
I don't think Central American refugees are in an economic position to bid up the price of homeownership. If they are, that's a pretty impressive immigrant success story.
In the micro/individual perspective, you are of course correct. But in the collective/macro perspective, they have to live somewhere, and thereby increase the overall demand for housing.
How about they move from the Bay Area, for example, to Oklahoma?
Then we will have Oklahoman incumbents making the same arguments, just like we already did with Idaho and Texas.
But the people who move will be able to buy homes for cheaper. They benefit.
I'm not sure **anything** in particular is going to happen to them. What I am suggesting is merely that we stop thinking we are doing something magical by "growing" the economy by adding more people. It's a Ponzi scheme. The U.S. and other developed e.g. Eurozone countries (and Japan and now China) have already begun reducing their populations simply by having fewer children. These are rational decisions by individuals, not a government mandate. The developing countries could radically improve their standards of living -- and reduce conflict -- by the same process. The people that are whining about this are levered investors, who need ever more growth - however detrimental to the general population's quality of life. Also, labor is subject to the same laws of supply and demand as other commodities. Once the population stops growing, and perhaps even declines a bit, housing availability and costs will gradually come into balance with the needs of the population, but "developers" will have to find a better business model than plopping crappy houses on good farmland -- or in inhospitable deserts.
The people who need homes already exist, declining to house them because you'd rather they had not been born is just pointlessly cruel.
I am suggesting no such thing. I'm simply saying stop population growth and let housing catch up. Then perhaps we can let the population decline a bit, tear down the crappy shacks and decrepit apartments, upgrade living standards, and improve (rather than continuing to pollute and destroy) the environment. We are not an endangered species, but our population is hardly in optimal condition.
Or you could let people who want to live in cities live there, by building enough high-quality ("luxury") apartments and condos for them in existing neighborhoods, and stop pushing them out onto the exurban and wild fringes where they don't even want to be.
The issue is that admitting less people into your country while it is simultaneously getting older is going to put quite a strain on your economy (See Japan). You need working age people to pay taxes for your welfare state for the elderly.
It wouldn't be a catastrophe, but a slowing of economic growth, for certain.
A slowing of economic growth, sure, if quantity rather than quality is the criterion. I invite you to read some of the work of Herman Daly, in particular "Beyond Growth" for an examination of economics in a "no growth" world. To be sure the transition will be fraught for the financial sector and the highly indebted, but debt is borrowing from the future -- and the future is now arriving. The highly financialized economy we now take for granted is a relatively new creature. Anyhow, Japan is managing to cope and after a few decades of stagnation is finding a new path -- and it involves neither population growth nor immigration. Also, real estate, especially in the countryside, is readily available at modest prices.
You may be right that this transition is the future, but I think the countries that can put it off as long as possible are going to be the strongest in this new world. It's clearly survivable, and perfectly fine to live a life in such an economy, I don't think everyone in Japan or Italy is in misery because of it, but I don't know that it would benefit anyone to try to actively encourage this transition any earlier than necessary. Overall I guess I think it's just better to be in a growing, dynamic country with high housing costs than a stagnant country with more affordable housing, but maybe Herman Daly can convince me otherwise.
I think you conflate a stable population with stagnation. Not the same at all. It is true that many of our social and economic systems will need a rather painful period of adjustment, but putting it off will make it both more painful and less manageable.
Maybe it doesn't have to lead to stagnation, but it seems like for the countries experiencing this transition now that stagnation seems part of it. Is there a counter example of a country with stable/declining population while still experience decent economic growth?
People can get richer (have a higher quality of life) without there being more of them. To be sure, given the debt loads of our current society, the transition period will be a problem as we work off the borrowing. I hope that one day our descendants will look back on today's economic slavery as a weird anomaly. In answer to your question, I think that Japan is now beginning to emerge from its transition period. The Netherlands seem to be doing OK. We should pay attention, because we will indeed have to deal with the same issues -- or worse.
The utility of cheap rural real estate in Japan is mostly lost, since all the young workers are trying to move to Tokyo.
That may change. It has in San Francisco. Technology. A Kiss and a Kick.
I find it annoying how addicted progressives, broadly defined, are to making moral arguments. Obviously we all have our moral beliefs, and most people involved in politics are doing so at least in part to reshape the world in a way we see as moral. But every argument boils down to, "you're a bad person if you don't support my political position." It can never be, "it's in your self-interest to support this," because if you're prioritizing your self-interest that makes you a bad person.
I place a lot of the blame on the NGO complex. Most professional progressive activists work for NGOs, which exist to make donors feel warm and fuzzy about donating. So NGOs will always prioritize self-righteous moral arguments that make supporters feel morally superior. Contrast that to unions, which exist to win money and benefits for their members. A left that is powered by unions instead of NGOs will be less reliant on moral grandstanding, and I would wager a lot more effective at winning.
What % of Americans would you define as "comfortable"? I find it hard to believe you cannot assemble a majority coalition out of people who would benefit from your policies. As just 1 example, I work in tech and make a very comfortable living, but I have been laid off and gone without health care, and would have much more peace of mind if my health care wasn't tied to my employment. On top of that, I have friends and family members who are not doing as well financially and would very much benefit from guaranteed health care.
I'd also add there's a common good. I pay taxes and they fund parks and pools I get to use. Maybe if I had lower taxes and bought a private pool membership I'd come out slightly ahead financially, but I'm happy to fund pools that I get to use and everyone in my neighborhood gets to use. They make my neighborhood a nicer, happier place. So I think you can talk about a common good that even relatively well-off people can benefit from.
Yeah no argument on housing. I sometimes think we won't see national housing reform until we're a majority renter nation. I would push back that there are a lot of majority-renter cities where you can organize a majority coalition, and a lot of tax-burdened homeowners who don't necessarily benefit in the short-term from spiraling prices who we can find common cause with.
I also would make a common good argument. I would venture there are plenty of SF and LA homeowners who have seen massive price appreciation, but ALSO seen such negative externalities from housing unaffordability their quality of life has declined.
Agreed. If you can’t figure out SOME argument for why your policy preference will ultimately be good for the person you’re trying to convince, even if it’s somewhat attenuated, you don’t deserve their vote and can’t really blame them for withholding it.
God forbid you can even talk to people and ask them what they want and compromise your position to accommodate their goals.