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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33683 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Which first principles would they be?

Because it seems pretty self-evident that housing is fungible. If I can't live in a grade A apartment because there aren't any available, I'll live in a grade B one rather than sleep on the streets. If grade A apartments become available, I'll leave my grade B one, which will then go on the market. The more apartments that come on the market, the less buyers will need to pay because there will be the same number of buyers chasing more properties, and sellers will be forced to lower their prices.

'Luxury' housing is just the word we use to describe the most expensive houses, it's not a characteristic of the houses that makes them qualitatively different.

The only way for me to believe that building luxury homes doesn't reduce prices would be for me to believe that either:

  1. Increasing supply while keeping demand static doesn't reduce prices
  2. Different types of housing aren't fungible

'Luxury' housing is just the word we use to describe the most expensive houses, it's not a characteristic of the houses that makes them qualitatively different.

It's even worse than that: it's a pretty meaningless marketing adjective that makes you feel better about paying a lot for something. Everyone slaps on the label except those at the cheapest, er "Value!" end of the market looking for price-conscious customers, and the polar opposite of brands that are well-known to the point where using the label is déclassé. And this doesn't just apply to housing.

Agreed. In my city, all housing that's not directly inside a high-crime neighborhood is marketed as “luxury”. I cannot find non-“luxury”-advertised housing, except in high-crime neighborhoods. Preliminary checks on other cities show the same thing.

Ah, the luxury of living in an area with the demographics of several decades ago.

That luxury has been reserved for the rich ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. See "When Did Healthy Communities Become Illegal?" by Charles Tuttle.

Except that you have the same issue that makes adding more lanes a bad idea. Which is that people who ordinarily would not be looking to Eugene OR as a potential place to live suddenly do because housing is more available there. If there are 50 apartments and you’re looking between several areas, you might pick Eugene, even if without the extra housing you’d probably say F it and move to some nearby town or suburb or exurb instead.

All this means is the benefit is spread around to other people. The people who move benefit and the property owners benefit.

The steelman for the NIMBY argument is that the demand for dense housing in the US is so high that building more density will always stimulate demand.

By building more big apartment buildings downtown, Eugene will become a more desirable place to live for wealthy people who will move there and drive up prices.

On a national level more housing will lead to lower prices but on a local level it might not.

That just means most of the benefit goes to the local property owners. It's still a net benefit to the community, which could be redistributed if necessary.

Yeah, in aggregate it's a good thing which is why it should be allowed to happen for the most part. But there are losers and the money likely won't be allocated to them in a meaningful way. Kinda like free trade that way.

The overall point stands that building new luxury housing in a community doesn't necessarily reduce the prices for housing in that community.

Moving isn't easy though and it's actually hard for people to figure out that things are better in a different place. Comparisons are hard and people have ties to their current communities. So it probably does help people in that community. It would take a long time for things to reach equilibrium again.

I believe the counter to the steelman is that 'stimulated demand' is just known elsewhere as 'demand,' which is to say the exact thing you'd expect to see from a supply and demand curve interaction when you increase supply.

In a contained system yes, but in this case you're inducing demand from outside the system.

With roughly 100k people, Eugene can't build enough to satisfy all people in the US who want to live in a dense environment. For the same reason, they can't solve their homeless problem by building shelters.

If those people are able to buy houses in Eugene, they are within the system. It's still just demand.

Now, it may be a demand curve that needs to be adjusted by different legislation- such as restricting property purchases by non-residents or some such- but that's different from a claim that the demand is stimulated.

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