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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   28430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Canada turned racist because their newcomers were subcontinental...If Canada had opened their borders to Mexico and Vietnam instead of India, Trudeau would still have a job.

Canada already had a bunch of "subcontinentals". Sure, the proportion got worse but terms like "Bramladesh" predated the recent wave of temporary foreign workers. There is a general sense that immigrants have gotten worse, but this is true within the same group.

Canada's biggest problem in terms of generating populist backlash is that it has the worst housing crisis in the G7 and everyone wants to/has to live in the same few places. You can't drop those amounts of people into such a market without massive backlash.

People hated it when it was the Chinese middle and upper classes competing with them for housing and their hate grew proportionally the more people they had to compete with. They'd hate Mexicans too.

That's probably why the preference cascade has been so total: talk about culture and you get suppressed as a racist. Housing? Everyone gets it. No amount of gaslighting or talking will change reality.

We saw huge numbers of people move in to a fairly small number of locales- the western two thirds of Texas are basically unpopulated, and most of the migrants went to just two metropoles, DFW and Houston. The rest mostly went to the other two major metros. Somehow, this avoided triggering a housing crisis.

Yet 100k or less triggered housing crises in NYC and Chicago. Both have governments more similar to those of Canadian cities. Conservatives would just chalk this up to leftism being incompatible with itself and reality.

They probably built more housing. Good for them.

I don't see how this matters to the argument about what's driving Canadians.

Somehow, this avoided triggering a housing crisis.

They build houses in Texas. DFW and Houston are both adding housing at a higher per capita rate than their population growth.

https://www.axios.com/local/houston/2024/03/19/texas-population-increase-htx https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-most-in-new-housing

Canada could have done this and not had housing prices rise. They chose not to, I guess because they don’t realize that more people need more buildings to live in. But it’s perfectly possible to expand the housing supply alongside immigration so prices stay stable.

The problem is that the government will not let house prices fall as a matter of policy. People who have bought into the housing Ponzi scheme ladder can't be allowed to lose their shirts. Solve, as they say, for the equilibrium.

The DFW real estate market has been consistently rising during the period of replacement migration and it’s still rising today.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DAXRNSA

I'm seeing nearly zero gains from 2000-2012 and up 70% from 2012-2019 (and of course all hell broke loose during covid). At least for a while it seems like housing prices were under control in DFW.

Once you adjust for the Great Recession, this is a mild increase until 2012 started to see large increases.

That is indeed my point - housing costs in Houston were well under control until 2012 at least. In Canada they were not. This is not a matter of "Canadians forgot to build more", because the explicit policy of the Canadian government is that housing prices must increase.

Most of the migrants went to just two metropoles, DFW and Houston. Somehow, this avoided triggering a housing crisis.

Thank zoning (or lack thereof).

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Houston is often presented as a counter-example to growth-management planning [i. e., greenbelts and urban growth boundaries] because it has no growth management and no zoning. As a result, it has highly affordable housing and is one of the fastest-growing large urban areas in the country

Unlike Houston, Dallas does have zoning, but it has had little in the way of growth management. Zoning has responded to local residents’ desires to protect neighborhood values, which was the original intention of zoning when it was first conceived in the 1910s, rather than to planners’ desires to reshape suburban lifestyles. Dallas’s housing record is therefore similar to Houston’s except that Dallas is a bit less influenced by swings in the oil industry.

2

Ultimately, what is wrong with the White House toolkit is that it is focused on local zoning when it should be focused on regional growth management. If there are no regional growth constraints, local zoning won’t make housing more expensive because developers can always build in unrestricted areas. Dallas has zoning, Houston doesn’t; yet in 2014 both had value-to-income ratios of 2.4. Only regional growth constraints make housing expensive. Every major city in America except Houston has local zoning, yet only those cities that have growth constraints have become unaffordable.

That's probably why the preference cascade has been so total: talk about culture and you get suppressed as a racist. Housing? Everyone gets it. No amount of gaslighting or talking will change reality.

Leading to this beautiful exchange from a couple of years ago.

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