Abundance being the word used by Musk and Andreesen lends it a lot of harmful ambiguity in terms of forgetting that externalities exist. For me YIMBYism means specific things and people/movements and it matters what those things are and who is in those movements.
Yeah ngl abundance is omnicausal which limits the sort of coalition you can build out of it.
But isn’t the idea broader than housing? It’s the same view of liberal economic policy I’ve always had - let’s make sure that we have so much of everything we can meet people’s needs instead of fighting over scarce needs.
Well, I suppose so, but that's why I think of it as trying to sell supply side economics as left-wing, with an implicit assumption that market actors will overproduce and drive themselves out of business for some reason
The leftist theory of housing describes a housing market that behaves like no other commodity market in the history, including the actual existing housing market
"just get rid of regulations and the price of the durable commodity will go to zero" describes nothing useful
That's true but I don't think anyone is saying the price would go to zero? Housing is inherently expensive - it's expensive to make and expensive to maintain. The idea is let's not make it MORE expensive via regulations that distort usage. Single family zoning makes houses more expensive.
Sure, but the marginal cost of regulation is not actually an interesting question. What you would *like* is to provide housing that people want at a certain low price and that is not something that tinkering with zoning or stair count can guarantee
And, like, it's really not surprising that in a country where home equity is half of the wealth of the bottom 50% that political incentives are as perverse as they are
The primary purpose of zoning in the 21st century is landowner regulatory capture. The impact is not marginal, nor is it intended to be.
Understand the meaning of the word "marginal" please.
Yeah it’s about breaking regulatory capture by landowners, something anyone with leftist principles should whole heartedly endorse!
Lol, no, that would be a state takeover of land, which people could then use on long-term leases. The very explicit "oh zoning stops people from doing what they want with their land, which is building multifamily housing and nothing else" messaging is quite the opposite of that
Urban leftist activists advocate for things like that for the same reason Elon Musk pushed the hyperloop: because they know it will absorb political capital and never come close to happening. Upzoning does produce results in the real world and that *does* threaten their class interests
This is just a profession of faith, sorry, and frankly this line of argument is exactly why this branding became so poisonous so quickly
It's actually funny because I'm very much in favor of upzoning and density, and these discussions are like 90% of Austin politics, but here we're able to actually make useful incremental progress instead of declaring half the city to be kulaks to be liquidated
Increasing supply relative to demand does reduce prices and rents in every city it’s been done in, I don’t know what else to tell you.
Okay cool nobody said the market would reduce the price to zero.
Oh no I’m not saying the movement is good, just that they stole a march on the branding
I’ve been looking for someone with a display name like yours to ask a question to. My sense is that abundance is a conscious effort to subordinate Yimbyism, and its attendant energy, to dem factionalism. It’s also looks like an attempt to corner “highly educated, urban renter class”. Agree at all?