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Did rents in Palms go up because they built housing or because it's a great location in a city with increasing rent almost everywhere?
Or in other words, is there any econometric evidence that building housing increased rents in Palms, or could we be confusing correlation with causation?
Do you have an example?
Another factor is smaller households. People are staying single longer and waiting longer to move in with partners, creating more demand for housing even without population growth.
What are some of the many other, stronger criticisms of the abundance agenda? Maybe Thompson has replied to some of those, too.
the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen
Do you have a source for this? Anecdotes along the lines of "they don't make 'em like they used to" are incredibly common but often fail to stand up to scrutiny.
And zoning restrictions are part of the reason why housing prices "always go up." Constrained supply is exactly and precisely what makes housing a profitable investment.
Usually I would agree, but the amount of distortion depends on what portion of DOGE savings are one-off (eliminating grants and contracts) and what portion are recurring annually (workforce reductions).
If DOGE savings are one-off then it would be fair to present alternatives according to their lifetime debt impact, since the presented DOGE numbers would already be "lifetime."
And TFA states "Please note: only grants and contracts posted on the doge.gov website with receipts are counted towards the total saving value. For this reason, the total savings value on the doge.gov website may appear larger, however due to the lack of supporting receipts, this value is unverifiable." So it looks like DOGE's recurring savings are (mostly?) not included here since they are undocumented.
Building housing lowers the cost of housing. Requiring some accounting of $ saved on brickwork -> $ spent on homelessness is just another bureaucratic hurdle, which is ironically exactly what TFA is complaining about.
Conflating free parking with a childhood core memory, a lake trip with your immigrant father, feels a little disingenuous to me. But I think you understand the core idea: by making something cheap or free, we incentivize the activity but we spend communal resources (tax dollars, or some rival good like space downtown, or space on a lake) to do so. But we as a society get to choose what to incentivize. Cars have externalities (traffic, the space they take up, pollution, their being required is expensive for working families) that other forms of transport don’t, so people are rethinking the various ways we incentivize driving.
It does wrap automatically if you keep typing. I agree the user experience is not great with that, the word you're typing should always be directly over the guide text.
As you note, no two dense neighborhoods are the same. Those experiences would be rare in Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur. I would say that cultural norms dominate density when it comes to explaining late-night partying.
A car driver could easily eat the same amount of food as a walker, the extra calories would be stored as fat. This also ignores upfront CO2 output from assembling and delivering the car and increased CO2 output from maintaining car infrastructure vs. pedestrian infrastructure. Not to mention numerous other externalities.
They aren't comparable metrics. Revenue doesn't represent value added. I can sell a $20 bill for $20, my revenue is $20 but there is no impact on GDP (nothing has been created, no value has been added). Do that enough times and you too can have revenue equaling that of a small country.
Then yes, I’ll agree with that. Both can be difficult but valuing just the underlying land is harder.
No, you are wrong. The two cases are analogous. Under a LVT, if their tax goes up, it's because their land became more valuable. So when they sell they get more money. And under a LVT, if they spend money to build or improve a house, then they also get a benefit when they sell for a corresponding higher price. It's just that those improvements would not be reflected in a higher tax bill.
Well, property taxes in my city are around 1% currently. Does that mean the city will own 100% of land in 100 years? Probably not. For lots of reasons.
The point is, currently if you build things then you pay higher tax. The current tax structure disincentivizes building things. We don't know what people would build without that disincentive - maybe still nothing, as you are suggesting.
There's not an argument from economic efficiency to tax by rock content.
But this problem already exists. Many people live in homes for 30+ years and pay property tax on the land + improvement (physical home) value. Why would it be so much harder to hypothetically value the land without a recent sale (required for a LVT) than to hypothetically value the land + improvements without a recent sale (required for property taxes which currently exist in almost every city in America)?
Detroit and most places in the US already have property tax. Little old grandma already has to pay more every year when her property becomes more valuable. And homestead exemptions already exist to prevent kicking grandma to the street.
A LVT would just shift property tax burden more toward empty lots or less-developed parcels and away from more-developed parcels. It wouldn't result in killing little old ladies.
Sure, that's possible. Or maybe Mr. Parking Lot Owner just likes the look of parking lots. But the key point is that today, improving the land is disincentivized because it would increase the owner's tax burden. So we don't know exactly what people would do with all those empty lots if improving them wasn't disincentivized.
As others have mentioned, it’s quite easy to structure a land value tax to avoid kicking little old ladies out of their homes. You are arguing against a strawman.
But property tax already exists, so apparently that regressive nature is fine. And middle class people mostly own land that’s been improved. It’s unimproved land that would be taxed much more with a land value tax. I don’t think it’s obvious which land owners would pay more or less - it depends on the structure of the tax and the relative value of their land vs the improvements on it.
Land that’s already been improved would pay less in taxes. Empty lots, parking lots, and other unimproved land would pay more tax. Calling an economic incentive to do something with your empty lot in an urban area “perverse” seems.. extreme.
Various other sources give much higher numbers, like up 179% from 1999 to 2020 [1] or up 110% from 1998 - 2018 [2]. So I'm not sure what's going on with the article. It could be that they're deflating by wage increases, or showing the change relative to overall inflation, or something like that.
[1] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has...
Edit: I would have assumed the OP article was based on this series: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SAE1
This is maybe true if you only store money in cash equivalents. If you bought stocks, housing, or almost any other productive asset you'd easily beat inflation over your working lifetime.
I hear Cabo is nice this time of year.
Most passive investors nowadays are investing in index funds. In that case all three of your investors receive equivalent return as the index rebalances away from the failing company.
You're arguing against a strawman. Nobody is saying that everyone needs to live in SF. The argument is simply that developers should be allowed to supply housing that meets demand. The fact is that lots of people do want to live in cities, for various reasons; but they can't, because building dense housing is illegal or heavily disincentivized.
If you want to live in semi-rural America that's great, I prefer a similar situation for myself. I fail to see what that has to do with allowing or disallowing density in cities. In fact allowing density in cities preserves rural and natural areas outside of cities, so that seeing cows and hiking in forests is available for those who want it. Feels like a win-win.
I also have vitiligo. Vitiligo sufferers have overall significantly lower rates of skin cancer. While the reason is unknown, in my mind the connection between "immune system aggressively attacks skin cells" and "less skin cancer" makes sense.