Comment by bazingakiller
12 hours ago
Unremarkable podcast spam decides that decades of housing market financialization has nothing to do with the cost of housing but because of some obscure 70s activist who had the evil radical leftist idea of "hey maybe don't bulldoze an entire inner city neighborhood to build an interchange". With intellectual titans like this working on the problem it's mystery why housing is so expensive.
It's a bit more nuanced than what you are saying. Here's what Yoni Appelbaum said:
> I should start by saying this: Jane Jacobs is right about almost everything. She was right about what makes cities vibrant and vital. She was right about the ballet of the sidewalk. She writes brilliantly about needing to treat cities as living things, that if you try to centrally plan them and assign all of their functions, it doesn't work very well. They need to evolve over time. They need a diversity of peoples, of uses.
She was right about all of that, and she sees great menace in the urban renewal schemes of the time, where the experts of her age looked at cities and saw disorderly places that needed rationality. In all of that, she was exactly right, but her solution was to reassert the original right of communities to define their own boundaries.
She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto new developments in their neighborhoods. And so you get the sort of endless processes of community hearings and reviews, and she's quite explicit that the goal of these reviews is not to gauge the actual opinions of the neighborhood or to balance the good of the community, but to empower activists like Jacobs to step in and say “no.”
She wants “right-thinking people” like her to be able to stop the government from doing bad things. It is a revolt against government from the left, and it is amazingly effective. But the new rules don’t just get exercised by right-thinking people, and one of the things about right-thinking people is they're often wrong about the things they're thinking about. And so, she imagines this as the ability to veto lots of destructive changes. But in practice, it emerges as a simple collective veto of almost all change, and it has had tremendous costs for Americans as a whole.
@tptacek
Later Jacobs would have been okay with financialization of housing, tho'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival
It ironic that the further she goes from experience & data, the more she ought to be taken seriously... but isn't
I didn't down-vote you, but your comments could adhere closer to the guidelines (kindly page down to the "In Comments"section).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing tends to go up over time, which results from housing scarcity. If housing is not scarce a long position on housing will lose money.
Blaming housing investors for housing affordability is like blaming gold market speculators for gold being expensive. If the price of gold comes down, the speculators lose money. Same with housing.
> Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing tends to go up over time, which results from housing scarcity.
This is not true. The art market is financialized and tends to go up over time, but this does not result from art scarcity. You can make a market go up by making huge institutional cash buyers 30% of the buyer's market, and by getting even independent sellers to collude on price. Independent buyers in that market are irrelevancies, because they bought on credit borrowed against a house at an artificial value.
Also, that little property bubble we had in the first decade of the 2000s was not a result of a sudden population increase.
edit: also, it's important to mention that "if housing tends to go up over time" is within a window. It can lose all of that false value in a day, and the government will respond by directly subsidizing all of the institutional losers, and their stockholders.
The art market does not tend to go up, only specific works of art that become collectibles tend to appreciate in value. And these are the works that become financialized. This is similar to the market for automobiles, only very specific cars become collectibles while the vast majority of cars depreciate.