Comment by jjk166

> So, Dallas doesn’t meet Quintero’s oligopoly threshold. Now let’s consider the rest of the country. I tracked down a complete listing of the country’s 50 largest homebuilding markets, from #1 Dallas to #50 Cincinnati. How many meet Quintero’s first oligopoly threshold (two companies = 90 percent of the market)? Zero out of 50. And how many meet his second threshold (six companies = 90 percent of the market)? One: Cincinnati. It turns out that the largest homebuilding markets just aren’t that concentrated

> I wanted to know how a careful monopoly-hunter like Roberts would answer the question: If six firms account for 90 percent of a local industry, is that automatic proof of a monopoly? “No, it’s not,” Roberts said. “The statistic isn’t totally vacuous, but there’s basically no useful information about market power in that statistic alone.”

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> the number of new single-family houses permitted per capita in the Dallas metro area rose steadily between 2010 and 2022. (This is illustrated in the graph below[1].) I mentioned to Quintero that steadily rising construction per capita in a fast-growing city seemed like a weird example of monopolistic abuse.

> First, he uses 2006 as his baseline. This was a highly atypical year in housing. Just before the housing crash that triggered the Great Recession, May 2006 was the peak of 21st century construction employment. That very month was construction's single highest share of total employment since the postwar era. Using a bubble year as a baseline could easily throw off the overall findings of any economic analysis.

[1] graph clearly shows long term downward trend, with growth from 2010 to 2022 being entirely recovery post 2008 crash and still being below late 90s levels.

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> The whole thing looks like a lawyer who arrived in Dallas with a conviction in hand and shaped the evidence to fit the indictment.

*spends entire article cherry picking evidence in an attempt to discredit one article specifically to advance a competing narrative.