We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young).
We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.
I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.
In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much.
It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.
I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.
In Canada - not so much
Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.
Why not?
(I guess I'm a "dunce", but I'm one that's ready for that conversation)
That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism.
Rate of new houses is below the rate of new households, and it’s been that way for years.
If there is a reckoning, the most pain will be the demographic here on HN, living in the suburbs. Not the billionaires living in the Hamptons or Napa.
The fuel of this fire is white collar high earners. Its also why not much is probably going to change, because these people also vote a lot. It's not billionaires and Black Rock driving up home prices, that's for sure...
It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy.
Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.
This has led to administration bloat and majors that are completely useless when you graduate. Federal loans should be eliminated and universities should back the loans themselves.
The government has a history of inflating anything they offer cheap money for. Housing, healthcare, education.
In our area parents can get several thousand for opting out of public school. That can be used to offset private school tuition. What happened? Private school tuition rose by about the amount the government was giving. It’s no more affordable, the government is on the hook for money, and the private schools have less incentive to compete since they got a 50% bump for doing nothing.
Any time the government offers handouts fraud, waste, and inflation will follow.
Aside from housing, every professional sector has been taken over and hollowed out by private equity or big tech. My grocery store, vet, plumber and doctors are all PE.
No, the problem is that the universities are too bloated, not that we need to take even more in taxes from working people to feed the bloat
Looking like the DMV was no longer accepted as you needed to actually attract students, which means supporting an ever wider array of different things. Daycare, job placement, etc etc individually get tacked on and before you know it administrative overhead has gone wild.
You see similar effects with housing where people buying stuff with major loans are simply less cost conscious. Saving even 1,000$ on a kitchen is a big deal for most people if you need to write a check for it today, split it over 30 years and suddenly it seems largely irrelevant.
That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.
The current rate of new build construction is the highest it has been since 2007, ignoring the spike during late COVID-era zero interest rates. Also: US population is growing slower than anytime in modern history, again excluding COVID (though, a few more years and we'll be down at that level again all naturally).
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST?utm_source=chatgpt....
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...
But more importantly, the most economically vibrant areas, with the most ability to provide economic opportunity, have been stunted by lack of housing: NYC, SF Bay Area, Boston, San Diego, etc. This transfers wealth to current landowners in those regions, but let's only the highest income job professions move in, and overall slows the ability of those with less to access economic opportunity.
And those areas down zones half a century ago, capping out their housing ages ago. That's the true lack of housing, and it's all locational. The only thing you can't build more of is land, and it's not fungible. Best we can do is build up in those special areas where there's the magic combination of people to allow for more productivity and more jobs. (Which also happens to be far more ecologically friendly too, but I'm aware not everybody cares about the environment these days).
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
How can you transfer wealth from people who don't have it?
> saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities
The debt came from rising tuitions due to the government making it too easy to get loans.
> created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
???
Worth expanding on these ??? I think - old people have less security if young people have less opportunities. The opportunities of the young is the surplus generation that creates the resources to support free riders (like old people).
In the extreme case, if the young literally don't have any opportunities at all, eventually they're going to have to just let the old people die off horribly because there aren't enough resources for everyone to make it to the end of the year.
Real estate pricing is far stickier than, say, stock prices. But that's also why it's super important to build before prices rise, because prices are probably not going to fall, they will at best stay sub inflationary.
Additionally, in the US many many people are locked in to their current mortgage. They have a super low interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, but interest rates are many points higher now, so if they switch to a new mortgage the can no longer afford as much house as they price they could sell their current house for.
That lock in and lack of places to live and move to also creates a higher demand when there are a few places that are built. "Thousands" doesn't mean much to me without comparing to the total number of existing houses, but there should be a minimum of 1% and maybe 2-3% of existing houses being built all throughout the nation. Yet most areas are not building that much if at all.
Asking those who have only been able to vote for a few years to have solved the problems, in a system where power is gained only through the accumulation of decades of experience, is, well blaming the victims.
The greed of older generations, their lack of compassion and understanding, and their narcissism are all to blame.
Young people are entering a system built by others with the ladders already pulled up. Violent revolution is the only way they could have changed the system in a short time, and nobody wants that.
You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.
I have a builder friend who told me in the SF East Bay he can't make money building houses except for 4000 sq ft luxury homes on tiny lots.
- the smallest population cohort is entering workforce - Trump and Covid slowed down immigration - high interest rate slows down R&D
I don't see a single effort to reindustrialize now, and in fact the tariffing of equipment and chaotic signaling of policy has been a major impediment to any reindustrialization.
And finally there have been several efforts to specifically discourage the sort of information sharing from highly industrial countries such as the Georgia Hyundai raid that was meant to stop knowledge transfer for manufacturing. The world is getting the message:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_imm...
However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it.
Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India.
So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.
I'm thinking lawyer, since legal skills aren't as portable across international borders?
Or make enough money to retire in the next couple years.
That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.
In the U.K. youth unemployment is about 2005-6 levels. It was far higher by 2010.
This also neatly explains why Boomers were able to have a good life with just a high school diploma. Wikipedia has a good chart, but the short version is that having a high school diploma in 1965 meant you were better educated than 50% of the labor force.
PhDs are the new undergraduate degree.
> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
e.g. assuming $500k/yr at 4% interest, that would be $20k/yr which is not enough to live on but is still a nice cushion
IMO you could learn a lot more, as a young person, starting a small business than you'll ever learn at college, and it'll cost less even if you fail. So I don't want to make it a "college fund" or anything like that.
We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.
No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.
So while I'd assume that yes, some graduates are more selective (as they should be, as they usually need to pay off student loans), a huge number of them are taking jobs that don't require their degrees.
College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).
But the people you meet at night school are likely to be even more useful. Connections rule the world.
Principles haven't done much good so far, but my sleep is bad enough as is.
Another part of it is of course the prestige of the institution. If everyone has a degree it's not what it used to be.
I definitely agree with other posters though that once you're in a remote work environment is South America really that different than another neighborhood or City if that same amount of money could bring in a more senior person with experience why hire the green? I think a key part of hiring green folks was culture and having young people around the office but that just isn't what it used to be.
The vibe shift seem to correlate with the general feeling that we're all busy and we really want to spend time babysitting a new grad versus all working hard with experienced people it's almost like once you're too busy it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that it's hard to spend time ramping people which is such a short-sihted thought.
Still I think in the fullness of time people will realize that eventually you do need to be bringing the next generation into the company and so this might be a temporary fad.
medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.
1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.
2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.
I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.
I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.
That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.
I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.
Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. The apocalyptic narrative warning of a dire skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:
Cybersecurity workforce shortage reaches 4 million despite significant recruitment drive (2023) https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workf...
It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.
It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.
Edit: If you need a sure thing, go into healthcare. The world is going to keep getting older, and the demand for care will not end in our lifetime.
(day job is cybersecurity and risk)
I had a tech career spanning from the late '80s until the 2020s, and I read articles in major media outlets about a shortage every single year. In all that time we had a actual, bona fide shortage for about two years in the late '90s.
Unfortunately, cybersecurity was a hot topic in the education market and people got sold on the idea that they could get a six figure job with nothing but some theory and an entry level certification.
Security, qa, devops, data emgonerkng, the list goes on and on.
Infosec also adds the angle that you want someone with actual grey or black hat hands on experience
So in this sense it is true there is a significant shortage of qualified cybersecurity people to fill the roles.
The mistake is that institutions try to fill that shortage with some undergrad program (or worse, certification) which of course can't build expertise in all the above fields in a few years. So that graduate is nearly as unqualified after graduation as before.
I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies.
I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to consider new hires (even for no-skill jobs) w/o an introduction.
My scholarship came with job placement but the entire program was axed by the Contract With America prior to me graduating. Apparently the animosity toward helping folks off the bottom rung outweighed any platitudes about jobs.
I eventually eked out a living doing local IT work but I never did reach a living wage.
The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.
It certainly can, companies just don't want to pay for that training. That's really where the "maniacal obsession" with job experience comes from. Companies just want to save money on training.
The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.
99% of cybersecurity in the commercial sector is a box checking compliance exercise.
Is your assertion that if fewer graduates struggled with these things, companies would post more jobs? Asking because there aren't enough actual¹, realistic² jobs to employ the current pool of job seekers.
¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.
² Qualification requirements that align with what the position actually needs.
This doesn't mean there aren't great candidates.
This could be less on the individual and more on: colleges are getting worse at instruction/preparation (I'm bullish on this explanation among my colleagues; colleges never adapted to computers, let alone AI, the impacts of this just took a decade or so to shake out, which you should expect given the 16 year latency on education most students undergo) (though, again, ultimately its very complicated. multiple factors at play.)
For a lot of these companies this is all surfacing as: They're posting fewer entry level positions than they normally would (oftentimes not zero; just fewer), and if they have money in the budget available due to that, its going into AI.
Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?
> By early 2026 recent grads sat at 5.6% unemployment
Which seems very far from your numbers.
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/10/nx-s1-5773327/women-men-jobs-...
> Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
In short, healthcare is the only field adding lots of jobs, and healthcare workers are something like 80% women. Men who are pursuing non-healthcare educational paths are much less likely to find a new job created for them; they'll have to compete for existing, filled jobs.
This presentation of the stats sounds really misleading to me.
Let’s say there were 10 million quits and 10.369 million hires in that period.
5 million quits and 5.021 million hires among men.
5 million quits and 5.348 million hires among women.
In that case, yes it’s true that employment among women improved more than employment among men. No, it’s not true that an unemployed woman was 17x more likely than a man to find a job.
Regarding the downvotes, I really don’t care about the fake online currency, I think their impact is negative in creating echo chambers in communities, and for some reason bringing men struggles is a taboo despite they suffer far more than women, suicide rates are clear example.
This is so very easily said but how else is this supposed to work, exactly?
People have to start somewhere, and McDonalds experience doesn't count for any specialized job. Fuck, the "McDonalds-tier" jobs will often turn down graduates because they'll obviously walk the moment they get something better.
If no employer is willing to take a chance on graduates, then they just can't get any job experience. "A job that will pay for a roof over one's head" really isn't that extreme an ask.
As has been said a trillion times about AI and tech before AI: Senior level staff is going to age out, it has to be replaced or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
In terms of general unemployment across fields, youth unemployment is extremely corrosive to society.
This is already visible in how anti-AI sentiment is starting to boil over and the lurch rightward in politics. If this continues to escalate, the outcome will be nightmarish. Half of them bombing datacenters, the other half cheering as ICE raids the tech workers.
Assuming there are any seniors offshore either
But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.
If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both:
- expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford
- localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability
- overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need
And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.
Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.
Group Wealth Income/yr Spending/yr
50–95% ~$75–80T ~$11–13T ~$9–11T
95%+ ~$95–105T ~$7–9T ~$5–7T
75–85% ~$18–22T ~$2.5–3.0T ~$1.4–1.8TYes but I can't promise Hard Data about Estimates (for anything): https://kagi.com/search?q=data+on+ghost+jobs&r=us&sh=RKCfaG9...
The whole current gop/conservative thing was to talk about manufacturing jobs. And current admin did their best to push women out of labor force and army/goverment career positions. They failed overall, because they are morons economically, not because they would favor women. Men were all the focus and the supposed recipients of advantages.
And if you want to talk about successfull suicides you will need to talk about gun ownership. Because that is a big reason men are killing themselves more succesfully - they are more likely to have the gun handy.
Male problems are talked about constantly. The issue is that some fairly large ones are tied to powerful industries like, hell, gambling and guns. And attacking those is treated like attacking masculinity itself, creating a cycle.
It's quite good. Zoe is really interested in this stuff. The reporting isn't confrontational, it's just how things unrolled.
Even in STEM, post graduate is the minimum to make the degree count for anything
-GenXer
So then everyone decided everyone should go to college - to me that's manifestly not the case, but that's where we are; plumbers doing quite successfully for themselves with a degree in something or other that doesn't matter at all.
That was one long ass day!
Then what was the purpose of sitting for a degree?
1. To the extent it's standard, it's covered in textbooks which are easily learnable by AI.
2. To the extent it's original, it often is independently rediscoverable by AI from a combination of general intelligence plus workplace training data over which the AI learns.
3. To the extent it's learned (by a human from another human), it'll still slowly be captured by workplace training data over which the AI learns.
4. To the extent it's undocumented, it's up to management to have the processes documented.
The news here is how much it's changed.
2011 and 2013 were the years most tilted in the other direction since 1991 (unemployment rate 2 percentage points lower among new grads than all others). Only since 2019 have new grad overall had a higher unemployment rate, and it's climbing.
One of the interesting aspects here is that bad economies generally favored new grads because the unemployment baseline was higher and employers were picky and favored "any degree" over "no degree". I wonder how much of the change is from less of a preference for "any degree but not much experience" to "experience regardless of degree" in work that doesn't exactly need a degree. And how much is from job availability shifts eating away at entry level roles combined with the ever-present "get a degree to get a good job" pro-college marketing for most of recent US history.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
While it is new, since 1990, that recent college grads are doing worse than all workers it's not the case that the degree is no longer a buffer. If you compare Young Workers(7.5%) to Recent College Grads(5.6%), i.e. the same age range, or All Workers(4.3%) to All College Grads(3.1%) as of today there's still a buffer.
Edit: They point this out later in the piece themselves
Colleges seem to be producing tons of the first, hardly any of the second.
The combined incentive of cost cutting at the outsourcing firm and foolish MBAs in the west opting for the cheapest outsourcing means that the offshore does actually employ juniors, who do build up the experience to become seniors.
45 years doesn’t even seem feasible if you want to retire at 65, since most people graduate college at around 22. Add in a masters or a doctorate and 45 years of work would bring you into your 70s.
(1) The test has to be signed by an online doctor. The firm arranges this implicitly, but it's not free. I can't go directly to Quest for any random test I want. The tests offered directly by Quest without an intermediary are too expensive and too few.
(2) States like New York throw a wrench in it by disallowing anyone with an in-state billing address from ordering such tests.
Ideally I should be able to pay the same low rate that the insurance firm would minimally pay, but in practice I can't. I have to pay a lot more if I can get it at all. The cartel is strong.
But not everyone in society is cut out to manufacture integrated circuits. It used to be that a person on the left half of the IQ bell curve could go out and get a job making brooms, or plumbing fixtures, or toys, or any number of things that are only manufactured in China now.
You can worry about manufacturing in the national security sense, but it is not missing in jobs.
Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else.
It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area.
We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows.
We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.
I'd add more nuance here, SF and many of the surrounding areas said we don't want population growth but they didn't say they didn't want economic growth. And that's a nasty combination for cost-of-living because if you have new higher-grossing, higher-paying businesses displace older ones, you're going to see a crapload of residential displacement and housing inflation.
SF didn't want to be Manhattan residentially, but they didn't do much to try to avoid being Manhattan industrially.
People who rented in SF got screwed because of that.
People who owned property didn't. They made out wonderfully. They kept their property, with the existing characteristics in many places so that they still had a nice big SFH instead of living in a condo like in Manhattan. And the fact that it's worth ten times as much is hardly a downside to them!
Sure, that plot of land would be worth even more if you could build a giant tower on it, but that increase in value is much less marginally useful or desirable to them than their home and neighborhood staying more or less the same shape.
If you want to change that, you have to be really specific about the incentives and the motivations of the current players. "Economic growth" as a sales-pitch alone doesn't resonate against entrenched non-financial NIMBY interests. Or necessarily promise anything to change the property-owner-vs-renter power imbalance.
Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.
And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.
So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.
And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.
> And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.
> So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.
> And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.
I don't think you can run this example in any state.
Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.
But the Metroplex "proper" - which now includes the popular new surrounding cities - has gotten a lot more expensive over the same time frame.
There's a demand aspect that means some places can build into the growth, and others can't. What's the old saw? Location, location, location. There's all the land in the world to grow outwardly in the area, but it doesn't happen uniformly in every direction, and it hasn't prevented rising costs in the popular areas. It's less acute than SF because the raging single-family-zoning NIMBYism isn't accompanied by being landlocked, but the combo of NIMBYism + popularity/demand constraining where new construction happens mean that supply hasn't kept up with demand. And the money you'd save by living somewhere else, for many, doesn't justify giving up the location they want, so those other areas don't have a strong economic case for growth (why invest in a project there instead of a project on the north side?).
(THAT part is universal, and part of why I wonder just how much Temecula would actually want to grow: would growth just look like Riverside or San Bernadino? Folks with means aren't choosing the inland locations first... and unlike in TX, the weather is enormously different.)
Sure it did. And Silicon Valley is just the current nexus.
In the mid 1800s, Pittsburgh was the startup technological nexus for chemistry and engineering around steel. In the early 1900s, Detroit was the startup technological nexus for car and machine manufacturing. In the 1960s, Silicon Valley became the startup technological nexus due to Fairchild and the Traitorous Eight.
The "trick" to creating a startup technological nexus is for the price of a startup to be in the range that experienced, generally young (roughly 25-35), mid-level technical professionals can fund.
We need to be honest in calling this what it is: yes the Chinese have incredible construction capacity, but the far bigger reason why their cities are growing so fast is because: they essentially have zero personal or corporate property rights in urban zones.
Prices are set through a combination of supply-demand and cost of providing housing. Almost all increase in housing costs are coming from land price increase, due to land shortage from planning policies that limit land use density.
Housing has been made into an investment first, and a home second, by creating housing austerity and shortage. The only way to prevent housing from being an investment is to stop the artificial shortage of housing.
Houses are lousy investments.
When you live in your own house, it's called "implicit rent" but when you actually rent it out at market rates it's just called "rent."
There are a few housing markets where what you say will be true, but it's not true of most of the US by any means.
You can't become a licensed electrician without doing x hours of apprenticeship under licensed electrician. And each licensed electrician doesn't need more than one or two helpers at a time, so...
Hollywood is the same. Want to join SAG? You need to get cast in 5 SAG productions. Oh, but SAG productions only cast SAG actors? Oh well...
Meanwhile, all us nerds were trying to teach anyone interested how to write software. Look where that got us.
They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
"increasing supply isn't going to solve many of our problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity"
It would just help with some of them.
But that's a statement that's obvious on the face of it - cheaper housing costs buy time if you lose your job, and makes it easier to have a bigger emergency fund, but it isn't an infinite reprieve. So. The charitable interpretation still hits a wall because that would be acknowledging that supply would help with some of them, and the "dunces" nonsense suggest that they wouldn't agree even with that.
(In some states in particular, though, home ownership is uniquely protected in ways that would help fight homelessness, so increasing supply and incentivizing selling-to-an-owner vs being a landlord could be very helpful too.)
Ezra Klein is an intelligent man, but he has put his intelligence towards selling hopeful visions to professionals who want hope rather than an earnest diagnosis of the dysfunction afflicting our culture, geography, labor market, and welfare system.
Where do you increase supply? The most desirable places to live like urban centers, or more likely more and wider suburbs. In a vacuum many people will say it doesn’t matter and poor people should move to where they can afford; but many people have strong connections to where they grew up and are not inclined to abandon their lifelong support systems because the pricing in one area has gone up.
How do you increase supply? Ugly 5-over-1s are cheap to make but not desirable, not particularly dense. Single family homes are even less dense. Most supply proponents are talking about these or luxury condos.
How much is the new supply? If we build new homes but they are still unattainable to the people who need them, then we didn’t help much right? Which leads me to
Who gets the new supply? Are they put on the open market for speculators/investors/landlords/private equity to gobble up or are there provisions for ensuring the housing goes to people who don’t already have housing or are physically real people not llcs etc.
Tl;dr we could build a million houses but if they are in undesirable places, unfavorable designs, or allowed to be snatched up and resold at the same high prices we already have, then supply alone wouldn’t fix unaffordability of housing across the nation.
It really is housing and scarcity at the bottom of all the other symptoms we see.
Inelastic labor supply into soggy labor demand is the issue. One that is solvable, but only if we acknowledge the problem. Of course, most people with a fortune have their fortune predicated on not understanding the problem, so every venue of discourse which can be bought (which is most of them) struggles to understand the problem. But that doesn't mean you should struggle to understand the problem.
Renting a place out has other costs. Tenant damage, tenants who don't pay rent, tenants who sue you (and landlords always lose), lawyer expenses, time when it sits vacant, vandalism, advertising, having to deal with the tenants, etc.
As for accounting guidance, just what are you driving at? Are those expenses I listed not real? They certainly took real money out of my account!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10559184/#aoi230067...
Really regret not doing that myself.
Just using some back of the envelope math from numbers I found. On the high end a plumbing company is valued at 5x EBITA. A very very good plumbing company has a 20% net profit margin (and no debt, no corporate taxes or anything so that net income and EBITA are essentially the same), and a good plumbing company makes $350k in revenue per truck.
So a $10 million plumbing company would need to have 30 trucks, all with high performing employees. They’d need to bring in $10 million in revenue at best in class profit margins.
That’s a huge operation. Very few plumbing businesses owners will ever get to that level. There are 3 times as many doctors in the US as there are business owners with business that do the kind of revenue in the above example. If you’re capable of running an operation like that you can probably succeed at plenty of other things.
That said, I agree with your overall assessment that $10 million single-owner plumbing businesses are rare, for the simple reason that $10 million single owner anything is rare. If it were not rare, by definition you'd have a lot more folks worth $10 million (and, in this case, a lot more people lining up to be plumbers), and then $10 million would probably not be worth very much.
Or work in start up, get acquired, and chill after ?
The path I outlined in my OP is a _very_ common path that people take in Australia and not at all unrealistic. The barrier to entry is drastically lower, and the access to funding/capital is far easier.
That’s why I tell people family isn’t #1 in America it’s like #3 or 4
What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US?
Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?
GDP growth rate, for instance, in the US doesn't have a significant inflection point around Reaganomics and its increases in deficit spending + "pro-growth" lowering of tax rates on the wealthy. We've never really gone away from that philosophy despite not seeing increases in growth + seeing a LOT of increases in inequality and the elites thriving while everyone else gets squeezed.
Perhaps "growth" is driven primarily by cultural and technological factors (especially the latter!) and inequality is driven primarily by whether or not a population has the balls to say "even if economies of scale suggest that wealth will concentrate in big mega-players, we want to fight that"? And the US had the will to do that 90 years ago, but was successfully brainwashed into giving up on it *despite the 50s in particular being still seen even by those on the right as a "golden age" of both growth and "everyman" quality of life?
If the PC revolution had started seven years earlier and the Iranian revolution had occurred seven years later how would our views of Carter vs Reagan (or some other Republican in 1984 instead) change? But which of those things did they actually cause personally?
A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.
Inequality is the result of allowing economic growth, i.e. freedom.
People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is.
I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "what ifs" that could be mopped up easily if they happened. The problem is people's beliefs, ideology, religion, whatever you want to call it.
The idea "oh but a richer person than me benefits" becomes the reason for blocking housing, eliding the fact that a poorer person benefits, the true thing the NIMBYs try to prevent.
At least, that's true in my area. People that already have housing, are comfortable, start to rail against all this economic growth and say that we should block all change to buildings to prevent it.
Anybody who is actually serious about providing more opportunity to those with less realized that we need more housing, where the jobs are. It's the homeowners and well-established that pursue degrowth and austerity.
The only thing it does to be anti "NIMBY" is aid in unchecked price hikes on "low cost" high density housing that none of us can afford.
If AI really does come in and destroy all that no job is safe. Blue collar households don’t hire tradesman at anywhere near the rate that white collar households do.
In a major economic downturn like that new construction dries up. The commercial work will dry up to as all those white collar companies close their offices.
The end result is that existing tradesman will be fighting over a much smaller pie. Plus they’ll be dealing with competition from all the unemployed knowledge workers trying to change careers. In some states and some trades new entrants will be less of an issue, but most trades in most states aren’t supply restricted like the above poster’s electrician example.
My point is getting to the trades isn’t going to protect you from AI taking your job unless AI takes over a small percent of jobs and stops. I don’t actually think AI is going to take all that many jobs myself, but if I’m wrong we’re going to have to completely rework our economy.
I still think the solution involves rapid transit (which could be cars maybe) - you need the outlying towns where there is space and room to be directly connected to the economic centers in a way that makes them practical.
Then the area that is low density can grow - connected to the city center but not contributing significantly to vehicle traffic.
> That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism.
And that is why Manhattan, due to having the most housing units per square mile, is one of the cheapest places to live in the US.
Since it's not, it is not a truism that merely increasing the housing supply will decrease prices. It takes more than that.
As long as you have excess people willing and able to buy $1M studios, every new studio will get snapped up. Prices can only begin to drop if you build so many that you exhaust the supply of people willing to pay $1M and the highest bid left is $900K.
Think of it as analogous to bond issuances. Just because the government issues more and more bonds the price won't drop as long as there are buyers to clear the price. Bond price only drops when they run dry of buyers at the higher price and must start accepting lower offers.
More housing will not make manhattan cheaper than Charleston, West Virginia, but it will make manhattan cheaper than how manhattan is today. That's the point.
Your argument is like saying obese people should not go on diet because statistically the people who go on diet are more overweight than average.
Where I live has ~21k units for ~45k residents (47%), and a median home price of $440k or so. NYC has about 3.6 M housing units for ~8.5 M people (42%), and a median home price of $870k. For NYC to make up that 5% they would need around 425k housing units.
Obviously these numbers can’t tell the whole story, but it does seem like the supply is fundamentally more constrained in NYC than here, and here is already pretty tight, with very low vacancy rates, high rental prices, and expensive homes.
Anyway NYC plans to build 200k units over the coming decade, increasing the supply in order to reduce the cost. Of course that’s not the only item in the plan to reduce costs, but it’s a major component.
Nah, what actually happens is the lower rung housing is either flipped to capture the increase in area pricing or the lot gets scraped, again to capture the increase in area pricing.
This is absolutely false, not true, disproven, and made up.
Social housing builders are good for many reasons, 1) they provide competition to the public market, and when efficient don't need to return profit to shareholders so provide a very good competitor in places like Finland and Singapore, 2) social housing builders smooth out the business cycle, because new housing is needed just as much when at the downturn of the business cycle as at the top, so it greatly helps provide stable employment and a stable workforce for housing construction, greatly improving housing.
But the idea that new idea drives up housing prices in any way is, at best, a fiction. It's mostly a lie from landlords and homeowners to try to justify their continued extraction of profits from their idleness.
Someone should tell the local housing market that then, because this pattern has consistently manifest over the last 20 years here. Without exception everyone I've seen make this claim isn't invested in residential real estate and hasn't closely watched how prices shift in response to new construction. In any event if you're trying to advance the claim that gentrification is a myth you're going to need to bring some serious proof to back that.
Sure, as with every other good.
But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.
How much? Searching a bit suggests that net profit margin in housing industry is about 8.7%
Consindering an investor can get ~3.75% in zero risk T-bills without lifting a shovel, that's about an extra 5% net profit to get involved in building housing.
Which isn't nothing, it's a decent profit. But I also wouldn't call extra 5% a huge difference.
The thing to keep in mind though is we’re talking small business, once you get to $10 million EBITA, you’re probably talking $50-$200 million in revenue and 200-500 employees. Thats firmly into mid sized business territory and I think revenue growth would be the or primary driver of the multiple.
From your source a 10x multiple would require very high revenue growth. That makes sense because you can get 10% average return with index funds, so you need to significantly beat that ROI.
There are massive numbers of unemployed college grads in US that would rather be unemployed than take a job they see as beneath them.
You may very well be right. However, everyone I hear saying how much money they made off of their house neglects to mention any of the expenses I listed.
And I didn't add in any of the expenses I listed earlier if I'd kept it.
I do not see how this is related to property rights? In urban China you do not own your home, it is a 70yr right to use the land.
Some of their construction is good, but not private homes. Because you do not own the land, the quality of your home is up to the developer, who basically follows no code and cheapens out on everything. Also the Chinese code is very loosely implemented, for it lacks basic insulation and ventilation to start with, let alone modern airtightness.
Anyone grew up in sfh like those in the US will not like to live in Chinese nail houses.
I’m sure China will eventually replaces leases with a property tax that would do the deprecation gradually and continuously like in the west rather than all at once.
I’ve lived in Chinese flats for 9 years and had no problem with them. Sure the nail houses are older less dense constructions that were decrease before local governments built roads around them, but absolutely nothing changed for the residents except for the road.
While nail house is the Chinese version of holdout [1], and it exists everywhere. In China it is never regarded positively but always linked with forced eviction [2]. The eminent domain rule requires market rate compensation, which is not possible in many cases because of state ownership and the dual rural-urban land system. It is basically how China financed its growth for around three decades, get rural lands paying out penny, then sell it to some developer for a fortune.
For the land use right duration I believe it has always been 70 yrs [3]? Renewal or not is not a big problem right now, because real estate took off in the 90s, so we still have four decades to go and see.
For foreigner China can be a bit on the rosier side, because of their subtle reverse-racism? Like in universities the dorm for international students is better than the domestic ones, and where expats live is usually a nicer part of the town. Nevertheless, among my Chinese colleagues one the top reasons for immigrating to US is always better and cheaper housing. A couple years back I was surprised to learn that a modest ~700 sqft apartment in Shanghai or Peking easily went for $1M! Since then they had an almost 50% crash post covid but still, impressive.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwelling_Narrowness
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_requisition_in_China
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_law_in_China#Obtainin...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44914153
It is rather fascinating that you would bring up a "gentrification is a myth claim," why would you try to insert that into my mouth?
Gentrification happens all throughout the US, but in the current era it's from the under discussed type from the original literature in the 1970s: through lack of construction. When there's not enough housing to go around, prices rise, wealthier people are the only ones who win the bidding war, etc etc. See Boyle Heights in LA for a classic example of this. No new buildings, massive gentrification because there's not enough housing to go around.
See also in LA for the neighborhoods where prices are not rising: the only places they are building lots of apartments.
Perhaps there was some era when the "rent gap" style of gentrification was actually prevalent, but it hasn't been that way for decades. It's all just shortage driven gentrification in every example I have been pointed to in recent times.
Probably because the sentence you quoted and responded to points explicitly to gentrification as a primary driver of the phenomenon in question. You know, that thing you said was false, untrue, and entirely made up?
"It's all just shortage driven gentrification in every example I have been pointed to in recent times."
Fair enough, allow me to provide a few counter-examples from the regional housing market:
- three massive mixed-use development projects (in different local cities) each added thousands of rental units and mixed walkable retail to what were aging downtown-adjacent neighborhoods. Demand in this quadrant of the city spiked in response. Home prices (regardless of age or condition) in a 10 block radius tripled over the course of 4 years. Surrounding commercial real estate owners where quick to pick up on the increase in traffic and promptly raised commercial rents, driving the majority of pre-existing businesses out. These were (entirely predictably) replaced by national franchises. Area residential landlords, seeing rising commercial rents and real estate prices promptly increased rents.
- There is a phenomenon in local "blue collar" neighborhoods where developers are buying a handful of adjacent lots, scraping the existing structures, subdividing the parcels, and then putting up these utterly vile two and three story skinny block houses that combine all of the worst aspects of private home ownership and apartment living. These new units are generally priced between 175% and 500% of the pre-existing average of similarly sized houses in these neighborhoods. In every neighborhood I've bothered to watch where these things have gone up the sell price of for housing in these neighborhoods has gone up between roughly 75% to 200% over a ~4 year period following. During the same time period cost of similarly sized houses in similar neighborhoods in the area has increased by maybe a 3rd, which suggests that blanket demand for the area isn't the primary driver of the increase.
- Then there's the time two county planning boards colluded with the largest developer in the state to conjure a medium sized bedroom community from thin fucking air (well a swamp actually but you get the idea). ~1k new units added to the market a year for the last decade, targeting the entire spectrum from "affordable" apartments to two golf course communities. The price of housing and lots have skyrocketed in the surrounding area, to the point that section 8 landlords in neighborhoods 10 miles away are backing out of their agreements so they can capitalize on the increase in local rents.
The one thing all of these instances have in common is new capacity was added to an area and local rents and real estate prices increased rapidly.
Here is the nytimes article about the Wenzhou leases, they were 20 years (I got that detail wrong):
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/26/business/china-wenzhou-la...
China did forced evictions back in the 90s and they were received very poorly, so they whiplashed in the other direction of never doing forced evictions. Western media just focuses on the former though, not the corrections.
I am as much as a critic about China as I defend it. Its problems are overbuilding, the hukou system is still trash, no property tax that would discourage speculation and empty apartments, etc… But property rights are still strong, the government feels it’s very important, and development occurs at a rapid clip, the China I left 10 years ago is already very different and no longer as poor.
There is increasingly becoming more of a divide between haves and have nots, and it has a temporal component because of how equity has appreciated over the last decade or so. Both housing and stocks.
People from a decade ago have seen absolutely unsustainable appreciation in their assets while doing nothing. That is putting them at structural advantages against younger generations that will not see those same appreciations. It's like the bus has left without them. No matter how hard and fast they run, someone asleep on the bus will always be ahead of them.
The lowest quartile of income have had the highest growth the past four years.
Could you provide source? I don't think that's true.
Or join an existing one.
Then talk to your local NIMBY. Housing crisis is not due to capitalism being evil, but due to constraining people from building. Healthcare is getting better all the time, we had MASSIVE breakthroughs this year at ASCO (which were made possible by big pharma!). As for education yeah, it could be better but it's completely tangential to the topic.
The society you desire can’t exist unfortunately as much as I’ve thought it could and worked for it
Society has always (yes always) “bent” toward dominating hierarchies because individuals want the stability of being part of the dominating group.
It’s a mix of the lifestyle not being exactly what people thought plus them getting culty. In many cases it’s more the latter than the former.
a) these communities often depend on consensus decision making. Problems that require collective action get nearly impossible when the society gets too big
b) People underestimate how much they depend on greater society in a modern context
c) It’s normal for future generations to have evolving values. The original idealistic notions tend to lose their luster to those who were born into it
There are others more unique to communes, but I highlighted those because they also make it hard for the inverse libertarian ideal to work as well. Meaning it has to do as much with human nature as any ideology.
A commune, however, can be.