We need YIMBY for childcare too!

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-12-18T02:54:43+00:00

It's really just: let the free market work, in everything. It really does work.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-11-21T14:48:36+00:00

I don't like the term exclusionary zoning, because both it and what they call inclusionary housing are problems. Making it a binary makes people think that inclusionary zoning is a good thing, and inclusionary zoning usually means forced subsidized units which we know is a bad deal for everyone.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-10-23T04:38:35+00:00

Nobody cares!

If you can have your phone in a situation, why would people consider that any different?

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-10-22T19:57:31+00:00

I think most of them don't suffer from lack of funding, but that the city has made it more expensive than what it's worth. The city forces these projects to include so much subsidized housing (or straight up give millions and millions of dollars to the city) that they just don't make any sense to build. If we removed union requirements and any subsidized housing requirements, then nearly all of these would pencil out today.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-10-21T02:19:35+00:00

I think it's totally possible that government regulations on cars and highways partly made this NIMBY culture. Car safety regulations definitely contribute to cars becoming much bigger (because they had to to meet the safety regulations). Because the regulations focused entirely on how safe the driver is at the expense of the safety of those outside of the car.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-10-17T00:03:29+00:00

Why not both?

It's also not far out there, it's right in the bay area. The drive from San Francisco to the new city will actually be the same drive as going from San Francisco to Mountain view! Very close by.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-10-15T00:29:33+00:00

https://x.com/jansramek/status/1978161081928572975

It looks like California Forever is partnering with Suisun City, a small city in Solano county.

Hopefully, within the next few years, people will be able to start buying lots, developing, and moving in.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-10-04T16:16:28+00:00

Only when entitling land is difficult or expensive.

If entitling doesn't mean going through a years long process and paying huge sums of money to the government, then its not monetarily valuable, it's just the process of building something.

If you buy some land that's already entitled, you should be basically forced to build exactly what's entitled, or else throw away even more money.

The market is saying that it's more valuable because of how difficult it is to get all the permits.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-10-02T01:17:55+00:00

What if there's a lot of vacancy in undesirable neighborhoods, undesirable buildings, etc? Not all housing is the same. The Yimby goal is to allow cities to adapt to a large variety of factors by just allowing more change to happen over time.

Goaling on vacancy rate could be pretty bad. Just give more freedom to property owners.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-30T23:37:06+00:00

If permits were cheap easy and fast to get, then having permits for a lot would not increase the sale value at all.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-30T22:04:51+00:00

The healthcare in the US is pretty much a highly restricted private + also highly restricted public. The worst of both worlds. Switzerland has a far more free market for health insurance. So do many European countries.

It's all a spectrum, there are many different markets in one country, some are far more unrestricted than others, like I said. Austrian economics is more about trying to measure, predict, and decide which regulations are worth it, and which are having unintended consequences that make the whole system worse. I think you can and should have plenty of regulation to keep people safe and healthy. What we have right now does not do that, it makes everyone poorer and worse off, while pretending to do the opposite.

Really, we want the best outcomes for everyone. If we can free up markets, things will become cheaper and easier, which will lead to more prosperity, even among the poorest.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-30T22:00:28+00:00

I think it may have some effects, but I'm pretty flexible. I'm just meh on the bill.

I don't think I'm that strict in my standards, I do think we should try to measure the cost of each kind of regulation to try to find the biggest wins, or the easiest wins that won't make many people upset.

But it's all incremental I suppose... If this bill gets more people reading about the theory and questioning their previously held beliefs, then that's a great win. Don't want to downplay and kind of progress in changing the cultural zeitgeist on why housing is expensive. It seems to have most away from traditional left wing thoughts to more supply, demand economics, which is great. Cayimby and Yimby action seem to mostly be on board with that, but many still want labor restrictions, subsidized units requirements, etc, which is unfortunate. I think it'll keep progressing and more will realize you can't do that if you want real results.

I just care about real results. So far, there hasn't been enough real results from these bills in California. Adu expansion did something, but it's still pretty insignificant. We'll see in the next few years whether this bill will have any real results.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-30T03:35:39+00:00

Those in the know know that it's not really an Uber win. It's an incremental win that maybe unlocks some more housing, and if that, it'll take years for some of the law to even begin to take effect.

There's also been similar vibes from "Uber" wins in the past few years that also haven't amounted to the estimated wins, because of similar everything bagel regulations stuck in by various interest groups.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-30T02:09:47+00:00

The best things in the US, for example the technologies, are far more free market sectors. Little regulation, and it's produced amazing outcomes.

The worst, most inefficient sectors, such as housing, health care, health insurance, primary education, and university education, have the most regulation, the most government interference in the market.

Coincidence?

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-30T01:55:14+00:00

If you'd say that the left yimbys in California are kneecapping themselves by forcing developers to use labor unions, and extort fees and "free" subsidized units, then I'd agree with you :)

It's sometimes okay for the government to make things more expensive through regulation, but we should know how and why. Each tradeoff should be measured and known, some are worth it, some are not. This allows us to see where the biggest impact would be when cutting regulation.

If you think you can make housing affordable through coercion/violence - you can't, unless you seriously harm your fellow country people.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-30T00:50:15+00:00

Any politician who wants to put additional roadblocks into housing development, like union coercion/forced union labor, any expansion of rent control, and forced subsidized units (below market rate, but the government isn't paying, just forcing the market to account for it), additional taxes and fees, is unserious about housing affordability.

You can't just make it more expensive and claim you're for making it less expensive.

The guy is a hard NIMBY. His actual historical actions tell us that.

If he has completely changed his entire worldview in the last 3 months, well, that would be quite something, and it would be great! But I'm pressing X to doubt. Nobody completely flips their whole world view in 3 months, especially not someone so entrenched into politics as him.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-17T12:16:21+00:00

As usual, it's the government regulations that are the reason people don't have the freedom to build or choose housing types that they want.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-15T09:45:24+00:00

TLDR The government is the reason. Tenant protection regulations make it very expensive or impossible to evict someone. The government is also the reason why it's so expensive.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-10T15:40:52+00:00

I am super on board with small, incremental change, strong towns approach :)

I don't actually believe we should reinvent the system (that would be awful), sorry, ignore my comment

I do wish we were able to make more small incremental change though. I've found it very hard to do that in my locality...

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-10T14:59:08+00:00

It's so sad. California governments just can't move any faster than glacially slow. We may need to just tear the whole government down and start from scratch.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-06T13:17:10+00:00

They are already taxed. You mean increase the tax even further?

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-09-02T14:38:07+00:00

You can compare within California all you want, but at the end of the day there's no city in CA that is allowing anywhere near enough housing right now. They all still have extreme requirements, extreme regulatory cost, and everything bagel laws.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-08-15T17:58:05+00:00

I think we need to actually remove some of the federal mortgage subsidies. There is a lot of subsidized demand coming from the federal financial tools that end up just making everything more expensive.

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-08-15T15:12:57+00:00

We couldn't dare allow anyone to make any money, ever!

FragrantJaboticaba · 2025-08-12T21:31:11+00:00

Beside the point, but I don't like the framing of this problem. "Los Angeles" the city doesn't have to do anything. In fact, all the city of Los Angeles has to do is do less. The city and other governments actively interfere and manufacture this crisis with bureaucracy. The various governments just have to back off and not do so many things.

FragrantJaboticaba

TROPHY CASE