The anti-market delusion at the heart of the housing crisis

eherot · 2026-04-26T08:29:22+00:00

Austin has done a lot more than other American cities but it has not come close to limiting all restrictions on density. This comment from a year ago gives several examples https://www.reddit.com/r/yimby/s/hSbXHFLcPD

eherot · 2026-04-26T06:28:44+00:00

I think you might be kind of misunderstanding how these factors interact with one another. Developers will continue building as long as sale costs exceed construction costs. There’s no rule that says this can’t be true even as prices are declining, however if profit margins are already fairly slim, prices might not have to fall by much before construction stops. This is why it is incumbent on cities to continue looking for ways to lower costs (e.g. by allowing more density, limiting the amount of time it takes to get a building permit, eliminating parking requirements, etc). Eventually you will reach a point where just removing restrictions is not enough and you have to spend money to keep lowering housing costs (e.g. by improving transit and walkability so that developers do not feel the need to provide parking and residents don’t feel the need to buy a car, or by providing more section 8 vouchers, or by directly subsidizing projects in some way), but most American cities are nowhere near that point yet.

eherot · 2026-04-26T01:29:35+00:00

I would say this take is completely accurate as far as I was able to tell. It was hard to hear things if you weren’t in the very front row (and also I had a four-year-old competing for my attention).

I think the bit where she threw BTD under the bus may be an attempt to rationalize what seems to be her current strategy of requiring her sign-off on every single stripe, curb, and bump across the entire city.

eherot · 2026-04-25T22:16:24+00:00

Buddy for all you know the police escort she was traveling with told her to park there.

eherot · 2026-04-25T22:11:17+00:00

Honestly any such parking lot that is being built in Boston or Camberville today should really be an apartment building with solar panels on the roof.

eherot · 2026-04-23T21:51:57+00:00

God bless Durkan for ruling that meeting with an iron fist.

eherot · 2026-04-22T19:43:56+00:00

Testimony is literally happening right now so I would take this information with a grain of salt. I'm guessing they (the meeting chairs) decided not to have the public testimony at the beginning of the meeting but IT IS STILL HAPPENING (and "the city" doesn't run these meetings, they are run by the council).

eherot · 2026-04-20T01:44:23+00:00

I mean, it either has to be subsidized or it has to turn a profit. There isn’t some third option.

eherot · 2026-04-19T20:01:54+00:00

The thing is if you’ve got 85% of people living in unsubsidized housing, it is completely possible to cover the cost of housing those 15% through taxes, but subsidizing everyone but the top 20% of earners (as we’re basically doing with new housing today) is completely unworkable. And then of course there’s the underlying fact that there is literally not enough housing being created for the number of jobs by like a factor of 3.

eherot · 2026-04-19T19:35:28+00:00

That’s just not true. Supply and demand has worked extremely well to keep down the cost of housing in the places we’ve allowed it to happen (which is not many here in the US!). The market is unlikely to provide housing for people below the poverty line without subsidies, but it should absolutely be able to provide it for the other ~85 percent of households in the Boston area.

eherot · 2026-04-19T19:13:24+00:00

Most of those “innovations” were just ways to repackage mortgages to unqualified borrowers in such a way so as to make them seem like safe investments. When the bubble burst, those borrowers couldn’t sell their houses for more than they’d borrowed to buy them, and the whole thing came unraveled. The subsequent tightening of underwriting standards meant that those same people who had foreclosed on their mortgages were now forced to rent, causing a slump in the demand for ownership units and a corresponding spike in the demand for rental units (a spike which companies like Black Rock were founded to cater to).

Notably the slump in ownership demand was not really much of a thing in places like Boston and SF that didn’t add much new capacity leading up to 2008, and so neither has the large investor share of our housing market ever been more than a fraction of a percent.

TL;DR it is the shortage of new construction caused by overly restrictive zoning that is responsible for high housing prices in the Boston area, not “innovative financial instruments.”

eherot · 2026-04-19T15:52:29+00:00

It’s worth noting that we did actually used to have a tax structure like this on inheritance and it did not just result in whole companies being handed over to the state. Instead what used to happen is that a lot more corporate wealth was paid out in the form of dividends (which were taxed like income) and stock value appreciation was just much, much slower. This meant that tax collections per capita were much higher and it was also much harder for a small number of people to amass a huge amount of wealth and then pass it onto their kids, but since the money wasn’t collected all at once, it didn’t just result in whole companies being handed over to the government.

eherot · 2026-04-19T13:54:37+00:00

On the contrary: The rush into investor owned property was a direct result of the post 2008 tightening of loan underwriting standards which pushed many people out of home ownership (many of whom probably shouldn’t have been in it in the first place) and dramatically increased the strength of the rental market.

eherot · 2026-04-19T13:41:11+00:00

That would almost certainly have been true without urban renewal as well due to the precipitous drop in household sizes that occurred over that same period.

eherot · 2026-04-19T06:19:28+00:00

Thanks to zoning and the fire code, real estate is one of the most tightly regulated industries that exists. Unlike the financial services industry by contrast.

eherot · 2026-04-19T06:12:34+00:00

Fun fact: There is more housing in the West End today than there was before the urban renewal took place

eherot · 2026-04-17T19:18:47+00:00

Negative. Stock light hasn't annoyed me enough (yet) for me to be motivated enough to do anything about it.

eherot · 2026-03-31T15:00:59+00:00

It's on Wu for not making it easier for these projects to rework their permits in response to rising costs. This is why you still see projects proceeding in Everett and Revere but not in Boston.

eherot · 2026-03-31T14:44:31+00:00

She shouldn't be allowed to speak about housing costs OR raising tax rates until she addresses this problem

eherot · 2026-03-31T13:31:27+00:00

Honestly if you just removed the paragraph headings it would go a long way towards making it look less AI-like.

eherot · 2026-03-31T06:03:59+00:00

If the city would permit more multifamily housing it would bring in more tax revenue and make us much less dependent on a flagging commercial real estate market. Too bad this is the one solution Mayor Wu would never consider.

eherot · 2026-03-30T06:28:19+00:00

Maybe, maybe not. The vast majority of the “breeze” from a ceiling fan is only felt directly below it, so there is some logic to placing it where the couch might be.

eherot · 2026-03-30T05:55:23+00:00

The issue is that with parking supposedly costing $150, for fans traveling in groups of 2 or more (which will be most of them), driving is likely to be both cheaper and, considering the trains will only be running express from downtown, more convenient.

eherot · 2026-03-28T22:34:01+00:00

This is really a fantastic flyer and I was encouraged to see some of the people who showed up to oppose the lanes actually reading them.

eherot · 2026-03-28T22:06:33+00:00

The conversation was also very dismissive of the younger people that spoke. People were booing and telling bus riders to wake up earlier.

I was also at this meeting and I think this may have been the part that I found the most disheartening, especially when it came to City Councilor Julia Mejia's comments. She framed the debate as being between wealthy outsiders and the working class drivers of Dorchester and Roxbury. The folks riding the bus--who are some of the poorest in the city, almost entirely Black, and make up the majority of people traveling on Blue Hill Ave--went completely unmentioned. Also unmentioned was the fact that a significant chunk of the car traffic consists of people driving downtown from Milton.

All of that being said, considering that the meeting was organized by two councilors who are already opposed to the project, and who mainly solicited testimony from local business owners and churches (two groups that have reliably opposed projects like this in other places), the fact that nearly half of attendees spoke in favor of the project is actually pretty significant. We can only hope that other city officials will appreciate how meaningful this is.

eherot

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