Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

There’s a great podcast that delves into the Big Dig. It was an exceedingly difficult giant construction project. The original cost estimate was a made up number for political expediency. They lied knowing once they dug a big hole the sunk-cost fallacy would pull them over the finish line.

Financial incentives stop aligning because of two things:

* Rent control means that tenants are paying less than market rate.

* Extremely low property tax rates combined with anti-development policy mean that asset price appreciation exceeds rents by a significant amount.

Stop controlling rents, tax the hell out of these people, and one way or another spend it on residents, and you are exacting a redistribution of wealth that doesn't distort the market in a way that leads to slumlords.

Restricted property rights limit the amount of housing and thus give current landlords power over renters. If there were plentiful housing landlords would be forced to provide attractive housing, otherwise tenants would vote with their feet and leave.

I have total opposite experiences from renting most of my life. I can't think of a mom and pop landlord I had a poor experience with. Financial incentives generally aligned fairly well for me. I was an extremely low-maintenance tenant, only calling for major repairs like mechanicals or outright dead appliances. I handled all basic maintenance and minor wear and tear myself at every property I rented from a small time landlord.

This resulted in pretty much zero rent increases across the 15 or so total years renting from such individuals. I had exactly one rent increase during that time due to a large property tax increase which I found to be reasonable.

Sometimes the small time landlords were a bit rough around the edges, but were good people trying their best. All emergencies were handled quite rapidly, and the non-emergency stuff I was quite capable of mitigating myself. I appreciated not having to do basic home maintenance due to my lifestyle at the time. I traded money for time.

I did not live in a city with good tenant protections whatsoever. If you stopped paying rent, you were evicted within 45 days or less.

Corporate landlords were the direct opposite experience. I avoided them like the plague until I bought my own home.

Tenant protection laws in some states have gone far too far in the tenants direction. I think societal incentives need to be reset to make rental units much less subsidized and lucrative, but I can't really fault individuals engaging in the practice. We setup the tax code on purpose to incentivize such behavior. Roll that back and you will see incentives re-align.

Tenants rights should not include the right to basically be a nuisance and a leech upon society. Professional tenant grifting should not be the profession it actually is today in many localities. It harms the rental market and society itself. A single bad tenant should not have the ability to ruin a small time landlord no matter how you feel about the ethical position landlords happen to be in.

    > I would love to purchase a home, but even 10 years of a software engineering salary are not enough for that in NYC.

This.

In New Zealand the only accessible way for the moderately wealthy to save is property (a failed financial system)

So there is a proliferation of "mum and dad" landlords who have huge political power, two "investment" properties, and they make life hell and insecure for renters

I rented until I was in my forties, and that is what it was like. They are not all bad, but many cannot believe that their tennents own their home, if not the property it is in. A landlord can not "drop by" for any reason, legally, but most importantly, morally

Being a landlord should be a business. Nobody should have tenants in an "investment" property. It is a conflict of interest and a power imbalance that immiserates the tenants

On top of that the poorest 60% are handing over the lion's share of their income to the richest 15%

So much needs to change....

Around the time we bought our place we had some spare cash and thought about getting another house. I'd seen the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book which had the advice that you should buy a rental property only it was wildly cashflow positive after the mortgage.

That's not realistic in most cases but we saw one rental property which looked crazy profitable that was full of Section 8 tenants. We passed on it because it was really buying yourself a job as a social worker and the fact that we were bleeding hearts would make it harder, not easier. I think my wife and I have gained the maturity that we might be able to handle that now but we've also gotten better at setting boundaries such that we wouldn't.

That's a result of the market your dad is in. Vast numbers of renters and landlords are just ordinary people with no/not dealing with drug or social problems.

Those are pretty extreme horror stories, but in general everything I've heard from small time landlords makes it sound like a terrible value proposition even under normal circumstances. The ones it works out well for are the exception.

The dwelling rental niche is far beyond over-farmed and is definitely overhyped. As with so many other things in our economy, the big players are usually the only ones with decent margins, and even they have to cut corners and be somewhat lucky on dice rolls to get them.

It's a law of large numbers thing. Americans romanticized mom&pop landlords vs big greedy landlords, but.. it's a bad business to be a smalltime landlord. It's like putting all your money in one stock.

If, say, 5% of the population is crazy, and make for bad tenants.. then owning 10-20+ units puts you in a position of always having 90%+ of your revenue coming in.

If you have 1 unit then most of the time you are OK, but every once in a while you may lose 100% of your revenue for 3-12 months, while you have to keep spending on mortgage/tax/utilities, plus lawyers, repairs, etc.

The key thing would be the government finally go and improve the situation around mental health care accessibility and a proper social safety net.

People don't fall for drugs on their own - the utter, utter majority fall for drugs to self-medicate for whatever crisis they're facing. Be it perspectivelessness, losing a family member or one's job - across the Western world, governments have completely given up supporting people who hit a rough patch in life, and now it's a situation that is very, very hard to resolve.

Why? If I'm renting a place it doesn't matter whether my landlord is a big corporation or some guy and his wife, I still need to know that the rent isn't going to triple next week, I still need to know I won't be evicted without notice, and I still need the heating the work.

If mom-and-pop can't cope with the responsibilities of being a landlord they should sell up to someone who can, not expect to be let off the hook when they make someone's life a misery.

> Small mom-and-pop should be allowed to do many things that extremely wealthy landlords and/or corporations are not allowed to do.

The problem is, then you end up with structuring/smurfing. It's already a common thing in real estate to have one LLC per each building in a development to prevent creditors from clawing money back from the actual developer corporation/fund, no need to entice this even more.

Besides, small landlords already are notorious for egregious violations of regulations. Creating effectively two classes of renters doesn't solve the problem, at all.

I think this completely elides the point the gp was making about the edge cases being the hardest part. As siblings have pointed out, even establishing "no damage to the property beyond normal wear and tear" is frequently contentious and not self-evident. Rights (and courts) exist precisely because parties frequently represent the facts of a situation to their maximal benefit.

Also, while reasonable people can agree that there's room to improve the balance on tenants rights, the idea of swinging from "total" to "0" rights based solely on payment status doesn't strike me as the debate's end.

Berkeley, CA in the 80s (90s?) a lady went into the hospital for an extended stay and rented her place. She had a verbal agreement that they'd leave when she got out. She got out, they didn't leave. Last I heard about the case it was 10 years later and they were still there.

Yeah, I know, Berkeley. Rent control was very anti-landlord. But "rents have total rights as long as they pay" sounds too harsh to me.

> as long as the property is not damaged

According to who? Landlords already tend to exaggerate to try to keep your security deposit, tenants would have no motivation to admit to damages after the lease ends. If the answer is "go to court", then "evictions are fast" will have to be amended.

Not only that, after X months of not paying the landlord can request an eviction, and from the moment the eviction is requested to the moment its executed the government pays the rent to the landlord (I believe 3 is reasonable for X, but it can be higher or lower).

I'm a renter and always have been a renter, but it has always been crazy to me that the cost of people without a house is dumped on the unlucky landlord. If the decision is that this cost must be put on society, at least it should be spread among all citizens/landlords (e.g. with a tax on rent).

Not having the government paying while waiting for the eviction is the same as now: the government can just take ages.

The risk to landlords when the renters doesn't uphold the contract needs to be limited. This is also the reason why an insurance would be an inferior solution: there is still no incentive for the government to intervene fast.

We might find out that it's preferable to build social housing rather than paying rent to landlords, and the government starts actually doing something about it

"renegotiate at market rates" is extremely tenant-punishing, because the cost of moving for the tenant is much higher than the cost of finding a new tenant for a landlord. It becomes better if you remove the "renegotiate" part and couple the allowed rent increase to some index.

I strongly suspect that you've never been a landlord. Nor a particularly perceptive tenant in rental housing. Nor seen any police/tenant/landlord cases.

Plus, the policy goal of allowing small-scale stuff like ADU's is to encourage people to become landlords. "Your tenant has total right" rules have the opposite effect.

> You always renegotiate at market rates.

As long as RealPage and friends exist, market rates are whatever they say they are. There’s no free market in real estate.

I agree, but most of the tenants' rights and left-wing groups reject this.

They seem to want the landlord to take on the government's role to provide social housing and therefore you shouldn't be able to kick them out for non-payment, contracts should be very long (>5 years, or even indefinite), there should be rent control instead of market rates etc.

> Do people abuse the process? Sure, some do. They get away with it at most once, because...there's a record of it all in housing court and eviction proceedings are pretty much a deathblow with any landlord doing their homework.

The problem is that for large corporate landlords this is a statistical risk that can be priced in and accounted for across hundreds of units.

For small mom-and-pop landlords renting out their basement, it's a roll of the dice on whether any given tenant will completely ruin their life and be impossible to get rid of.

Of course many people will respond to this by saying that the rights of people to have a place to live are more important than the rights of homeowners to have a bit of side income, but if the law makes it too risky to rent out a second suite, nobody will want to do it -- which makes the housing crisis even worse for renters as there will be fewer places available to rent.

Eviction proceedings suck. It takes at least 6 months and you don't get rent in that time even if you have a slam dunk case. Imagine if you took out a home loan to build an ADU and lost the equivalent of half a year of payments on it.

The risk of legal costs are basically passed along in the cost of rent. And bigger corporate landlords are naturally going to have a bigger advantage because they can pool their risks.

The point isn't that there are bad landlords. It's that you are creating a treadmill. The more you add tenant protections, the more costs you add to housing. And the more incentives you give landlords to screen tenants and otherwise behave badly.

It's amusing that you picked Massachusetts. You can get rid of all eviction records as part of the Affordable Homes Act.

What this means is that you can rent somewhere, not pay, it will take a minimum of 6 months to get rid of them since they can request RAFT and you must wait until the application is processed before the trial can proceed. After they're successfully evicted, after 4 years of no evictions, they can have it sealed, regardless if the judgement is paid or not.

Or, you can pay the judgement and have it sealed immediately, effectively getting a free loan. Not to mention, if you don't pay and proceedings are brought against you, if you pay to cure, prior to going to trial, you can have those sealed immediately with or without the landlord, so other landlords can't even know about that either.

Repeat. Free rent.

Two hours of daily commute to work, to live in a dense suburban hellscape is "good"?

If you listen to the histrionics that NIMBYs say, it's an example legislation that would lead to typical NIMBY histrionics, but when implemented leads to none of those claimed issues, because it doesn't get used that much.

"See, that wasn't that hard". It's baby's first upzoning.

Yes. I agree. It could still be a net benefit. But it does have cost.

> many of the Tennant rights are waived for it if the primary property is owner occupied, aside from some cities like oakland

And this can change overnight... CA cities have made some pretty drastic changes quite suddenly in the past. Not worth it. Eg: https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2025/01/29/mountain-view-stren...

The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with.

Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.

One of her campaign promises was to tax unrealized gains at 25%, it was definitely more than just status quo.

Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you?

There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign.

Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.

>My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different

But

>most people didn't know what to expect from her.

Combined with more of the same from the Democrats where they pick the candidate and preordain them. These are the things that tanked her chances.

Hillary wasn't super popular, but what really killed her was being forced on us from the political Democratic establishment.

Biden only won because Trump is such a turd for many.

It's been since Obama that the Democrats actually had a candidate that people liked. I do not understand this strategy.

The comment is saying that liberal politicians should be

>prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds.

Nothing about what you mentioned at all. Nor did I ever claim Kamala ran on what you said. The fact that you and the commenter have different ideas of what rational policies are and assume politicians should be running on that platform is part of the bias. You assume that most people want the same thing as you but most people don’t. The majority actually enjoy social issues.

She wasn’t running on an abstract program, people just weren’t paying fucking attention. For just one example: https://www.kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Poli...

> Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her.

She had less charisma than Hilary. Probably even less than Al Gore or Zuckeberg before his new software update was installed. And she had a history of bending the knee to the progressives.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

No one cared. One of the better things a president has done for the country in quite a while, and no one cared, and no one remembers.

It probably wasn’t either inflation or Harris’s race, because the rightward swing was heavily skewed by race. Compared to 2016, all of Trump’s gain came from non-whites: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/03/18/opinion/18eks-sho....

Whites didn’t shift at all from 2016 to 2024. Latino moderates shifted 23 points to the right, and Asian moderates shifted 11 points to the right.

It’s hard to explain how inflation would cause a racially unbalanced shift like that. The 2016 election was a pretty neutral baseline—the economy was fine and had been for years. So if inflation was the cause, why didn’t white voters shift right compared to 2016? It doesn’t make sense that inflation would only cause hispanics and asians to shift right.

Likewise, if race was the reason, why didn’t white voters shift right, compared to 2016 when the candidate was a white woman? And why did black conservatives (a bloc about the same size as black liberals) shift 8 points to the right?

People assume a female candidate is to the left of where they actually are. Worked great for Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel who both represented center-right parties and took their nations rightward and whose favorite slogan was “there is no alternative” but not for center-right Hillary Clinton who headed what is allegedly a center-left party. [1]

If the Democrats have a fight between an abundance agenda and populist leftists who are really inclusive like Bernie Sanders I think that will be great.

[1] Clinton was always as far to the right as she could get away with, probably to compensate for being a woman, but paid the price for her mindless hawkish in 2008 when she lost the primaries to Barack Obama

>People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else.

Republicans haven't?

> Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.

I have no idea how movement Democrats convince themselves to make up a platform for Harris, often from whole cloth, although usually from some vague, unenforceable statement or general platitude repeated at a few speeches. Instead they blame people for attaching policies to her; either conservatives attaching policies that she articulated clearly in past statements and campaigns, or Democrats attaching Biden's policies to her (which, nonetheless, were all perfect and he was the greatest president in a generation.)

People asked her point blank whether she still had policies that she articulated in the past. She refused to answer, and would just give some memorized speech (that someone else obviously wrote.) People asked her whether any of Biden's policies were wrong. She said none that she could recall, like a person carefully lying on the witness stand. She relied on media surrogates to make up policies that she could possibly have, and spent a lot of her campaign denying that things that her surrogates said could be her policies were her policies.

The only thing we knew for sure about Harris is that Israel, crypto, and big tech were in. We could get that from Trump.

Harris lost because she wasn't willing to alienate a single donor, and would never be.

> she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked

Which, though definitely suboptimal, would have been a pretty reasonable alternative to her opponent’s plan to self-cannibalize the government, threaten the sovereignty of long-standing allies, and chaotically disrupt world trade.

Republicans are even more focused on controversial social issues, so it’s not obvious to me that’s the real problem.

That voter much be very happy now because he is hurting plenty of people aplenty.

Can you say Bernie is in power? I think he proves my point, especially in regards to the presidential primaries, or maybe that's the point you're making.

He was giving a speech to some super privileged college kids not too long ago when one of them asked something like "why should we work against a system that benefits us" and he said change likely isn't going to come from the government/rich kids so he's working on organizing unions because that's where meaningful change will come from.

Solidarity/Collective bargaining is how you challenge power.

Just like when the pitchforks came out in Nazi Germany in order to overthrow the Nazi regime... /s

Pitchforks don't work without a supporting institution, and the Intelligence state, corporate and governmental, is very very capable of preventing free association by people who might wish to supplant an illegitimate government with a new one.

No it will work until the economy is properly destructed and we are defeated when our war machine is incapable of production, we become incapable of importing necessary goods, or the nuclear taboo is broken causing entire industries to disappear in the a flash.

If we are lucky some brave military officers will uphold their oath to the constitution before it's too late, but that seems unlikely. Pitchforks were for the last 5 months. Historically speaking if there aren't pitchforks in the next month it's over and we are on the fascism train until catastrophe.

Corporate power funds both of them, but Trump offered a better deal (no law to restrict them).

So democrats find themselves abandoned and powerless at the most important time to have power -- the ability to do something when someone does something you don't like and says "what are you going to do about it?"

The worst part is how much this parallels 1930's German history.

We challenge corporate power all the time in our capitalist nation of Denmark. Denmark beats the U.S. in ease of doing business (https://archive.doingbusiness.org/en/rankings). I'm always bemused by Americans who think no other country practises capitalism.

FDR's New Deal was widely celebrated. There was almost a corporate coup against him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot). Teddy's trust busting was also very celebrated. We used to have stronger unions that checked corporate power. OSHA is a hard check on corporate power.

There is a strong legacy of checking corporate power.

Unfortunately now that almost all media is oligarch owned it's hard to understand corporate abuses of power because both politicians and "journalists" are on the oligarch's payroll, quite literally.

There's a lot of effort to conflate basic civil liberties with fringe social issues, tie them together, and burn down the civil liberties because they're just 'fringe social issues.'

There are some fringe issues supported by some democrats, but the real base of the party is black voters and their civil rights are the real target. Conservatives still haven't forgotten about being forced to end segregation in schools, nor have they giving up on trying to re-segregate.

Composition fallacy much?

I was a CA voter in 2020. The focus I saw from candidates and citizens alike were things like democracy, rule of law, housing costs/policy, and police reform. Prop 16 was a footnote, not a focus, which is probably one of the reasons it lost (alongside the fact that its language made it difficult to tell if it was allowing for civil protections or tearing them down).

And democratic domestic policy focus since has been pretty clear: economic stimulus, infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and various kinds of working class relief. Pretty standard "promote the general welfare" stuff, sometimes joined with efforts to protect "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (even for people who look or love differently). That's what you'd expect from classic liberals who still believe in enlightenment values and ideals. Or even just anyone who wants those things for themselves and realizes that to guarantee it to anyone, you have to support it for everyone.

This was definitely all over the 2024 democratic platform.

The problem isn't that people don't like the policy and values they'd get from the Democratic Party and its candidates. It's that they're increasingly mislead about what the difference is. As evidenced by the polling on relative policy popularity last fall:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/22/trump-har...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/tru...

https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50802-harris-vs-t...

Did you read your own link? It says that affirmative action enjoys at least plurality if not majority support:

> Americans who had heard the phrase affirmative action in the Center’s December survey were asked whether they saw it as a good or a bad thing. Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.

> By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs.

I hardly think most (any?) democrats or their constituents are talking about affirmative action in this day and age.

It’s pretty shocking that this extremely fringe issue is the only thing you can find to support the narrative that dems are “spearheading” radical social change.

Whats actually happening is that conservative fear monger about random various minority groups, as they have for all of time, and then enact policies intended to harm them. The dems have no choice but to respond.

You would think that conservatives continuing this playbook for, well, ever, would cause people to stop and say “wait… are the conservatives really the ones stirring up the culture war?” But no, somehow it hasn’t. Somehow, we’re all still living under the delusion that conservatives just maintain the status quo and oppose radical change, and not that they’re the ones creating the need for opposing action.

Republicans are trusted more on schools post-COVID and evidence is blue states lost more schooling progress than red state even if blue states were mostly ahead pre-COVID. (if you argue that we are not post-COVID, people are not going to trust you on schools even if the virus still lingers. As callous as it sounds, everybody dies, but not everybody gets a complete education and if you think the way the education-industrial complex thinks, students don’t get back social and educational progess they lost)

I dare you to find a Democratic candidate saying "defund the police" any time in 2024. Bet you can't find any.

Here's some quotes from the 2024 D platform:

"[We] made record investments in public safety, putting more police officers on the beat; today, violent crime is at its lowest in 50 years"

"Democrats provided funding for communities to hire more police."

"since day one, President Biden has been working to make sure police officers have the tools they need to protect their communities, including more police officers on the street. We need to fund the police"

"Democrats passed and President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, with the largest ever federal investment infighting and preventing crime, reducing violence, and investing in public safety. That funding enabled cities and states to invest more than $14 billion in public safety and violence prevention, putting more police officers on the beat for accountable community policing."

https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...

Why is it that when looking for examples of what some are doing wrong, you're casting back over 5 years to an activist slogan that even then was treated as a poor expression rather than "lapped it up"?

It's almost like what you're here to do is actually reinforce the unproductive association rather than point the direction to a better way.

You want to talk about what's "bewildering"? What's bewildering is that your apparent confidence (or deliberately mislead?) confusing very online cheer-squad discourse from some corners over stated positions of most officeholders or candidates.

One could charitably assume that it's because you have some acquaintances or media follows who represent themselves or others as you've described and you've accidentally made parasocial promotion into an unfortunate wider partisan caricature. One could also warily assume you're an operative who is here to actively reinforce the associations you were ostensibly fighting against. Perhaps uncharitable, but hardly implausible these days.

The majority of liberal politicians are classic liberals who spend their campaign and policy time as you said you wanted, and it seems you haven't noticed.

"pronoun" doesn't appear in that 2024 D platform document. Also can't find it in a CBS news summary [1] of the Harris campaign. You know what does show up, though? Housing issues. Actual working class tax cut proposals. Child tax credits (pretty pro birth, very pro parent).

And those are what I think about when I think about liberal officeholders and candidates. Because that's what I see them talking about when I follow them and what's discussed in the media coverage I follow.

Where are you directing your attention?

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-platform-policy-p...

What does the voting population look like?

Where I am in Canada, we typically do not prioritize canvassing neighbourhoods with more renters as they usually don’t vote.

I imagine that tenant rights and rent control transform many renters into essentially homeowners for purposes beyond the asset itself. They also aren’t impacted by prices.

> a supermajority in the Senate when Obama was elected

Obama wasn't elected with a super-majority. He had 58 votes, but Al Franken's race was contested, then Robert Byrd got sick, then Ted Kennedy died.

He did have one briefly for about 20 working days the Senate was in session about 9 months after he took office.

"Didn't even win the democratic primary" might be a bit of a misnomer if it's implying that winning the democratic primary should be much easier than winning the general. Bernie has positions that are popular outside of democrats, many people think that if he had won the primary, he would have had a much better chance of winning than Hilary or Biden, since he had less baggage and his policies were broadly popular.

In fairness, and NHS didn't get tested at the ballot in 2016. There's a structural problem with parties of the "left", namely that they're hostages of their predominantly centre-right memberships. Labour in the UK has the same problem, as do the Socialist party in France. Pretty much all social democratic parties have been hollowed out by a managerial class (alongside career lawyers and the like) that their traditional bases aren't welcome. This stymies the ability of left wing populists who would challenge the current system and bring about policies like universal healthcare to even run in the first place.

What's worse is that they'll inevitably be attacked by those same centrist incumbents while they do run: Jeremy Corbyn was a great example of this. One of his fiercest critics is now a minister for health, another was made a Lord, others are now safely pickled in think tanks which will tide them over nicely until they can return to the fold.

The only way to fix this is to do as the right have done across Europe: to accept that it'll be a very long haul indeed until your people get power, and to start insurgent, radical parties. This sidesteps the big incumbent parties as a filter, and makes it clear who one's friends are. That's what needs to happen in the US on the left, but the odds of it paying off in anything less than decades are staggeringly low.

They’ve been saying they want to repeal Obamacare since Obamacare and they haven’t been able to do it.

Ok yeah, I'd consider moving if I could sell my house at $100k above market. But that's not how it works. Realistically, the whole market moves together, so I'd just end up paying $100k extra wherever I move into. It's not real.

Whether I get mugged while I'm walking home from the grocery store... that's real, and it's a function of whether there's affordable housing available.

Also, these are not independent variables. My house would be worth more if it were not in an area where you get mugged on the way home from the grocery store.

That results in even more property tax I have to pay. People should want higher land prices due to growing incomes and business opportunities, not solely due to lack of housing supply. The former is sustainable, the latter is either a tourist trap or a short term game of musical chairs.

generally you use grants when there isn't money

The problem is that voters don't seem to actually reward parties for getting stuff done, or for basic good governance in general. Trump accomplished relatively little of his agenda in his first term, and tried to overthrow the government at the end, and people decided to reelect him four years later anyway.

They sort of care about costs, but basically in the sense of, "getting a fat guy to lose weight by chopping his arm off".

It's code for free childcare. Although in the old days the deal was the elderly took care of the kids and in turn the sandwich generation takes care of the elderly. Now the elderly taxes the shit out the sandwich generation, wields housing regulation to enrich themselves, and renegs on giving anything in return because they have you by the balls already paying taxes to them whether any SS is left for you or not.

Yes, and most people prefer to eat sweets and pizza instead of vegetables.

That doesn't change that single family homes are essentially making childcare and elderly costs skyrocket.

Personally, I'd much rather deal with the inconvenience of having family in my house than pay more than the mortgage on my property for childcare, and have my parents die bankrupt because of long term care costs.

Single family households bleed generational wealth, and that's somewhat ok during a period where the house itself appreciates enough to offset that... but otherwise... it's a bad deal.

Side note... it really helps if you don't hate your family. Sounds like you have personal issues on that front.

All of the above is completely true.

But right now they are in the acute/fallout phase of a massive economic disruption (the deleveraging of a highly indebted real estate sector, no less severe than the GFC, they overbuilt to a massive degree). No matter what folks are going to be struggling bad atm.

The trillion dollar question is what does this look like in ten years? It could go either way. A Japan style lost decade, or they manage to find and exploit new growth opportunities. I guess we'll see whether having pretty much the cheapest energy on the planet and impressive logistics allows them to get through this.

Do not discount the tremendous potential of electrification, and cheap renewable energy.

> We have the tools, it's just going to be inter-generational warfare, and nobody really wants to say it out loud.

No, it's not. The people who own houses pass them down to their kids. As people invading a neighborhood, YIMBYs may be new, but they are not that young. They are early middle-aged and wealthy. They are trying to move into elite neighborhoods and cities that they can't afford, not trying to avoid homelessness. That's not a crisis. All of them can afford property, just not the best property in the world, (not coincidentally) near the jobs that pay them the most.

The problem is normal-case housing affordability, not elites wanting to build high-rises. Normal housing affordability is ruined due to the asymmetry between resident homeowners as buyers and wealthy buyers. Wealthy buyers are trying to extract wealth from housing. Resident homeowners and renters are the extractees.

The YIMBY goal is to make somebody in e.g. SF refusing to sell, and/or refusing to allow the houses on the corner to be demolished and a high-rise put in, the enemy. I have no idea why YIMBYs think they are either more rational, more likeable, or more victimized than that homeowner. Maybe all of the self-praise.

On a purely numbers basis the older generation of homeowners far outnumber the young. It's going to take a good while before the balance of power can be shifted. Democracy has the longterm tools for sure, just not for another twenty years or so.

Hopefully over time yimby can take hold in some pockets and gradually expand out from those strongholds.

If old people -- literally or spiritually -- don't voluntarily get out of the way then they must be pushed out forcibly.

It won't be pretty I'm afraid; not much else we can do however.

Yeah, some local standards are reasonable and necessary, but most are just about "character", not actual building standards to adopt to local geography or anything like that.