“Haha sure housing is expensive and it’s objectively very hard to build anything that would improve the public welfare at all, but have you considered that externalities exist?”
“when one person exerts an externality on another by exerting his freedom, he's constraining the freedom of others.”
Such as by using spurious reasoning to block the production of housing that would give people the freedom to live closer to where they work, go to school, worship or socialize?
There are brothels on every corner. They’re called “bodywork places”and they aren’t next to elementary schools, they’re in the same building. And this is occurring in only the most seedy and undesirable neighborhoods like Chelsea and the Upper West Side.
Certainly the number of legal ones, considering that's a thing in exactly one state and they still ban them from population centers and require them to be literally in the middle of the desert.
is there a single public figure on the broad left who cut their teeth in the 60s and 70s who DIDN'T internalize "population bomb" nonsense, because that's what this is at its core
This isn’t my area of expertise, but I feel like it also relates to how they view high-density affordable public housing as a magnet for misery and *what specifically they think is wrong* with it. And I think this infects how they feel about all apartment buildings.
Someone should tell him about the brothel in a zoned suburban neighborhood in my area (frequented by cops, of course) that made the news when it was busted a few years ago...
OK, good, so I'm not the only one who thought that was a weird rhetorical move. I don't think restrictive zoning codes are the only thing preventing the establishment of a brothel next door to every grade school, actually!
A significant housing development in Cupertino was curtailed into long delays and reduction partially because of fears (I am not joking) that it would become a magnet for trafficking the city’s young women into prostitution to service Apple employees. An elected official stated this.
I also hear a lot of anti-capitalist stuff regarding apartments, because apartments always have LANDLORDS. A lot of "you will rent everything and own nothing" rhetoric.
It works fine in other countries. I saw many building in Hong Kong and Japan that might be considered "projects" in America, but were filled with people that were probably considered middle class.
It's when you stuff them full of people who are purposely being held back that it is a problem.
This has been the main source of conflict I have with an older activist I am close with. We live in an area that desperately needs more housing. But she cut her teeth on protecting the environment from greedy developers. She also believes in the myth that we have a lot of empty apartments.
In case anyone was wondering, this is the house Reich was writing about. It seems like a nice enough house but hardly something worth getting up in arms about! i0.wp.com/newspack-ber...
The episode of @ifbookspod.bsky.social about that book was revelatory for my understanding of my liberal boomer parents relationship to the suburbs. They clearly illustrate how the ideas in that book flowed through political and pop culture
Houston, a land of a great many HOAs, is so far from a Madmax Building Hellscape but it behooves everyone in the debate for various reasons to act that way. Mostly what we do here is pretty mild, all told
I got into an eight month fight with my HOA over the height, material, and location of a fence on an empty property that I own.
Stiglitz can get fucked on this one
"Building what you want on property you own is a unfreedom to people that don't own the property" Yeah no shit Sherlocke that's what it means to own something
I just can’t get over the fact that his whole argument is nothing more than that externalities exist, as if Pigou didn’t write about that a hundred years ago. Can’t we say more on the subject at this point? Could we, I dunno, say something about the actual calculus of the real world?
Right, it is not for nothing that we're better than most major US metros on this score, we build, but its not Mad Max, nothing is regulated build whatever land as is commonly portrayed. What we do isn't even that extreme
What a superficial and unserious definition of freedom. It's perfectly possible to have a theory of freedom that doesn't define it as unrestricted choice, but these dudes need to spend a few years reading Hegel to have that thought coherently.
