Yeah it's simply an incredibly powerful way to influence US youth in ways that are favorable to the CCP.
I don't understand how or why this is hard for people to grasp? It's no different than Radio Free Europe being secretly funded by the CIA, except it's even more powerful.
Radio Free Europe was covertly funded by the CIA into the 1970s, but your comment should say “having been” instead of “being”, because its current funding is not a secret: that comes from the US Agency for Global Media, an openly acknowledged part of the US government.
I've been in LA for 14 years, and I always say LA has great weather in the same way a mall has good weather. It's never unpleasant and is always "perfect", but at some point you miss the feeling of breeze and slight variations and it feels like you're breathing air from a can.
Respectfully, confidently asserting someone else's mental state or their motives is a mistake. Because there's no way for you to know, it backs you and others into an intellectual corner that is entirely unnecessary and lowers the level of discourse, in addition to being unhelpful when people are experiencing actual psychiatric crises.
Second this. It do a great job explaining how the WW2 armament buildup required both legislative and mindset changes on behalf of the government about what a good working relationship between business and government looked like.
When my mom was teen, she says the way they had the most fun was to go to dancing parties in people's houses and sometimes in some special venue for younger people. That was in the 60's. As I grew up in the 80's we had nothing like that, we just went to night clubs or some street full of bars/restaurants. Dancing was mostly a thing you did by yourself, like in most night clubs still these days, not like she describes, with "their faces touching" :D.
It seems to me that every single generation changed and there needs not be an external reason for that other than young people wanting to do things the way they see fit, which normally is anything different from what their parents see as ideal.
Yet I can't help but wonder if people also said the same about the telephone (which enabled socialization without colocation) and television (Which enabled entertainment as a passive indirect consumption)
I realize of course that the internet, and mobile (and eventually VR/AR) is Yet Another Step Further.
But...like every step does it not also come with benefits for some at the expense of others?
For example, I simply can't believe that true extraverts are simply going to be resigned to giving up all these physical moments - they will continue to seek out and create and participate in-person spaces.
To me, the problem is less about the way that we do or do not socialize, and rather the monumentally addictive nature of online and app spaces, and the fact that the companies in charge of them have no other motivation at his point it seems than to just push it all to the limit.
Our feeble caveman brains cannot handle the dopamine roulette that is the TikTok/Instagram/Twitter feed. We have no immunity to it, so the only solution is artificial restrictions like screentime. Then again, we've had to reckon with that with plentiful calories too as we trended towards universal obesity and have STARTED to turn it around (but not succeeded yet). And that took decades.
Every generation struggled with something. Our grandparents were choked by smog. Our parents had polluted waterways and lead in everything. We are engulfed in microplastics and addictive technology. Our children will wreckon with the effects of climate change.
Through all this, humanity continues to grow, invent new technology, and raise both the floor for existence and the ceiling for prosperity.
The worst thing we can do now is to give up on the next generation or on the future of humanity. Optimism is our obligation and responsibility.
> and television (Which enabled entertainment as a passive indirect consumption)
Absolutely. There were periods of time in history when there was significant opposition to television. Hence the coining of terms like "boob tube", "idiot box", "idiot's lantern", "cultural wasteland", etc. You can see a bit more of some of that (although not with a primarily historical focus) here:
> if people also said the same about the telephone [...] and television
I'd say they were probably right. Pre-solo-consumptive technology, people on average were better socialized.
It's inherent in the nature of improved consumptive and interactive experiences to smooth off the pain points.
Unfortunately many of those same pain points are also intrinsic to realworld, realtime interaction. And doing them more proficiently is a skill that one can learn and improve (or not).
> I can't help but wonder if people also said the same about the telephone (which enabled socialization without colocation)
There were a lot more letters before the telephone. In London, the mail would be picked up and delivered up to twelve times per day. Within the city, you could have back-and-forth conversations through the mail within a single day.
There’s an unspoken phrase here, it’s “in the way I think it should be done”.
Just because the younger generation are doing things differently it doesn’t make them wrong, in my generation it was sending text messages that was wrong because we weren’t talking on the phone. Before that it was talking on the phone rather than going to people’s houses.
I’ll also add what my psychologist told me.
Social skills aren’t innate in humans, we have to be taught them. Smaller family sizes and greater distances from extended family mean these aren’t taught by older siblings/cousins/etc like the used to and parents aren’t filling the gap, which means standards of social interaction are changing much more rapidly.
You say it doesn't make them wrong, but you also clearly illustrate the decline of a skillset which is essential to maintaining the social fabric across a large swathe of the population. Sounds like a pretty big problem to me.
When Facebook first took off, I had an inkling radical transparency was going to be a societal outcome.
With everyone posting everything, and everyone's digital history recorded (if anyone cares to archive or dig it up), everyone would have skeletons in their closet.
I was hoping that would make society more tolerant and willing to accept faults in people.
In actuality, it just seems to have produced an industry of digital cleaners that the wealthy can afford, while everyone else gets fucked.
But then, that's why I limit my posting on social media outside of HN.
This seems like way too complex an explanation when a much simpler alternative is possible.
Most people are simply not that virtuous, because by definition the vast majority of the population has to have mediocre virtues or be in that ballpark range.
So ‘radical transparency’ reveals as much negative as positive, on average.
But the next step was how society would change (or not), suddenly realizing that most people are simply not that virtuous. Certainly not as much as their previously perception-dominant "best face" made them seem to be.
Instead of accepting that, we seem to still be taking pot shots at leaders or prospective leaders for faults.
Or... maybe Trump's twice electability is an indicator that most people are willing to overlook things, now.
> Or... maybe Trump's twice electability is an indicator that most people are willing to overlook things, now.
They are not overlooking things. They are looking at things and like what they see. There is segment population for which a credible accusation is seen as a good thing about a guy.
Girls are not as interested in nightclub substantial interaction anymore. "Substantial interaction" defined as "genuine attempts to meet a guy to go to the next club/bar/party and then maybe home"
There's a whole separate realm of social circle snapchatting (networking).
In my experience young people are just as good at face to face interaction as they have ever been, but they now integrate online communication into the same interactions.
It's different but I think it's wonderful.
I actively work to learn how to do the same, and it's like having an extra-sense. The ability to backchannel while also doing face-to-face adds elements to communication that people who don't do it fail to catch.
Boomers basically pulled up the social ladder of fun when it wasn't convenient to them anymore.
Technology combined with oligarchy is really leading to a demographic and social disaster. I think the iron placenta and designer babies are the only things that will prevent population collapse. Well, age extension will probably kick in too.
It's a race between us killing the worlds biosphere and us fading away to nothingness right now. I think there's plenty of population momentum to kill off the planet
Many cities effectively ban or heavily restrict new housing developments that increase density.
I'm really not surprised real estate prices continue to rise when building new units is often an extremely expensive, risky process that in some areas can be stopped at any time with literally no reason required
Huh, why is college getting expensive, healthcare getting expensive, day care getting expensive, hell even streaming services getting expensive, none of these are heavily restricted that no development is happening there.
And in many cities breakneck construction activity is happening still real estate is getting very expensive.
One can easily see how high real estate prices can translate to all those being more expensive.
Colleges pay rent. Colleges pay salaries to people who pay rent. All those go up with high real estate prices. Further, even if the college owns a land, the money they earn on that land has to compete with what a developer who is willing to tear it down and put up a residential building which now earns higher rent or sale price.
I don’t think all the increase comes down to high real estate costs but it’s clear that high real estate costs can easily raise prices downstream across nearly every area.
I have a strong suspicion that a lot of it is the rise of the two income household. In the early years it increased household buying power, but as it became the norm many services began raising prices because people could actually afford to pay them now. So the net result is that the increased productivity from nearly doubling the workforce turns into higher and higher executive salaries while the average middle class household is now roughly back where we started, with the added burden of a whole second career.
Yes, this seems to make lot of sense. Initially second income maybe additional savings, day-to-day conveniences, some extra luxuries etc, now it is part of survival.
Since second job is sold as "freedom from household drudgery" and GDP booster it can't really be challenged.
Yeah, and property is a positional good. Its price is a function purely of willingness to pay. So if you double household income, and perhaps quadruple theoretical discretionary income (after food, energy, gas and so on), give it 40 years and real-estate inflation eats the damn lot.
Yes, if you can substantially increase supply in the top decile or quartile, in terms of desirability.
That's difficult, for all sorts of reasons. NIMBYs protecting their investment is one aspect, but the maths of density, transport infrastructure and travel times is another big deal.
Walkable, interesting downtowns AND big floorplans AND low taxes AND abundant supply within a short travel time is a tough set of constraints.
Because of government subsidies. (If you were willing to pay $100k for college and the government will give you $50k, now the college can charge $150k. Yes that's simplistic but it's the crux.)
> healthcare getting expensive
Healthcare is doubly removed from price feedbacks - patients don't pay for doctors, insurance companies do. Patients don't even pay for insurance, employers do.
Not too mention that the number of new doctors in the US is artificially constrained.
> day care getting expensive
can't help you on this one
> streaming services getting expensive
Streaming services started out undercutting cable prices. That's no longer necessary so the price is stabilizing. Plus now they are expected to produce their own content.
Expecting everything to have the same root cause is unrealistic.
> In economics, the Baumol effect, also known as Baumol's cost disease, first described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s, is the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
Stuff that's made in China gets relatively cheap, so stuff that's not made in China gets relatively more expensive.
All government interference—significantly restricting supply and then doling out free money/tax-breaks to pay for whats left. As if govt leaders never took an econ 101 class.
I just think people who say this are very funny and weird. I took an econ 101 class, but drawing supply demand curves to talk about wide ranging governmental policy is just a bad methodology.
Where exactly did I say you should run a deficit? The words that I said were “wide ranging governmental policy.” I was thinking of examples like the minimum wage, where people often try to use econ 101 reasoning to definitively prove that raising the minimum wage must produce significant unemployment, when the real world literature turns out extremely muddy and contentious, ie the effect is much less than expected for a variety of complicated reasons that a supply and demand curve do not capture.
There is no supply restriction. We're close to the record-high number of housing units per capita, it's only a bit lower than in 2007, and we're likely to surpass it by 2026.
This is not the right calculation. Housing units per household makes more sense, as the number of people per housing unit has been shrinking since we started collecting data as peoples preferences change. From what I can tell it peaked in 2011 at 1.17 and has declined to 1.12 since, and considering that we expect some vacancy from moving, condemned units, and people prefer certain areas and dont like many others, the trend does not support that we have enough housing. Not to mention the prices clearly show demand is there
The calculation changes if you only include adults in the denominator - there is a lot more adults relative to children compared to the past. The solution is to remove the very much existent density and other supply restrictions - see:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/th...
Nope. It becomes slightly further from the record high numbers, but still better than at any time before 90-s.
At this point, the misery caucus is just grasping at straws. In a couple of years, the housing inventory will make even that metric irrelevant, but the price of housing will still be going up.
> The solution is to remove the very much existent density and other supply restrictions
Nope. The solution is the opposite: preserve the SFH at all costs and shut down the misery caucus. Build new cities, not new density. Create jobs outside of dense hellscapes.
Because the reality is that NOT A SINGLE CITY has lowered the housing sale prices by increasing the density of existing areas. Not a single one in the US, Europe, or Japan.
“Flat earth” style economic denialism is not as cool as you seem to think. Govt interference propping housing prices through various means was previously mentioned as well.
> “Flat earth” style economic denialism is not as cool as you seem to think.
Yeah, can you then point out an example of a city where densification worked to decrease the housing sale prices?
Tokyo? Nope.
Seattle? Definitely nope, even though its housing inventory grew by 25% within 12 years.
Moscow? Nope.
If it's so "round Earth", then there must be some early metrics that can indicate the success of densification railroading in places where it's been tried?
For example, Minneapolis went full cookoo nuts by abolishing parking requirements and the SFH zoning in 2019. They gave out the city to be screwed up by developers. How's it faring now? Oh, the price growth not only not slowed down, it ACCELERATED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS33460Q
Do you know Mark Twain's definition of "insanity"?
I said nothing about "densification." This whole diatribe is in your mind. My original point was about there being a well-documented shortage of housing across the country. You can argue against it if you like but just look foolish.
You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
We do NOT have a housing crisis. Not even close. Housing is more affordable and of better quality than ever.
We have a DENSITY crisis. People are forced by economic forces to move to relatively few unaffordable locations.
> You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
What "higher order derivatives"? I read most of the new research on urbanist policy. And so far everything I've seen confirms what I said.
I gave you an actual link to the data. Sorry for destroying your whole world view, but "economy 101" is not enough to describe the complexities of the real world.
That is because the internet is what largely has made real estate more valuable.
In pre-internet times, people shared real estate. Bars, restaurants, church, etc. Their discretionary income went into the fees, offerings, etc. to make these places comfortable. With the rise of the internet, people started preferring to stay home to use the internet. All that discretionary income once spent on fuelling those third places is now competing for each own's individual domain, thus driving up the price where individuals are found.
Two years of COVID exacerbated things because even those who still got out of the house from time to time were forced to stay home, so what remaining money was still funnelling out to activities outside of the home was entirely redirected into individual real estate.
The pin that pokes a hole in this theory is that commercial rents, at least in my part of the world in an expensive city, have risen faster than residential. Presumably this wouldn’t be the case if those third places were in such rapid decline.
Also, I’m pretty tightly involved in the local bar and hospitality scene, and most places are doing just fine — not quite pre-COVID levels at a number of places, but some are busier than ever.
> not quite pre-COVID levels at a number of places, but some are busier than ever.
The real estate bubble, if we are to call it that, goes back to the early 2000s at least. Pre-COVID, implying somewhere around 2019, isn't telling. For what it is worth, the housing price data I have in front of me shows that prices have come back down to nearly pre-COVID levels as well, so that more or less tracks anyway.
How does it compare to the 1990s? The landscape has definitely changed here. A couple of decades ago there were three busy bars mere steps from my place. Now, there isn't a single bar in town. Those closures brought consolidation to bars found in the next town over, which saw them thrive there, but now the decline is staring to become visible there too. The next, next town over is probably busier than ever as a result with even more consolidation slowly starting to take place, I can believe you there, but that doesn't imply general strength of the industry.
The media regularly reports on the dying death of the third place. Your local experience may not be providing an accurate picture.
My jurisdiction gave free money to everyone that lost their job/income, with far more liberal eligibility criteria than unemployment insurance had, at fixed amounts conveniently we’ll above the monthly rental costs for most.
Supply can't possibly keep up when real estate is used as an investment.
As an analogy to the dead internet hypothesis I present the dead real estate market hypothesis. Increasingly it's just investors buying and selling properties from each other.
And it's not just a hypothesis. China built enough homes to house its population twice over, yet it's not reflected in the prices. All because everyone and their grandma is investing in real estate.
> China built enough homes to house its population twice over, yet it's not reflected in the prices. All because everyone and their grandma is investing in real estate.
Yes, but this is reflected in China's vacancy rate: 22% by some estimates.
In the US, home vacancy rates are sub-1%.
Not saying people aren't treating homes as investments, but it seems clear we also have a supply issue.
"Real Estate is Investment" should naturally lead to overproduction as investment-only properties get built to satisfy that demand—as we see in China. In the US, we don't see that.
The methodology is to take a hot city like Shanghai or Beijing, and count the number of windows lit up at night on a standard 30 story concrete apartment building. You'll find something like 25% of the units never light up. Now, those are in cities where people want to live, it is much worse in lower tier cities and new districts without services or jobs of lower tier cities.
Property taxes in the US mean you can't speculate so easily on property (you lose ~1% value a year). But they have 99 year leases instead, but everyone thinks the government will let you renew those with minimal fees.
>"Real Estate is Investment" should naturally lead to overproduction as investment-only properties get built to satisfy that demand—as we see in China
China had massive home overproduction because the goddamned totalitarian government told builders to build or else. It was not market forces.
How do you suppose we do that in the US? Especially with this administration?
In the US, builders don't build 100 starter homes because it is more profitable and easier to build a couple McMansions and sell them for crazy prices. THOSE are the homes that get built as "investments". No builder will benefit from producing a large supply of homes, so they don't. The market will not self correct.
Exempt or lighten planning requirements for affordable housing construction. California is going in this direction now.
There are other levers like subsidized financing for developers building homes targeting a certain price range as well as favorable tax treatment of those profits.
A lot of these have would probably have some bipartisan support.
This is what they did in my county. If you build a house as the actual owner (not as an LLC or for rent or sale) and promise not to sell within 1 year there are no design, code, inspection or planning requirements.
Lots of people taken advantage of this here. It is a pressure release valve available to those who can't afford commercial construction or boomers wanting 5x the real value they paid for their home. You can build whatever you can afford without oversight so long as it's only for your family. Most people end up just dragging in budget prefab, but you get the odd earth bag house, shipping container, one man shop carpenter, or just rich people with weird design ideas not allowed elsewhere.
Of course the naysayers have screamed bloody murder about everyone dying in a fire, but this has been law for 2 decades now and none of the apocalyptic prophecies came true.
In China, the local government gets income from leasing new construction land for 99 years, hence the incentive to build.
In the US, the largest amount of government land is held by the Feds and they keep increasing the limits on what the land can be used for year after year. Figure out how to make new home building key to government finances like in China and you will INSTANTLY have the problem solved and even have over supply.
Some say there's little demand but that's horse shit. People snap up much worse desolate land around me to homestead for mucho dinero. Building a house with your own hands on public or unowned desolate lands is the most essential of basic human fulfilments. The youth cannot afford the already built homes nor their construction, so they ought to be able to take matters in their own hands.
As someone who has taken raw land with no utilities to a full house all with my own engineering and construction labor this is only half the story.
To build a starter home I not only had to go to bumfuck Egypt with the most libertarian zoning anywhere near jobs I can find, i also had to rule out the 9/10 of properties with practically irrevocable covenants made by self righteous boomers back in the 80s who already built their pig farm shithole and don't want their precious livestock living near anything but a mansion.
Then I had to find a rare loophole around code compliance and inspections so I could DIY it on weekends and not be subject to weekday inspections. Most codes want stuff like an expensive egress window even though no one living in the house is bigger than a much smaller sliding window, and it goes on infinitum.
Then I had to find a place they hadn't outlawed water yet through a grandfathered well, and finally get buddy enough with the power company to actually get them to run power without royally fucking me with arbitrary requirements. Almost the entire system is designed around grandfathered protectionism while kicking the next generation in the teeth with entirely different and constrained rules voted on by people who who live in places that don't even conform to the requirements imposed on you, which of course gives them a free artificial value boost as well.
A lot of the time code requirements get changed because someone fucked up so hard local government was forced to actually clock in and do work. It's also worth keeping in mind code isn't a ceiling it's the floor. As in it details the most half-assed way to build anything and have it still be legal. All of that said I'd love to have a word with the folks that have decided 3 acre minimum tract sizes locally are a requirement to put in a mobile home. Talk about defeating the purpose...
This is really the issue. There are plenty of places people can live and afford. But everyone wants a particular lifestyle and a certain job in their desired field and maybe proximity to certain people. That sense of entitlement has been rebranded as an affordability crisis but it isn’t that. It’s just entitlement. People should instead live within their means and make sacrifices. Not everyone gets to live in highly desirable places like SF and that’s okay.
You could say that not everyone gets to: have a car, use a computer, have access to quality food, visit a museum, etc and you could argue that that's okay and people should instead live within their means and make sacrifices.
We could also, you know, go the post industrial revolution route and build as much and more of what we need.
Very dense locations such as parts of NYC, Paris, and Tokyo exist and there is a shortage of apartments in these types of spots relative to how many people want to live there. And the areas surrounding, say SF, are mostly suburban. Why not convert these surrounding suburbs to essentially just be more SF - or even more dense and build significant amounts of transit connecting them? Then repeat this for every expensive city in the world, adding a multiple of capacity compared to what we currently have.
This is nonsense. Someone has to haul away the trash, police the streets, put out fires, teach the kids, ya know.... all that stuff you feel entitled to.
The people who actually take care of a community aren't "entitled" for wanting to be part of it.
I think this paradox makes sense to me when combined with the comments above.
The best way to maximize return on real estate is to influence gov to restrict supply
A 6.9% rental vacancy rate implies an average vacancy of ~3.5 weeks per year. Given the high turnover of many rentals, that seems pretty low to me. Turnaround time just to do a make ready for a new tenant tends to be a week at minimum, sometimes longer for proper overhauls (replacing carpet, fixes damage, etc). Sure, not all properties turn over every year, but there's also quite a few properties that have longer vacancies to counteract that.
Agreed, but one thing to note on the Chinese real estate is that a lot of it is apparently "tofu dregs", so a good portion of the real estate is just a building waiting to fall down that you can crumble with your bare hands (lots of YouTube videos on this) and a lot of the supply is also in the middle of nowhere. So the supply is kind of not as much there as you would normally think. To use an analogy, does building a massive housing complex in the middle of the Mojave help American home prices come down?
This is because a ton of them are in the Chinese equivalent of like Boise, Idaho where demand is fairly low. People want to live where the high paying jobs are.
This is the lesson the board game Monopoly was originally intended to teach. The Georgism side of "The Landlord's Game" sometimes feels as relevant as ever, and as obvious as ever why those rules not packed into the game by Hasbro. (They aren't fun and we don't actually want to question what real estate ownership should mean.)
Also made possible by the internet and computers in general, I'd argue. Without the easy availability of prices, sales data, and general number crunching capabilities I don't think this would be happening. Certainly not at the scale we're seeing.
It isn't a hypothesis. It is a well known fact. The more expensive a property is the more time it will be spent vacant because a lot of the very expensive properties are just uses as investments.
> why doesn't someone introduce a legislation to tax vacant second homes at astronomical rates
They tried this in China. People would just get divorced so each partner had their own home. It turns out you can easily find someone in your family to "buy" a house as well.
if someone shows up there 3-4 days a week, how would you know? Even China doesn't have the surveillance setup to tell if someone is living in a house or not (well, they can check to see if it is renovated, and can check to see if the lights turn on at night). It isn't really a rule of law society, so you can't use "the trust but sometimes verify system" they used in Vancouver, and it is definitely not like Switzerland where your neighbors are constantly spying on you. It is a bit counter intuitive, but checking on these things is harder in China than in the west.
We did that long ago - well the rates are not astronomical, but taxes are higher. Some states (probably all but I don't know how to look this up) have a homestead credit, and they date back to the 1800s.
One thing missing - renters cannot homestead their apartment and so the funds that own the apartment have to charge more rent to cover taxes on those apartments.
Do you know who owns most real estate either directly or indirectly? Pension funds. And who wants to shake up their pension? Nobody. It's the most democratized form of asset ownership, literally everybody is going to get angry.
And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society.
Second vacation homes (plus Airbnb) become a problem for locals of that area. The young ones can't survive there and eventually have to rent (or provided as comp package) from established businesses (B&B/hotel).
> And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society.
I'm not sure if you mean owning one primary home and two vacation homes, or one primary home and one vacation home when you mention a "second vacation home," but either way this strikes me as out of touch.
4.6% of 65.6% is 3%, meaning at most 3% of Americans own a second home (but this doesn't account for citizens that own 3 or more homes, so the actual percentage is even lower.)
I don't consider that to be common. I also wonder: why is it a good thing for society (or even most homeowners?)
Why? Because politicians aren't generally in the habit of introducing legislation that pisses in the face of the folks that fund their election campaigns. Oligarchy's a bitch.
Do you like all your Capital fleeing to other countries? Because that's how you enrich Canada, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Lichenstein, etc at the USA's expense.
Sometimes I dream with a wishful solution like defining areas of "great living desirability" (basically the cities where seemingly majority of people compete to live in), and charge a yearly tax of N% the market value of each home (with crazy high N, like 20), for owners who have more than M units in that area (with a convervative M, like 3 or even 2).
...You'll see how greedy investors flee fast, and the remaining buyers are honest people who don't want to speculate, but to actually own a home where to actually live.
Commercial RE too. When you say supply is constrained, they don’t mean there’s no RE available, they mean RE isn’t available at a lower price. Most cities in the US right now have a huge commercial RE vacancy rate, yet if you try to lease it, you’re not getting rates that a free market low demand situation is going to get you.
No, it's not. Supply of housing is not in any way limited. Cities are desperately fighting a rearguard action against greedy developers plopping multi-story monstrosities in former SFH areas. All in the name of "affordable housing".
While the supply of house units per capita is at the record-high levels.
Reality: housing is cheap, abundant, and high quality. Just not near the downtown cores of large cities.
The internet doesn't change "location location location" that much. It doesn't change weather, or scenery, physical entertainment options, in-person social opportunities, or backyards and amenities.
It's also created big windfalls - due to easy distribution/sales for online stuff - for more than enough people to drive up prices in many of the most-already-in-demand regions.
Ye olde rich person historically has traditionally addressed the "there are different pros/cons to the city than rurally" dilemma by having multiple properties. Which of course only eats into supply more. Is the percentage of people able to do that now higher or lower than it was when a country home required full-time live-in staff?
I know people with an urban condo and a country house. At one point, I did think about it but decided I didn't want the hassle and, anyway, preferred to have my choice of cities during a given year. I'm sure there are circumstances where a second home makes sense especially for people who want to migrate summer/winter or heavily use a ski condo.
The internet has actively _boosted_ real-estate prices. Real estate prices were suppressed pre-internet because transaction costs were high and there was nearly zero utility of an unoccupied space.
Airbnb, easy and cheap travel, remote work, property management firms, remote surveillance and access control, etc. And also declining household sizes (many more people living alone) which is seemingly a result of internet/social media/mobile devices.
I'm as anti-RTO as anyone, but I've seen this asserted over and over but have never seen anyone give evidence in favor. As I understand it the claim is something about cities giving tax breaks to companies for having offices? Or is the idea that CEOs have investments in real estate?
Does anyone have a source that actually shows that this was a factor?
People prefer cities due to access to stuff, but most people also would prefer a 3000 sqft home with a pool. During different phases of life, your ability and your relative importance given to either of those two poles will vary.
As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Also, not all suburbs are created equal, and this is even more true outside the US.
> most people also would prefer a 3000 sqft home with a pool
If someone else does all the maintenance, dusting and vacuum cleaning, maybe. Other then that, actual swimming pool for doing laps or actual water park with slides is kind of better in most cases. There are some people who would use that large house or would be using their backyard swimming pool often ... but most just dont.
> As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Someone with kids appreciates not having long drive to and from work, those take away from time with kids. And someone with kids over 7 years including kids themselves appreciates presence ability to do go to sport clubs, music clubs, libraries, school or whatever else without parent having to drive them each time.
There is some advantage to big house in remote place with kids, but it also causes you and the kids to be more isolated from everything else.
Compromise is the key. You cannot have everything. There are times I wish I lived downtown. There are times I wished I lived in the mountains. There are times I wish I lived on the beach. If you live in the city that enables some lifestyles and makes some impossible. If you live on a rural area you get a different life, and suburbs again different.
I know farmers who think nothing about hunting off their back porch - and why not their gun doesn't have the range to kill a neighbor so they don't have to worry about missing their shot. I know people who shoot guns in the suburbs, but they have done extra work to create a safe range in their house (and generally only safe for the lowest power rounds). The denser your living the less viable having a safe space to shoot is.
There are things that are only possible in a dense city. You need a lot of people to have enough interest to support a symphony orchestra. There are a lot of niche stores that can only make it in a dense city because that is the only way to get enough people interested in that niche to support a store.
If you live in LA or San Diego, you can live close to the beach and go there all the time. Most people there don't, but if that's important to you, you can achieve it.
If you live in Vancouver, BC or Seattle, you can ski in the winter and hike in mountains outside of cell phone reception in the summer AFTER WORK, never mind every weekend.
I assume most american cities have gun clubs. If the attraction to shooting a gun can be satiated with target practice, that can be a decent compromise. (Of course if the attraction is feeling like a frontiersman by shooting straight off your porch, that's a different thing. I can understand it even if I don't share it)
This is not possible with every city and every hobby, but that ends up kind of becoming the point. The cities that have this overlap become even more in-demand. It's why housing is so expensive in places like YVR and SFO.
Some but I gake just a tiny list. You wilL have more than one thing from the complete list but no matter where you choose to live you can't have everything.
I think it is almost entirely job driven. Given the choice of equal pay, most people would pick a cheap suburban 2000sqft house with a garden for 10% the price of a SF condo.
I think you have it backwards, and I think “most” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Given equal cost of a home, most people would prefer to live in a city. Especially if you look globally, cities are absolutely trampling suburbs with demand. Yes, people in the suburbs often chose that preferentially, but there are less people in suburbs.
In America, suburbs are disproportionately popular. I’m guessing that has more to do with civics than preferences. Most of suburbanites I know in America either live near their suburban job, or express some fear/distrust of various aspects of city life - and it’s mostly related to cars and transportation.
I think you've got causality twisted here. People prefer having a job, the higher paying the better. High paying jobs exist mostly in metro areas, so folks move there for work. Preference for the suburbs is just folks exercising their perfectly natural tendency to want as much space/land/house as they can afford while maintaining access to services and proximity to work. I'm quite confident the majority of suburbanites would strongly prefer living on 20 acres if they could still get to work in 20 minutes and the grocery store in 10.
> People prefer having a job, the higher paying the better. High paying jobs exist mostly in metro areas, so folks move there for work.
People work minimum-wage jobs and choose to live in cities. These individuals are not preferencing a city for the wage, but rather the lifestyle, access to amenities, the lower cost options it offers, car-free life, etc.
I think it's super disingenuous to claim that people only live in cities for work. There are tons of social options in cities, tons of civic amenities, and tons of lifestyle differences that draw people to a city.
> their perfectly natural tendency to want as much space/land/house as they can afford
Is this a natural tendency? I don't think this "natural" tendency holds true globally, and I'm even skeptical it actually holds true in America, where suburbs are unusually popular.
> I'm quite confident the majority of suburbanites would strongly prefer living on 20 acres if they could still get to work in 20 minutes and the grocery store in 10.
I'm quite confident that the majority of people (ie city dwellers, which are the majority of humans) would preferentially prefer the access and amenities of a city home at the expense of 20 acres. Which is the reality we see globally.
But it's of course a ridiculously illogical claim that people would prefer rural living if only it had all the benefits of city living. What are the benefits people derive from the hypothetical 20 acres? What does it even mean in this context, because it's incompatible the whole premise of this argument. People prefer "grocery store in 10 [minutes]" more than 20 acres, and that's why cities exist.
> People work minimum-wage jobs and choose to live in cities.
People working minimum wage jobs have very little choice in their lives and certainly can't afford to move arbitrarily.
> I think it's super disingenuous to claim that people only live in cities for work. There are tons of social options in cities, tons of civic amenities, and tons of lifestyle differences that draw people to a city.
All of which is available to people that don't live in the city. We have various forms of transportation options. Hell I once flew halfway across the country just to catch KMFDM in concert. At no point during that trip did I feel the urge to move to Denver.
> I'm quite confident that the majority of people (ie city dwellers, which are the majority of humans) would preferentially prefer the access and amenities of a city home at the expense of 20 acres.
I'm dead-ass certain that's your own biases speaking. Of course we could settle this if either of us can be assed to put together a poll and go flog it on social media. Want to co-author a paper?
> All of which is available to people that don't live in the city. We have various forms of transportation options.
Not really. It is a big difference between having mat 30 min to gym, school, whatever or whatever and not even needing a car and having to drive almost an hour to get anywhere. It is difference between "I can and will actually do it" vs "nope, cant do it".
> Hell I once flew halfway across the country just to catch KMFDM in concert.
That is definitely not something an average person would do on the regular.
> Not really. It is a big difference between having mat 30 min to gym, school, whatever or whatever and not even needing a car and having to drive almost an hour to get anywhere. It is difference between "I can and will actually do it" vs "nope, cant do it".
Man if you think adult humans are that helpless I really don't know what to tell you. They aren't, but apparently you'd need some convincing.
> That is definitely not something an average person would do on the regular.
Sure, it's a pretty extreme example. It's nothing for folks to drive up the eastern seaboard between Atlanta and Baltimore to catch shows though. Anyway point stands, none of the entertainment and cultural experiences that folks who are stuck in major urban areas use to tout the experience are denied to folks who don't live in the city.
> Man if you think adult humans are that helpless I really don't know what to tell you. They aren't, but apparently you'd need some convincing.
It is not about being helpless. It is about day having certain amount of hours, you needing minimum 8 of them for work, another 8 for sleep and showering, then another time for cooking, cleaning, putting kids to sleep, ensuring they do homework and simply being at home supervising them. If your kids cant engage in hobbies without you driving them there and back, then congratulation, you just spent 3 hours driving and waiting.
Additional 3 hours a day needed to get to work, back from work, to gym and from gym are a time you simply cant use for anything else.
> none of the entertainment and cultural experiences that folks who are stuck in major urban areas use to tout the experience are denied to folks who don't live in the city.
Sure, it is just that they require more effort, time and money to get there and back. So much, that you just wont do it on the regular.
If you removed the legal protectionism imposed by zoning codes, which require the reservation of large tracts of land for single-family housing regardless of actual market forces, suburb demand would decrease even more dramatically.
Im not sure I follow your point. What does demand have to do with zoning?
I agree that if you remove zoning, many areas of single family homes would be built up if they are in and around urban cores. That isnt new demand, but existing demand, not able to be expressed by current law.
However, my point is that if your [random small town] job paid the same as NY or SF, you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns.
You appear to be asserting that the demand for suburban-style low-density housing is naturally quite high, and that many people who live in cities are merely settling for less-desirable dense urban housing, as a sacrifice they must make for a higher income. I counter that if this were the case there would be no need for single-family zoning, because people would naturally choose such housing whenever possible, and the market would respond.
> you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns
Having actually tried this, hated it, and moved back, I am skeptical.
>I counter that if this were the case there would be no need for single-family zoning, because people would naturally choose such housing whenever possible, and the market would respond.
This mistakes the price one person can pay for a piece of land with the price many people can pay to to use the same land. A single family home does rent for more money than a condo if they are on the same block in the city.
> I counter that if this were the case there would be no need for single-family zoning, because people would naturally choose such housing whenever possible, and the market would respond.
A major reason zoning exists is because with out it you'd have developers and investors out-bidding the homeowners to redevelop plots of land as they became available.
It's a collective response to the power of $$$ in a free market.
Even if all of those condo purchaser who would buy a unit in the building that replaced a single home would've preferred a single home, they didn't have a direct say in that lot being turned into condos. The person with the most money did.
And of course, they couldn't have all fit there. But I am skeptical of "enough people with money want to live in your area now" as being a sufficient justification to say that local control has to be eliminated. Why favor the future richer potential-resident over the current resident? (I would extend this broadly, for incumbency protections for renters and owners alike - why is it an inherent good for an existing area to get denser forever? Why not encourage less centralized development? Why would "the people with the most money should get to decide how this area is developed?" the best plan?)
I strongly suspect that had remote work remained a bigger trend post-COVID peak, you'd be seeing a lot less core urban residential demand (and all that would imply). After all, a lot of large US cities were seeing urban flight of both residents and companies in the late 1990s. When I graduated from grad school--other than NYC finance--pretty much none of my classmates went to live in a city or worked there. Urban living/working is hardly an immutable law of nature.
Cities are not just where the jobs are, cities are where everything is. You'd likely have to offer double my salary before I'd consider exchanging my life here in the heart of it all for the lonely, empty, car-dependent barrenness of the suburbs.
I guess it depends on your idea of the suburbs. I can walk to a major grocery store, coffee shops, restaurants, and breweries, but have a quarter acre with fruit trees and gardens.
Im happy to trade that for having to spend an hour in car/train a few times a year to see a show or museum.
Like many in the suburbs have convinced themselves they're rural as a result of oil company propaganda (rural identity sells big mall crawler trucks), it sounds to me like you live in a central, quite urban area that's otherwise sparse on local options and have convinced yourself it's your extra special private enclave in the hills, completely separated from the economic center, despite it literally being your economic center.
Ditch the suburbanite identity politics and start advocating for the development of shows and museums in your local area that you could walk to, instead of taking your money away from your economic center at the benefit of oil companies (bc let's be real, suburban identity sells car dependence and even if you take the train, all the cultural momentum from the propaganda shaped your life decisions to move there and what's that train run on?).
Nah what living outside the city really buys me is more of my preferences of freedom. I have no government maintained roads, basically no police, I can build what I want without an inspector telling me what to do rather than some narrowly constrained window of options set by a city planning board. If I want to keep cows to feed my family fresh meat I can do so. There is no sound ordnance, no regulation on gunfire, you can ride dirtbikes all around, your kids can explore without encountering hordes of junkies or karen callin CPS for childhood independence. My taxes are near zero. I depend on myself and my neighbors not through violence of law and taxation but through mutual voluntary cooperation.
It's not for everybody but it's not an oil scam either.
Your situation is literally the opposite of what I was responding to and your situation is not included in what I was discussing.
Your situation is a completely irrelevant red hearing for the discussion we are having. You are actually rural, and are describing an actually rural life—not a suburban rural identity & not an urban suburban identity.
If you don’t even have state or county roads, like no paved roads going anywhere near where you are and there’s nothing around and there’s no police around and everything else you described then that’s not at all what I am responding to. Because what you describe sounds to me like you don’t have anything within walkable distance, and I was directly responding to somebody who says that they have shit they can walk to.
You are living an actual rural life because you are outside the range of services provided, relying on yourself instead and in terms of my own personal Urbanist Theory that’s exactly how it should be.
I find it amusing that so many activists in US believe that the sole reason why people like the suburbs over the cities is some kind of "propaganda". I'm from a country where suburbs are far less common and I grew up in a city of 300k and then lived in a megapolis for several years. And yes, we did have public transportation etc.
When I moved to US, I chose to live pretty much as far as I can from the nearest large city that wouldn't be considered straight up "rural" (although we do have a bunch of farms around here). And the reason is because I don't want to live in what is, in effect, a giant human anthill.
The sprawling car based American suburbs are actually a result of propaganda and master planning by white supremacists. I find it amusing. That so many people are so sure that so many things are innate without having ever done an ounce of research or investigation into the source of why things are the way they are.
It’s OK to admit that you don’t actually know or maybe that you even have learned something today, but I did actually do a research paper with how and why we came to live in suburbs as a core point of research, and guess what? It was a result of master planned communities by white supremacists and their oil and motor industry buddies.
Most of the best old suburbs in America were built organically through bit by bit demand around street cars, not car cars. Then the motor industry executives and oil industry executives got together and lobby the government to create the crime of jaywalking, to buy up all the street cars and remove them from American cities, to build out the highway system, and to change zoning laws, to encourage if not outright force the building of car dependent American suburbia.
Do not get me wrong streetcar, suburb, designed suburbs are fantastic, walkable compact, wonderful wonderfully tight communities. But today in today’s world this year of our Lord 2025? Today those street car suburbs are urban compared to the car dependent suburban sprawl that we have now.
It really depends on how you draw the lines between urban and suburban.
For this conversation, we're talking about the cores of tier 1 cities where the high paying jobs are most abundant. I considers a location suburban if they are predominantly single-family homes and if many of them commute into the Metro for work.
I'm going to ignore all that identity politics stuff because frankly I don't understand what you were trying to say there
Age of the suburbs has a significant impact on their character. A New Jersey burb established in 1880 can be far more pleasant and walkable than a Florida McMansion neighborhood built in 1980.
I am not shocked that your ego shut your brain off the second that your suburban identity felt attacked.
I do implore you to attempt to reengage your brain, despite the the mental anguish it will require to actually comprehend what somebody was saying to you when it conflicts with an identity you don’t know that you hold.
Haha, cities are where everything is if you want everything and experiences delivered up to you in a one stop mall like package and don't have personality enough to organically find things.
Personally I find city people the most boring and socially/culturally stunted because they think a cultivated/curated 'mall like setting of stuff' = culture. They also tend to think buying access to art/culture because they have money = having artist style/culture. The music scenes/art scenes are overly (often self) curated pap.
Lots of cities 'diverse' districts are just... suburbs... that the cities absorbed.
Even for things like 'exotic' foods I routinely find bombed out suburban strip mall restaurants to be superior and less 'catered' to American Paletes than places in cities that have to be more generic because they serve such a large population.
I also have personally found when I have been lonely in life, being lonely in the city is the worst kind of loneliness.
It's obviously fine if that's your preference. But many jobs are in the suburbs and you can access many city amenities pretty conveniently without living in the wilds.
That sounds quite rural - not suburban at all - and I am sure it is a lovely place to spend time!
It is sprawling, car-dependent, low-density development I can't abide, the kind of cul-de-sac-ridden suburbs the US has been building around its urban fringes for the last 80-odd years. It feels suffocating to be surrounded by mile after mile of other people's stuff, with nowhere to go but strip malls and nothing to do but drive from one parking lot to another. People talk about wanting a house with a yard, but when that yard is the only place you can be without justifying your presence there by participating in some transaction, it can feel like a very confining space indeed.
If we are talking about Tier 1 cities, those are the ones that de-urbanized.
Interest rates had a huge impact on prices, but my understanding is that suburban real-estate, especially ones with outdoor attractions skyrocketed as much or more.
The fact that you can build 200 condos on the same acre as 1 ranch house does not negate the fact that most people would choose the ranchouse over the condo if presented a choice between the two.
It is numbers game. Its not about what any single wants best, but how many times you can sell people their 2nd choice using the same land.
While I would much rather have a nice downtown condo in a major city over a ranch house in the sticks. I would rather have the ranch house in the sticks than a condo in the same location as that ranch house.
Some dream of living in a condo in the city, some of a rural ranch house. I don't think anybody dreams of a rural condo.
'If this were true, we wouldn't need to protect our water bodies with EPA laws. Obviously people prefer polluted bodies of water, and it's the artificial EPA laws that prevent it.'
What this analogy says is that people don't want other people living at high density near them. This is expected, since those other people are going to be poor and often dark skinned. Needless to say "other people are pollution, yuck" is not a good argument for zoning.
I think the argument would be much stronger if it just stopped at poor. While Im sure that type of racist exists, I have never met someone who would object to a rich dark doctor moving in next door. To the extent I encounter racism, it almost always follows the logic that dark = poor = crime & dysfunction
Big cities pay top performers the most, by far, but median incomes tend to be quite a bit lower than small town/rural areas. If you are a professional sports star or F500 CEO, the city is unquestionably the place to be†, but for the normal person who will end up in a drab job the money often isn't there. Many will accept the low pay due to being temporarily embarrassed CEOs, of course.
† Although knowing some of these people, they tend to live rurally as well, having the means to be able to live in both settings. The rich rarely live in just one place.
Pay is lower in small/rural towns for the cheap jobs - but your cost of living is also lower. The trick is finding the best compromise for your situation - dense enough to have the higher pay of a city while not so dense that your cost of living is too high.
Where I live in the Suburbs of Des Moines, McDonalds starts at $16/hour. There are rural towns not far away where they start at $14, and I know rural towns farther out where you start at $10 (McDonalds isn't in these towns so it isn't a full comparison but that is the closest I can give). Where I live apartments can be had for under $1000/month so it is feasible for someone working at McDonalds to live on that wage. In the more rural areas apartments might be $500/month but you are making less plus the local grocery stores are more expesnive than the Aldi you could walk to from the apartment (thus meaning you don't need a car though crossing the highways isn't exactly safe).
Of course the real issue is people pick where to live based on factors other than cost of living. They care where their families live.
> Pay is lower in small/rural towns for the cheap jobs
I expect the median income is often higher in rural areas because, while there is little on the high end, there is more mid-tier opportunity. In the big city if you don't make it into the big leagues, only the dregs are left. Cities amplify the extremes. In rural areas, the $30 per hour jobs are willing to hire any warm body that shows up.
Of course, rural is a difficult categorization as it is a catchall for everything that is left. A rural area with a strong agricultural sector, for example, is nothing like a rural area that is not much more than barren wilderness. In the former, there is a lot of money to be made, comparatively, while in the latter the McDonalds at the highway rest stop may be the only business there is for hundreds of miles. We are definitely talking about a certain kind of rural here.
As you say there is a lot of it depends. If you are willing to learn to run a excavator (they will train you!) you can do well enough, but there are only so many jobs and not every area needs another. It won't be as good as a valley tech job, but still pretty good and the cost of living is much better. If you are a farmer you often do very well - but most of your money is tied up in land and equipment and so until you retire/sell you don't look any better than excavator operator. If you can't do the above though there often isn't anything good left and so working at a cafe for minimum wage may be all you can get.
That is true of anywhere, but employment metrics (e.g. unemployment rate) tend to look a lot better in these rural areas. The average Joe has a better chance of finding a job, and a higher paying job at that, in these rural areas. Something that hasn't gone unnoticed, of course. Population data since the mid-2000s shows relative decline in large urban areas and relative growth in small towns, although all area types are seeing population growth.
It won't be a superstar job, but Average Joe isn't getting that kind of job no matter where he is located. He may think so while in his temporarily embarrassed CEO state, but in the end he never does. Only a small segment of the population reach those heights. A SV tech salary is quite unusual.
> If you are a farmer
A farmer is, by very definition, a business owner. That may be beyond our discussion, but certainly those farm businesses are hiring anyone they can get, and paying a pretty penny for it. Those farm jobs are an opportunity for most anyone.
> so working at a cafe for minimum wage may be all you can get.
Cafe workers tend to be tipped, so it is far from a minimum wage job. I have the books for an industry-adjacent small town restaurant in front of me and the workers are making around $50/hour all in (maybe even more; I don't usually see the cash tips).
McDonalds isn't in that realm, but only foreign workers who come with some binding to the business, limiting their options, with a willingness to sacrifice to come into the country ever end up there.
That ignores that plenty of people are in cities because of the amenities that concentration allows. If you want niche/specialty restaurants, grocery options, entertainment, medical care etc. you will have to be in a large metropolitan area
The opportunities you get in a city of 3million is different from 600k is different from 250k. I've lived in all of the above over my life. You can find niches in each. However the larger the city the more options. The smallest city had great Thai food - some family from Thailand moved there and opened a restaurant, but there was no Vietnamese, the next largest city has both, and the 3 million city more options than I was ever able to check out. (there are cities > 10 million around with even more options).
Yeah big cities provide a one stop mall like experience for 'experiences and culture' for people who need that curated for them. To me it's the most boring, non-organic, empty experience, but I've always preferred non-mainstream scenes or to hunt out my own entertainment/style/beauty. I can see the draw for people that doesn't work for though.
It's funny that cities various 'interesting districts' are normally just suburbs that the city absorbed. But yeah, suburbs are just awful places without their own culture or interest (unless absorbed, then they are a distinct interesting district).
IMO, the internet and residential real estate are complements, not substitutes. The less people leave their homes, the more they're inclined to pay for bigger, nicer ones.
It did affect housing. I remember the great deals one could find when remote work was in full swing, and all that was said about vacant office, or smaller cities growing at the expense of bigger ones.
It was only two years though. An industry can hold off and fight back in that time.
It has caused the prices to plummet in small towns and lowest tier cities. It's big cities that saw the internet grow their real estate prices because the Internet made it easier to research large cities before moving there
yeah i think the internet is helping speculators to increase prices. I think they manipulate prices by using their market power to increase prices by asking high price for example online for 1/3 of their houses so price inflates.
in my opinion is the same with every price augmentation in the last 20 years. The Internet helped make fake offers that drove price high.
snd yes blablabla the invisible hand of the market…
the invisible hand of the markt is if all speculators work for the same goal on a market with scarcity they dont compete. See prices of Art. its all fake
More like "How come the younger generations aren't doing <Fun thing>?"
Because they can't afford it.
Also my belief is that people don't do anything anymore because nobody gets really bored anymore. Boredom is a powerful motivator to make plans, set up clubs, find interests, meet people etc.
Now you just swipe through instagram for a few minutes and boom, no more boredom.
Going to a club is cheap, in most you only pay for drinks which a bit more expensive than in a pub, but it's not breaking the bank.
Here in Italy you can go to a club and spend less than 10€s for the night if you don't have to eat.
I'll say what the issue with clubs are: plenty of people never got there to have fun but to meet people and get laid. Now dating apps have removed the need for youth to go to clubs.
Obviously we live in different places, but I finished uni in Canada not too long ago and going to the club during uni was expensive. There was often a cover, if you want drinks at the bar, they'll be like 10-15$ each, if you drink at home, it's much cheaper. So usually we'd pre and then make our way to the club. But often , we'd get a little too drunk/high at home or enjoy one another's company enough that we never made it to the bar! Or if the idea was to meet new people there were often house parties where they played music, people were dancing etc anyway, they were free, didn't require lining up/id checks and often enough we're close enough to where we lived that walking home would've been easy.
Right, but rave culture used to be the antithesis of cover prices and fancy drinks. Rave culture was very much the domain of the transient, the semi-homeless, the youth that had left their parents houses without much money. (Plus some trust-fund kids of course, but they really weren't the majority.)
So "can't afford it" isn't an explanation for the decline in rave culture, even if it might be a reason kids don't go out to clubs today.
> rave culture used to be the antithesis of cover prices and fancy drinks...the domain of the transient, the semi-homeless, the youth that had left their parents houses without much money
And before that, it was grunge rock. But now, check out the prices for Pearl Jam tickets!
exactly, so those people who own an old empty warehouse, a large basement, or whatever, now have a huge incentive to find uses for them. or they have to sell them which pushes prices down for everything
The theory is that (a) the tax would be paid by the property owner and not the venue (it is assumed rent follows an econ 102 inelastic supply model) and (b) property would be less attractive as a store of wealth so prices would drop.
Sorry, but a "land value tax" is one of the worst political propositions I've ever heard. This is a great way to further erode the middle class, ensure that owning is always prohibitively out-of-reach for anyone born after 1980, and to promote corporate consolidation of land by BlackRock and other corporations.
I assume the parent comment proposes land value tax as a replacement for existing property tax schemes. In other words, instead of taxing the value of the land + whatever is built on it (current system in most parts of the world), you only tax based on the value of the land, regardless of what is built. Such a system would incentivize using the land as efficiently as possible, as that part is not taxed.
If you have prime real estate in the center of a city but that is undeveloped, currently developing it increases your tax. In a land value tax system, that land would presumably be taxed higher, but tax would not increase if it is developed, therefore incentivizing the owner to actually use it.
So what happens when someone owns land, and then has a bunch of neighborhoods and developments pop up around them? I know a lot of poorer people who bought their home when the area wasn't developed, only for things to spring up around them. That would increase their land value, sure, but also their tax, and I don't think that's fair.
It feels like a way to force these people out of the towns and family homes they've grown up in, in favor of some rich guy or corporation. They can be strong-armed out by increasing their property value around them past a point they can afford the taxes.
If someone is lucky enough to win the lottery by buying a pot of land for cheap and then seeing its value rise astronomically, they would be given the option to defer their tax payments until the sale of their profit when they realize their gains.
Obviously, there is still a large incentive for them to move sooner rather than later, but they would not be forced out of their home. I think this would be much fairer than the status quo as it would increase the incentive for them to move.
Ultimately, it is not an efficient use of land to have someone keep their single family home in the middle of high-rises like you see in the movie up. We've got a homeless crisis and random parking lots or low density is making it worse. There needs to be a compromise here. Deferred payments lets you balance the scales in a way that would be fair to all.
> ensure that owning is always prohibitively out-of-reach for anyone born after 1980
I would expect a land tax to do the complete opposite and reduce the value of land by half or more, which would do quite bad things to the finances of homeowners, most of whom were born before 2000.
> It's shocking how often the answer to "How come X changed?" is either the creation of the internet or the cost of real estate.
Why is it shocking? The Internet is the current Big Thing that's upending everything the way previous Big Things (steam engine, movable type, etc) did. And real estate prices are one of the central coordination mechanisms for arranging things in the physical world.
Since people keep trying to draw the connection, I’ll try my hand.
The Internet is the most recent technology that is enabled a small number of individuals to become vastly wealthy alongside, of course, a certain lax style of government. As wealth inequality increases, more of the money in the economy becomes tied up in wealthy people’s investments and savings, which inflates asset prices.
This post makes me wonder why videos of militias training always look so farcical.
Practically, why are there not militia groups with Navy SEAL/Delta-level tactical abilities? Or at least near to that? Is it personnel selection effects or bc that level of training requires time/money investments that are out of the reach of non-professional organizations?
Possibly those with real abilities have the discipline to not publicise it in videos.
Also, in experience with self-organized volunteer organizations in different fields (not militias, etc.), the lack of discipline, organization, motivation, just basic thought is often shocking. The dysfunction can be overwhelming. I'm not surprised that very few have developed real capabilities.
> Navy SEAL/Delta-level
Maybe you didn't mean it literally, but that is a pretty high standard. It's like asking why you don't see local basketball players with NBA-level ability. 99.x% of military personnel, with years of training and experience, don't reach those levels.
You bring up some interesting points. The publicizing side of things makes sense. Although given how often you hear about ex-military, police, etc, members in groups like these, I'd still expect that we'd see a handful of criminal/terrorist activities taken out by highly competent groups, even if it's unclear who it is.
But that may get back to your point about discipline, motivation, intelligence, etc.
Re SEAL/Delta-level: I guess I'm asking two distinct questions.
1) To use your basketball analogy: while NBA-level skills may be an unreasonable expectation, why do the videos seem to show middle school or JV-level competence? I'd expect that D3 college-level competence wouldn't be super difficult, but evidently that isn't a correct assumption.
2) What is the practical requirement for a world-class tactical unit (or near that level, e.g. D1 basketball or a bad pro team)? I wouldn't expect current militias to be at that level, but what about less developed nation-states?
> What is the practical requirement for a world-class tactical unit (or near that level, e.g. D1 basketball or a bad pro team)? I wouldn't expect current militias to be at that level, but what about less developed nation-states?
One common form of US military aid is training elite units in partner militaries, often in less developed countries. This has an evil history, training death squads and other war criminals, knowingly or unknowingly. It also has a cost-effective and good history, training Ukraine's elite units, for example.
(My impression is that it's a cost-effective compromise solution to a very difficult, expensive problem: The institutions of militaries are sometimes highly corrupt and incompetent; the Afghan military is an example. Fixing that problem would require building a new military, which could take 20 years at great cost and may be impossible: The corruption usually comes from the government, whose corruption comes from elites and from society-wide political problems.)
You can find some competent people and create a small, isolated organization, and train and equip them, and do it cost-effectively. The Afghan military was hopeless; their elite units were reportedly very good.
1) Opsec is synonymous with survival to elite warfighters, so again you will rarely if ever see them in PR videos. Then think about the video production resources available to actual militaries versus homegrown militia. Appearing competent on video is a different matter from actually being competent.
2) World class units require world class funding. Training and equipment are not cheap. The amount of money spent on the military by the US government is a big factor in tactical superiority, not just for the front-line units themselves, but also the massive amount of logistics it takes for them to operate at that elite level anywhere on the planet at the drop of a hat.
Brazil has some really high level militia groups. The largest ones are mainly active in Amazonas.
I think it boils down to their ability to make money as well as practice their craft. Militias in Brazil will be paid in secret by the government to fight drug traffickers and vice versa. They can be hired out by rival cartels fighting against each other too. They can have jobs to protect loggers from eco-terrorist or to protect swaths of forest from illegal logging.
There isn't much "work" for private militias in the US. Private security has demand but it's fairly small scale. Their isn't really the opportunity to field brigades with 1000s of well trained soldiers for regular off the books military action.
> There isn't much "work" for private militias in the US.
There's a great deal of work for private US militia's, China has a substantial contract with a subgroup spun off from the private contractor formerly known as Erik Prince's Blackwater.
TBH it's a full time investigative exercise keeping track of them all. The linked article gives a very partial overview of one arm of many and tails off after 2021.
Not sure I would classify PMC's as militias. They are operating internationally and it's more like a full time job or deployment.
There's not really much domestic demand for American PMC services. In Brazil the militias are locals that primarily have other income.
The US is paying a billion dollars to a PMC to secure the green zone in Iraq, but it's not like all those people will be militia in the US in a certain area.
However US PMC's are labelled, they are private groups, not national armies, they are as well resourced if not better than a number of national military regiments of comparable size, and the fact that they operate internationally and often for other non US nations and various transnational companies makes them of greater concern than cosplaying LARP'rs.
FWiW one general definition of militia is:
A militia is a military or paramilitary force that comprises civilian members, as opposed to a professional standing army of regular, full-time military.
and PMC operate within and without that grey zone; a siginificant number of members are "civilians" that take on contract gigs for a period of time, then tap out to do other things.
To me the distinction is that PMC soldiers are full time. They aren't spending their days farming or being cops and lawyers or whatever. And for the most part they are officially government funded.
The militias on the other hand are more so made up of normal people moonlighting as soldiers.
> Militias in Brazil will be paid in secret by the government to fight drug traffickers and vice versa.
these "militias" in Brazil are not militias by your criteria.
From my PoV the described activities carried out by paramilitary groups in Brazil are similar to the activities carried out by US PMC's, and there's as much of that kind of work available to US contractors as there is for Brazilian operatives.
Also, having that level of skill makes you valuable. You could probably earn a decent wage and therefore have more to lose and be less likely to use or want to pass on those skills for free. If you have the skill, you’re probably not desperate enough to use it. If you’re desperate enough to use those skills, you probably can’t afford to learn them.
A very good point. Also, if you are a professional, few things are more frustrating that working with amateurs. Mostly you are wasting time, trying to prevent fundamental mistakes, and failing.
The “new generation of paramilitary leaders” described by the article includes “doctors, career cops and government attorneys”. All of these would seem to have a lot to lose. If this is true, one would think that elite military operators might be even more likely to take risks for what they believe in. They’ve already made peace with the possibility of death.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I meant that elite military forces make peace with death as part of their training. So, “having a lot to lose” would be less of a deterrent compared to those without such training.
> elite military forces make peace with death as part of their training
That seems like a narrative someone might tell, but I don't know it's true at all, or if it's part of their training. Lots of PSTD out there, even among elite soldiers. Look at the person who blew up the vehicle in Las Vegas.
I've read interviews with them saying that killing is unnatural and you never get used to it.
My two bit understanding is that militias are mostly LARPing (in a very open sense)? And it’s not like they have a giant candidate pool
Probably important to consider that everything you know about SEALs etc are filtered through a massive PR system anyways. So you might not be comparing the same level of quality of video either. Good editing can do wonders.
> everything you know about SEALs etc are filtered through a massive PR system anyways.
I saw a joke about Navy Seals awhile ago that went something like:
A Navy Seal and a Delta Force operator are chatting in a bar. The Navy Seal immediately starts talking and bragging for hours about all the amazing things he and other Seals have done. The entire time the Delta Force operator smiles and nods.
I think the militias don't get the top-of-the-line retired military people. They get the wannabes, the people who love the trappings of being tough and deadly, without the actual skills or training. Putting on my amateur psychologist's hat, I'd guess that the militia types mostly washed out in the military, but are still looking for what they went into the military to try to find - a sense of belonging and identity.
The real SEAL/Delta level people don't go into a militia to try to find that - they found it for real in the real military.
More often plate carriers and body armor, mag holders and other “operator” gear than just military syyle vests. “tacticool” is the ironic label given to overtly “tactical” gear.
This is a good point, and the emphasis on belonging aligns with the article.
A trope of many action/thriller movies is groups of top-notch professionals becoming disenchanted with democracy and forming terrorist organizations. While movies aren't reality, it's striking that even watered-down versions almost never seem to happen. Maybe the military is just that good at filtering out those types during psychological testing, or maybe belonging is far more important than ideology.
>>Maybe the military is just that good at filtering out those types during psychological testing, or maybe belonging is far more important than ideology.
The more mundane reason is probably because it's more appealing to use those skills to enter law enforcement or become a private military contractor than knowingly and overtly breaking away from society to form and maintain an organization that uses violence to achieve specific political aims.
What you write sounds plausible at first, but then there’s this example from the German KSK:
„In 2018, the German Federal Criminal Police Office uncovered a plot involving unknown KSK soldiers to murder prominent German politicians such as Claudia Roth, Heiko Maas and Joachim Gauck among others, and carry out attacks against immigrants living in Germany.[7] Also, earlier that same year in a separate investigation, the State prosecutors in the city of Tübingen investigated whether neo-Nazi symbols were used at a "farewell" event involving members of KSK.[8][9]
In June 2020, German defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced that the unit would be partially disbanded due to growing far-right extremism within the ranks.[10] The KSK had become partially independent from the chain of command, with a toxic leadership culture. One of the force's four companies where extremism is said to be the most rife was to be dissolved and not replaced.[11]“
> why are there not militia groups with Navy SEAL/Delta-level tactical abilities?
Let's set aside talent, access to experience trainers, facilities and equipment and just look at time on task: real special forces operators spend 30-60 hours per week, 48 weeks a year (assuming 4 weeks of leave) working on their craft. Finding people that can put that kind of time in would be rare.
When you look at the other factors, the gap widens.
So if the militia doesn't hold a candle to the SEALs the why do they matter? Because of modern point and shoot repeating and guided weapons. We're seeing that in how the Russians are taking people off the streets and out of prisons, giving 1-3 week of training and throwing them at the Ukrainians. We saw that with the Ukrainians when they stopped huge Russian armored columns with man-portable anti-tank missiles. Bullets, grenades, ATGMs and drones really don't care about the experience level of their target. Artillery, even portable stuff like a pack mortar or repeating grenade launcher takes out any Spetznaz or Rangers in the general area you aim at just like it does any other soldier. The age of the super-proficient ended with the US Civil war: the revolver, repeating rifle and machine gun level skill gaps pretty quickly..
A large part of the FBI's job is to shut these militias down. You can't grow a resistance movement without making some noise, and the US government is obviously very keen on maintaining the status quo.
Examples from the past are easy to come by (COINTELPRO), but a recent example would be the failed 2020 kidnapping plot of Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan at the time.
Thirteen arrests were announced, and the FBI has admitted to using three informants and two special agents. The defense argued that there were at least twelve.
Using the official number as a conservative guess, that's still 5 feds for 13 arrests (a 38% ratio!)
Now imagine if instead of 13 dudes trying to kidnap a governor, it was a local militia trying to arm and train hundreds or thousands of people. The full power of the US government to crush opposition is terrifying.
Exactly. And defense against tyranny is a legitimate thing. Militia's are not really special. It's unclear what it even means given many things are legal in the US.
In addition to the prohibitive cost and effort to setup and maintain such a program, I believe all 50 states have laws on the books that make it illegal to organize and train in military tactics without prior authorization from the state.[1]
The law doesn't say that at all. They're not allowed to perform law enforcement _functions_. There's nothing that prevents them from /training/ to do so.
A “paramilitary organization” is
“an organization of two or more persons who engage or conspire to engage in
military instruction or training in
warfare or sabotage for the purpose of unlawfully causing physical injury to
any
person or unlawfully damaging the
property of any person.” N.Y. Mil. Law § 240(6)(b)(i).
Perhaps, but do you think these groups would NOT train just because of some state law?
It feels like the "no scammers" thing you see on Craigslist ads; as if some scammer would say, "Darn, and I was really hoping to cash in on THIS one; I guess I'm out."
>>[...]but do you think these groups would NOT train just because of some state law?
To your point, the groups will likely continue to train (seemingly illegally), but the quality of the groups will definitely be degraded due to the more limited pool of qualified trainers driven by the presumably high-deterrence of state laws. The original comment above asked why we don't see high(er) performing militia groups, and these types of state laws seem like a strong contributing factor.
And when you’re done being a SEAL, you use your skills in organization, focus, and motivation to succeed in business and having a normal life. Not cosplaying your old job with a bunch of dudes that suck.
> This post makes me wonder why videos of militias training always look so farcical.
This exactly - a few 300-pound dudes taking a break from their McDonalds to look like they really mean it by firing long barrelled weapons at some cardboard target. All this escape and evasion training, with all the wilderness stuff too - it's nonsense, little guys playing soldier is all.
this is that guy bringing his tactical knife to the forest and putting wax in a can to light a fire for a "bushcraft/survivalist" YouTube video, but in group
I think this whenever I read a modern detective novel (Bosch). So much of their work seems to be looking up data from different databases and trying to make connections or recognize patterns.
I assume the FBI or whomever has automated this to some degree already, and I really hope someone does a great writeup of how LLMs/agents can do even more.
This is an almost impossible post to respond to without it become a flame war.
But if anyone is curious about the idea that we have too many government bureaucrats, and whether this increases costs, I encourage them to read the findings of the Transit Costs Project. In looking deeply into why transit is so expensive in the US, they found that a major cost was that the US has too few bureaucrats, and instead has to hire extremely expensive consultants.
This aligns with my understanding from friends/family members who work at state and county agencies: they are rarely able to provide the quality of service people want because they're severely understaffed, and are killing themselves in a sisyphean attempt to meet people's needs.
There's a valid question to be asked about why the government allows union contracts that seem tailor-made to keep people who don't want to work hard (by making it impossible to get fired and underpaying people) while encouraging young, ambitious folks to leave, where they can be promoted more easily and aren't managed by less competent administrators.
But "just get rid of 80% of the bureaucrats" isn't how you start that conversation.
> In looking deeply into why transit is so expensive in the US, they found that a major cost was that the US has too few bureaucrats, and instead has to hire extremely expensive consultants.
See also Noah Smith's 2023 post "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy":
> I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war.
The counterpoint being public-servant-rich economies that stagnate and turn inwards, connecting with intrigue and politics instead of their job(Latin American Brasil and Argentina). Plus feedback mechanisms for issues of state management are incredibly crude and act at a very far away point, through the president or legislator of a nation.
I don't understand how or why this is hard for people to grasp? It's no different than Radio Free Europe being secretly funded by the CIA, except it's even more powerful.
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