What I would've rebutted in this ending paragraph is that no society, even the USSR, abolished the housing market. As @unlearnecon.bsky.social argues, it's a waste trying to abolish markets rather than expanding public capacity. If you want to focus on that, good but its not impeded by zoning reform - ThreadSky

idothethinking.bsky.social • 46 days ago

What I would've rebutted in this ending paragraph is that no society, even the USSR, abolished the housing market. As @unlearnecon.bsky.social argues, it's a waste trying to abolish markets rather than expanding public capacity. If you want to focus on that, good but its not impeded by zoning reform

Comments

spencerheckwolf.bsky.social•46 days ago

Those guys are self-promoting hacks.

idothethinking.bsky.social•46 days ago

What this debate with @resnikoff.bsky.social feels like is a group is focusing on land use reform and another group keeps jumping in the middle of the firing range screaming: "this won't fund public housing." There is no real tension here. Nonprofit developers support land use reform for a reason.

idothethinking.bsky.social•46 days ago

I have found it extremely easy to focus on lobbying for subsidizing housing (which "houser" groups in CA do like NPH) or focus on land-use reform. For some reason, anti-trust activists keep trying to get these groups to fight when they're not interested and are usually allies

idothethinking.bsky.social•46 days ago

Oh this is from a debate between antitrust people and @resnikoff.bsky.social on YIMBYism in Dissent Magazine. https://bsky.app/profile/resnikoff.bsky.social/post/3lfnb24zzbc2c

idothethinking.bsky.social•46 days ago

Even in the Soviet Union, some departments focused on funding public housing and other departments focused on urban planning, land use and permitting. Another dept focused on building typology and modular housing. It's like, not a conflict at all.
https://bsky.app/profile/dereksagehorn.bsky.social/post/3lfnduxyxnc2l

gibbers.bsky.social•46 days ago

These folks are, ironically, very top-heavy and don't actually understand how coalition building looks.

Ironically, a chapter based movement that pushed for greater antitrust enforcement at the state and local level is very much needed and would really help them understand basic politicking.

resnikoff.bsky.social•46 days ago

To say nothing of the fact that I made clear my support for funding public housing!

big-naldo.bsky.social•46 days ago

I sense these activist-types have a fundamental distrust of developers, a distaste for the idea that profit-seeking corps can be part of the solution, and an identity of anti-gentrification which obscures real solutions.

big-naldo.bsky.social•46 days ago

Watched an old episode of Parts Unknown where Bourdain goes to San Francisco and complains about tech bros coming in and running rough-shod over the city. The reactionary sentiment was really interesting. There were a lot of complicated parts to that episode

big-naldo.bsky.social•46 days ago

However, in the segment on Japantown, a local business owner admitted things remaining stagnant in an area was not a good idea and change was inevitable.

gibbers.bsky.social•46 days ago

I feel insane because when you bring up Alex Lee's social housing bill or the work Paul Williams and Center for Public Enterprise do it's just....crickets.

Like, my dude the people doing the things you want done are aligned with YIMBYs maybe consider why that is?

kto1243.bsky.social•46 days ago

My Sovietology department chair Darryl Hammer said the first week of 1992 that the Soviet Union finally failed because even Captains in the USSR army had Dachas.

sadbusdriver.bsky.social•46 days ago

the building codes fixation boggles my mind. you're the open market institute, you love small enterprise. what are small builders comparatively good at? Small lot infill. What's de facto banned by two stair and large elevator requirements? Small lot infill!

socialconcarne.bsky.social•46 days ago

📌

robertcruickshank.com•46 days ago

I wrote about this in my piece at @theprospect.bsky.social last month. The USSR did have a right to housing. It also did not build nearly enough housing, access to it was rationed by proximity to political power and favor (less so by money, but the black market and corruption was real)

robertcruickshank.com•46 days ago

The housing that most Soviets had was substandard, you had one family to a bedroom sharing a kitchen and a bathroom, people didn't like that and wanted their own place. Other things - heavy industry, military, high-tech - competed for public funds and resources and housing shortages were chronic

robertcruickshank.com•46 days ago

So sure, you can declare a right to housing, and sure, you can eliminate capitalism via a revolution, but that doesn't mean at all that you can solve a housing shortage - and even if you do, you can solve it in ways that sap support for the system and create support for a return to capitalism.

akgerber.bsky.social•46 days ago

And comfortably-housed aesthetes will hate the result of housing construction at scale even in a system where it's only done by the state, as illustrated by the animated introduction of The Irony of Fate, one of the most famous Soviet films
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ms5Ga6kNvHM&t=30s&pp=2AEekAIB

suddenlygarmo.bsky.social•46 days ago

📌

robertcruickshank.com•46 days ago

I had forgotten about this! Spot on.

robb.doering.ai•46 days ago

I mean, the soviets had plenty of money to house people better, they just chose to spend it on empire-building (aka tanks). I think the same obviously applies to contemporary western society, especially the US.

Socialism(/ization), by design, tackles this directly.

robb.doering.ai•46 days ago

In other words: surely any system could mess it up like we are now or in some new exciting way, but declaring it a right would be a *huge* step forward. We don’t need to figure out how to provide housing, we need to decide to provide it.

mikethemadbiol.bsky.social•46 days ago

📌

westnorth.com•46 days ago

From a left-wing journal: Cuba's "experience has shown the difficulty of eliminating the real estate market". Markets turn out to be the most efficient way to allow people to maximize their own (widely varying) utility values for housing.
https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/6930

robb.doering.ai•46 days ago

I think you’re greatly misinterpreting that article 😬 A) they’ve had a legal market this whole time, and B)

> By the early 1990s, more than 85 percent of Cuban households were homeowners, paying little or nothing for their units except for maintenance, repair and utilities.

Sounds nice!

josh.hawn.xyz•46 days ago

Both @cayimby.bsky.social and @housinghumanright.bsky.social supported Prop 5 but it wasn't enough.

Also y'all gotta use domain-verified handles on here, please!

josh.hawn.xyz•46 days ago

Also, @idothethinking.bsky.social I got http://idothethink.ing if you want to use it.

idothethinking.bsky.social•46 days ago

Oh thats funny. I dont really get how the urls work

dereksagehorn.bsky.social•46 days ago

While the USSR didn't struggle with zoning the tension between local resistance to growth was very similar.

It was that some cities/regions tasked with building housing for industrial and other in-migrant workers refused to do so and we're overridden by the national govt.

socialconcarne.bsky.social•46 days ago

📌

estupi.do•46 days ago

great point derek

justinfagnani.com•46 days ago

What's this from? That first paragraph is a doozy on its own. It assumes all regulation is good, all deregulation bad. Heaven forbid any "safety" regulation be challenged.

idothethinking.bsky.social•46 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/resnikoff.bsky.social/post/3lfnb24zzbc2c

kohngregory.bsky.social•46 days ago

It matters what you mean by abolish. The USSR didn't depend on a housing market. You could buy housing, but that wasn't necessary to get housing. Rent was ~3% a families income, and it achieved the second-highest rate of home ownership via subsidizing dachas (дачно-строительный кооператив).

davidjorgonson.bsky.social•46 days ago

There wasn't enough housing and connections and favoritism decided who got homes. That isn't a market exactly, I admit.

kohngregory.bsky.social•46 days ago

That's not universally true across the Soviet period. In the 70's to 80's over 75% of the urban pop had second homes. You could also build them if you had the skills for almost nothing in garden plots. I know many people who weren't apparatchiks get homes far easier than finding a studio in NYC

davidjorgonson.bsky.social•46 days ago

So it would vary over time due to.... amount of housing production relative to demand. Including non state production - California would enforce its bans on irregular permitless construction.

kohngregory.bsky.social•46 days ago

Sure, there were supply-demand relationships, but it was not a market per se because housing was not exchanged as a commodity but allocated as a publically owned social good. Supply absolutely sucked around the war, but post-thaw, almost anybody could get a spot in a khrushchevka or brezhnevka.

woolie.meowmeow.city•46 days ago

A lot of anti-yimby discourse is just dancing around the idea of residency permits without saying it explicitly.

mapwitch.bsky.social•46 days ago

i mean i think a lot of people in that vein would love inter-state travel permits

woolie.meowmeow.city•46 days ago

Freedom of movement is lately the squishy centrist position 😅

jamellebouie.net•46 days ago

yes

big-naldo.bsky.social•46 days ago

Sorry, can you explain more?

woolie.meowmeow.city•46 days ago

"Decommodifying housing" is not automatically "infinite abundance." You still need a way to allocate a very scarce resource. There's only one other solution: waiting lists and permits. Many countries have tried to find a third way; there is no third way.

big-naldo.bsky.social•46 days ago

Got it, thanks!

djasa.bsky.social•46 days ago

Not an economist myself, I'd put commodification and financialization as opposite poles on one axis, either it's cheap commodity, or an thing that can store or grow wealth at the cost of robbing everyone non-wealthy.

sciortino.bsky.social•45 days ago

To be fair, Marxists have a long-established weird way of using "commodification" that is different from the way economists use it.

teakei.bsky.social•46 days ago

Don't let NIMBYs learn about the hukou system..

atcl.bsky.social•46 days ago

Given how prominently the screencap mention "decommodification," I was hopeful that the authors would finally offer a clear explanation of what they think that means and looks like, on a practical level.

They did not, of course.

But you did. 👍

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