This isn't everywhere. I live in Nashville and we have SO MUCH housing being built. Just apartment building after apartment building after apartment building.
It is a big problem in Democratic states like California, where the leftists (Dean Preston and other leftist NIMBYs) have allied themselves with homeowner liberals to make it impossible to build housing.
Republican states like Texas do a significantly better job, as you can see by looking at annual per capita new housing, and lower rental inflation.
There's a growing liberal movement to change this status quo but they're still not that influential beyond rhetorical support from some Dems.
To be fair, Minnesota is getting it right and Washington is reluctantly stumbling in the right direction. However, I’m forced to agree on the general sentiment.
California is a bit embarrassing. We’ll see how the Builder’s Remedy and laws like SB 1123 play out, I suppose.
Is "blue state" / "red state" the right distinction, or "rich area" / "poor area"? Rich people anywhere will do all they can to keep their property values from going down.
There is a proposal to build an apartment complex in my neighborhood in Northern Virginia. The houses that had Trump lawn signs up last year, now have lawn signs arguing to block the new housing (or "preserve the neighborhood's character").
NIMBYism is an economic issue, not a culture issue. It has far more to do with how much impact the new housing is expected to have on the value of people's property. Or more saliently, the equity they have in the property. If people expect that nearby housing will cut their $500k equity in half, they're likely to petition against it, regardless of whether their governor is a Republican or a Democrat.
NIMBY isn't red or blue, it's just fear and greed.
It’s part fear and greed, but also part rational and practical.
Increased housing nearby brings increased traffic, parking pressure, crowding, and noise, none of which are positives for current residents. Fear and greed don’t motivate renters to be NIMBY, yet we have NIMBY renters because of other factors.
Those are words that are low in epistemic legibility.
I look at metrics to arrive at my opinions. Things like the difference between the number of new housing per capita in various cities in California compared to Austin, Texas. Things like the R^2 when you do a linear regression of the amount of new housing per capita against changes in rental inflation.
I can't really follow your comment but new housing costs a lot because we now have high standards for what can be legally rented for buildings with more than 5 units.
The housing I was describing as plentiful is a mixture of existing housing as either standalone or fewer than 5 units.
Hi there! I live in the US. I am a leftist. I am in favor of prison abolition, universal basic income, massively increased taxation of the rich, and voting reform.
Care to explain why I either don't count or don't really exist?
Because of the two party system, you have to either vote Democrat or Republican for your vote to count, so your actually leftist ideals, which are to the left of the centrist Democrat party, do not meaningfully exist as a voting block.
So the only political movements that you think are allowed to be said to exist in a country are those explicitly and broadly represented by a major party?
I mean, I guess that's a position you could take, but it seems like a pretty extreme one.
Can we stop calling reform abolishment? I know it's more fun to call it abolishment because it triggers the people you disagree with, but it's entirely counter-productive.
I'm just getting so tired of these constant motte and bailey fallacies in US political discourse.
People talking about "prison abolition" aren't talking about reform when they do.
Some people talking about prison abolition (but far from all, or even the majority) might also be willing to accept reform as an intermediate step or compromise, and might engage in discussion about the shape of reform that might be acceptable in that role, but that's secondary too, and not the focus of, their advocacy for abolition.
Oh I take it seriously and I also agree that in the US there's a large population that's sent to prison for no good reason, with almost no attention paid to rehabilitation and treatment.
However I have doubts that, when people who hold that position come to power, El Chapo will be walking free with no restrictions the next morning.
Some form of restriction of movement will be required for frequent violent offenders. You may abolish the old system since you believe it's rotten to the core and you may call whatever replaces it something other than prison, but it will still be prison.
> However I have doubts that, when people who hold that position come to power, El Chapo will be walking free with no restrictions the next morning.
"Prison" (carceral punishment) does not encompass all possible restrictions on personal freedom and movement. Even in systems with carceral punishment, other restrictions on freedom and movement are used for some situations, that do not involve incarceration.
And this is exactly why calling for "prison abolishment" is so counter-productive, because when most people hear that the assumption is that everyone who's in prison right now is free to go.
It does not help your cause to adopt a motto that espouses a more extreme position than you actually hold and both your supporters and detractors will feel betrayed when they learn your position is actually more moderate.
>And this is exactly why calling for "prison abolishment" is so counter-productive, because when most people hear that the assumption is that everyone who's in prison right now is free to go.
So what? You say "DEI" or "woke" and people assume you mean racism against white people. You say "toxic masculinity" or "feminism" and people assume you hate all men. "Pro choice" means you choose to murder babies. Transgender people are pedophiles and fetishists. Immigration is invasion. Atheists are incapable of morality. Opposition to Israeli Zionism is antisemitism. Any economic system besides free market capitalism is socialism, all socialism is communism and all communism leads to the death camps. Democracy is the worst system except for all of the others. By the way did you the Nazis were socialist, and BLM was a violent Marxist army that burned entire cities to the ground?
Most people (especially Americans) have been indoctrinated by society to be unable to interpret any radical or leftist concept in any but the most extreme bad faith way possible, so they don't have to take it seriously. Their minds are protected by a cloud of thought-terminating cliches. Despite this, one doesn't let the opposition control one's language or police one's tone, because that just leads to one's own argument being co-opted and undermined.
The position being described here begins with "abolish the prisons," it just doesn't end with that. But that isn't reform, and if one called it "reform" just to be civil, no one would even bother to listen. Even getting people to consider the nature of the systems they live within and benefit from enough to say "abolish the prisons? That's crazy talk" is getting them to examine their biases more deeply than they probably have in their entire lives.
> Most people (especially Americans) have been indoctrinated by society to be unable to interpret any radical or leftist concept in any but the most extreme bad faith way possible.
That is true, there is a concerted effort to control the narrative and define terms that are left vague with the most unfavorable or extreme interpretation. This is possible is because these terms are left so open to interpretation, however the vagueness is not an accident rather it is fully intentional.
The real reason that slogans like "defund the police" and "abolish prisons" are so vaguely defined is because America's two-party system demands "big tent" politics. Both parties need slogans that will unite both extremists and moderates on their side of the political spectrum. The fact that "prison abolishment" can be interpreted as both "fundamental reform" and "all prisoners go free" is a feature, not a bug.
Most politicians will actively avoid giving a solid definition to these slogans, because they know that when they do they will a lose voters. So be aware that adopting vague slogans is to your own detriment too, because the people you think support your position may not actually share your interpretation.
Shaw deserves better than to be so misread. Progress so called depends far more on the "reasonable" than otherwise, because we so far outnumber all others. We are whom you must convince and yet you show open contempt for the task, which is why only in days when everyone is half mad with terror do you ever get even half a hearing - which is twice what your risible excuse for a coherent ethos actually deserves.
Of course, one does have to be careful with one's definitions when talking about "capitalism", because I've seen people mean everything from "the current, specific, late-stage capitalist system and nothing else" to "the basic concept of exchanging currency for goods and services" and everything in between. Personally, I'm in favor of abolishing the former and some of the stuff in the middle, but I'm skeptical that even in a fully post-scarcity society we would abandon the need for the latter.
As for US hegemony...I think that the current situation demonstrates very well why it's a serious problem. We're a single point of failure, and the polarization here has been rising for decades, leaving something like this all but inevitable. Indeed, even if someone like Trump had not come along and normalized hatred and fascism, we would still have likely been in a situation where every 4-8 years the US's policies on a wide range of things flipped violently back and forth.
No; while I fear that the transition will be very rocky, the world will be better off if a broader coalition of nations can collectively take up the role of attempting to enforce the notion of universal human rights across the globe. While they're at it, maybe they'll finally be able to get the US to agree to things like the UN Convention on Rights of the Child, and the authority of the International Criminal Court.
His instagram bio reads "Housing advocate, democratic socialist", so if self-descriptions are taken as truth, it kinda undermines the whole point of the argument.
Depends if you find the following prices affordable, for TN salaries. Here's one blog I found [0]; seems Nashville has a slight glut at the high-end:
> Nashville home prices went up in May 2025, but not by much compared to last year.
> Average sale price $853.8K; median price stayed flat at $613K.
> But here's what's interesting: sellers had to drop their asking prices more than before. The average list price was $1.012 million, but homes actually sold for about $158K less than that...
> More Homes Available for Buyers: Active inventory jumped +29% compared to last year.
> Total inventory (including homes under contract) increased +16%
When more people are being priced out of a market than new housing units are added, then yeah they do need to be cheaper to make housing more available. The net result is more stratification, not less.
Ask anyone how to make cheap housing though. No one has a convincing answer. I'm convinced that it's the right question.
Housing becomes cheaper when supply outstrips demand. That is really all there is to it. If there is induced demand due to new housing being built, you just need... more housing.
A U.S. default would spike interest rates, crash bond markets, trigger a credit freeze, and destroy consumer confidence. Mortgages would become unaffordable. Mass foreclosures and job losses would crush demand. Asset fire sales would follow. Housing prices would collapse.
This would also reshuffle assets, so speculators and highly leveraged people would be punished instead of being rewarded.
It will also cleanup the situation for future generations so kids won't have to be under extreme debt to pay back in some way to government, because the older people lived above their means.
The dilemma is you can’t make new housing cheap because if the price falls too much it becomes unprofitable to build and you don’t get new supply.
My city is currently facing this where the interest rate hikes, build tax hikes and falling prices have created a perfect storm of vastly reduced housing starts.
There’s not a lot of confusion about how to build cheaper.
Build less and worse per unit. Share foundations, roofs, walls, and common areas. Build less square footage per unit. Build less fancy per square foot (cheaper kitchens and baths). Use all standard materials and finishes. Install low-end appliances and HVAC. Everything cookie-cutter; no per-unit changes. Use less land per unit (and maybe less expensive land overall). Have no private outdoor space (or just a tiny balcony).
That’s not well aligned to how to maximize profits from a given unit though (fairly obviously and by intentional design).
Parts of this do align well with how to maximize profits. Shared walls, progressively smaller units over time and removing balconies have been the story of condo buildings over the last generation. The area that doesn’t line up is the low end apartment fixtures. It turns out people will pay $15k for $10k better of appliances and countertops.
There are 1.5 times as many people in the US competing for the same amount of land and buying houses using mortgages that are around 40% cheaper and many mortgages accept down payments that are 1/6th the size versus 1975, with underwriting that judges debt-to-income of 36% as “ideal” and some programs allowing 50% versus a limit of 25% in 1975, meaning the same amount of 1975 Americans plus the 50% extra Americans can all bid way, way more for that house you want, forcing you to pay up if you want it more than they do. In that time period, dual income households went from a minority to a majority, further heating up the competition.
Houses are also around 1.5 times the size with more bathrooms per bedroom in 2025 vs 1975, so “build less square footage and less fancy per square foot” isn’t at all “giving up so much that was standard 50 years ago”, but rather returning toward the standard of 50 years ago.
Sounds like you found a niche that market hasn't exploited then. Can I build a small house for fraction of the cost or most of my cost is going to be land?
Land cost depends on the location. You can find an acre of rural land for $1K. Or an 1/8th acre for $1M or more in a city.
For a cheap parcel of land in an unincorporated area with no building permit process, but with existing grid power, you can buy and build quite reasonably. (There are several YouTube channels covering builds like this.) In these areas, I wouldn’t overlook existing properties as well.
just subsidize it. raise taxes on people making for than, say, $3 million a year, and give that money to construction companies to build homes. (subject to strict oversight that the money actually be used to build affordable homes)
This does appear to be an application of Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). Affordable housing is neat but it implicitly encourages infinite housing be built and does nothing to address employment and crazy down payment requirements (especially for those who could otherwise pay the mortgage!).
