Brian Potter Newsletter
How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part III
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From one piece Book Review: How to Build a Space Station by Jonathan Morrison ★★★⯪☆ 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Putting people into a tin-can with no windows, blank walls, and an infernal background hum will drive them mad.
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The fact that we don't have swarms of drones prefabbing houses in the relatively benign atmosphere of our planet should be evidence that maybe these claims aren't quite matched with reality.
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Finland made great progress towards eliminating homelessness by giving people houses which they could feel was home. Alas, right-wing government has cut some of the spending and is driving homelessness back up.
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If you consistently get the same particular negative reaction from people, it's best to model your own affect/behavior as the cause.
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The chart of housing affordability is almost a direct inverse of how many new homes are built It's that simple Build more houses!
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The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real MagicTheir words
Mind candy fantasy: in which an early-21st-century American young woman, whose English-lit thesis and love life are going equally poorly, does a good deed; gets rewarded with three wishes, without realizing it; and, in consequence, wanders off, first into Faery and then into a Fantasyland which is convincingly poor, sexist and dirty, but also magical.
From one piece Some Things YIMBYs Tend To Get Wrong (and Right) 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
korrents.com
Housing subsidies cannot scale to the size of the problem, and the YIMBYs are right to say so.Their words
While there are certainly some benefits to these programs, YIMBYs are right to doubt that housing subsidies alone are a scalable solution to affordability challenges.
Some Things YIMBYs Tend To Get Wrong (and Right)strongtowns.org
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To real estate professionals, slowing growth or declines in rent are often signals to stop building new housing.
Some Things YIMBYs Tend To Get Wrong (and Right)strongtowns.org
Their words
As is the case with most businesses, suppliers in the housing industry generally set prices based on market conditions and what buyers or tenants are willing to pay, rather than on production costs.
Some Things YIMBYs Tend To Get Wrong (and Right)strongtowns.org
Their words
Making housing widely affordable today through the removal of development regulations would require allowing extremely low quality housing.
Some Things YIMBYs Tend To Get Wrong (and Right)strongtowns.org
From one piece Europe's housing shortages are even worse than America's 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Without densification restrictions, housing shortages will only ever be serious in cities where land is really intensely scarce, as in Hong Kong.
korrents.com
Europe's housing shortages are worse than America's, and Europeans do not discuss zoning as their cause at all.Their words
In fact, European housing shortages are generally worse than America’s.
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I suspect the same is often true in the rest of Europe: NIMBYism is the ultimate reason why the French and German states don’t solve their housing shortages through unbanning densification, but since the claims of the NIMBYs have been preemptively conceded by everyone, NIMBYism has basically remained latent.
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if you want to manage something like as a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present.
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Our interpretation of this result is that once you slide the statistic above five, essentially all the signals of natural selection are real.
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This post is about whether data centers waste the land they’re on relative to what they compete with, and my claim is that they mostly don’t compete with things we need more of (housing) and mostly compete with things we need less of (farmland).
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AmourTheir words
If I was put on the spot to name the greatest movie of the 21st century, I would probably say Michael Hanneke's Amour, an achingly moving, relentlessly unpleasant portrait of an elderly couple sinking into illness and senescence, forced into making the grimmest decisions possible.
From one piece A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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I think the majority of society problems are all downstream of housing affordability.
korrents.com
The right response to housing costs is to build millions more homes as fast as possible.Their words
Every economic issue is complex, but this one seems pretty straight forward: we should build more homes. Millions of them, as fast as we can.
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Between 2015 and 2025 US manufacturing wages rose 40%, while the cost of purchasing a home rose 93%.
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and TomorrowTheir words
Fiction, 416 pages, which go very quickly. #76 on the NYT's list of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. This was a new find in 2025.
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It turns out that simply getting people into temporary shelter—often derided by the homelessness-industrial complex as a band-aid—significantly reduces both social and individual harms of unsheltered homelessness.
korrents.com
That data centres have not raised national electricity prices so far is no promise that they never will.Their words
This is not to say that data centers won’t affect national prices in the future.
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cultural engineering is extremely difficult in the 21st century: in this age of infinite personalisation, people can swipe past anything they dislike
From one piece From the vault: Why housing shortages cause homelessness 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.
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The American cities with the highest housing prices have the worst homelessness problems.
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Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him, yet he's always willing to debate his opponents, and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face. He's a happy warrior, and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence, where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement.
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HaskellTheir words
The programming language for the 21st century.
From one piece Shortages and Spillovers: How People Misunderstand the Housing Crisis 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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So, when housing demand can’t be met in a given place, it doesn’t evaporate. It spills over. It goes somewhere.
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In fact — and this is a point that is, in my opinion, underappreciated by the pro-housing side — building a bunch of housing in Santa Monica would probably not lower rents in Santa Monica. It would bring more people to Santa Monica, creating lower rents elsewhere in Greater Los Angeles as the spillovers from Santa Monica lessened.
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But understand that it’s ultimately a moral and political argument, not an empirical question of the ideal population or the exact level of housing demand in Santa Monica.
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The biggest barrier of all, of course, is that the majority of neighborhoods are not allowed to add any housing at all.
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Empirical data drawn from many different regions clearly shows that, on a metropolitan scale, rents tend to rise when vacancy rates are low and stabilize when vacancy rates are high.
From one piece What Makes Housing So Expensive? 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Discussions of housing policy often focus on issues of zoning, regulation, and other supply restrictions which manifest as increased land prices, but for most American housing, the largest cost comes from building the physical structure itself.
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What is different about construction is the level of coordination that takes place: whereas in a car everything is carefully designed to tightly integrate together, in housing construction the work can be done (and often is) with surprisingly little coordination between the various trades.
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It’s only in dense urban areas that the cost of land begins to dominate the cost of new housing, driven by regulatory and zoning restrictions that limit how much housing can be built in a given area.
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Bulk building materials are already mass-produced in factories, and are among the cheapest materials civilization is capable of producing.
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Similarly, most recent discussions of how to promote fertility discuss how we might promote housing, inequality, schooling, day-care, etc., but few consider directly paying parents big amounts to have kids. As indirect approaches require us to guess what are the actual main obstacles to fertility, they are more likely to fail.
korrents.com
Survival can be guaranteed without a universal basic income, by making housing, food and above all energy dirt cheap.Their words
You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do, is make housing and food dirt cheap. Right? And that’s the good world. And actually, let’s go into what we should really be making dirt cheap, which is energy.
korrents.com
Building more housing in a city raises its local prices, because density is what people are moving there for.Their words, before
So empirically, as you move along the density spectrum from the empty North Dakota plain to Manhattan, housing prices go up.
Their words now
Although it wasn't a mistake to ask people to change my mind, I've mostly updated against believing the theory.
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And frankly biologists, most biologists are still very reluctant to even get themselves tangled up in questions like electrical fields influencing development. It seems like mumbo jumbo to a lot of biologists and it should not be because this is the 21st century biology.
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Charming, beautiful and astronomically expensive because like in most of the western world it's illegal to build anything.
From one piece Fiscal Policy under Low Interest Rates 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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I believe that, except in times of hyperinflation, the price level does not behave as an asset price but as the aggregate of billions of mostly backward-looking decisions, and that expectations of future primary balances have little effect on the price level today.
korrents.com
There is no tight relation between growth rates and interest rates, either theoretically or empirically.Their words
while the growth rate may well affect saving and investment, there is no tight relation between growth rates and interest rates, either on theoretical or empirical grounds.
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The more restrictions on land use, the higher rents you see.
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But it is an argument for reducing your emotional investment in the world of the news, and reinvesting in your own.
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BossypantsTheir words
Not only is Tina Fey a very funny writer, it's fascinating to have the opportunity to climb inside the head of a successful female leader. Reading the internal drama within Tina's head as she thought about whether she wanted a second child while considering how it would affect the 100+ employees that worked for her on 30 Rock was priceless. As a manager, it gives me an understanding and level of empathy I wouldn't have had otherwise.
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21 Lessons for the 21st CenturyTheir words
In his fascinating new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the historian Yuval Noah Harari creates a useful framework for confronting these fears.
korrents.com
Denying that games can affect the people who play them is a way of calling games a lesser medium.Their words
Saying games can’t affect people is to denigrate them.
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