“Arizona brags about solar power, but we buy the juice that powers the bragging billboards at the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station. Take that, Texas!”
Our recently-massively-inflated money supply might seem to account for the price increases, but – now more than ever – all real estate is local. The “macro” factors argue against any supply shortfall: Household formation? Birth rates? Substantial immigration? All down, significantly, and for a long time. Our current highly-localized “housing shortage” is caused by an abandonment of still-serviceable inventory in riot-torn cities.
I can’t defend that claim because it is not being documented by the real estate press, but it will turn out that rioted cities will have lost population to non-rioted cities, that more-suburban areas in rioted cities will have gained where more-urban areas will have lost, and that, generally, people will have moved from D- and C-quality housing to B- and A-rated domiciles – leaving many empty former-residences behind them.
The abandoned homes will be gradually subtracted from the available housing stock Detroit-style. This is Bastiat’s seen and unseen – among many, many shiny objects – and we’re not built to notice gradual change. The decline in the rioted areas will be masked by the hyperinflation: “See! Prices are rising in Portland, too, just not as fast!”
The housing shortage is a flight to safety – from every sort of peril, real or imagined. There is no shortage of perfectly adequate places to live in recently-rioted neighborhoods – and there may soon be a housing glut in Texas!
In other news:
Glenn Kelman: Diversity at Redfin in 2020. When is a “struggle session” audit a self-authored confession to a national fair employment lawsuit? What is Redfin getting wrong? It got big enough to be cannibalized.
Housing Wire: Mortgage applications drop for second week.
CNBC: Retailers trade Fifth Ave for Worth Ave as Palm Beach scene thrives with Americans heading South.
Townhall: Texas’s ‘Nightmare’ Energy Situation Is a Warning to the Rest of America. How did oilmen go “green”? By way of the other green – graft. No one is consistently stupid by accident.
The American Spectator: Life in DeSantis’s Florida: Time Travel to America.
City Journal: False Hero of the Pandemic: The disastrous results of Andrew Cuomo’s nursing-home policy are finally revealed.
The American Conservative: Married Americans Are Different.
Brian Brady says:
A few thoughts.
1-The obvious one is that Florida is open for business– all “boomtown” benefits stem from that. Forget everything else you read and understand that a government which governs least, governs best.
2- If you read the first and last links. you really see Kelman’s bias shining through. I read his last paragraph and was stunned:
“Though we’ve generally prioritized racial diversity ahead of gender diversity over the past years, gender fairness took on a special meaning in 2020, when schools and daycares were often closed; due to sexism at home, women were often expected to carry the child-care load, limiting their capacity to take on new responsibilities at work.”
Specifically, the phrase “sexism at home” was offensive. If Kelman wants to “combat that sexism”, he should offer higher salaries to his managers to compensate for the opportunity cost women trade when they choose career over childrearing. It’s not “woke” to write a blog post; put your money where your mouth is, Glenn.
This caught my eye from Abrams piece (in the last link):
“One surprising finding in the data is that married Americans are far less concerned with the politics of their neighbors, which seems to cut against the idea that Americans sort into like-minded communities. When asked if it was essential to the community they would most like to live in whether most members shared their political views, just 8 percent of married Americans answered in the affirmative. In contrast, 17 percent of single Americans stated it was essential to be around others who share their views. The figure is essentially the same for unmarried cohabiting couples as well. There are real differences in tolerance of others cut along marriage lines, and marriage appears to have a potent connection to openness toward others.”
Glenn ought to survey his customers and hire a “Chief Redneck Officer” because his customers aren’t the nerdy, single millennial engineer anymore. That gal met a guy, got married, had a couple of kids, and cashed in on her stock options to raise the kids because she WANTED to. Now they want to sell the downtown San Francisco, his and hers condos and buy a house in suburban Miami… and they won’t care about the politics of their neighbors
Glenn is wrong to call the scientifically-proven model of child-rearing “sexism at home”. Yeah…he should apologize for his slander of good families or pay mom outrageous sums of money to reject motherhood for career
PS– Glenn’s response might be “Look! I upset a cis-gendered, white, married man. I MUST be doing something right to combat ‘sexism at home”. Glenn would be wrong. Diversity tolerates people who think or act differently than you do. I have never shown bias to people who choose to live a life differently than I do. Glenn should learn to live and let live and stop with the bigotry
February 17, 2021 — 8:44 am
Greg Swann says:
There is no limit to how much I want to mock this mishegoss, but here’s the funniest bit of all:
A gigantic national fiduciary just announced it actively hires on non-merit-based criteria. It doesn’t matter if your deal was screwed up, what matters is the skin color and gonads of the screw-up. I yearn to hear that argument in court!
February 17, 2021 — 10:49 am