[jmyeet]

First, the very idea of the "middle class" is capitalist propaganda. It's meant to divide the working class. It serves no other purpose. It serves to be aspirational for people to participate in a system they won't benefit from while allowing the slightly well off to blame the less well off for their own circumstances.

Second, the voters are absolutely complicit in this sytem because they think they're benefitting. But they're not. The ultra-wealthy are reaping the rewards.

Example: you buy a house for $200k. Because of house horading and constrained supply and policy changes you vote for that house is worth $800k after 15 years. You think you've made money so you support everything that's going on. But you haven't. Why? Because you still own exactly one housing unit's worth of wealth. You have to live somewhere and every house costs $800k now.

So then you think "maybe I need to own multiple properties" but you're barely better off.

As for the rest, you're confusing a whole bunch of different things. "Abundance neoliberalism" (as per Ezra Klein) is just repackaged Reagen-era trickle down economics, designed to make status quo Democrats somehow feel good about being indistinguishable from Republicans.

Not sure why you're associating NIMBYism with leftism. They're diametrically opposed. For one, trust leftists would abolish private property (as distinct from personal property). You get to own your house. You just don't get to hoard land.

I do partially agree about Texas though. Texas's property tax system, at least up until recent years, is significantly better than California's (as one example). In Texas, seniors can defer property tax increases until their death (when they'll be collected from the estate) giving people a choice to downsize or not. In California, you can inherit preferential property tax rates because the voters voted in Prop 13 that allows Disney to pay property tax rates set in the 1960s on the backs of seniors not getting kicked out of their homes.

I'm not sure what your objection to the "neoliberal" is. If you support the hoarding of private property and are pro-capitalist then, by definition, you're a neoliberal. That's definitional, not a perjorative.

[energy123]

> Example: you buy a house for $200k. Because of house horading and constrained supply and policy changes you vote for that house is worth $800k after 15 years. You think you've made money so you support everything that's going on. But you haven't. Why? Because you still own exactly one housing unit's worth of wealth. You have to live somewhere and every house costs $800k now.

I agree with you on this.

> Not sure why you're associating NIMBYism with leftism. They're diametrically opposed.

That may be your interpretation of the underlying philosophy, but in practice, leftist politicians turn out to be more NIMBY than center-left liberal politicians. I'm not so interested in No True Scotsman type appeals on this point.

> "Abundance neoliberalism" (as per Ezra Klein) is just repackaged Reagen-era trickle down economics

It's laughable to equate "social democracy and targeted industrial policy but with less red tape when you try to build something" with Reaganite policies.

> I'm not sure what your objection to the "neoliberal" is.

The deployment of the word "neoliberal" is almost always a slur and a misunderstanding. People use it as a catch-all category to mean "status quo thing I don't like", wrongly bundling up heterogeneous things that are vastly different. It's the left's version of "uniparty". A thought-terminating rhetorical device, not to be used in any serious analysis.

[jmyeet]

I suspect you might be confusing "leftism" with "liberalism with progressive aesthetics". This isn't a "No True Scotsman" type situation. If one supports private property, one is definitionally not a leftist. People love to call themselves "progressive" (moreso than "leftist", which has nasty socialist overtones; thank you Red Scare) because it makes them sound and feel tolerant and caring. But leftism isn't about social issues directly. It's economics.

The leftist solution to housing is social housing, meaning the government builds, maintains and supplies a significant percentage of the housing to ensure that everyone has a roof over their head. Vienna is an excellent example of this where the majority (61% IIRC) of all housing is "social housing". 50+ years ago the UK almost entirely got rid of landlords [1] and then along came Thatcher.

"Abundance" is indistinguishable from trickle down economics. The core tenet of "Abundance" is that if there is so much then everybody will get something, basically. How is that not trickle down economics [2]? "Abundance" doesn't challenge the status quo. It reinforces it. So Ezra Klein gets a ton of media and invited to all the good parties and allows liberals to feel good about supporting fundamentally right-wing policies.

And "red tape" here is just another way of saying "deregulation". The defining characteristics of neoliberalism are "free market capitalism" and "deregulation". I don't really care if people misuse "neoliberal". It still has meaning. It sounds like you just don't like being (correctly) labelled as such. That's really no different to people saying things like "the far Left" or "the radical left" about the Democrats, which is beyond laughable.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-...

[2]: https://www.deanprestonsf.com/blog/abundance

[energy123]

It's not trickle down economics because social democracy is not trickle down economics. Industrial policy is not trickle down economics. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is not trickle down economics. Funding public goods is not trickle down economics. Taxing externalities is not trickle down economics. Subsidizing supply is not trickle down economics. This is the problem with the leftist worldview where everything is either "neoliberalism" or "not neoliberal ism". It's an overly coarse worldview that doesn't facilitate useful analysis, it impedes your ability to disambiguate between different things. If you think cutting bad regulations as part of the policy mix is by definition Reaganite and therefore bad, then you really need to reevaluate things because not all regulations are good by virtue of them being regulations!

  "But leftism isn't about social issues directly. It's economics."

I am talking about people like self styled socialist Dean Preston (the guy you linked, who is a NIMBY that made California's housing crisis worse) or the various Greens parties across the anglosphere who occupy the leftmost end of the political electorate. Whether we label them as leftists or not isn't a hill I'm going to die on. The point is that the leftmost end of the spectrum are more likely to be NIMBYs and have some very wacky and economically illiterate ideas about housing policy than the center left. And I'm someone who supports social housing as part of the mix like what Carney is planning for Canada.

[jmyeet]

Are you under the misconception that "Abundance" is social democracy? It isn't. It is a defense of the neoliberal status quo. It doesn't challenge authority or the economic order at all. It argues the opposite: we need to do more capitalism, more deregulation and more wealth hoarding. That's why it gets attention from the mainstream media and the Democratic Party's donors and power brokers. It's Democratic Reaganism. I cannot stress this enough.

Simple deregulation of building will not solve housing prices. Private developers will not build enough housing to meaningfully reduce housing costs. The "free market" (which isn't real) will not solve this problem. It takes government intervention.

YIMBYism is well-intentioned and I'm all for more housing. My point is simply that it will not meaningfully solve the problem. I'm sorry if you're offended by the label "neoliberal" but objectively, if you believe that deregulation and capitalism will solve the housing crisis then you are definitionally and objectively a neoliberal.

I'm not sure what Greens you refer to. You might be talking about Jill Stein, who is 100% a grifter.

As for Carney, I had a look at the supposed plan [1] and I see a bunch of demand-side policies where the private development sector is being somehow tasked with lowering their own profits. Housing in Canada needs to be cheaper. That means existing house prices need to go down. Only government intervention in the market can make that happen.

You want to see what a leftist housing policy looks like? Try this:

1. Massively increase property taxes on investment properties;

2. Tax worldwide income of anyone who owns property in Canada meaning the "beneficial owner" (so no hiding behidn LLCs and trusts). Property without a declared beneficial owner simply revert to government ownership;

3. Give the government the right of first refusal to buy any foreclosed property. Use it to build up housing stock. Banks can eat the loss;

4. Homeowners can walk away from properties that are underwater. They revert to government ownership as if they'd been foreclosed on. Again, banks eat the loss if there is one. The previous owners get to stay on essentially a perpetual lease paying affordable rent to the government;

5. A lot of development policies require a certain percentage to be "affordable" housing. There are a lot of games played with this. Ownership of all affordable units goes to the government. The government pays for these. If the price isn't agreeable, the property simply doesn't get approval to be built.

This would tank the property market. As it should. The goal should be for the Canadian government to own 30-50% of all housing units within 10-15 years.

[1]: https://economics.td.com/ca-federal-housing-plan

[energy123]

You seem to be mixing up democratic socialism, which is against capitalism, with social democracy, a more mainstream center-left prescription playing out in various European countries that Ezra subscribes to, which coexists with capitalism but is categorically not right wing or Reaganism. Ezra is basically "social democracy but where the good regulations are enhanced and the bad regulations are removed."

  > It argues the opposite: we need to do more capitalism, more deregulation

We definitely need more deregulation of bad regulations and not of good regulations. Some regulations are bad and they need to be removed. This is the non-ideological position that evaluates each regulation on its own merits. Not the ideologically possessed position that clusters every single regulation in a monolithic tent and says "deregulate it all because regulations are bad" or "maintain them all because deregulation is bad".

  > Simple deregulation of building will not solve housing prices. 

And you are basing this assertion on what economic theory or what empirical research?

Compare rental inflation in San Francisco which has effectively outlawed private construction with Austin Texas where construction is more deregulated and housing starts are allowed to track demand.

Get a dataset of American cities, do a scatter plot of rental inflation on the x-axis against the change in per capita housing starts on the y-axis and observe the high R-squared.

It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.

I am not against a land tax and social housing as added measures but the inability to accept the efficacy of supply-side policies on purely ideological grounds will mean left-wing politicians like Dean Preston will continue to do more harm than good whenever they gain power. They don't know how damaging they are because they fail to grasp the basic facts of housing economics because accepting those facts violates the dishonest shibboleths they need to hold to (developers always bad, capital always bad, regulations always good, economics isn't real).

[jmyeet]

Like I said in an earlier comment, there are things about the Texas property tax system I like. But we can't really compare Texas housing to the Bay Area. Texas is flat with low-value land in all directions. The Bay Area is incredibly space-constrained in an earthquake zone.

I'm not defending the largely single-family home zoning of SF here. I'm simply saying that any affordability you get in Austin (which itself isn't really that affordable) is mostly by spreading in all directions, something simply not possible in SF.

If regulation was the core problem, wouldn't Houston [1] defy housing price trends having no zoning regulation? It does not (eg Austin [2]).

> It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.

No, they don't. I'm sorry but you are uninformed here. You are either confusing liberal policies with leftist policies or simply haven't seen a leftist policy or you're confusing opposition to deregulation as being a NIMBY and not understanding why.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS26420Q

[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12420Q