[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