Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by greenie_beans 39 days ago
i never hear YIMBYs talk about this: https://yonahfreemark.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Freemar...
1 comments

Again, talk to YIMBYs, and you'll get an earful about that paper, about a low-demand market with already affordable housing, that has been generalized to apply to situations that are quite different.

Yonah Freemark has some OK work, and that's a fine piece in isolation, but it's an outlier in the literature but gets trotted out because NIMBYs want to use it to block housing, not because it's a significant piece that applies across the nation.

YIMBYs will point to a chart of new multifamily builds and conveniently not look at the building starts before the regulations were moved and then certainly not think about what was happening in the economy during that time.

a market with regulations: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

crazy that there were more houses being built pre-GFC when all those burdensome regulations were so suffocating and it never rebounded