the fuck your feelings crowd huh

Went to Maryland briefly and decided randomly to stop at Total Wine....

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and damn does it make the ABC store look like its run by the government. Honestly, i haven't really shopped for etoh outside of VA and NC, and what I felt was what I imagine what it was like for Nikolai Krushchev when he visited a grocery store.

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Like holy shit the selection.... I even found baijiu, which the ABC doesn't even list on their website, and was able to pick up some serious cognacs and scotch's that ABC never has. of which Total Wine had like 5 of each available. And there was this lady letting me taste test like 4 different bourbons. Nevermind the aesthetic was just like shopping at a normal place, not the soulless mental institution vibe the ABC is going for.

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Driving back home, in the rain, to our controlled state was depressing. But my alcohol shelf is looking might more prestigious right now.

People express that component in the prices they offer. Shit like racism and other forms of discrimination can basically be priced out of the market with enough competition..... as firms don't have the market power to hold out or use non-price forms of discrimination.

> everyone should take all steps they can to give themselves the best chance they can to get the house they want in this market.

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why artificial shortages lead to discrimination and inefficient allocation 101.

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if its anything other than "that is the best price," then the we need more housing competition.

There are those out there who want to legalize more housing!

>The younger generations are fucked because of profit incentives, and now the cartel ass algorithms are squeezing every paycheck because rent is being decided by soulless code. Yeah it costs money to make houses no shit.

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profit incentives are what build homes in the first place --nobody builds a home to loose money. think about why profits are rising, but supply is not.

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consider the inputs to housing: its not like the drywall, nail, lumber and concrete manufacturers are sharing these windfall profits. so the physical inputs to housing are more or less unchanged real prices. its a regulatory bottleneck. --- my neighborhood has seen home prices 2x in the last 5 years, yet the city hasn't legalized one additional home here. in fact, the quantity of homes in my neighborhood hasn't changed in 80 years. 80 years, and not one additional home. thats crazy

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>Zillow or BlackRock can buy 1,000 houses, and that’s just a drop in the bucket to them. They can swallow up an entire community like it’s nothing, and then what? they effectively control the regional markets?

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it actually doesn't change anything. since those homes already commanded monopoly level profits, zillow owning them doesn't confer additional rents. because if they did, the landlords would already be charging those prices.

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zillow faces the same rental market that the landlords do, so demand isn't really changing. ie -- the people zillow rents to and the people the landlords rent are the same, so they are both cost constrained in the same way.

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>I feel like this is grade school, literal monopoly board game logic. We’re literally the most prosperous nation on the planet and the majority of people are just fucked.

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Its not really wrong. NIMBY's basically control the city council and entrenched landlords/home owners are able to extract massive rents simply because they have their thumb on the supply. They know that if they legalize housing more broadly, prices will fall. So they purposely keep supply so constrained....and often limited to expensive large-scale development.... they purposely lag supply to maintain their extra-normal profits.

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Its basically regulatory capture by homeowners against renters.

>unit supply growth has not kept pace with the increase in demand.

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Every house in my neighborhood is on a 1/3 acre lot and have seen home prices nearly 2x what they were about 5 years, and nearly 5x cost of the houses original real construction costs. But the city has not legalized one additional unit since 1950, when the neighborhood was complete. 5 fold price increase, 0 supply increase.

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That is an elasticity of supply of....0. Perfectly inelastic. The city simply does not allow enough to housing to be built. Its baffling and frustrating.

>Housing/shelter is commodified by entities so wealthy that of course it seems illogical to a regular person that can’t gobble up vacant homes.

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bruh, housing was "commodified" since the invention of housing. A house is literally combination of commodity goods -- timber, drywall, romex, concrete, nails,etc. Even the trim or 'luxury items' are mass produced, "commodified" products.

Appealing to somekind of other, "the corporations" or "foreigners" or whatever I always see, is garbage, neither backed by the data (low vacancy rates) or economic intuition. No, they are not buying them to keep them empty because the opportunity cost is huge (ie, lost rental income).

A frustrating but utterly predictable result of constrained supply. People will absolutely use non-price ways of sorting buyers/renters if they face limited competition and/or growing demand.

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We basically need to 'compete the racism out' of these people.

Yes, it is required. But its not required and a contractor might not even bother.

My experience has been that yimby nerds like myself are all democrats. My repub relatives all seem to be indifferent or uninterested in the topic, and at least notionally for "the free market"

Nimbyism the only truly bipartisan platform

Yeah, it's so wack because the same people who complain about megacorps in housing are also the ones that oppose reducing the zoning costs that make them the only players who can afford to play.

Housing theory of everything yall

Prices tell you if a place is nice or not. So if home prices are higher than the cost of construction, then you're not at risk of making a place undesirable, because if it was undesirable, prices would fall below construction costs.

And there is a missing middle for businesses just like there is for housing. The zoning restrictions basically create a price floor that small businesses/low income people can't ever reach, effectively pricing them out of the market.

>Density makes it cheaper to maintain actually.

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sobs in R1 zoning

is there a way for students to opt out that sports fee?

we have tons of underutilized but developable land throughout the city. just upzone the rest of it before we can complain about potentially underutilizing 1% of it.

A homestead exemption in rva won't help if you try to move to nova. It would have to be statewide, but we can see in areas other areas like california and colorado, it doesn't help in any long term way in maintaining affordability. Nor does it help renters, who are often low income, and depending on the extent can cause budget issues from a decline in revenue.

A more economocally effective policy is a low income tax credit.... a "property tax break circuit breaker"

Depending on the extent, that could just geographically lock people in place because they would face a steep increase if they tried to move. It would also result in inderdevelopemnt, causing home prices to appreciate faster than otherwise.

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>Richmond advocates a constitutional amendment to allow local governments the option of creating tax exemptions and other tools to protect homeowners from rising real estate taxes because of soaring home prices and assessments.

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prop 13 to RVA? I heard its been a resounding success in california.

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> Allowing local governments to develop and implement means-tested, long-term owner-occupied real state tax relief programs will help prevent the displacement of long-term owner occupants due to dramatically rising property tax assessments, thereby leading to neighborhood gentrification,” the city states as its third legislative priority.

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we'll fucking do anything but legalize more housing. we'll even ensure people are stuck in pockets of multi-generational poverty before they legalize more housing.

>The people have spoken.

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They could of just not gone to the casino.

>He said that eventually all the people that do your manufacturing will become as wealthy as you and then you will become their slaves

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But then they loose their comparative advantage, the reason people traded with them at all, and those low-cost manufacturing firms will move elsewhere, and you'll just import/export intermediate white-collar goods. Like, there isn't a bubble to burst.

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Really -- you should ignore the veiled fear of the "foreigner" and just think of trade as a technological black box -- that there its a whole different country is irrelevant. You put in good x, and it spits out good y. And the greater the difference in prices x and y are, the more it will spit out. That the box is actually a country across the ocean is irrelevant.

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>And the financial sector being what it is, went insane with that power, gutting the American dream in the process and making the Elites of the country superwealthy.

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power to do what? make loans? People want to limit the supply of housing and are surprised that prices balloon. Its baffling.

I don't remember the unemployment rate being particularly high in the 90s.

What is "marginal consistency". Almost by definition, something on the margin is not consistent.....

If demand for carbon really is inelastic, then that means climate change is efficient, welfare maximizing outcome. And it would mean any alternative is more costly and welfare reducing. Otherwise demand wouldn't be inelastic. But there are clearly ways in which firms can reduce their carbon consumption.

And yeah, +dividend reduces any concerns over progressive taxation.