> "Again, Todd ignores this theory. He sees sexual repression as an anachronism. He links the shift toward sexual freedom since 1950 to the advent of better birth control, notably the pill, and to Christianity’s rapid decline ... By the 1960s ... Extramarital sex and divorce lose some of their stigma. Women’s sexual desire is acknowledged."
Birth control the libido killer - is invented - at the very same moment women's sexual desire is acknowledged!
This is just one of the little ways that we don't seem to be grown up enough, ironically, to be totally free and frank about sex (others concern the shared pretense of (once) magazines and (still) the popular culture, that certain practices are actually wildly enjoyable for women, instead of a sacrifice, or more coldly, a compromise or trade; another is the notion, that surely must confuse a lot of young women, that sex is and must be and can be an equal exchange, a one-to-one correspondence of outcome for men and women, through all seasons. It's like people are simultaneously vulgar and prudish, too prudish to discuss what real life is like).
Anyway, I can assure you that nobody acknowledged anything of the kind to a teenaged girl in the 1980s. Which, I suppose, was because they had a thoroughly grown-up understanding of teenaged boys' sexual desire, and so viewed the usefulness of a prescription for the pill solely in that light.
Still and all, since I accepted feminism, the water we swam in (not by study or thought, but in a conformist sort of way; a callow "feminist" framing was a lazy way to write English papers, especially if your teacher was stressed-out with career and family, and if you had no gift for literary analysis [and who does at sixteen? I continue to believe that at that age they should just be telling you things, not asking you, good God) - or if you hadn't actually read "Macbeth"] - maybe if a doctor had said - this pill rather than being a badge of feminism is something that will curb your sexual interest - which, I see that you weigh 100 pounds so it's probably not very great anyway - and so accommodate the desires of the opposite sex -- I might have kept boys at arm's length and elected not to go in for chemical alteration.
In any case, I was forgetful, then as now, and far from systematic, and would miss a day here and there, then try to swallow a couple down at once, and throw up; and was soon pregnant.
Never underestimate how very, very badly the body of an adolescent girl - wants to be pregnant, never mind desire. It is the total opposite of your 30-something career women "trying to conceive". It's hard to fool Mother Nature, as the ad used to say.
Which is why I think it's so funny that everybody is now worried that "the teenagers aren't having enough sex!".
There is no way to argue for "be normal teens, like we used to be!" while also arguing that babies are the one evil that must be thwarted. Babies may be discouraged, sure, but the flip side is that they aren't that big a deal - you, teenaged girl, aren't that big a deal. The babies are going to slip through, or they are going to have to be stopped; and abortion is not a beautiful rite of passage. And pace Freddie Deboer's piece the other day, it is not a simple matter of revealed preference. It is very unlike other choices, and more significantly, it is something to which your attitude may change over time, because life is long.*
*If your attitude doesn't ever change - well, yeah, FdeB is right, you've revealed yourself - and humanity may have dodged a bullet.
I think you have a good point about the very regional nature of housing markets. I am pretty skeptical of numbers talking national averages, and would like to see numbers at the state, or better county (or even more betterer school district) levels. My suspicion is that a few metro areas, which have a lot of the population and shy high prices, probably drive most of the results. That's still a problem to be considered, of course, but the answers for dealing with housing prices in 15 cities will be very different than the answers if it is truly a national problem affecting all regions.
Regarding housing prices, my simple model is supply and demand. Demand depends largely on population and population is going up (probably more than official figures because of the large amount of "undocumented" immigration). Meanwhile, it is impossible to build cheaply and in many places almost impossible to build at all. So prices in desirable places will continue to stay high--and a large proportion of America is desirable.
The Boston area is highly desirable and about the cheapest 2BR apartment we can find around here is $2200. Meanwhile, deindustrialization continues to cause the population of Binghamton, NY to stagnate. So my sister's house has a monthly mortgage payment of $679.
I am slowly working my way through Lineages (p. 208 of 284) and so far my reaction is similar. I suspect that Todd is vaguely familiar with evolutionary psychology but is afraid to get too close. So, for example, after telling us that most of our history was hunter-gatherer and that there was a strong sexual division of labor, he says:
"The question here is not whether [women's] specific attitudes are transitional with respect to a heritage from the past or anchored in the genes of our species. To understand the present, it is enough for us to admit that 100,000-300,000 years of human habits cannot be erased in seventy years, if we place the beginning of the great transformation in 1950." (p. 196)
I suspect there are two reasons for his lack of engagement with ev. psych.
One, for many in academia, genetic explanations are considered right-wing--and the person who supports them immoral, not worth listening to.
Two, as a French sociologist, Todd was marinated in Emile Durkheim's commandment, "a sociological fact can only be explained by another sociological fact."
One "solution" to the present predicament regarding the sexes may be the legalization of polygamy. (I assume it will result in polygyny--namely, high status men marrying multiple women.) I think I oppose this, but it is interesting to think through the potential implications nonetheless.
Asset prices are crashing. The bond market has been hammered, chinese real estate markets are being hammered- those are the two largest asset classes in the world. The stock and housing markets are holding up for now, and they can keep up for as long as there isn't any forced selling. The Fed avoided the forced selling wave with their BTFP program last spring (but that was a 1 year program and banks have to pay ~5% interest on those loans coming due in 5 months). We are constantly on this knife's edge with low volume and high prices for major assets just looking for a reason to fall.
Great Allison Schrager note, including 4 quintiles and two top deciles of wealth increases. Tho I wish it included avg absolute amounts, as well as the 0.2 — 1.0% increase. It notes the increases in wealth are hugely because of house value increases, tho the bottom quintile’s house value increase was bigger than the second quintile. Allison doesn’t mention this is probably because even the crappiest low cost owned houses went up quite a bit in % terms.
Far fewer of the bottom own homes, so how that’s handled isn’t clear.
The poor getting richer more slowly than the rich is part of that inequality problem, not mentioned.
Probably the key error - and it is an understandable error - across all macro housing discourse for the past 20 years has been the presumption that rising price/rent ratios mean that prices are not being driven by rents. In almost all cases, higher rents drive higher price/rent ratios - over time, within metro areas, between metro areas. Prices systematically rise at more than a 1:1 rate with rising rents. So high price/rent ratios are almost always caused by rising rents.
You can see this in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report, where they highlight a few cities where price/rent ratios had risen the most. Those happened to be the cities where rents had risen the most! It was caused by rising rents. But the entire exercise proceeded as if they had shown that rents weren't important.
Price/rent ratios will only come down after a massive amount of new building moderates rents. We should hope that it will happen, but it won't happen fast.
I write about this a lot, because it's so fundamental. Here's one post that touches on it.
Housing unit growth has been faster than population since early 2017, almost 6 consecutive years of building exceeding population growth and still we need more 'supply'?
Every macro class emphasizes that rising prices should diminish demand, and here we are with higher prices, even adjusted for higher incomes, and higher interest rates and higher down payment rates than in the mid 2000s- and yet demand is for more units of housing per person? The cure for high prices is supposed to be high prices, even if it doesn't bring more supply on line, what we are seeing is clearly not just a simply supply story.
Honestly, it's just not even remotely close. The lack of supply is so extreme that it really is the main issue and everything else is a rounding error.
In 2005, new construction was just getting to the point of finally bringing rent inflation down to a neutral level before starts collapsed to depression levels. To get back to the vacancy rates that were associated with stable real rents, we need about 5 million additional homes that are just vacant. Forget about more households or whatever. We need 5 million vacant, empty homes, just to get back to normal, to a level that might be associated with a reversal of decades of excess rent inflation. That's how out of whack we are.
Millions of households have been regionally displaced from our most slowly growing cities over the past couple of decades because of regional housing shortages. Millions. It's an extreme historical anomaly. It's like water flowing uphill.
From 2015 to 2022, rent inflation averaged more than 2% higher than non-rent inflation annually. That was in all conditions - rising interest rates, falling rates, stable prices, rising prices, expansion, recession, recovery. It's supply. It's all supply, to a first approximation.
Really, just looking at the housing completions per capita in the post, you have to be giving some other theory a massive amount of the benefit of the doubt to think anything else. But, it isn't just that. There are dozens of extreme empirical signs of inadequate housing.
You skip over actual use of homes, and homes per capita in assuming we don't have enough housing. The home owner vacancy rate was stable from 1986 to 2004- between 1.6% and 1.8% for that 18 year stretch and then it jumps to 1.9, 2.4, 2.7 and 2.8% for 2005-2008. The rental vacancy rate was below 9%, with a 40+ year average of ~ 7% from 1956 to 2001 (using Fred data and what they have, not changing start points for any other reason) and from Q4 2002 to Q1 2012 it was >9% with quarters over 10%.
Total housing inventory around 2006 was 126 million units, and the homeownership rate was 69%. A 1 percentage point increase in vacancy rates would be ~870,000 empty homes, a 3 percentage point increase in vacant rentals would be ~1.1 million empty units above trend. That is ~ 2 million empty units in 2006 above 20 and 40 year trends.
Meanwhile new privately owned housing units were at ~1.55 million in 2001 and rose to average a little under 2 million completions from 2004-2007. Roughly speaking we had 2 million more units completed above trend from 2004 to 2007 and in a weird coincidence we had roughly 2 million more empty homes and rentals in that period than trend.
Subsidized demand frequently looks like under supply, but you have to discuss actual units and actual use to convince me of 'under supply', without it ALL increases in prices look like 'under supply'.
There are a couple of charts in that post that I think help to see how miniscule housing production has become, relative to the scale of the nation's housing stock. Vacancies have mostly scaled with the growing stock while construction has been flat for 50 years. And, the vacancies in the 2000s were from frictions of the demand shock, not really supply and demand. Most of the rise was when construction had declined, and in the cities where vacancies were famously disruptive, all of the additional construction had reversed, and then some, by the time vacancies peaked.
I see no reason to expect rents to come down. While some locations have shortages that may moderate, I'd argue that isn't one of the main factors. Besides an increase in land value in most urban and metro areas, two things are happening separately on low and higher rent. The regulated minimum standards are being continually raised. It is simply more costly to offer these units. Units above this minimum see far smaller increases for this reason but often include far more amenities simply because renters demand it. Again, this is not likely to reverse either.
Raising regulated minimum standards is an important way that municipalities constrain supply. And that, combined with a number of other obstructions is why land prices are high.
Minimum standards don't make land prices high except maybe a second order effect because the minimum unit square footage is bigger. Minimum standards make the construction cost higher.
Density limitations may make land prices higher but I don't see those restrictions going away either.
Yes. But, not "may", they "definitely" make land prices higher. And the minimum standards are mostly just part of the larger package of obstructions meant to block new units. And this is why shortages are extreme, not moderate.
I see this a lot, where people play down the supply problem, and then when they acknowledge it, they treat it with a fatalism. Like, if you treat it as a fait accompli, then, it becomes a sort of control variable in your mental model of housing, and not an independent variable, and so you can still act like it's not the extreme, obvious variable making housing too expensive because it's just a state of nature.
The most expensive cities have added very few units for the last 25 years. That's what makes them different. That's what makes them expensive. And they use zoning, minimum standards, and a bunch of arbitrary veto points to prevent enough units from being built.
This creates a number of irregular scars across housing market data, one of which is high land prices in the deprived metros.
“And the minimum standards are mostly just part of the larger package of obstructions meant to block new units. And this is why shortages are extreme, not moderate."
I'm talking about minimum requirements that mostly don't block new units from entering the market. A friend renting a very typical house had to put in new windows that were easier to exit in a fire, nevermind no other house in the neighborhood had such windows. Many of the new standards are also being applied to commercial buildings, but not owner occupied residential. Unlike limits on building new units, these minimum standards don't much change supply, they just mean rental property prices at the bottom are higher, and always will be.
Patriarchy vs Women's Lib vs Matriarchy is not a good framework for analyzing different sorts of sex relations. There are at least dozens of significantly different kinds of patriarchy (Baby Boom era Western patriarchy is very different from, say, Imperial Japanese patriarchy, which is different from early 20th century Arab patriarchy, which is different from Tokugawa Japanese patriarchy, and so on), and women's liberation is a recurrent feature of history (see JD Unwin's Sex and Culture, published 1934), not something that was only invented in 1950.
The last sentence is the key observation- mortgage rates since 2008 have been sub 4% and at times sub 3%- everyone that owns a house today has locked in those low rates even if they bought before 2008. That is going to limit the supply of houses for the market with rates at 7%+ today.
"I think that the most likely scenario going forward is for a gradual decline over the next ten years in home prices relative to inflation. I give this scenario a 60 percent chance. There is a 25 percent chance that home prices will keep up with inflation over this period. There is a 15 percent chance that home prices will crash by 20 percent over the next three years."
No. While there's a chance of a recession in exactly 2033, housing prices will almost certainly hold or go up. Ironically, the reason is earlier in your post: "…Though the top 50% is doing great. They have much more money compared to 2019, so unless asset values crash—they’ll keep spending." While the US unmortgaged home ownership rate was only 23% according to Forbes 6 months ago, the people driving the market have cash. My DINK nephew bought a 3 bedroom in suburban DC paying all cash. Three of four offers were all cash. I had my house paid off a couple years ago (exactly one payment left) and I refinanced 80% of the value at 1 7/8% to invest. In most of America, especially the hottest markets, cash is driving the change in the market's direction.
Quoting from your quote of Todd in your Todd review:
>"But there has been no massive, industrialist and protectionist collective reaction… ask ourselves if the feminist revolution is not also contributing to our inability to act collectively."
He could answer this question himself with some of his other observations about the division of violence between the sexes. There tends to be a pervasive denial of the violent and terroristic nature of labor movements among academics. You will even hear them describe historical incidents of labor terror with approval in one second and then immediately you will hear them characterize the labor movement as one oriented towards peace and democracy. Effective labor organizations have always been terror organizations, which is perhaps why feminization and bureaucratization through pervasive regulation gelds them. On the one hand, it's good that labor terrorism has been suppressed. On the other, it certainly drains our politics of the bloody conflicts that once made it interesting.
I wonder as the sexes converge or are made to converge, or as "stuff in the water" as some would have it, brings them closer together - if there may not be an "uncanny valley" effect. Will they like each other as much, on the whole, the more that the differences between them are erased? The ways we are messing with reproduction are pretty reckless.
> "Again, Todd ignores this theory. He sees sexual repression as an anachronism. He links the shift toward sexual freedom since 1950 to the advent of better birth control, notably the pill, and to Christianity’s rapid decline ... By the 1960s ... Extramarital sex and divorce lose some of their stigma. Women’s sexual desire is acknowledged."
Birth control the libido killer - is invented - at the very same moment women's sexual desire is acknowledged!
This is just one of the little ways that we don't seem to be grown up enough, ironically, to be totally free and frank about sex (others concern the shared pretense of (once) magazines and (still) the popular culture, that certain practices are actually wildly enjoyable for women, instead of a sacrifice, or more coldly, a compromise or trade; another is the notion, that surely must confuse a lot of young women, that sex is and must be and can be an equal exchange, a one-to-one correspondence of outcome for men and women, through all seasons. It's like people are simultaneously vulgar and prudish, too prudish to discuss what real life is like).
Anyway, I can assure you that nobody acknowledged anything of the kind to a teenaged girl in the 1980s. Which, I suppose, was because they had a thoroughly grown-up understanding of teenaged boys' sexual desire, and so viewed the usefulness of a prescription for the pill solely in that light.
Still and all, since I accepted feminism, the water we swam in (not by study or thought, but in a conformist sort of way; a callow "feminist" framing was a lazy way to write English papers, especially if your teacher was stressed-out with career and family, and if you had no gift for literary analysis [and who does at sixteen? I continue to believe that at that age they should just be telling you things, not asking you, good God) - or if you hadn't actually read "Macbeth"] - maybe if a doctor had said - this pill rather than being a badge of feminism is something that will curb your sexual interest - which, I see that you weigh 100 pounds so it's probably not very great anyway - and so accommodate the desires of the opposite sex -- I might have kept boys at arm's length and elected not to go in for chemical alteration.
In any case, I was forgetful, then as now, and far from systematic, and would miss a day here and there, then try to swallow a couple down at once, and throw up; and was soon pregnant.
Never underestimate how very, very badly the body of an adolescent girl - wants to be pregnant, never mind desire. It is the total opposite of your 30-something career women "trying to conceive". It's hard to fool Mother Nature, as the ad used to say.
Which is why I think it's so funny that everybody is now worried that "the teenagers aren't having enough sex!".
There is no way to argue for "be normal teens, like we used to be!" while also arguing that babies are the one evil that must be thwarted. Babies may be discouraged, sure, but the flip side is that they aren't that big a deal - you, teenaged girl, aren't that big a deal. The babies are going to slip through, or they are going to have to be stopped; and abortion is not a beautiful rite of passage. And pace Freddie Deboer's piece the other day, it is not a simple matter of revealed preference. It is very unlike other choices, and more significantly, it is something to which your attitude may change over time, because life is long.*
*If your attitude doesn't ever change - well, yeah, FdeB is right, you've revealed yourself - and humanity may have dodged a bullet.
I think you have a good point about the very regional nature of housing markets. I am pretty skeptical of numbers talking national averages, and would like to see numbers at the state, or better county (or even more betterer school district) levels. My suspicion is that a few metro areas, which have a lot of the population and shy high prices, probably drive most of the results. That's still a problem to be considered, of course, but the answers for dealing with housing prices in 15 cities will be very different than the answers if it is truly a national problem affecting all regions.
Well, ideally, at least.
Regarding housing prices, my simple model is supply and demand. Demand depends largely on population and population is going up (probably more than official figures because of the large amount of "undocumented" immigration). Meanwhile, it is impossible to build cheaply and in many places almost impossible to build at all. So prices in desirable places will continue to stay high--and a large proportion of America is desirable.
The Boston area is highly desirable and about the cheapest 2BR apartment we can find around here is $2200. Meanwhile, deindustrialization continues to cause the population of Binghamton, NY to stagnate. So my sister's house has a monthly mortgage payment of $679.
I am slowly working my way through Lineages (p. 208 of 284) and so far my reaction is similar. I suspect that Todd is vaguely familiar with evolutionary psychology but is afraid to get too close. So, for example, after telling us that most of our history was hunter-gatherer and that there was a strong sexual division of labor, he says:
"The question here is not whether [women's] specific attitudes are transitional with respect to a heritage from the past or anchored in the genes of our species. To understand the present, it is enough for us to admit that 100,000-300,000 years of human habits cannot be erased in seventy years, if we place the beginning of the great transformation in 1950." (p. 196)
I suspect there are two reasons for his lack of engagement with ev. psych.
One, for many in academia, genetic explanations are considered right-wing--and the person who supports them immoral, not worth listening to.
Two, as a French sociologist, Todd was marinated in Emile Durkheim's commandment, "a sociological fact can only be explained by another sociological fact."
If you have not read this Misha Saul post, you will enjoy it: https://www.kvetch.au/p/wife-economics-and-the-domestication-e8f?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2. I prefer his perspective over Emmanuel Todd.
One "solution" to the present predicament regarding the sexes may be the legalization of polygamy. (I assume it will result in polygyny--namely, high status men marrying multiple women.) I think I oppose this, but it is interesting to think through the potential implications nonetheless.
Asset prices are crashing. The bond market has been hammered, chinese real estate markets are being hammered- those are the two largest asset classes in the world. The stock and housing markets are holding up for now, and they can keep up for as long as there isn't any forced selling. The Fed avoided the forced selling wave with their BTFP program last spring (but that was a 1 year program and banks have to pay ~5% interest on those loans coming due in 5 months). We are constantly on this knife's edge with low volume and high prices for major assets just looking for a reason to fall.
Great Allison Schrager note, including 4 quintiles and two top deciles of wealth increases. Tho I wish it included avg absolute amounts, as well as the 0.2 — 1.0% increase. It notes the increases in wealth are hugely because of house value increases, tho the bottom quintile’s house value increase was bigger than the second quintile. Allison doesn’t mention this is probably because even the crappiest low cost owned houses went up quite a bit in % terms.
Far fewer of the bottom own homes, so how that’s handled isn’t clear.
The poor getting richer more slowly than the rich is part of that inequality problem, not mentioned.
Probably the key error - and it is an understandable error - across all macro housing discourse for the past 20 years has been the presumption that rising price/rent ratios mean that prices are not being driven by rents. In almost all cases, higher rents drive higher price/rent ratios - over time, within metro areas, between metro areas. Prices systematically rise at more than a 1:1 rate with rising rents. So high price/rent ratios are almost always caused by rising rents.
You can see this in the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report, where they highlight a few cities where price/rent ratios had risen the most. Those happened to be the cities where rents had risen the most! It was caused by rising rents. But the entire exercise proceeded as if they had shown that rents weren't important.
Price/rent ratios will only come down after a massive amount of new building moderates rents. We should hope that it will happen, but it won't happen fast.
I write about this a lot, because it's so fundamental. Here's one post that touches on it.
https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/rising-home-prices-are-mostly-from
FRED data (estimates of course) has the # of housing units against population at a 23 year high (with their data only going back to 2000).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ETOTALUSQ176N#0
Housing unit growth has been faster than population since early 2017, almost 6 consecutive years of building exceeding population growth and still we need more 'supply'?
Every macro class emphasizes that rising prices should diminish demand, and here we are with higher prices, even adjusted for higher incomes, and higher interest rates and higher down payment rates than in the mid 2000s- and yet demand is for more units of housing per person? The cure for high prices is supposed to be high prices, even if it doesn't bring more supply on line, what we are seeing is clearly not just a simply supply story.
Honestly, it's just not even remotely close. The lack of supply is so extreme that it really is the main issue and everything else is a rounding error.
In 2005, new construction was just getting to the point of finally bringing rent inflation down to a neutral level before starts collapsed to depression levels. To get back to the vacancy rates that were associated with stable real rents, we need about 5 million additional homes that are just vacant. Forget about more households or whatever. We need 5 million vacant, empty homes, just to get back to normal, to a level that might be associated with a reversal of decades of excess rent inflation. That's how out of whack we are.
Millions of households have been regionally displaced from our most slowly growing cities over the past couple of decades because of regional housing shortages. Millions. It's an extreme historical anomaly. It's like water flowing uphill.
From 2015 to 2022, rent inflation averaged more than 2% higher than non-rent inflation annually. That was in all conditions - rising interest rates, falling rates, stable prices, rising prices, expansion, recession, recovery. It's supply. It's all supply, to a first approximation.
Here's a recent post on rent trends.
https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/update-on-rent-trends-through-september
Really, just looking at the housing completions per capita in the post, you have to be giving some other theory a massive amount of the benefit of the doubt to think anything else. But, it isn't just that. There are dozens of extreme empirical signs of inadequate housing.
You skip over actual use of homes, and homes per capita in assuming we don't have enough housing. The home owner vacancy rate was stable from 1986 to 2004- between 1.6% and 1.8% for that 18 year stretch and then it jumps to 1.9, 2.4, 2.7 and 2.8% for 2005-2008. The rental vacancy rate was below 9%, with a 40+ year average of ~ 7% from 1956 to 2001 (using Fred data and what they have, not changing start points for any other reason) and from Q4 2002 to Q1 2012 it was >9% with quarters over 10%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USHVAC
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RRVRUSQ156N
Total housing inventory around 2006 was 126 million units, and the homeownership rate was 69%. A 1 percentage point increase in vacancy rates would be ~870,000 empty homes, a 3 percentage point increase in vacant rentals would be ~1.1 million empty units above trend. That is ~ 2 million empty units in 2006 above 20 and 40 year trends.
Meanwhile new privately owned housing units were at ~1.55 million in 2001 and rose to average a little under 2 million completions from 2004-2007. Roughly speaking we had 2 million more units completed above trend from 2004 to 2007 and in a weird coincidence we had roughly 2 million more empty homes and rentals in that period than trend.
Subsidized demand frequently looks like under supply, but you have to discuss actual units and actual use to convince me of 'under supply', without it ALL increases in prices look like 'under supply'.
I address some of that in this post:
https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/its-never-overbuilding-and-that-wont
There are a couple of charts in that post that I think help to see how miniscule housing production has become, relative to the scale of the nation's housing stock. Vacancies have mostly scaled with the growing stock while construction has been flat for 50 years. And, the vacancies in the 2000s were from frictions of the demand shock, not really supply and demand. Most of the rise was when construction had declined, and in the cities where vacancies were famously disruptive, all of the additional construction had reversed, and then some, by the time vacancies peaked.
Also, here's a deep dive on the topic:
https://www.mercatus.org/research/research-papers/build-more-houses
What conditions would you need to see to call it a supply story?
How do you tell if it isn't rising prices pulling up rents in those cities?
I see no reason to expect rents to come down. While some locations have shortages that may moderate, I'd argue that isn't one of the main factors. Besides an increase in land value in most urban and metro areas, two things are happening separately on low and higher rent. The regulated minimum standards are being continually raised. It is simply more costly to offer these units. Units above this minimum see far smaller increases for this reason but often include far more amenities simply because renters demand it. Again, this is not likely to reverse either.
Raising regulated minimum standards is an important way that municipalities constrain supply. And that, combined with a number of other obstructions is why land prices are high.
Minimum standards don't make land prices high except maybe a second order effect because the minimum unit square footage is bigger. Minimum standards make the construction cost higher.
Density limitations may make land prices higher but I don't see those restrictions going away either.
Yes. But, not "may", they "definitely" make land prices higher. And the minimum standards are mostly just part of the larger package of obstructions meant to block new units. And this is why shortages are extreme, not moderate.
I see this a lot, where people play down the supply problem, and then when they acknowledge it, they treat it with a fatalism. Like, if you treat it as a fait accompli, then, it becomes a sort of control variable in your mental model of housing, and not an independent variable, and so you can still act like it's not the extreme, obvious variable making housing too expensive because it's just a state of nature.
The most expensive cities have added very few units for the last 25 years. That's what makes them different. That's what makes them expensive. And they use zoning, minimum standards, and a bunch of arbitrary veto points to prevent enough units from being built.
This creates a number of irregular scars across housing market data, one of which is high land prices in the deprived metros.
“And the minimum standards are mostly just part of the larger package of obstructions meant to block new units. And this is why shortages are extreme, not moderate."
I'm talking about minimum requirements that mostly don't block new units from entering the market. A friend renting a very typical house had to put in new windows that were easier to exit in a fire, nevermind no other house in the neighborhood had such windows. Many of the new standards are also being applied to commercial buildings, but not owner occupied residential. Unlike limits on building new units, these minimum standards don't much change supply, they just mean rental property prices at the bottom are higher, and always will be.
Patriarchy vs Women's Lib vs Matriarchy is not a good framework for analyzing different sorts of sex relations. There are at least dozens of significantly different kinds of patriarchy (Baby Boom era Western patriarchy is very different from, say, Imperial Japanese patriarchy, which is different from early 20th century Arab patriarchy, which is different from Tokugawa Japanese patriarchy, and so on), and women's liberation is a recurrent feature of history (see JD Unwin's Sex and Culture, published 1934), not something that was only invented in 1950.
The last sentence is the key observation- mortgage rates since 2008 have been sub 4% and at times sub 3%- everyone that owns a house today has locked in those low rates even if they bought before 2008. That is going to limit the supply of houses for the market with rates at 7%+ today.
"I think that the most likely scenario going forward is for a gradual decline over the next ten years in home prices relative to inflation. I give this scenario a 60 percent chance. There is a 25 percent chance that home prices will keep up with inflation over this period. There is a 15 percent chance that home prices will crash by 20 percent over the next three years."
No. While there's a chance of a recession in exactly 2033, housing prices will almost certainly hold or go up. Ironically, the reason is earlier in your post: "…Though the top 50% is doing great. They have much more money compared to 2019, so unless asset values crash—they’ll keep spending." While the US unmortgaged home ownership rate was only 23% according to Forbes 6 months ago, the people driving the market have cash. My DINK nephew bought a 3 bedroom in suburban DC paying all cash. Three of four offers were all cash. I had my house paid off a couple years ago (exactly one payment left) and I refinanced 80% of the value at 1 7/8% to invest. In most of America, especially the hottest markets, cash is driving the change in the market's direction.
Quoting from your quote of Todd in your Todd review:
>"But there has been no massive, industrialist and protectionist collective reaction… ask ourselves if the feminist revolution is not also contributing to our inability to act collectively."
He could answer this question himself with some of his other observations about the division of violence between the sexes. There tends to be a pervasive denial of the violent and terroristic nature of labor movements among academics. You will even hear them describe historical incidents of labor terror with approval in one second and then immediately you will hear them characterize the labor movement as one oriented towards peace and democracy. Effective labor organizations have always been terror organizations, which is perhaps why feminization and bureaucratization through pervasive regulation gelds them. On the one hand, it's good that labor terrorism has been suppressed. On the other, it certainly drains our politics of the bloody conflicts that once made it interesting.
I wonder as the sexes converge or are made to converge, or as "stuff in the water" as some would have it, brings them closer together - if there may not be an "uncanny valley" effect. Will they like each other as much, on the whole, the more that the differences between them are erased? The ways we are messing with reproduction are pretty reckless.
Is it a bit odd to use an average and a median in the price/income ratio? Wouldn't average/average or median/median make more sense?