Michael Wiebe
@michael_wiebe
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Economics (UBC), yimby, replication, effective altruism, data science. Support my replication work:
Joined July 2009
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This👇 is why we have a housing crisis.
Yes, new luxury condos don't directly help the typical person. But they do help indirectly:
(1) by preventing the rich from competing for existing housing.
(2) by making homes available when people move in and vacate their previous unit.
Who's messed up on housing more? Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre?
Both lost hundreds of thousands of affordable homes that went to developers.
Both have deep ties to rich real estate investors.
Neither can be trusted to fix this mess they've created.
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Single-family zoning is a giveaway to the rich:
A rich person could buy this house for $2.5M. Or, a dozen people could each spend $800K to construct an apartment building. The dozen could easily outbid the one, but zoning makes it illegal to build apartments.
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If 100 people want to live here, shouldn't we have 100 homes?
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NYC needs more housing supply but no one ever explains how many units you need to actually "fix" the problem of high rents. YIMBYs are aggressively analytic until you ask for an actual threshold for what would make a median one-bedroom apartment in NYC rent for less than $2,000.
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How single-family zoning screws over renters for the benefit of mansion-buyers:
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How Boomers screwed over their kids:
Affordable homes are old homes. To ensure enough affordable homes for when their kids are looking to buy, Boomers needed to allow new housing 30 years ago. But instead they were NIMBYs. Result: a shortage of cheap 30 year-old homes today.
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@AlecStapp
Conservatives oppose free tax filing because they want people to hate taxes. It's a standard ideological battle instead of special interests ripping off the public.
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@AdrienMatray
How is this an unintentional error? You're directly shrinking the pre-treatment coefficients to hide evidence of pretrends.
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The measles vaccine was a tremendous achievement.
Measles does more than just the acute infection
It can wipe out large swaths of acquired immune memory by directly destroying the memory B cells, plasma cells, and T cells - causing people to become susceptible to infections they should be immune to:
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Who benefits when NIMBYs block new 'luxury' housing?
Not you.
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@dirtyshallot
If you don't build housing for the middle class, they'll just outbid the poor.
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The Harvard admissions data is striking.
- 0.85% of Black applicants are in the top decile, and their admit rate is 56%; for Asians, these are 18% and 13%.
- most Asian applicants are in the top 5 deciles; most Black and Hispanic applicants are in the bottom 5 deciles.
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The housing crisis in a nutshell:
The population kept growing, but our cities didn't.
Once single-family neighborhoods were built out, there was no room to add more homes.
We need to replace houses with apartments, but homeowners don't want the neighborhood character to change.
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Landscape architects: "we tripled the number of homes, but prices went up! Economics is a sham."
Economists: "supply tripled, and demand more-than-tripled, so prices went up."
note to obama from vancouver: patrick condon has a masters in landscape architecture, not economics. I probably wouldn't trust him on this one.
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The new Senakw project in Vancouver will add 6,000 homes. But the total effect on housing supply is even larger, since some residents will be locals who vacate their previous unit to move in. Once we account for this multiplier effect, the total number is ~10,000 homes.
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"Are those new homes affordable for working-class people?"
The problem we face is rich people moving into the city and outbidding poor people for housing. If we can build expensive homes that rich people will buy, then we preserve the existing housing stock for poor people.
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You might have heard that China promotes its leaders based on GDP growth. When I collected my own data on this, I found a null result. Then I replicated the literature—turns out, it's all wrong.
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Left-NIMBYs: "new housing will be luxury and unaffordable!"
Right-NIMBYs: "new housing will be shoddy and create slums!"
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If one person is living in a house, and dozens of people are living in an apartment next door, why should the one person get to set zoning policy?
Holyday has a photo of himself standing next to a six-storey building. “Spot the councillor! Oops, there he is! That’s what six storeys is! Imagine that next to a bungalow where there’s been nothing before — that’s deplorable.”
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"Developers won't build if rents fall"
False. Developers will build if revenues exceed costs.
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Single-family zoning shields the rich from competition, and hence transfers wealth from poor to rich. This is why we have a housing crisis.
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You've heard of Robert Oppenheimer. But the story of Joseph Rotblat also deserves to be told.
Rotblat joined the Manhattan Project to prevent the Nazis from using an atomic bomb. When it became clear that the German program was a failure, he quit on grounds of conscience.
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Couldn't have put it better myself:
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@cafedujord
Blocking new housing for tech workers is what caused the problem, by forcing tech workers to compete with teachers.
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The NIMBY-YIMBY debate will end with the NIMBYs admitting they were wrong about the economics (that more supply will help affordability) and saying openly that they care more about neighborhood character than affordability.
Can't we skip ahead to that point right now?
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What would it look like if city planners took vacancy chains seriously? New market-rate housing frees up affordable old housing through vacancy chains, as people upgrade and vacate their previous unit. Accounting for this, we should be much more supportive of market-rate housing.
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The housing crisis in a nutshell: cities place no limits on the number of jobs, but strictly limit the number of homes.
When people move in for new high-paying jobs, they outcompete locals for the existing housing stock, bidding up prices.
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NIMBYs try to use affordability as a reason to oppose apartments, but when push comes to shove, they're willing to sacrifice affordability to protect their neighborhood character.
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Apparently
@UBC
's 2050 Campus Vision includes no plans to densify the mansion district in University Hill (circled).
Why is UBC choosing to use its land for mansions instead of student apartments?
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Why insisting that new housing be affordable makes the housing crisis worse:
>tech worker moves in
>developer tries to build a fancy apartment
>left NIMBYs block it, because it's not affordable
>tech worker outbids locals for existing housing
>locals have to move away
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Left- and right-NIMBYs don't agree on *why* they oppose apartments, they just agree on opposing apartments.
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The problem with rent control is that it's a bandaid solution and doesn't address the root cause of why rents are increasing.
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@brownie_terror
If you care about asset value, why not upzone your property, build an apartment, and sell for $$$?
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🚨Replication alert🚨
I reanalyze Moretti (2021), which tests for the effect of tech cluster size on innovation. I find that the event study and instrumental variable estimates—necessary for a causal interpretation—are caused by coding errors.
#EconTwitter
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Why are we building homes that use so much space for empty air? That should be extra floors for people to live in!
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Hilarious right-NIMBY replies here. I particularly like this genre:
- "you can't build apartments there, that's violating the property rights of the homeowners!"
- "you can't let the homeowners build apartments, that violates the neighborhood character!"
If 100 people want to live here, shouldn't we have 100 homes?
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"higher density within 800 meters of post-secondary institutions"
Is this the end of UBC's mansion neighborhood in University Hill?
In addition to transit-oriented development, the federal government will require higher density within 800 metres of post-secondary institutions. A condition of the Permanent Transit Fund.
It'll help reduce rental housing pressures near universities.
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Imagine if every future resident in this building came to the public hearing to support rezoning. For 170 units, that's ~300 people. If they each spoke for 5 minutes, that would be 25 hours of support.
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How would you feel if this was proposed on your duplex lined street? Precisely. Which is why I opposed aspects of the Broadway Plan. My friends on West 14th aren't NIMBYs but don't want this next door, so I am motivated to start the battle all over again.
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Future historians will be baffled by our housing discourse.
People are ACTUALLY opposed to the "luxury" housing that is—not mansions, not penthouses—the humble townhome.
I don’t believe all housing supply is created equal. I don’t believe that building luxury townhomes will make rents more affordable. In our current real estate market, housing is a product that generates wealth.
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@AdrienMatray
And don't the pretrends invalidate your event study?
"Panel B plots the coefficients and confidence intervals when outliers are winsorized at 2% and shows that the point estimates are now the same as those shown in the figure of the published paper."
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@michaelgeller
Let's put it to a vote: the hundreds of new residents vs the dozen incumbents.
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Single-family zoning causes gentrification.
Here's 347 E 24th Ave in 2014 and 2020. Do you think the new owner is richer than the previous owner?
Because zoning doesn't allow multi-family housing, the old house was replaced by a fancy new house, instead of apartments.
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This new building would block my view of the sunset. Should I be able to veto it? If so, why should the utility I get from sunsets count for more than hundreds of people having a place to live? How is that a fair system?
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@MagoffinWilliam
Double standard: for houses, property rights determine land use. But for apartments, property rights don't mean anything, you have to "convince the community"?
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In a city with:
• 100 houses, only the richest 100 people live there.
• 100 duplexes, the richest 200 people live there.
• 100 fourplexes, the richest 400 people live there.
Can you see how upzoning helps people afford to live in a city?
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Could there possibly be a causal link between supply and prices? 🤔
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Left-NIMBYs think that blocking new development means blocking gentrification. But since development is a response to demand increases, they're really just transforming it into *low-density gentrification*, where rich people move in and renovate the existing homes.
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When evaluating a new condo proposal, you need to be thinking about the affordable housing you're creating thirty years in the future. And yet, public hearings are dominated by retirees who won't even be alive in thirty years.
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NIMBYs are shameless.
Left, 2019: opposing a proposed apartment because it's "dropping the ghetto" in your neighborhood.
Right, 2024: claiming that you thought the apartment was "not a bad thing" because it had affordable units.
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If you're a selfish NIMBY, how can you protect your luxury neighborhood character, while appearing altruistic?
Easy: oppose new housing for not being affordable enough. This seems prosocial, and achieves your goal of keeping new residents off your street.
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@ReflectiveAlt
Focusing on whether something is a good look instead of whether it's true is not a good look.
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The NIMBY mindset: new housing has to be either low-density or affordable.
Low-density: affordability is irrelevant, since it maintains the neighborhood character.
High-density: it's violating the neighborhood character, so needs to be affordable to compensate.
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I'd guess most of the explanation is that singles are willing to pay more (per square foot) than couples, and there's a huge amount of pent-up demand, so developers target them first.
Solution: keep building until demand from singles is met.
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@HelenLW_
Block homes for folks with $100k income
-> $100k folks compete with $90k folks
-> $90k folks compete with $80k folks
-> ...
-> $60k folks compete with $50k folks
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What NIMBYs don't understand:
(1) Old things are cheaper than new things (homes, cars, computers).
(2) To get more old things, we need to make new things.
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"Zoned capacity" is a severely flawed concept: this new 6-storey building is across from the skytrain, and is now zoned for 20 storeys. But it won't be redeveloped for decades. So there are 14 storeys not being used, but they still count as zoned capacity.
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The era of single-family neighborhoods is ending. Cities are for people to live close to their job and family, which means apartment buildings. People who want semi-rural living should have it—outside of the city.
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Shout-out to
@robertwiblin
for doing a great job as host of the
@80000Hours
podcast. I often find myself thinking "oh boy, that was a lot of info, I'll have to rewind", and then Rob will summarize the last few minutes, which allows me to understand the discussion!
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Any idea why the confidence intervals would jump in the Post period? There's no discontinuity in sample size or number of clusters.
#EconTwitter
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How credible is the air pollution literature? One test is whether the papers have posted their data and code for others to check.
I found 23 papers on the effects of air pollution. Of these, only 7 had data available, and 16 had missing or incomplete datasets.
#EconTwitter
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I'm always surprised by how blatantly selfish people are when it comes to housing policy. These people are happy to screw over seniors if it means they get a bit more sun.
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@johnrmyers
Simple interpretation: the magnitude of the upzoning was smaller than the magnitude of the new regulations.
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New replication:
I look at Gendron-Carrier et al. (2022), which studies the effects of subway openings on air pollution. If new subways induce people to switch away from driving, pollution should go down.
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#EconTwitter
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Two staircases per building seems awfully risky. Shouldn't each *unit* have two staircases?
NEW VIDEO: Could this Rule Change make Apartments More Deadly?
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Good news everyone! This land is going to be rezoned from detached houses to 8-storey apartments, since it's within 800 meters of a train station.
If 100 people want to live here, shouldn't we have 100 homes?
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Empirical evidence shows that building 100 new market-rate units frees up around 60 units in below-median-income neighborhoods, by this "vacancy chain" mechanism.
From a US paper:
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@RossBarkan
It's quite simple, really: zoning makes apartments illegal, and housing would be more abundant and affordable if we legalized apartments.
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Local control over housing is undemocratic.
Democracy means giving a say to people whose interests are affected. Housing policy determines whether someone can move to a new city for a job, but local control gives a voice only to incumbent residents.
I emigrated to BC over 30 years ago from HK under a colonial govt. I entered politics because I cherish our democracy. It's disheartening to witness the NDP government's disregard for democratic values.
The commitment to democracy must be unwavering but this isn’t it.
#bcpoli
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Note that the landowner also loses: restrictive zoning makes their land less valuable. But while the apartment residents are *willing* to pay $10M, *how much* they pay depends on the scarcity of land. If apartment-zoned land is abundant, they'd pay $2M.
🧵How zoning for apartments affects land and housing prices, a thread:
Consider a city with four plots of land, and four developers who want to build: fancy apartment dev, basic apartment dev, and two single-family builders. They are willing to pay $20M, $10M, and $1M.
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@paulkruegersd
Is there research showing that blocking new housing makes housing more affordable?
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NIMBYs oppose density because it ruins their luxury neighborhood character. Sometimes they make up rationalizations about displacement or affordability, but that's the core of it.
Bonnie Crombie wants to force four-storey buildings in every neighbourhood. She thinks she knows better than every single mayor.
I believe in working WITH mayors to build the right homes in the right places and rewarding them for their success. That’s how you get it done.
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Imagine the type of person who can afford a new luxury high-rise condo. Do you really want them looking for housing at the same time as you?
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@pmcondon2
We can still do it in the rest of Point Grey! Let's replace those awful mansions with gentle and affordable density!
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Lessig claims that Harvard was "yielding to the Internet" by reacting to Data Colada's findings.
Note:
- DC sent a report to Harvard in 2021
- Gino was on administrative leave before DC published any blog posts
Why would Lessig describe three researchers as 'the Internet'?
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If you block apartments while living in an actually luxurious detached house in a luxury low-density neighborhood, you're the reason we have a housing crisis.
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Who should decide whether apartments can be built?
Under local zoning, homeowners get to decide, and they choose neighborhood character over new housing. But why should our country be organized for the benefit of rich homeowners?
How would you feel if this was proposed on your duplex lined street? Precisely. Which is why I opposed aspects of the Broadway Plan. My friends on West 14th aren't NIMBYs but don't want this next door, so I am motivated to start the battle all over again.
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@michaelgeller
@BobRansford
@pmcondon2
Upzoning reduces land costs by increasing the stock of apartment-zoned land. New projects are viable if both rents and costs fall.
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@AboveTheGods_
An apartment and a detached house literally cannot both exist on the same plot of land.
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