Thanks for sharing this piece Alex. Consumables like beer are not the same as durable products, especially essential durables like housing, and a lot of people forget that, so thank you for reiterating.
I have some rambly thoughts, shared in no particular order below:
A clarification: It almost sounds like you are saying the private housing market cannot deliver the combination of small-scale “microbrew” developers and large scale “mass produced” developers in a way that is similar to the beer market. Am I understanding correctly?
You are certainly right that the housing market and beer market are different: Cities don’t say “you can only produce 1 beer per acre of land,” they don’t have arbitrary restrictions on beer production like floor area ratios dictating that beer production must be proportional to land quantity. If anything, the biggest constraint on beer production in cities is zoning for breweries.
Taking a long view, the phrase “nobody votes on their beer” is only true in America right now because beer has been widely legalized. During Prohibition days, a lot of people voted on their beer!
We live in the days of widespread housing prohibition. While I agree in abstract we need to “rebuild the housing economy according to the logics and needs of housing and homebuilding, not the ideological buzzwords of markets and capital and sectors,” I don’t know what that means in practice. Ending housing prohibition is one example of something that feels a lot more concrete.
As you say, it’s not an either/or issue, and the ideological buckets we trap ourselves in prevent us from pursuing comprehensive solutions. We need fewer restrictive regulations, we need more federal funding, we need more state productive capacity (ie social housing), we need more tenant protections, preservation, emphasis on race and class and sustainability and comprehensive systems change.
Yet I worry we lose sight of the concrete, achievable wins when we get caught up in abstraction. Money, zoning, tenant protections, social housing—these are tangible, winnable things that lead to the housing we need. Getting “housers to move beyond ‘single narratives’ - both economically, politically and in terms of ‘solutions - and to really internalize just how dangerous ideology of all stripes is to our housing” feels a lot more abstract. Who or what are you even referring to? Maybe rather than throwing out ideology altogether, we should be creating an all-encompassing ideology of housing abundance, with an all-of-the-above strategy to get us there.
Thanks again for the piece, I’m looking forward to the long form follow up this fall!
Thanks for sharing this piece Alex. Consumables like beer are not the same as durable products, especially essential durables like housing, and a lot of people forget that, so thank you for reiterating.
I have some rambly thoughts, shared in no particular order below:
A clarification: It almost sounds like you are saying the private housing market cannot deliver the combination of small-scale “microbrew” developers and large scale “mass produced” developers in a way that is similar to the beer market. Am I understanding correctly?
You are certainly right that the housing market and beer market are different: Cities don’t say “you can only produce 1 beer per acre of land,” they don’t have arbitrary restrictions on beer production like floor area ratios dictating that beer production must be proportional to land quantity. If anything, the biggest constraint on beer production in cities is zoning for breweries.
Taking a long view, the phrase “nobody votes on their beer” is only true in America right now because beer has been widely legalized. During Prohibition days, a lot of people voted on their beer!
We live in the days of widespread housing prohibition. While I agree in abstract we need to “rebuild the housing economy according to the logics and needs of housing and homebuilding, not the ideological buzzwords of markets and capital and sectors,” I don’t know what that means in practice. Ending housing prohibition is one example of something that feels a lot more concrete.
As you say, it’s not an either/or issue, and the ideological buckets we trap ourselves in prevent us from pursuing comprehensive solutions. We need fewer restrictive regulations, we need more federal funding, we need more state productive capacity (ie social housing), we need more tenant protections, preservation, emphasis on race and class and sustainability and comprehensive systems change.
Yet I worry we lose sight of the concrete, achievable wins when we get caught up in abstraction. Money, zoning, tenant protections, social housing—these are tangible, winnable things that lead to the housing we need. Getting “housers to move beyond ‘single narratives’ - both economically, politically and in terms of ‘solutions - and to really internalize just how dangerous ideology of all stripes is to our housing” feels a lot more abstract. Who or what are you even referring to? Maybe rather than throwing out ideology altogether, we should be creating an all-encompassing ideology of housing abundance, with an all-of-the-above strategy to get us there.
Thanks again for the piece, I’m looking forward to the long form follow up this fall!