In 2010, during the Great Recession, he said: ...After a few years of such imbalances, the country unsurprisingly ended up with far too many houses. There were three ways to cure this overhang: (1) blow up a lot of houses, a tactic similar to the destruction of autos that occurred with the ‘cash-for-clunkers’ program; (2) speed up household formations by, say, encouraging teenagers to cohabitate, a program not likely to suffer from a lack of volunteers or; (3) reduce new housing starts to a number far below the rate of household formations.

So, unless you're arguing that between 2010 and now either we blew up a lot of houses or Buffett doesn't know what he is talking about, then I still don't an argument for tiny houses as compelling.

The macro economic issues (massive capital accumulation by the 1%, stagnant wages for the majority of workers, etc) are more in play than NIMBYism and zoning. I'd be interested whether or not you're active in zoning issues in your community or how it is that you came to the conclusion that zoning boards everywhere are responsible for unfordable housing.

In the desirable places, every terrible house is used and potentially worth millions. Due to NIMBYism, there are restrictions on development.

In contrast, other less-desirable places have made it very easy to build houses (and often even provided tax incentives), leading to over-building. But without corresponding jobs, those houses lie vacant.

You can simultaneously have housing shortages and housing excesses.

> The macro economic issues (massive capital accumulation by the 1%, stagnant wages for the majority of workers, etc) are more in play than NIMBYism and zoning.

To take an example relevent to HN, do you really think the reason that even well-paid developers can't buy houses in the Bay area is "stagnant wages?" Wages have increased massively over the past 5 years, but NIMBYism prevents the addition of new houses to meet the demand.

The problem is more the 5-10% of older people who got lucky with real estate than a conspiracy by the 1%.

> I'd be interested whether or not you're active in zoning issues in your community or how it is that you came to the conclusion that zoning boards everywhere are responsible for unfordable housing.

My mother is on the selectboard of a small Vermont town and she sees this all the time. There's a decent amount of demand for new affordable housing, but the existing power base of voters overwhelmingly demands that there be hard limits on how much new construction there is every year. They're particularly opposed to apartments. The end result is that housing is rather expensive despite there being an abundance of available land and the young families who would like to move to the area are priced out.

+

>Right now, the market wants to build - we should let it. )

vs

( >I would be much, much more apt to lay the blame for the current housing crisis at the feet of misguided zoning and NIMBYism [and I'm going to leave this alone, since it's basically trolling (often dressed up in pseudo-leftist rhetoric)]

&

>If the state wants to step in and build more housing too, great, but first it should get out of the way.) =(?) ( >We need to build more houses, for anyone, as quickly as possible and as much as possible if we want to shift the curve of rental pricing.) & ( >I agree that tiny houses are a feel-good distraction.)

I'm first going to say, my initial response was semi-simplistic/not point-by-point, because your comment doesn't exactly unpack or follow too neatly. But, since you've taking my comment apart seemingly point by painful-point, I simply want to go back to point out that your argument is inconsistent.

Do you think that the "market" is omniscient and will not error? No, it is just a bunch of people and companies doing business within economic, business, and political environments. So before you go writing off government from being able to contribute anything to the solution, remember that all those houses that weren't built where people want to live in them...

>The problem is that there's a massive disconnect between where houses exist and where they're demanded.

...yeah, the market made that cluster fuuuu possible in coordination with our government.

so my mother is a partner at the largest private developer in the state and my dad recently wrapped working as city manager for one of the fastest growing towns in the state. zoning, private vs public land use, eminent domain, affordable housing are conversations i'm familiar with. i was on the board of habitat for humanity in a smallish town during my first years out of college, even.

i'll leave it with this. it's a mess of issues. that's clearly not a "thesis" level argument, i just say it to mean, it's not nimbyism. it's not simply zoning. housing is central to being human. it is where we return and reset daily, and by virtue of that it is intertwined with our personal, professional, and political lives. cheap housing won't fix it. smaller houses won't fix it. more housing won't fix it.

if you ran a race, every day, restarting every day, and every day you lost that race, just in a different way, and then someone said, "sprint faster when you start", you'd probably say something like "eff you, clearly there are other things going on besides my start". because you can fix your start, but three days ago you lost because of your pacing. and a week ago you lost because of endurance. and a month ago you lost because of shin splints... well, maybe, you think, maybe you're running the wrong race. or maybe you're not supposed to race. or, who the eff knows.

that's what i mean. yeah. it's a mess of issues. but that doesn't mean we need to solve each issue. maybe we need to back up and, get some perspective, and re-frame the problem.