No matter what we do on the supply side it will be eaten up by the unlimited demand from people coming here. Unless we slow down immigration housing will always be too expensive.
This only further hurts people living here by chasing them out of their homes and taking control of their communities away from them.
We can't solve the problems of every country in the world by destroying our own. That only makes things worse for everyone.
I think we would have an a lot larger issue if the 2.8 million immigrants who work in construction[1] suddenly fell away. Even if it would potentially (but probably not) relieve demand a tiny bit.
Current immigration is a strong positive contributor to GDP growth. All things equal, it should allow for more construction and lower (real) housing prices under the right regulatory regime.
If your thesis is true then increases with immigration should be correlated with increases in housing prices, right? But this is not at all what is empirically verified.
It's not a supply-side problem (or not only or even majorly a supply-side problem). We can see this because the housing bubble is occurring in widely different places with widely different construction rules: both very restrictive and very lax. This is fundamentally a finance bubble.
Housing is entirely local. The US has plenty of cheap land to build housing. People choose to live where the jobs are or where QOL is high. High prices reflect that. And that's good - it's a signal we should be building housing and opening new businesses elsewhere.
Funny, without js all the specs say "0." I guess they wanted it animated for dramatic affect and now you get something very much the opposite, like they're sarcastically selling you a rock.
This problem happens even with JS enabled. They’re supposed to be dynamic as you scroll but it doesn’t work properly so you end up staring at zeros for quite a while!
I was working out of a studio apartment until this year and I honestly didn't feel like my WFH set up took up any real extra space:
In the beginning I would use the breakfast bar and just put the laptop up after work. Later on I bought an Ikea arm chair and an end table that just stayed in a corner I didn't use. This is all in addition to the partitioned off area for my side projects that had it's own desk and chair.
Pretty much nothing (including emacs!) We're only supposed to use our work computers for IM, email, and ssh to the VMs (hosted by the VM team) where we do the actual work. IMO: this is the optimal way to do it. The engineers know how to build decent machines and it separates our work from the mess corp IT creates and also decouples our capabilities from the PC hardware which has many other competing constraints.
If you look closely you'll notice that this isn't how extremists (on both sides) use the word. Racism to them means something closer to oppression (similar to the Marxist idea of class oppression.) The idea itself, the way it's used by extremists, is bigoted.
I wish the moderates arguing in good faith against bigotry would stop using it. It has an ugly genocidal history going back to the bolshevik revolution and the Holodomor that followed.
I don't understand your comment. What is the context for "using it" in your second paragraph? Also, could you elaborate on how you see racism as being closer to oppression?
My employer brought in a Harvard University professor to preach at us for ~45 minutes about how the US is awful and White people should feel guilty just for living their lives. I have absolutely met these people and have to deal with them at work.
In the strictest sense, OP is of course correct. In the age of global satellite coverage, nothing is unknown in quite the same way as the west was to Lewis and Clark.
> People seem to do this sort of thing pretty often in the Arctic.
The arctic is a different beast. It is impossible to survive for long in the arctic without either a supply chain or substantial reserves, and expeditions can last for at most a season.
However, the United States has a lot more empty public land than people seem to realize. Even in the densely populated Northeast, you can walk into the White Mountains or Adirondacks without a map, leave the trail, and probably spend years exploring in a mostly self-sufficient manner. Especially if you commit to turning back whenever you encounter people or trails. And that's to say nothing of the west or the great deserts.
Just because a map exists and trails are cut doesn't mean you have to acknowledge their existence. Remember: Lewis and Clark, for the most part, were traversing already inhabited land.
Being told you should feel guilty for being a particular race is as valid as being told you should be proud for it.
Moderates stepping into arguments about racism made by extremists (on both sides) might not realize how bigoted the idea of "racism" itself is. Those on the left argue that the "oppressing" race should feel guilty, not just that no one should feel pride in their race.
This only further hurts people living here by chasing them out of their homes and taking control of their communities away from them.
We can't solve the problems of every country in the world by destroying our own. That only makes things worse for everyone.