tim cook / lisa cook ticket would also be great for the genre

an appropriate set of taxes and transfers may not be able to solve all of life's problems, but i think at this point they're underrated.

next on my agenda: cap and trade replies in will stancil's mentions. everyone on bluesky gets one per year, and we'll let the market decide who can use them best

between pricing junk calls and laws on one-click cancellation, and crackdowns on hidden fees, a lot of the annoyance with modern consumption seems very fixable

I wonder if you could back of the envelope an optimal per call / text tax that would fix the spam call problem.

I figure something like a ten cent per call tax and a way for legitimate businesses (eg dental offices) to verify themselves and get bulk pricing. Seems pretty doable

i mean there are uhhhh workarounds to this problem

oh yeah, that would've been brutal. and this way i still have hope of a high draft pick 😂

it's okay we'll get a top 3 draft pick now

warriors season really gonna end cause jalen green went nuclear :(

Worth elaborating on 3). There are two common args for why new construction can increase prices:

1. It brings more amenities (more retail, less crime, etc)
2. “sleepy” landlords see higher new prices & update accordingly

Inclusionary zoning cannot fix these. It’s “value capture” not affordability

"it's really not hard" about mandatory 20% subsidized units for new builds is a very funny take for a policy that has

1. been tried by lots of cities
2. never worked in practice
3. doesn't even work in theory if you believe OP that the reason new apartments increase rents is through new amenities

the tricky part is that to the extent the best upzonings are preemptive, you should expect to find short term nulls

i think an underappreciated point with upzonings is that they really should be preemptive. cities need capacity when demand shocks hit, not after

san francisco could upzone today and get a decent amount of housing, but it missed out on probably 70K units by not having capacity when demand was high

the payday loans and the NAR have incentives to write stuff to get clicks, appear as experts, and (second order) promote their products.

th BLS, census, and other statistical agencies have incentives to get things right. which often means admitting they are/were wrong! no one else does that

i think it's similar to the payday loan surveys. like, yeah, there's some incentive there for payday loan company to promote survey saying people are doing bad (and need payday loans!).

but IMO the bigger thing is that none of these private orgs have cultures of saying no to putting out shoddy work

like the NAR writes a lot about problems in the housing market. their incentive is to come off as experts and have saucy takes.

now, they're often *bad* about writing about the housing market, but that's partly because they don't want / aren't incentivzed to say "hey our survey broke"

i don't think it's a "they want to fudge the numbers" stry and more like "their survey got broken by COVID".

the incentive is that people and groups want to promote their work and promote their survey and won't admit "hey you shouldn't trust us on this"

the college tuition one is especially funny because

1. it was true that the price of college grew way faster than wages
2. that stopped being true in ~2015
3. adjusted for wages, college has been getting more affordable post-COVID

hard to use that to explain why people are mad post covid!

yeah, the issue is youll end up with a bunch of businesses that survive because of sweetheart deals.

i guess maybe landlords can exploit tenant switching costs and that's a reason to regulate commercial rents? otherwise, there's a very easy way to subsidize local businesses as a resident lol

if you're gonna do rent stabilization for small businesses, i think the public is obligated to some of that business' revenue.

Otherwise, "commercial tenants can't be charged market rents" ends up being a small business subsidy paid for by the landowners and the public via smaller tax revenues

san francisco is weird in that

1. it's the only city in the country where the typical resident is a rich renter. everywhere else that's rich has a mostly homeowners (except manhattan)
2. rent stabilization means the renter market looks more like the owner market in other cities

Food pantry usage would be a good thing to survey! I’d say news coverage is a bad metric because “things are going well” isn’t reported.

Food inflation has outstripped overall inflation so it’s possible things are worse in that respect. Clothing has never been more affordable on the other hand

you can say they're falling behind with respect to rent. because we've ~basically~ held incomes constant by looking at inflation adjusted incomes in specific bins, if theyre behind on rent it mechanically means theyre ahead on some other category.

now, you might put more moral weight on shelter

bc clothing inflation went up by less than overall inflation, so an equally valid chart would be "after clothing, low income tenants have never had more money"

both are weird questions because most tenants got inflation adjusted raises, so what you really want are like bottom X percent

at its core, the chart is asking for low income hhs "if you didnt get an inflation adjusted raise, how much money do you have after <expense>?"

bc rent grew faster than overall inflation, residual income goes down. if they'd picked a different essential like clothing residual income wouldve gone up

the other part of this is that shelter inflation outpaced overall inflation, so the chart is saying "if you made 30,000 adjusted for inflation before and make 30,000 adjusted for inflation now, you have less residual money because rent grew faster than overall CPI"

we looked internally at this w/ fannie mae's is the economy on the right track / wrong track question and there wasnt much of a gap by renter / owner

yeah, that was part of what i was thinking of. BUT, the conference board will still have an "expectations" gap since it's trending down like Umich, just not "lowest of all time levels" and i'd be curious how big that gap is relative to what it "should" be.

how hard would it be to update the charts with another measure of consumer sentiment? like what Conference Board puts out.

being reviewer 2, one concern is that U mich changed their survey methodology recently, so it might be nice to have a robustness check

IMO the tricky part with the shared kitchen / bedrooms is that young professionals are pretty affluent and so im not sure what the required rent discount would need to be to make communal facilities work. but with SROs there's obviously not that issue

it's an interesting observation that a lot of the tenderloin adjacent office buildings in SF could most easily get turned into the next generation of SROs.

like you could imagine a competent gov tearing down the old ones for apartments + turning offices into new SROs