If I read that, Marshall Steinbaum's twitter feed is going to reach through the screen and choke me.
Having the debt and the way credit is calculated makes it harder to buy a house too - even when on income based payment plans.
I'm not sure the median wage is the way to look at this since old people who have paid off loans are included in that and the younger workers paying the loans probably earn below median wage. Having no disposable income until middle age is not good for things like family formation and establishing wealth sufficient to retire.
I strongly believe that it should be possible to get an education - even a graduate education - without taking on so much debt and we should pay for that with progressive taxation. People who get rich will pay it back that way.
PSLF is great. I'm grateful for it. But the way it's structured now, you get either all of your loans forgiven after 120 months of qualifying employment or none. Maybe after 8 years, you want to work for a for profit or a Union, because your boss sucks. But you don't do it because you will have wasted those 8 years at a lower salary.
I am so tired of programs that are worried about helping the undeserving. This is why we can't have nice things in this country.
Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/should-biden-forgive-student-loan-debt/629700/
Posting the link only because I'm curious about the scenario in 1.
I want what my parents had -- essentially free high quality public universities. Anything short of that is bullshit.
Student loan forgiveness I get confused by. I think beginning your adult life in debt is very bad for you in terms of building financial habits -- I think parents with the ability to let their kids start out debt free have an obligation to, even if it's difficult for them. And a lot of student debt seems unconscionable to me. On the other hand... someone like me coming out of law school with high five-figures (maybe six? I don't remember) of debt but a job that made paying it off perfectly reasonable, doesn't actually need the help.
I guess what I'm thinking is that while I'm usually opposed to means testing, for debt relief it seems okay.
Nebraska was $1,500 a year when I went, which is pretty close to free compared to the $14k a public university costs in Pennsylvania even after you adjust for inflation.
Your quality varied, but you could find it if that was your thing.
With higher tuition, the admission strategy (admit all in-state high school graduates with a C or better then flunk out half) would have been immoral.
I am so tired of programs that are worried about helping the undeserving. This is why we can't have nice things in this country.
This is exactly right.
If we guaranteed nice things for everyone, regardless of whether they were deserving, then it wouldn't matter so much that...well, there are so many ways to finish this sentence.
Our best means of reducing debt across the board is high inflation, but people don't seem to like that.
Of course I'm not going to read the link to see if they discuss this, but a good idea I saw is basically void out the payments due to onerous interest- either make it interest free or some very low rate that government guaranteed loans would qualify for. So in the interest free case, if you've already paid principal + interest totaling at least the original principal, your debt is forgiven. If you haven't yet, the principal is reset to original debt - payments made so far. This makes it a lot easier to message as screwing to predatory lenders while still giving people some responsibility for paying for their education (and on top of that keep the programs that wipe out the principal if you're in certain fields.) They can also point to examples like people making payments as required who now owe many fold more than the original debt, which is a much more sympathetic case. It takes away the unfairness of randomly having a high interest rate just based on when you went to school. Finally it addresses the going forward issue of what to do with future people who miss the current jubilee- student loans remain interest free or very low interest*. And you can even tie it to Jesus and appeal to the antisemites by implying that charging interest is bad.
*Although I still don't know how you prevent colleges from just jacking tuition to take advantage of lower payments, like how low mortgage rates result in higher home prices.
7: we could accomplish that by taxing you, like they do in Scotland.
What would you have done if it had been a bad recession and you were significantly underemployed for a while?
13: Younger folks have fixed rates. Older borrowers had some high rates. Inflation goes up, but not your income and you pay more in interest.
The "essentially regressive" thing is a red herring unless you make the mighty strong assumption that, under current law with nothing else changing, the funds used to buy out student loans* would necessarily be spent on people poorer than the median student rather than, idk, being captured by some other lobby or used to retire government debt as the default option.
Used to pay Elon Musk to hire Nazis to tweet.
15: That's the difficulty with means testing, of course -- making sure that it's only affecting the people who do have the ability to pay. Doing it on a year by year basis, so if you have a low income for a year your loans are forgiven for that year, or something like that, would work.
19 - pay a percentage of your income for 10 years. If you want to be regressive, you can cap it at the amount that would pay it off in 10 years. Or, the masters of the Universe with their Wharton MBAs could pay 10-15% of wage income above poverty level too.
Just out of curiosity, did anyone but heebie click through and read the article? I definitely have not made a serious effort to summarize the article here; I have left a lot out. (Honestly, I could just write my own guest posts if I wanted to give you all something self-contained to discuss. I didn't realize doing a tl;dr was effectively mandatory.)
I didn't read it. So much of politics lately is deliberately incited rage at anything having to do with education, so I'm just ignoring all of it.
I haven't, because I am sleep deprived. But I'm also increasingly annoyed with the Atlantic, because the owner platforms a lot of people who are anti union and am reflexively suspicious. (Ed Yong and Katherine Wu ar fantastic.)
Obviously, I resent many people who went to college, but I'm very specific and have my reasons.
Just out of curiosity, did anyone but heebie click through and read the article?
It's little difficult with the post as written.
I know. That makes it seem like excluding it from the post was a deliberate choice by lk and/or heebie, which is in an interesting choice.
I remember back when you could never be really sure a link in the comments wasn't going to a gif of a dinosaur fucking a car.
That's fine. It's not easy to find that link these days.
UNC tuition ranged from $480-$600 per year when I was an undergrad in the late 80s/early 90s. Currently it's $9000/year.
I can't track down my sources, but I've arrived at the understanding that the handling of student loans has been so haphazard that 1. they don't have the capacity to apply complicated rules for forgiveness and 2. there is absolutely no justice between loan-holders on things like who has good interest rates and who has enrolled in forgiveness programs and who got what benefits out of their schooling. I saw some senior student loan administrator say something like 'it's a total cluster; just wipe it all' and that suits me fine. Also, the forgiveness programs have apparently been run to prevent forgiveness until now, when they are being revised to promote forgiveness and mine will likely qualify at which point I'll lose interest in the topic.
The other interesting thing to me is watching to try to make a conclusion about how loud the cry has to get before it actually gets results. I feel like I'm hearing about it in lots of places, a couple times a week, and maybe that's what the threshold has to be?
Pretty sure dinosaurs banging cars was a Sifu Tweety specialty.
Sorry. My apologies if you're lurking.
33: Last I checked UC Davis law school was now more than $59k, up from 10k in 2000, which was quite a bit more than undergrad, though a cushier experience. Anyway, I think the stock Ed price could be cheaper at a private school with an ok endowment like BU.
If house prices had increased at the same rate as in-state tuition, the median house price in NC would be ~1.2 million dollars.
38 - it's seemed to in Davis. Classmate bought a house with her sister. Deal was, they would pay the mortgage and their mother would get the appreciation. They saved a ton on rent because of how fast it went up every year, and their mother got a good return when they sold.
The tl;dr is probably something like: cancelling student loans is something Biden could potentially do via executive order, and it might be popular enough to be worth whatever backlash it generates; however, given the very limited number of cards the Democrats seem to have to play, it's not clear that this is the proposal that would help the greatest number of lower-class and/or minority voters, or even the greatest number of young voters, and the structural issues that gave rise to the student loan crisis won't be addressed directly by forgiveness. So... maybe worth doing, maybe not worth doing, hard to adjudicate.
13: The part of inflationary conditions where employers actually raise wages is very hard for me to believe in, although I try.
Jesus fuck. Why can he only do one thing, so it must be the single optimized thing? I swear to god, Trump did five illegal things by executive order every week; we should have learned that playbook. Why are only Democrats bound by the political capital/backlash bullshit?
If you aren't holding yourself to the One Optimized Policy, you could do this and then do other good things for the people who got left out. It should be enough that it would make a lot of people's lives so much better, and then do that shit like twenty more times.
Okay, maybe the problem is that I am a truly terrible summarizer. "Essentially regressive" was my phrase and it prompted 17, but I think it was a bad/inaccurate one; similarly "Biden can do only one thing" was my implication, and I also think it's a bad/inaccurate one. This is why I hoped people would read the article and interact with it themselves.
This might be my last guest post, lol. What a shitshow.
(I mean my parts of it have been a shitshow, not anyone else's. I can't seem to communicate so I'll just say I'm sorry and leave it there.)
No, you're terrific! People are talking about a subject they're interested in! I've abdicated doing any work at all keeping this place running, so it's all on Heebie, and you sending in posts like this is what keeps her going.
Given that it's Unfogged, though, engagement with any post is going to incorporate being nitpicky about it.
I recommend first reading a post to see if you can make an appallingly stupid pun, then checking for a cock joke, then for typos. Engaging the content itself is down the list.
The article is good (and, for anybody hesitating about clicking through it's written by Jerusalem Demsas, which should count as a recommendation).
I don't know that I have anything smart to say about it. My prior position was, "I'm not opposed to student debt cancellation, but have some hesitation and wouldn't list it as a high priority" and the article mostly reinforces that.
cancelling student loans is something Biden could potentially do via executive order
I've not yet been convinced that there are 5 votes on the Supreme Court that support the view that the statute people are pointing to really gives him this power. It's the same people who don't think Congress gave the CDC the power to require masks on airplanes during a pandemic.
Did Congress intend in 1965 or whenever to give the President the power to just wipe out all the debt, for any reason or no reason? I suppose if you take the statute literally, you might say yes, but no one ever takes statutes literally, unless it's for the purpose of screwing the powerless. You also have to kind of ignore the section, in the same part or subpart, where Congress micromanages loan forgiveness. OK, yes, Congress said that loans meeting exactly criteria must be forgiven, and said that all loans may be forgiven. And all those statements about fiscal impact that assumed debt repayment were just air . . .
The reason that Trump's experience is inapplicable, is that if a court overturned a Trump EO, the narrative was that the liberal elite was thwarting the will of the people, while if a court overturns a Biden EO, it'll be because he was only pretending to try to do something, and never actually believed in it, so he deliberately picked a method that wasn't going to work.
It's clear enough that Biden is going to use the existing authorities to the extent he can, and then work in subcategories like predatory private trade schools and the like. Like LB, my loans should not have been forgiven, and the amounts I paid for kids' tuition shouldn't be refunded to me. Then again, my retirement would look completely different if they did either.
As would the terirement/carrer path of the people who didn't go to college because of the cost.
Advocates cherry-pick the polls on this -- what makes sense for the Admin is to do the parts that have broad support within the coalition before (if ever) getting to people who went to better law schools than I did.
But, like, fuck that.
Biden wipes out student debt and it is gone for the three or four years it takes to get to the Supreme Court and then how would it ever be re-established? Some future administration goes back through and puts it back? The few years before Supreme Court reversal are really important and set a new default. Trump gets reversed on everything, but he reset the ratchet where he wanted it and it matters.
I know we're not supposed to be lawless and shit but it really worked for the other side.
Given that it's Unfogged, though, engagement with any post is going to incorporate being nitpicky about it.
Yes, it's not a bad guest post by any means. This is just what happens around here. If you really want to prompt engagement with the substance of a link, it is generally best to do a little more summarizing in the post or early in the comments. For better or worse, very few people are going to click through and read links.
52 I have two words for you: Shadow Docket.
I'd not a reason to do nothing, but they aren't doing nothing. They're making a huge difference in how existing programs are run, and wiping out a lot of debt that way. They'll go to the limits on the stronger cases (predation, etc).
Biden has always been consistent, I think, that he wants a means-tested and/or circumstances-tested program. He's not going to go full forgiveness. The problem with the limited program is that between the whatever percent of people who are opposed to anything, and the very vocal slice that aren't going to qualify, you end up with the public square being dominated by people pissed off at Biden.
Obviously Megan, yours should be forgiven.
This is how it works, LK: you write a short, punchy post that relays the contestable nugget of the topic, no one reads the link, some barely read the post, then they nitpick and bicker and occasionally make a joke, then someone reads the thing or knows a thing, and wellakshwally you're an idiot because of these details, which of course you know, but you also know that we wouldn't be having this conversation if you'd included all the details, because no one would read the blog, so you go, ah, well, nevertheless, YOU'RE GAY, Details Man, etc.
Or you post about bicycles and it stays on topic for 1000 comments.
Today biking to work I was behind a contractor truck that had "Fuck Biden" on the left of the rear gate, some kind of elaborate cross on the right (couldn't find the exact image online so not sure what it meant) and in the middle "If we're sharing the road with bikes now, let's also share road tax, license, registration, and insurance with them." I stayed way the fuck away from him after I saw those.
50.2 is basically where I am. It might be worth doing (combining all meanings of "worth"), but there's no way that its primacy in current political discourse remotely touches its importance.
I also think it's kind of weird that I essentially never see discussed that the ongoing problem has been, if not solved, then greatly ameliorated: the kinds of insane high-interest, predatory loans that created these horror stories are much, much smaller part of the market than they used to be. Schools giving out financial aid packages essentially build them so that kids only need to take out the subsidized federal loans (the ones with zero interest until graduation and low interest thereafter). Obviously, FAFSA results don't always accurately reflect ability to pay, but at most schools the looney tunes sticker prices aren't paid by anyone who isn't a foreigner or truly rich, and the loans to fill in the gaps are modest. Iris is on track to take out something like $12k in total loans for a school with a $55.5k tuition & fees. We're paying a chunk out of pocket, we have some savings from grandparent checks, and the rest is aid + scholarships. If our savings were lower, they'd give us more aid. When our 2021 income dropped 15% from the 2020 levels FAFSA was based on, they added another $2k/year.
I'm not saying this means the system is hunky dory, but these changes are completely absent from the discourse. I see 100 tweets a day about loan forgiveness and I never knew the system had changed until AB told me a few months ago. It's weird, frankly.
What's the best way to measure spindle width while the old bottom bracket is still in? I don't have calipers.
Google the specs for your frame, of course. If you're not sure what model frame you have, buy a new one. It will be easier to replace the bottom bracket on a new frame, although you'll probably also want to buy some calipers (sounds like you don't have any).
I'm very sensitive right now; if this is bad advice or doesn't fit your financial situation, please just ignore.
I feel like I missed context here. Sewing machine repair?
57 is super interesting -- I definitely haven't been paying attention to undergrad financing for quite a long time. My sister got kind of a raw deal with her graduate program, and to the extent that I have any selfish interests, I would theoretically love to see some way for her to get some of her loans forgiven. In general, it would be nice to see help for the college-bound kids of parents with significant student loan debt, so one family's gross debt burden doesn't get compounded across generations.
But it all does tie into other cost-of-living issues. I mean, the only loans I took out for grad school (M.A. program, not at my PhD institution) were to pay for room & board in an expensive city; tuition was minimal and covered by a grant. It made me sad that even 4 years later, the tuition had shot up so far that the same arrangement would have been impossible, or at least very imprudent.
(also, thanks but no genuine need for reassurance about the post -- I was just super frustrated that I had managed to write three different misleading things that misled people, because... I'm stressed? Recent mild concussion? Unclear.)
Looks like I can waive into the PSLF loans that are forgiven after ten years and I've paid since before PSLF existed (2007; paid since 2005), so they'll be forgiven any day. Might get some money returned to me, but not all the payments since 2017, which would be the case if my loans had had a different name and truly this is all arbitrary.
I'm not the most important case, but watching the process has convinced me it is all a hopeless mishmash.
I didn't even know bikes had a spindle.
51: Or people who choose more lucrative careers as a default, partly because on-campus recruiting is the path of least resistance, but partly because they have to pay. Ask their loans.
57.1 You can't throw a rock on twitter without hitting someone who claims to be a single issue student loan forgiveness voter. It's hard to believe that people would be OK with Republican control of any part of Congress over this, since Republicans are definitely going to be hostile on every front, including student loan forgiveness. But the need to lash out is sometimes felt to greater than the need to think shit through, and so there we are.
If there are such people, it won't take many of them in particular locations to make a difference. And because things are so nationalized, a trendy position in Oakland, where it won't hurt, bleeds into Nevada where it might make the difference.
(A short anecdote: in the spring of 2017, our county central committee was flooded with new people encouraged by Our Revolution to show up and demand open primaries and same day registration. These were big issues in NY. We'd had both here for years. Our new folks had to decide whether "the Democratic establishment" was lying to them -- and why wouldn't it be -- or maybe that they didn't need to spend an evening with a bunch of patronizing oldsters.)
57: zero interest in undergrad, not so much for grad.
The situation that always breaks my heart are the parents who took out loans whose children die, and they're still on the hook for the loans. The actual student loans do disappear at death and don't need to be paid by the estate.
It seems obvious to me that if Biden were to unconditionally forgive all students debt, the forgiveness advocates on Twitter would suddenly get around to wondering why Biden is allowing new student loans to be issued, while the rest of the country would start dwelling on the UMC kids who took out loans to go to medical / law / business school and make $500,000 a year.
I guess Biden will be fine though because of all the loyalty he engendered by withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, which was not only the morally right thing to do but in broad agreement with the policy preferences of Americans across the political spectrum.
59. Thanks for the thoughtful post and hte reasonable bike advice. It's an old frame I like, Ochsner, I have the size of the bracket, replacement can have 2 spindle widths. I'd like to order the part before disassembly. I have a few friends well-stocked for tools, I'll borrow calipers.
Only student loan contribution I have is that I helped pay off my ex's deep law loans, don't regret it, anyone with deep loans for undergrad should be forgiven. Means test or don't, but you know there are a bunch of young people who would deeply benefit. Who cares if it's not demographically significant. People writing ingflation in this context leave me pig-biting mad. Fuel shock, China manufactured goods shock, huge readjustment from goods to services, prices up world fucking wide yes Japan also and you think easing up on some kid that borrowed and tried for something in their life is goinhg to affect the price of what, luxury vacations? Boots made of hippo skin?
Wait, maybe that's the solution-- commision a hunt of Pablo Escobar's rogue Colombian hippos, make it so expensive that only Musk and Bezos bid, use that money.
71: If I'm reading you correctly, I am onboard with the idea that most potential actions to ameliorate any aspect of the current mess would be politically counterproductive. However, I take this as an argument to just say "fuck it" and do the right thing. Afghanistan, as you say, is a prime example.
Supreme Court draft opinion overruling Roe just leaked.
74 posts and nobody points out that a vast quantity of student debt is owed by folks who never graduated from terrible for-profit institutions?
this is a WAY more relevant issue to the poor/working classes than y'all think, and it should be a policy slam dunk.
read Tressie Cottoms's _Lower Ed_ why dontcha?
74: Well, they just changed their precedent in religious symbols in government buildings.
Do you think they would uphold a national ban on abprtion?
76: Ayanna Pressley didn't go to a for profit, but she didn't graduate and ran into a lot f trouble.
72: oh no, are you insulting my post? ;) I guess the bike advice wasn't 100% tongue-in-cheek -- I did look up the specs for a salvage frame once -- but I was trying to be ridiculous. Sounds like you know more about what you're doing than I do, though, so good luck.
74: okay, this is good. The author, who is black, has this to say about racial equity and student loans:
Across the board, student-loan advocates have centered racial justice in their demands for loan forgiveness. They cite a variety of statistics showing that Black college graduates have more student-loan debt than their white counterparts, and that they pay off their loans at a slower rate than white graduates. But the former simply reveals that Black Americans are on average poorer than white Americans, and the latter is likely because of labor-market discrimination, neither of which is addressed by student-loan cancellation. Student-debt cancellation does not actually change anything about labor-market discrimination or credit-market discrimination or discrimination within institutions of higher education, nor does it address the rising cost of college. One could argue that debt forgiveness increases the wealth of nonwhite families, making it easier for them to support future children in attending universities. The wealth boost would be marginal at best, however, given that the majority of nonwhite borrowers owe less than $40,000 one year after graduation.
What's more, the majority of all student-loan debt is held by white borrowers, and, according to the Pew Research Center, just 23 percent of Black Americans older than 24 had a college degree in 2019. The large majority of the Black population would not be directly served by student-loan forgiveness.
[plus some other stuff, plus halfheartedly responding to Marshall Steinbaum.] Her source on borrower demographics is this, and she is selective about the stats she pulls, to the point of arguably being misleading with the minimally-overlapping sets of "Black Americans older than 24" and "nonwhite borrowers". I didn't actually check to see if Tressie McMillan Cottom noticed this article on Twitter, but maybe?
But as far as the "vast quantity of student debt" goes: do you have numbers?
Many years ago people, some on this site, gave me some entirely useless advice about student loans based on what things seem to have looked like for them maybe a decade before I took out loans. If you look into income-based repayment plans in any depth, you can see how people can easily get trapped in a state where forgiveness is the only way out. In fact, forgiveness is built into those plan automatically, but at 20-25 years after repayment begins. And unless things have changed since I looked into it, income-based repayment plans often don't have a monthly payment that keeps up with interest (because it's "income-based" not "repayment-based"), so if your income is not high at the start your debt can start to balloon during those early repayment years, making it harder to get back to standard repayment later, if that's even possible. As your income increases, your payment increases, but not enough to pay off the loan. So after a few low-earning years, you could have a debt that you're essentially never going to repay. Until one day, when you're in your 40s or 50s, you will be deemed to have served your purpose as a resource for extraction and the loan will go away.
When I was about to start repayment about a decade ago, I used a loan payments calculator provided with an article that was actually promoting income-based repayment and concluded that unless I got the public service loan forgiveness, I would likely end up owing more at the time of forgiveness 20 years down the line than I owed initially, while also paying out more than what I owed at the beginning of the repayment period. I think I assumed something like a 50-60k salary with annual raises to get to that number, not something extremely pessimistic. I then did what I could to stay on a standard 10 year repayment plan, got some help from my parents (especially in the crucial first months when I was still unemployed and would have needed forebearance or an income-based plan), and did a bit better with raises than I'd originally projected. I might have been able to go the other route and qualify for public service forgiveness next year or the year after, but I actually paid off the loans. I know a bunch of people who are basically forgiveness or bust, the question being when forgiveness will happen, not whether it will happen.
Oh - the advice I got until people learned the interest rate on my loans (all from the federal government) was around 6% was: you can let the loan grow because you'll make more money investing in the market. I think a bunch of people might have been getting student loans at 2% interest at some point?
A waiver for IDR plans (to go back and reinterpret all payments/forebearances as generously as possible) is supposed to come out this Fall.
I didn't actually check to see if Tressie McMillan Cottom noticed this article on Twitter, but may
Not about the article directly, but she did recently post:
I hope the Biden administration forgives the debt. I hope they forgive it all without means testing. I hope they do it without further delay. It is sensible policy, good politics, and a necessary correction to a massive policy moral hazard.
She also hosted an episode of Ezra Klein's podcast that was all about student debt. But that was like a year ago, before the most recent Biden admin maybe/maybe not ritual around forgiveness. Speaking of which, is student loan debt even an "outsized" part of "the discourse"? In network news when I watch it with my parents, it's generally border inflation border gas prices border war border disease border some celebrity did something maybe involving homicide border billionaire did something maybe involving social media border war border war border border feel good story about people volunteering in a way that papers over the failure of social and public institutions border border border. And I'm not talking about Fox.
81 was me and probably understates the amount of war war inflation war in the news. I regret the mistake. Also, why won't anyone forgive the debt on the border wall?
79 - maybe through 401k. IDR has lower payments than IBR, but for me keeping my AGI down through retirement savings, maximizing my FSA etc, kept my loans low and then I got out of it through PSLF. Now I don't have to work for a non-profit if something better comes up.
Speaking of which, is student loan debt even an "outsized" part of "the discourse"?
"The discourse" is what political junkies talk about to each other, largely on Twitter. It has nothing to do with what's on TV news, but it can have very big effects on what happens inside Congressional offices, because political junkies are the people who run campaigns, staff offices, populate nonprofits, etc.
So for instance, right now there are efforts nationwide to increase density in cities so that cities will be cheaper to live in*. This is of great interest to young, educated city-dwellers, but of zero interest to the vast majority of Americans who neither choose nor desire to live in urban apartments. It's an issue with virtually no electoral constituency (hell, given the redistricting effects of packing liberals into cities and/or California, it's probably a net loser), but it's huge in the discourse and sucks up a lot of energy that could probably go elsewhere.
I'm personally an urbanist who's favored dense cities my entire adult life, so I don't object as such, but it's clearly completely disconnected from electoral concerns--it's essentially a self-interested circle-jerk.
*but, to be clear, cheaper for people with professional incomes. The policies center on increasing market-rate apartments in expensive cities and would do little to help someone find a $850/mo apartment.
The variation here is a wholesale embrace of Econ 101: building units, any units, will bring down prices eventually.
On the other hand, maybe having a whole bunch of new people paying much higher rent for those new units leads the market to a new understanding of what rents can be charged. So rents get raised on the existing housing stock.
But Econ 101 must be right, right?
Jesus Christ, you guys.
Yes, expanding the supply of housing will tend to put downward pressure on housing costs across the market, which is best thought of as a spectrum or better yet an ecosystem of different housing types filling different niches.
Yes, existing barriers to housing production and various other factors will often limit the impact of expanding supply in the absence of other policy changes.
Yes, YIMBYs are often annoying even when they're substantively right.
And yes, this is a great example of an issue where the correct policy is very difficult politically, more so than student loan forgiveness where both the policy and political impacts are very uncertain.
84: Our Republican Governor signed a law requiring multi family zoning aroun transit, and even in towns adjacent to transit.
84,85 The dense cities are cheaper to live in and decrease CO2 / GDP dollar. Living in the dense cities allows young people to have better work than is available in a regional center. Charlie, won't the new people vote differently in the aggregate? If a core area becomes more expensive (maybe because it's becoming an exurb of silicon valley), doesn't that benefit people on the periphery on average, at least in dollar terms?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA
84-86: You all know I favor dense urban living as a matter of taste, but it's not just about that, it's about having some hope of reducing carbon emissions to a point where my kids are going to be okay fifty years from now. Housing policy isn't frivolous lifestyle politics, it's about reducing the number of people who are going to die in heat waves like the people dying in Pakistan and India right now.
On the contrary, a friend's Trumpie brother recently moved from something like civilization in NJ to the PA hinterlands. He's renting the new place. With his simple salt-of-the-earth wisdom relevant to the preferences of a vast majority of Americans, he purchased a riding mower to better enjoy his rented lawn.
He might just be having sex with the lawn mower and moved to cover his tracks.
You should always give family the most favorable of the plausible alternative assumptions if there is doubt.
He is single, so this video is of only limited interest to him. I asked him whether he kept the stock steering wheel and gearshift lever, I could actually see the thoughts forming in his mind before he responded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSHObH5NYw
they cite a variety of statistics showing that Black college graduates have more student-loan debt than their white counterparts, and that they pay off their loans at a slower rate than white graduates. But the former simply reveals that Black Americans are on average poorer than white Americans, and the latter is likely because of labor-market discrimination, neither of which is addressed by student-loan cancellation.
The first three points here also mean that they would benefit *more* from cancellation.
Student-debt cancellation does not actually change anything about labor-market discrimination or credit-market discrimination or discrimination within institutions of higher education, nor does it address the rising cost of college
Nor does the work of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It does change a lot about *debt*. This doctrine that any policy must solve literally all problems or else it must be vetoed is poison.
"If we're sharing the road with bikes now, let's also share road tax, license, registration, and insurance with them."
I daydream about doing this, but having the reg fee proportional to vehicle weight to the fourth power, because IIRC that's a good estimate of road damage. Charge bicycles a dollar, start a charity to get them all pre-paid for a decade.
Yes, expanding the supply of housing will tend to put downward pressure on housing costs across the market
Tending to put downward pressure is a long way from creating new units rented below replacement cost.
Set aside COVID living patterns. If Fran Sancisco is a city where 100k current residents could afford newly built units at $250k* and a further 100k people would love to live in such units, but they haven't been built, then you can build 50k new units without touching the below-replacement market. Every single unit will be bid up to a place way above affordability. You could probably build 150k new units without having much impact on the bottom half of the market.
And of course landlords take unprofitable units off the market. A small apartment in a run-down building is viable at $2500/month because that covers maintenance; at $1250/mo, the landlord loses money and seeks to sell or finance upgrades that can command sufficient rent. This is why shrinking cities can see affordability crises: even without a lot of bidding up of rents, old, "naturally affordable" housing stock is continually coming off the market, whether through abandonment or upgrade.
Anyway, my primary point wasn't that YIMBYism doesn't work at all, but rather that what it mostly does is provide more supply at the top end of the market, which YIMBYs themselves insist are badly underserved--which means that, again, you can build a lot of new units without increasing supply at the bottom end. But the people who dominate the discourse are absolutely people who will be able to afford those new units or the overpriced ones that will drop slightly once the new ones are built.
Increasing LIHTC funding directly creates affordable units, and there's a massive backlog of projects that are already viable under current zoning. But that doesn't create any units for Substack types, so it's not a high priority, even though doing that would just require 50 votes in the Senate, rather than winning a hundred battles in a hundred jurisdictions.
*under US building codes with US builders, it is effectively impossible to create new urban housing units for less than this regardless of land cost or zoning code. In seismic CA, that number is probably too low.
Building CTUAL affordable housing is a way better idea, I think, than supporting all building, regardless.
97 to 86.
As 96 shows, building your way out of it is a lot more complicated than just approving every proposal that someone submits.
89: People living in cities isn't really a supply-side constraint, not in the US. People who live in Greenwich and Scarsdale aren't there because they can't afford Inwood. The only way you're going to herd the populace into low-carbon cities is, well, frankly, a Cultural Revolution-style effort. If NYC had an infinite supply of $500/mo apartments, how many suburbanites do you think would move in?
Remember how Millennials were going to save the cities? Then they started having kids and moving to the suburbs, just like 120 years of Americans before them? And then of course COVID came, and people couldn't move away fast enough--it's a knee-jerk, gut-level reaction.
Quadruple gas prices and start tearing up freeway lanes, maybe you start to get somewhere. But as you well know, the vast majority has zero interest in my SFH urban lifestyle, let alone your apartment one. Maybe YIMBY would raise the US urban population by a few million. We have to do everything we can, every positive move is a good one*, but YIMBY is really far down the list (again, except when paired with completely infeasible anti-suburban policies that I would love to see).
*one thing to bear in mind is that standard construction is still pretty shitty from a carbon POV, so moving someone from an existing suburban home to a new urban one is a marginal improvement--long-lasting and compounding, but marginal. If we built new urban housing the way the northern Europeans do (already damn-near carbon-neutral with incredibly low operating carbon), that would be a very different thing.
Wouldn't the phenomenon in 96 (depletion of cheap units) show up in migration studies of rental housing? I haven't seen it mentioned. Here's an overview of recent studies, does anyone looking for this see it?
https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/
The alternative without allowing new building in places where the population is growing as far as I can see in neighborhoods like that I know near DC and Philly is not flat rents, but rather more expensive housing in the preexisting minimally changed buildings-- anecdotal, but it's a pretty clear phenomenon.
I agree that tax policy and better treatment of section 8 tenants would both be improvements. There's no opposition between doing that and increasing supply where necessary. Aside from improving the situation in places with plenty of good work is finding a way to deal with vacant properties where there is less. I don't know of easy answers there--- apparently in Baltimore getting rid of the tax liens on the properties is a problem because of bonds the city has issued.
If NYC had an infinite supply of $500/mo apartments, how many suburbanites do you think would move in?
Lots, and I have no idea why that's not obvious to you. Why do you think that the apartments that do exist are expensive? It's because demand is high. I'm not saying the suburbs would disappear, but a whole lot of people would move to NYC and SF and so on if they were affordable.
100: a lot of them here would be happy with a duplex, a way for one person to get to work on public transit and a Life where a family can get by with one car instead of two. Most millennials here are rap ied out of buying. We built more housing in the 70's when our economy was stagnant than we have in the last 20 plus.
102: NOBODY WANTS TO LIVE THERE. IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE.
With subsidized housing, it's a problem for residents when one member of a family starts doing well. Maybe my perspective is skewed because most of the places in the US I know well have good work-- in places where there's no work or steep discrimination barriers, the idea that people stay in the economic lane they're born into applies more often.
I don't think the phenomenon in 96 shows up empirically, would be interested in evidence. Again, migration studies would identify it.
105: it's what conservatives complain about when they say that high taxes disincentivize work, only in this case it's true, because it's a cliff. You could solve that problem by allowing people to stay and pay a set percentage rather than saying, if you're no longer poor, you had to move out.
Building CTUAL affordable housing is a way better idea, I think, than supporting all building, regardless.
I used to believe this, but I've been convinced by the YIMBY arguments that both are good and that, if you have to pick one it's better to pick "more market rate housing" than "more affordable housing" (for most circumstances).
What changed my mind has been a huge recent increase in rents locally -- everything has gotten more expensive because there just aren't enough units.
Unit for unit, I'd pick more affordable housing, but both are good and developments with some market rate housing are easier to build.
I think people believe that induced demand works for housing the way building roads increases traffic, and it really doesn't. When you build roads, the same number of people can immediately drive more, without any offsetting drop in demand anyplace else. When you build housing, more people don't appear out of thin air to occupy it -- they leave someplace else they didn't want to be living.
106: Work sucks is the bigger problem.
Unit for unit, I'd pick more affordable housing, but both are good and developments with some market rate housing are easier to build.
Sure, my swing in the direction of market rate housing is based on the idea that you're rarely looking at equal number of units (given the same political lift).
I remember a tweet pointing to a study showing that every new market-rate apartment translated down the market to 0.7units of affordable housing. But of course I can't find it again.
Affordable housing is also politically toxic, of course. Probably more so than upzoning. We need as much of both as we can get, but it's just an inherently difficult political problem across the board.
Over here we are prepping a push for better rules around accessory dwelling units. Right now, unless you live an a rural or agriculturally zoned area of the city, you can't convert your stand-alone garage into an ADU. Meanwhile, in the denser part of town, there are hundreds of old garages and carriage houses that no one is allowed to fix up and move into. A lot of these aren't even used for parking cars - just storing junk.
The current rule says ADUs in populated areas have to be attached to an existing building, connected by a door, and a minimum 400 square feet. A friend of mine wants to turn her garage into a tiny house she can rent out, but that will be illegal.
112. Some papers assessing that are under the link in 101-- they look at the chain of apartments that housed people who move into newly built housing.
I think most people don't realize that developers base their decisions on where to build buildings by hiring people to figure out where the gentrification is going to be happening 5 years from now. New building starts going up, a Caribou and Lemongrass go in, rents go up. It must be the first thing that caused the later things?
Has anyone here ever lived in subsidized housing? I have worked for a state housing agency that has some tangential involvement in subsidized housing and there was a lot of paperwork for verifying residents, although I'm not sure how much fell on residents vs the nonprofit landlord orgs. My assumption is that is it a lot more paperwork to move in there than a regular market unit. I think reducing paperwork/hassle is a very underrated issue and I wonder how much of that there is (annual income verification for all residents?) It seems like there is a fairly large amount for some of the artist housing one of my friends tried to get into.
Caribou is still regional, no? I think we had them then they disappeared back to Ohio.
In Ohio, every morning my boss would buy a large coffee from them, ask for them to use two cups so she didn't burn her hands (cup sleeves weren't a thing there yet because advanced cardboard was still under export controls), pour half the coffee into the second cup, and fill the other half of both cups with whole milk.
If you build enough housing then some of it should become affordable *at market rate*.
Caribou left Ohio at the same time.
In May 2013, Caribou Coffee announced plans to close 80 stores in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Illinois and Eastern Wisconsin, with 88 others in those locations to be converted to Peet's Coffee & Tea during 2013-2014.
Our neighborhood Caribou converted to Peet's, but after a year or so Peet's left Ohio too.
119: Oh, could be. I saw them in the midwest and they have them here in Colorado so I assumed they were national.
119: Oh, could be. I saw them in the midwest and they have them here in Colorado so I assumed they were national.
119: Oh, could be. I saw them in the midwest and they have them here in Colorado so I assumed they were national.
It's possible my boss kept up her behavior and caused them financial problems.
Has anyone here ever lived in subsidized housing?
I have. I just had to sign something saying my income was under the limit. The rules are different for different programs, though, and I'm sure some are much more onerous.
125: I just found out there is still one Caribou Coffee in Ohio. Less than 2 hour drive from my home.
The one she went to was across from the capitol.
129: In the Huntington Center, right? I worked in that building.
Yes, probably. We worked in Rhodes.
That was my first real job, over 25 years ago that I started.
as someone pursuing a loooong search for a flat to buy in sf, 100 is so far removed from any reality i have a relationship with that it is basically incomprehensible. i had the guys try to guess the per month $ of the rent in the hypothetical at the dinner table last night & when i told them $500 they laughed hysterically.
anyways the first rule of looking for housing to buy in sf is never ever tell anyone but your agent & mortgage broker what you would be willing to spend on a given property bc everyone will clock you as insane, which - fair enough!
Yeah, I be poor in California. Here, I'm fine.
Even in my small college town, people who aren't undergrads, faculty, or rich in some other way, basically can't afford to live in the walkable parts of town any more. Which basically is new in the past 10 years. Ten years ago you could buy like a 2 br 1k sq ft house in a walkable neighborhood (but not the "fancy" walkable neighborhood) for like $175k, now the same place would be $350k. My favorite house sold 10 years ago for $300k, went on the market last year at $525k and was bought for $480k (something must have come up on inspection, the offer was $500k) by some LLC that's now trying to flip it for $585k.
You down with LLC?
Yeah, you sell me.
I truly feel like supply and demand has massively broken down around Heebieville. I know for a fact this has happened on the level of commercial venues: businesses say they're closing because their rent has been doubled, or they're having to move, or whatever. This happened to my gym, the movie theater, the Half-Price Books, and on and on. Yet there is a massive amount of vacant storefronts. Oftentimes the business gets forced out and then the place just sits empty forever (like in the case of my old gym location).
All I can figure is that landlords are greedier than they are smart, and they're caught up in the idea that they're entitled to a lot more than they're getting, almost in a temporarily-embarrassed-millionaire sense of delusion.
I have a suspicion that it's also happening with the cost to rent an apartment - that there are a ton of vacancies and they're priced so high that people can't find anything affordable and end up moving out of town and commuting in.
The Cultural Revolution famously took young people and intellectuals out of the countryside and forced them to live urban, bourgeois lifestyles.
And make steel in the coffee shop patio.
I get baffled regularly about empty retail and then people explain it to me and I think I understand but I forget. Anyway, there's a surprising amount of empty retail space even in NYC.
137: My old town had one commercial landlord who jacked up a lot of rents and refused to sign leases of a reasonable length. I think 5 years is normal b/c there is construction work that a tenant has to do. I think they maybe wanted to redevelop some of it, but there was a whole stretch of empty shops with one that was still open. I think the town passed an ordinance against leaving it empty or something.
Real estate prices were high, although rents weren't crazy high all things considered, but this was just egregious. It might also have been that there was a fight between sibling owners of the real estate biz.
It's not surprising to me that a lot of restaurants closed over the course of the pandemic, but what amazes me is how many people have been opening restaurants. It's even more puzzling to me than investing in crypto -- at least with NFTs you can lose your investment without also having to work crazy hours.
Maybe they like shouting at teenagers?
When you build housing, more people don't appear out of thin air to occupy it -- they leave someplace else they didn't want to be living.
Bozeman, Montana, would like you to hold its beer.
It's true that when someone moves from Houston to Bozeman, there's a vacancy in Houston. The economic effects of that don't do shit for a working person in Bozeman.
Nationalizing our housing market here, and with remote work I think that's a fair description of what is happening in the classes for which remote work is plausible, you get a lot of price equalization. People is Seattle get paid a lot more, so when they move here, it's a great deal for them, and their presence raises prices here.
The most problematic in-migration, imo, is the Flathead variety: come for the affordable housing, stay to build a white supremacist theocracy. Why can't those people choose Idaho instead?
100 is so far removed from any reality i have a relationship with that it is basically incomprehensible.
It is a testable hypothesis, though! Let's test it, right now. In both NYC and SF, to get good data.
(One question might be: if we could move to, say, a 3br in SF and rent it for $500 or even $1000 a month indefinitely, would we sell our suburban house and do it? I would be very tempted; not sure about the rest of the family. If it were central-ish Oakland -- i.e. much closer to various routine activities -- I think we'd all do it. Maybe. Home ownership is deranging; compared to less tangible investments, it's more like a physical swimming pool full of cash that you can roll around in. And yet, I think I can still truthfully say that if the FMV fell to half of our purchase price in 2019, I would be overjoyed. The idea that most of my neighbors want their home values to keep going up is unsettling. The only way I can handle it is by thinking that the amount of money you need for a long and dignified life in the U.S. seems infinite.)
144: That used to be enough for them.
At least in yesterday's school board election we got rid of the anti-masker Xtian asshole who'd been appointed to represent my district. The teachers unions' endorsements mean a lot.
Just for a snapshot, here's the guy we got rid of:
Michael Gehl was appointed to the Board of Trustees in June 2021. Mike is a former Law Enforcement Officer, serving in the Montana Highway Patrol and a Detective for the Lake County Sheriff's Office. He works for Motor Carriers of Montana as a private consultant to the trucking industry, providing employee training and consultation services to membership regarding Federal and State regulations and employee safety. Mike and his wife Sharon have two boys who attend Hellgate Elementary. Mike and his family enjoy spending time with their two rottweilers, camping, golfing, and barbecuing. In his spare time Mike is busy with woodworking in his home workshop and working on home projects.
Here's the leading vote-getter:
Wilena Old Person (Yakama/Blackfeet) was elected to the Board of Trustees in May 2019. She is a graduate of the University of Montana and is the Program Coordinator for the Health Careers Opportunity Program (HCOP) in the College of Health Professions and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Montana. Wilena and her husband, Jason Plain Feather, have four boys; three attending Russell Elementary and one at Sentinel High School.
144 is a real problem, but I think it's particular to places that are beautiful and geographically constrained. Though there's a related issue around being an appealing retirement destination, which can happen even without Bozeman levels of beauty.
But also part of the issue is that sometimes changes happen where the scales of building needed are much larger than we're willing to contemplate any more. Detroit had 285k people in 1900, 465k people in 1910, 993k in 1920, and 1,568k in 1930. Palo Alto + Mountain View literally should be 1.5 million people by now.
Well, right. The problem is what we're no longer willing to contemplate building.
If it helps, thinking about building a cob hut is very relaxing.
There's also a wonderful YouTube series about some kid who builds a log cabin in the Swedish forest.
152: Which is why the point about - if you build enough, it gets more affordable.
There are places where you can get a really nice house for less than the cost to build a new house, because there's not that much on the way of jobs. So, woe to you if you own one and it burns down and you don't have the right kind of homeowners' insurance.
Speaking of Detroit, what's the best way to use all of that extra housing in places that are being depopulated? Similar, but different problem in large parts of central and western NY.
Why can't the iPad remember my name properly?
I feel remarkably self-restrainted that I haven't made jokes about it yet.
stepdaughter went for tt interview in back of beyond southwest, like seriously nowheresville although in reasonable proximity to a natl park. local housing market completely out of her & spouse's reach, even as renters. just absurd & strangling so many lives.
155.last: Move large government agencies there?
stepdaughter went for tt interview in back of beyond southwest, like seriously nowheresville although in reasonable proximity to a natl park.
Ooh, interesting. I'd be interested in any further details you're willing to provide; email is linked if you don't want to put it on blast in comments. (And yeah, housing costs are crazy even in remote areas these days. The nice thing about actually working for the NPS is that they usually provide housing, though even that's not always true anymore.)
I need to log off so badly but here, have the NYT article about red tape in the solar industry.
"The industry is essentially frozen," said Leah Stokes, a political scientist who studies climate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It's already leading to layoffs, to say nothing of the impact on our climate goals."
The Commerce Department initiated its investigation on March 25 after Auxin Solar, a small solar panel manufacturer based in California, filed a petition requesting an inquiry into whether China was circumventing rules intended to prevent state-subsidized solar parts from flooding the U.S. market.
Tariffs on Chinese solar panels have been in place since 2012, when the Obama administration imposed them in hopes of promoting domestic manufacturing and preventing China from dominating the emerging global market. In 2018, President Donald J. Trump imposed additional tariffs on certain solar products from China, and Mr. Biden extended those tariffs in February.
To avoid trade problems, U.S. solar installers have bought many of their panels from the four Southeast Asian countries. But according to Auxin, many of those panels are manufactured by overseas subsidiaries of Chinese companies and use cells, wafers and other parts that originated in China.
Is there any reasonable defense of the tariffs at this point?
My uncle kept trying to get me to go to the New Mexico Military Academy, but I passed.
My grandfather went to NMMI. He hated it.
It seemed unpleasant to me too. Not that I ever saw it.
Some of Western New York could probably be fixed by selling it to Canada...
It's pretty up there if you don't mind the winters being cold and gray.
Forested land seems cheaper there than in Pennsylvania too. Hard to tell about comparability since I've never looked at the land though.
The housing market has been out of control here for years, of course, but it's gone stratospheric. The new property assessments just came out and mine went up by 55% in a single year, my sister's by 80%. Fucking Californians.
151. I presume she is related to the late Earl Old Person, who led the Blackfeet Nation for 60 years.
P.S. I am pro Californians in general, just not the ones who pay cash for houses here.
If they'd only let them build in California, they'd stay there.
Except when their stupid libertarian bosses want to evade regulation.
My Seattle cousin's joke was that Oregon existed to filter out all but the most determined Californian emigrants. She was raised in San Diego.
Here the cliche is that people moving in to drive up housing prices are from Connecticut.
I can't complain about it too much, just because I moved here for the affordability shortly before everyone else got the same idea. But even then, its affordable to me because the work I do is fully remote. Its much tougher on people working for local salaries, which seem scandalously low to me in comparison to what people would make doing the same work in a major metropolitan area.
I'm planning to move from an expensive part of California to work remotely from another expensive part of California. Just doing my part to help out.
In theory, I'm WFH enough that I could move to a cheaper part of Pennsylvania, but if there's one thing the last six years have convinced me of, it's that I don't want to do that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/earl-old-person-dead.html
149 The canyon of the Clark Fork just east of Missoula is known as the Hellgate. Today this is where the Interstate and the railroad go, but long ago it was the route from the Missoula valley -- a rest stop for people from farther west -- to the plains. Groups from various western tribes, including the Nez Perce, Spokane, Coeur d'Alene, would go out onto the plains every year for a buffalo hunt. Blackfeet folks were exactly fown with that, and at some point had discovered that the canyon just east to Missoula was a great place to ambush people on the way to the plains, kill them, and take their stuff.
When Metis trappers arrived in the early 1800s, they found a lot of bones, and called it Porte d'Enfer.
Tomorrow is Missing and Murdered Indigenous Person's awareness day in the US.
180: Thanks. I guess if I were on the school board, I'd probably try to name it after some boring local guy instead of the murder-canyon.
I for one think more schools should be named after murder canyons.
Maybe I should run for school board.
I get baffled regularly about empty retail and then people explain it to me and I think I understand but I forget
In the UK, or London anyway, a lot of it is because the developers are required to put in retail/office space to get planning permission, but then they price the rent too high for tenants so that after a year or two they can apply for a change of permitted use to have more flats. Obviously this dynamic would not apply in places which deprecate/ban mixed use developments. And at the moment a lot is also pandemic related. Half of Fleet Street's retail is vacant after a year and a half of no office workers getting lunch.