Kevin Erdmann
@kevinerdmann.bsky.social
I discovered the surprising story of what really happened in 2008 (not enough housing) and accidentally became a housing policy guy. https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/ https://www.amazon.com/stores/Kevin-Erdmann/author/B099P7SN1G
Rereading this post from a few months ago and I think it holds up well as a general highlight of the failure of economists in 2008. kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/another-ne...
Another Nevada Hallucination
Matt Darling recently alerted me to something that had somehow escaped my attention.
kevinerdmann.substack.com
Auckland and São Paulo both upzoned in 2016, and by similar amounts: 31% and 35% increase in density. But Auckland increased the housing stock by 8% over seven years, while for São Paulo we predict only a 2% increase over ten years. What's going on? 1/
Oh my god the dietician who is telling everyone in the White House to only eat steak and sauerkraut doesn't wipe his ass.
We’re still doing the ivermectin thing in 2026?!😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterdayRon Johnson: "Aaron Rodgers was smart enough to take ivermectin when he got covid ... unfortunately, more people didn't follow him. We wouldn't have had as many of athletes falling unconscious, sometimes dead on the field of play. You've seen the video reels of this happening in 2021."
The sitting president of the United States got his accounts closed for money laundering and its barely news 🤯
Also cannot forget my personal favorite, Sarah, who is really really concerned about wetlands management ever since the project was proposed (she has never thought about this before in her life and it shows obviously to anyone who has for a moment. Which is not Tim or Jan)
The origin of the housing crisis isn't a lack of investor desire to build housing (even affordable housing, thanks to LIHTC and so forth), its your neighbor jan, who believes it will cause noise pollution (people living their lives), and your neighbor Tim, who believes [vile racism] working together
I think a big source of confusion on housing is that people think that since locational amenity value can make individual neighborhoods much more expensive, amenity value can make entire cities more expensive at the same scale. It can't and doesn't.
Tyler Cowen has a great TED talk where I think he suggests using stories centered around villains lowers our IQ by 15 points. It nearly turned a decent housing bill into a net negative. 15 points is an average. The maximum is only bounded by the zero lower bound.
Elizabeth Warren@warren.senate.gov · 4d agoPrivate equity going after fire trucks makes YOUR neighborhood less safe. Not on my watch. I've got a bipartisan resolution calling on the FTC to investigate. We can't let Wall Street put public safety at risk.
You want to fight ICE? Don't strap up. Go talk to your neighbors, get into a Signal chat together, talk to immigrant communities about vulnerable spots, start making a list of known ICE cars. Start learning how to quickly identify a potential undercover car. They're easy to see once you know how.
Austin is a canonical supply success story! In our odd era, yes, supply is what matters. open.substack.com/pub/kevinerd...
In our odd era, yes, supply is what matters.
Charles Marohn at Strong Towns wrote a post the other day throwing cold water on the idea that Austin’s recent rent reductions are a sure sign of a housing supply success story.
open.substack.com
Resharing this because I think it hit the mark. The Keynes and Hayek Rap Battle, in Hindsight open.substack.com/pub/kevinerd...
The overwhelming right wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it's Joe Biden's fault.
Politics aside, do people believe federal government gas stations with deeply discounted prices are a good POLICY idea? What are they intended to accomplish, in your view? What problem do they solve? www.cnn.com/2026/07/09/b...
Trump promotes ‘Freedom Fuel’ stations that sell cheap gas. How they’re able to do so is unclear | CNN Business
President Donald Trump is heralding a new chain of gas stations that are selling gas for $3.479 a gallon, well below both market prices and wholesale costs.
cnn.com
@stephenjacobsmith.com wrote his diagnosis a little while back. Shortest version is that the city makes it hard to open new grocery stores. www.vitalcitynyc.org/nyc-grocery-...
Mayor Mamdani, Here’s the Real Reason New Yorkers’ Groceries Cost So Much
The mayor's public supermarket proposal is a distraction. To get cheaper apples, the Big Apple must correctly diagnose why prices are high.
vitalcitynyc.org
I suppose since New York City recently invented binned trash collection, it only makes sense that they should continue innovating and invent the grocery store.
Here's another way to see that rent is probably the most important long-term affordability constraint: In a world where rent (shelter) prices increased only as fast as the rest of the economy, purchasing power today would be about 13% higher (measured by wages)
Joe Fish@sadbusdriver.bsky.social · last wk.Anyway, the chart you should be posting is how rent prices look like compared to wages. Note: This has been going on for a long time! The housing crisis is a long standing issue.
This article mentions a 2023 White House report that claimed that rent pricing software cost renters $3.8 billion. Last year, tenants paid rent totalling $777 billion. So the claim is that the software raises rents 0.5%. That’s the stat in the story used to support the ban.
OPB@opb.org · last wk.Critics argue that the tools used to analyze public and private market data to suggest rental prices to landlords enable collusion and price-fixing, allowing landlords to skirt antitrust laws.
Republicans do things TO people, not FOR people.
Awful awful awful. I hope there are news cameras ready to go. If there’s any single lesson we learned here in Minneapolis, it’s that ICE melts in sunlight.
Catherine Rampell@crampell.bsky.social · last wk.TPS for Haitians officially expires tomorrow. ICE is planning big operations, with Springfield, Ohio among the targets www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-hai...
Ethnic cleansing of 100s of 1000s of people who have lived in the USA as legal, productive neighbors for over a decade Will harm them & the communities they've helped keep vital White supremacist ideologues want white Americans to believe this will help us It's a dirty, harmful lie
Catherine Rampell@crampell.bsky.social · last wk.TPS for Haitians officially expires tomorrow. ICE is planning big operations, with Springfield, Ohio among the targets www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-hai...
TPS for Haitians officially expires tomorrow. ICE is planning big operations, with Springfield, Ohio among the targets www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-hai...
ICE plans to target Haitians as Temporary Protected Status is set to end, sources say
The plans include arresting migrants in Ohio and quickly putting them on deportation flights to crisis-stricken Haiti, the internal documents indicate.
cbsnews.com
I can‘t not share this. It is magnificent. Poetry. The human mind is capable of wonders.
There has only been one historically accurate version of The Odyssey
I had Claude give this a go using Census and ACS data. I also added unmarried couples, which I think makes sense? They only started tracking that in 1960.
What a clever way to get at the housing supply question with some basic Fred measures. Btw, getting back to the pre-2008 level would take about 15-20 million homes.
Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social · 2w agoI'm actually astonished at how clean this graph looks as a diagnostic for our housing ills. Note how close it is to 1 at the start. Houses per single adult or married couple.
One of those charts that is "watch the Great Recession destroy an industry that never recovers." Home-building drops until about the same employment recovers and then remains at that level.
Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social · 2w agoI'm actually astonished at how clean this graph looks as a diagnostic for our housing ills. Note how close it is to 1 at the start. Houses per single adult or married couple.
