Fast Takes: Boudreaux and Manville
Two short podcasts on *Build, Baby, Build*
I’ve created a series of short podcasts with cool people to sell my latest book. It’s called “Fast Takes on Build, Baby, Build,” and here are the first two installments.
I talk to Cafe Hayek’s Don Boudreaux about Bastiat’s classic essay, “On What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” and why it’s especially relevant for housing regulation. Then we turn to the national conservative case for protectionism, and why YIMBYism is a vastly more realistic remedy for the plight of working class families in general and non-college males in particular.
I talked to UCLA’s Michael Manville about public opinion on NIMBY versus YIMBY. If you blame NIMBYism on objective self-interest, Manville is one of the top people showing how wrong you are. His ”Opposition to Development or Opposition to Developers?” is a great place to start.
The Manville video badly misses the key point: ECONOMIC diversity is BAD for the upper (richer) party to the mix. Denser housing brings poorer people AND MORE of them (congestion). Poor(er) people may or may not be bad among themselves, but mix them with richer ones, and opportunity knocks for the criminal among them, along with envy.
Call me NIMBY. That's me.
When you buy an existing home it's a physical thing you can see. You can send an inspector over to look at it. It is what it is. If you don't like it you can walk away.
With a new build home that isn't the case. You have some materials (often misleading) about what it might be like. As you go through the process you find that it's not what was sold. You also have to devote a lot of time to trying to keep the developer honest, and you can never devote enough time for every little trick. I managed to notice when they installed a supporting beam wrong. I had to pay a structural engineer to come in and write a report saying that it was faulty and needed to be fixed (until I gave them the report and threatened action they stonewalled me). This was a lot of time and money, and if I hadn't been going down there to see the construction it might have gotten missed.
The extra kitchen they said they could build for my mom never got done. We had to settle for less even though it was a big part of why we wanted to do a new build.
Lots of things like that. Everyone in the development has a list.
Let's say I got fed up and walked away. In addition to the time and trouble, I would be out my deposit which was large. I'm more or less stuck with it once they have that deposit.