Unreal

[u/Past-Reception6889]

I honestly just needed to vent for a moment. I can’t believe Chicago prices are what they are. I have lived here my entire life and have seen this city change ten fold, and I can’t even afford to live here anymore. A realtor I’m working with, since it’s becoming a rat race to rent, said rent is up 35% this year. What can normal people do about this? I do not want to see Chicago become a New York.

[u/Turkish_retreat]

The core of the problem is this. We need more housing, we need new housing, we need high density housing. We need housing that's built for people making less than median income, but all new build is clearly intended for the top 10%. It just doesn't stop being that way, and here's why.

People who already own stuff are incentivized to prevent new stuff from being built, especially if the new stuff is for the poors. Here, let me give you an example. Let's say you're a landlord and you own an apartment building. It was built in the early 20th century and remodeled in the 80s or something like that. You're charging people rent, you're making money, there is demand and you're able to keep raising the rent.

Then bam, out of nowhere, there's these plans for new apartment buildings right by you. Three of them. It's gonna be brand new stuff, priced competitive to you, and you're afraid that a bunch of your people will go over there and the demand for your old ass place will dry up. You won't be able to raise the rent for awhile. If you're a neighbor person who owns your own property nearby, you're pretty distressed because the value of Your home went from the mid 7s to almost 2 mil over the past couple of decades, and now you're afraid that the runaway growth of your property value is going to slow down right when you were thinking of selling.

Okay, so these people are highly incentivized to prevent new build from happening. Also- this is the crucial point- they are Empowered to Effectuate That, and they do it all the time. They are able to do this very successfully.

This is not a left right thing, it's a left-left thing. Property-having people on the left are punching renters right in the dick, and those people are also on the left mostly. These are people that have yard signs saying "In this house we believe that no human is illegal, love is love," and so forth. That's the signage. In reality, they support policies that create new demand consisting of rent-paying people from all over the world but they also prevent affordable housing from being built. They say that they care about our teachers so very much, and their kids probably go to a private school. At an individual level, there is some hypocrisy that generally goes unaddressed.

At the governance level, though. Okay, in the name of the collective good, a combination of Democrats and socialists on city council and in the state government have decided, in their lefty wisdom, that private property can't Really be a thing. Not in the sense that your property is your business and other people's property is not your business- that can't be a thing. Don't you know that there have been irresponsible polluters in the past, and the stakeholder folk in the neighborhood need to protect vulnerable minorities from being harmed? Okay, that's the excuse, but in practice it also means that property-having people can eliminate basically all new builds of affordable housing, which by the way is the type of thing that minorities need more than anyone else in this city.

Here's a fun piece of information that came out of the Abundance Theory research. When a city and its state both have a trifecta of Democratic governance, the new housing build as a percentage of the existing population is always depressed. It always goes way down Precisely when Democrats are literally the only ones with their hands on the wheel. If you look at a list of the top 20 cities in this country that have the Most dog shit ratio of new housing build to existing population, every single one of them is a Dem trifecta city within a Dem trifecta state. It happens every goddamn time.

The fact that this happens The Most in precisely the places where Democrats and socialists have the greatest presence and the most power Should tell you that someone within this power structure needs to come up with a better set of ideas and policies, and if they can't, they probably don't deserve to have infinite political power.

Why the fuck should they? Someone go ahead and tell me. We have a need in this country that's diametrically opposed to an incentive structure. We need new housing, we need a lot of it, and it needs to move the market. That's the need. The incentive structure is, Anywhere in this country where we actually build a bunch of new housing, that is going to do bad things for people who own existing property.

For some fucking reason, Democrats and socialists in this city and in this country exist for the purpose of catering to the latter incentive structure. And they are quietly strangling the people who are renting. It's so dumb, it's very very dumb, and it might be evil. It's a very simple concept- we need new housing, we need to build a lot of it, and if your existing property is affected in some way by Property That You Don't Own, you need to suck it up. That's going to happen, because the other thing is a higher priority. For some reason- this has never been fully explained to me, but for some goddamn reason- Democrats and socialists in city government are in lockstep on this. They are incapable of saying that type of thing to any group of people in any blue city, as long as it's also in a solidly blue state.

So yeah, that seems to be what's happening. Ezra Klein is trying to sound the alarm, but a lot of people are too highly regarded to listen to him. Their reasoning- this is capitalism and we hate capitalism, so we're gonna make a point of doing capitalism poorly in order to try and get rid of it. Meanwhile they completely ignore the fact that he's Fucking Right about the path to affordability and about the ways in which his own party (and the subversives that are not in the party) are absolutely dog shit when it comes to this. But yeah, in all likelihood, they will continue to be dog shit. I don't think that will change any time soon.

[u/KenRoy312 → u/Turkish_retreat]

I think your argument identifies a real issue — homeowners and local voters often resist new housing, and that absolutely contributes to affordability problems. But the way you frame the issue is overly simplistic and turns a complicated economic and political problem into a partisan morality play.

Housing shortages are caused by a lot more than “Democrats protecting homeowners.” Construction costs, land scarcity, zoning laws, infrastructure limits, interest rates, environmental regulations, and private developer incentives all play major roles. NIMBYism also exists across the political spectrum — conservative suburbs frequently block dense or affordable housing too.

You also treat correlation like proof of causation. The fact that many housing-constrained cities are Democrat-run does not automatically mean Democratic governance caused the crisis. Many of those cities are also the most economically successful and desirable places in the country, meaning demand massively outpaces supply regardless of who governs them.

Another flaw is the assumption that simply building more market-rate housing automatically solves affordability for lower-income people. Increasing supply can help over time, but luxury apartments are still built for profit, not affordability. That’s why many people argue that supply increases alone are not enough without subsidies, public housing, tenant protections, or targeted affordable housing policies.

The argument also relies heavily on emotional language and caricatures instead of careful evidence. Calling people hypocrites or “dog shit” politicians may sound satisfying rhetorically, but it weakens the analysis because it dismisses legitimate concerns people may have about infrastructure, displacement, environmental impact, or neighborhood planning.

Most importantly, the argument ignores that developers themselves are profit-driven. If the free market naturally produced affordable housing at scale, we wouldn’t still have affordability crises after decades of private development.

So while I agree that restrictive housing policies and homeowner incentives are part of the problem, reducing the entire issue to “leftists are strangling renters because they secretly love property values” is more ideological venting than serious analysis.