Along the river through Anaheim is astounding. Most all of this has appeared since 2016.
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New York has the same situation but with a wider swath of foreigners using the real estate market for money laundering/taking cash out of the country purposes. Typically many developing world muckity mucks, Russian oligarchs, and Narcotraffickers.
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Er, this is most definitely NOT part of the theory of Capitalism.
Ah, NOW you’ve got it!
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The market no more exists to serve people than fire does. It’s simply a thing, which we can permit to various extents or not or not, depending on whether we feel the benefits outweigh the downsides.
Deifying it the way some Libertarians do is as ludicrous as deifying fire because it prevents people from freezing to death. In the end, it’s just a tool to a greater goal.
In Bostons nicest parts, parking spaces go for 7 figures, even in the close-in suburbs they’re worth 200-500 a month.
I don’t like dem apples.
So, they overestimated demand for a product that requires a lot of lead time to produce. When their product hits the market, they have to price it at less than they had anticipated. The lower prices will discourage the production of more product, giving demand time to catch up with supply. The long lead time to produce these housing units and the fact that forecasts are not perfect, will mean that supply and demand will seldom be perfectly synchronized. How is this any different from what we would expect? What control scheme would you advocate to get a different outcome? Do you think a command economy would forecast better? What, exactly, are you complaining about? Is there some backstory you are not explaining to us? I’m not disagreeing with your point. I can’t, because I don’t know what it is.
Fires exist without human participation. Markets exist because (a certain subset of) humans actively participate and maintain them.
When markets are made of greedy, short-term thinking, fallable humans, they create perverse incentives to do awful things. Theres nothing magical or priviliged about the information that markets generate, its just like any other human process. Garbage in, garbage out.
ETA: I see what you did there. I said “economy” and you said “markets” as though they were the same thing.
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Well, that subset is pretty much every one of us. Short of an entirely command (or a subsistence) economy, we’re almost all buying and selling goods and services.
Everything is made up of greedy, short-term thinking, fallable humans. I’m certainly greedy (I’m part of the global 1%), I’m pretty short-term (do I exercise enough? No, I’d rather be reading Boing-Boing), and I’m definitely fallible.
Anyway, my point was that we should no more expect markets to naturally deliver what we want than to assume that democracy naturally leads to our desired political outcome.
After all, I want to see markets decrease the level of inequality between the ultra-rich and me by making the ultra-rich a lot poorer and fellow North Americans a little wealthier, but I don’t want to decrease the level of inequality between me and the rest of the world by making me a lot poorer and the rest of the world a little wealthier. (Yeah, I’d really like it if I could make the rest of the world richer without me making any real sacrifices, but if correcting inequality is going to chop my income by 80+%… (I think global median income is ~$10K). Well, I did say I was greedy.)
So, if I want to achieve my particular goal (more nationally equal, but not too globally equal), then I’m going to have to persuade others, all of whom have their own ideas as to what is right for the economy.
The market, like all other institutions in an economy is a million-way tug of war between between millions of greedy (and a handful of non-greedy) humans. It’s job is not to serve me because it has no “job”. It’s just a human process.
Nor should I be particularly upset that every human is doing what they can to move the economy in a way that they see is right. That’s exactly what I’m doing. That’s presumably what you’re doing.
With luck, I find enough like minded people and we get the market pushed in a direction that we find better.
Oops. At least you saw - I didn’t. (See fallible). However, I’m curious - did you mean them differently? For me “economy” is just a description of goods and services and thus really can’t “serve”, hence my conflating it with market.
Not Boston, (Atlanta) but my parking at work literally costs as much as my first apartment. I have to say though, my parking garage is much nicer than my first apartment building.
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