Post

The fact that the only way to meaningfully lower housing costs requires letting capitalists make a lot of money building expensive new homes kind of breaks a lot of people’s brains.

Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin

@lindseyschromen.bsky.social

12 Mar

Actually in Port Angeles, WA we lowered housing costs by limiting Airbnb ownership to 1 per person.

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈

@maxdubler.com

How much did housing costs go down?

12/3/26, 2:49 am0 reposts13 likes

Patrick Siegman

@siegman.biz

12 Mar

The average Port Angeles, WA home value is $439,732, up from about $250,000 or so in 2018. That doesn’t strike me as a decline in housing costs. Am I missing something? www.zillow.com/home-values/...

Charlie Wu

@sparkleapplepie.bsky.social

12 Mar

And it's made things a lot shittier because my wife has family there and AirBnBs are a lot more expensive when we visit. There's a way to do this without enshittifying services people actually use. Build more housing.

Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin

@lindseyschromen.bsky.social

12 Mar

In Port Angeles we had doubled the housing construction rate through prioritizing infill and multi-unit housing construction. But because of the Airbnb market, that new housing wasn't going to more housing: we were losing housing to Airbnb as fast as we were building new housing. "Build more" is BS.

Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin

@lindseyschromen.bsky.social

12 Mar

My point is that a model of housing stock that doesn't take into account housing that is lost from the housing stock doesn't accurately reflect what is going on. If we want to increase housing stock, then that is about maintaining existing housing as residences as well as adding new housing.

Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin

@lindseyschromen.bsky.social

12 Mar

We have to look at comparables and the relative change. Plus there are confounding variables which makes any causation analysis arguably speculative. Sorry I should pull the data but won't get to that timely unfortunately.