Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
This seems to be a good time to remind everyone following this thread that I have no expertise whatsoever here. I work with numbers for a living and I've lived in California for a while and I've made a real effort to explore the state, but other than that, my knowledge of this topic is limited to what I could glean from following the news and doing a few searches on Google, Wikipedia and Census.gov.
My lack of expertise makes me especially nervous when I come across something that is, for lack of a better word, interesting.
For instance, if I am looking at the right numbers, the vacancy rate for SF is and has long been much higher than San Jose or Oakland (or, while we're on the subject, LA or Fresno), despite having the highest housing prices.
Other places I've checked follow the expected and presumably causal pattern of shortage, low vacancy, high prices (for example, I get 4.5% for Fresno). Only SF seems to break the pattern.
Are these number the best way of tracking vacancy? Am I getting the math right? Take a look at the Census data for cities you're familiar with. Are they behaving the way you'd expect?
If you can find a more concise, approachable way to understand critical concepts in driving automation then by all means, watch them. Thing is, I'm not sure that exists... so just watch Moody's videos! https://t.co/wuNn1ll7E9
One of the challenges of LA housing and infrastructure has always been that much of it has to be done on a forty-five degree slope. Back in the streetcar era, housing developments relied on networks of stairs (making life very demanding for some postal workers even to this day). The most famous of these was immortalized by Laurel and Hardy in The Music Box (1932)
And since the Central Valley has been caught up in the housing bubble, this is a good time to throw in a reference to the camp classic named after the place, The Big Valley which was basically Bonanza if Douglas Sirk had been the show runner.
Trump statement just now: "If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do."
By December, the Republicans were finally facing the reality of an impending Trump nomination. They realized they had lost control of a movement they had created through decades of cultivating outrage and anxiety through propaganda and disinformation. There was talk of desperate measures to stop him but they never got anywhere in large part because Trump had the power to devastate the GOP through either running as an independent or simply telling the party's base to stay home.
Almost five years later, the situation is remarkably similar, but cranked up to the next level. Trump has essentially cinched the nomination three years before the election and is now explicitly calling for a vote boycott if the Republican establishment doesn't go to extreme lengths to defend him.
[I'm rushing this out and scheduling an early posting because, as previously suggested, Jonathan Chait is writing a very sharpseries of post along these lines and I'm afraid he's is going to beat me to the punch.]
In recent years, a large part of the foundation of the GOP strategy has been the assumption that, if you get base voters angry enough and frightened enough, they will show up to vote (even in off year elections) and they will never vote for the Democrat (even when they really dislike the Republican candidate).
Capitalizing on that assumption has always been something of a balancing act, particularly when you constantly attack the legitimacy of the electoral system ("The system is rigged!" "The last election was stolen!" "Make sure to vote!"). With the advent of the Tea Party movement, it's gotten even more difficult to maintain that balance.
I don't want to get sucked into trying to guess what constitute reasonable probabilities here – – I'm just throwing out scenarios – – but it certainly does seem likely that, if he doesn't get the nomination and does not choose to run as an independent, Trump will still make trouble and things will get ugly.
Keep in mind, Trump's base started out as the birther movement. They came into this primed to see conspiracies against them. Now the RNC has given them what appears to be an actual conspiracy to focus on.
I don't think we can entirely rule out the possibility of Trump calling for a boycott of the vote to protest his treatment but even if it doesn't come to that, it seems probable that, should we see a great deal of bitterness and paranoia after the convention, the result will not help Republican turnout.
What kind of magnitude would we be talking about? It's still too early to say and even if it weren't, I wouldn't feel qualified to speculate, but it would be an interesting conversation to follow among political scientists.
At the very least, the possibility of something big happening down-ballot, though perhaps still not likely, is more likely than it was in the days before Trump.
One piece of the housing cost piece that is complicated is that a lot of the YIMBYs are also urbanists. For example, look at strong towns. This is the view that density allows us to create more efficient infrastructure and get rid of automobile dependence.
At some level this is a very logical proposition. Putting in place common infrastructure for a city, like sewer pipes, is always going to benefit from high density. It is also true that places that are walkable are attractive and interesting, which gives this idea a lot of appeal.
Now it is true that the incredible benefits of car traffic does have a lot of infrastructure costs. Things like fast transportation and convenient parking are expensive commodities to resource. Just look at the budget for Winnipeg, a mid-sized Canadian city. Road costs are nearly three times the cost of public transportation and, even post-pandemic, the roads are not lightly congested.
However, there is another option that could be explored to reduce housing costs: sprawl. This is an attractive option in places like Southern Ontario (see this discussion on Twitter). But if you want to resist sprawl and projections indicate that you will need one million new homes in the next ten years then the options are "build up" or "build out".
Now, my sympathies tend to be with the urbanists. But I also lived without a car as a responsible working adult. That said, if you want to do this transformation, there is a LOT of planning that needs to be reconsidered. In Canada there are a lot of services directed by the government: it is hard to pick where you have daycare or a medical appointment. Try having twice weekly medical appointments with > 1 hour bus rides each way (and buses are unreliable and appointments are unforgiving of being late). This could be fixed but it isn't a matter of just tinkering with density but rethinking cities from the ground up.
This doesn't mean that it is infeasible (Europe has great examples) but that this is two intellectual ideas (density and housing costs) quietly linked. It is like when people are anti-carbon but also anti-nuclear -- it could be a sensible position but the second half of the idea needs to be defended on its own merits.
Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was always struck by how much white evangelicals based their identity on feelings of persecution. https://t.co/5fGS0fvLYO
Every time someone from Berkeley wins a Nobel, I want to go on an extended rant about the California Master Plan, the UC System, and what it means to have built—and, latterly, criminally neglected—the greatest public university system on the face of the earth. pic.twitter.com/ghTnoKOTaM
Opinion: “High on the list of complicit business leaders is Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, who announced this week that he would move Tesla’s headquarters to Austin.” https://t.co/CeEB551jRe
it wld be one thing if he just happened on this idiocy: a super high-price drug cocktail to own phrma when the whole thing can be avoided w a $20 vax. But it's GOP wide. While DeSantis has railed agst the vax he's deployed teams to fan out across florida with antibody cocktail. https://t.co/5C5KxjUbdo
Monoclonal antibodies are, of course, hand-crafted in small batches by simple artisans who want nothing more than a smile in return. https://t.co/cmtLJOptjY
Thing about popularism is that it used to be called 'Clintonism.' Thats not a dig. Contrary to much griping, Clintonism made a lot of sense in the political context of the 90s. Maybe it makes sense now too. But its a lot of brouhaha over rebranding what we were saying 30 yrs ago.
Remember when so many, including news organizations, took poll results that 40% said they would quit rather being forced to get vaccinated? https://t.co/BXkCdbiS6U
Great read from @rodneyabrooks, who says #AI isn't quite ready to surpass human intelligence.
"Just about every successful deployment of AI has either one of two expedients: It has a person somewhere in the loop, or the cost of failure is very low." https://t.co/bGrdrEHms4
One of the most popular genres of science writing since at least the age of Edison has been the "cusp of coolness" story, where the writer breathlessly tells us how some futuristic development is about to revolutionize our lives.
Although it may sound more sci-fi than sci-fact, a commercially developed jetpack is actually being eyed for mass production, with plans to eventually release it to the public. Let that sink in for a second. Jetpacks are real, and you might be able to buy one someday soon. Or at least see them among the skies.
I don't think we'll need the full second since jet packs have been around for between fifty and seventy years and you've been able to buy them for much of that time. The Germans had a prototype in WWII (Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has an excellent write-up on the subject). By the mid-Sixties they were flying over the World's Fair and showing up in Bond movies (yes, that was an actual Bell Rocket Belt).
But despite consuming countless man-hours and numerous fortunes (and prompting at least one kidnapping*) over what is now more than half a century, progress has been glacial. Jet packs are and will probably remain one of the worst under-performing technologies of the post-war era.
"Cusp of coolness" stories are annoying but they can also be dangerous. They give a distorted impression of how technological development works. Columnists and op-ed writers like John Tierney (whose grasp of science is not strong) come away with the idea that R&D is like a big vending machine -- deposit your money and promptly get what you asked for.
It's OK when this naive attitude convinces them to clear out space in their garages for jet packs. It's dangerous when it leads them to write editorials claiming that the easiest way to handle global warming is by building giant artificial volcanoes.
*from Wikipedia:
In 1992, one-time insurance salesman and entrepreneur Brad Barker formed a company to build a rockeltbelt with two partners: Joe Wright, a businessman based in Houston, and Larry Stanley, an engineer who owned an oil well in Texas. By 1994, they had a working prototype they called the Rocketbelt-2000, or RB-2000. They even asked [Bill] Suitor to fly it for them. But the partnership soon broke down. First Stanley accused Barker of defrauding the company. Then Barker attacked Stanley and went into hiding, taking the RB-2000 with him. Police investigators questioned Barker but released him after three days. The following year Stanley took Barker to court to recover lost earnings. The judge awarded Stanley sole ownership of the RB-2000 and over $10m in costs and damages. When Barker refused to pay up, Stanley kidnapped him, tied him up and held him captive in a box disguised as a SCUBA-tank container. After eight days Barker managed to escape. Police arrested Stanley and in 2002 he was sentenced to life in prison, since reduced to eight years. The rocketbelt has never been found.
It is without doubt that something is wrong with the housing market. The fundamentals do not change so rapidly over a short period. I think there are two dominant narratives.
One, is that something is wrong with supply. The sources of housing supply are complicated with issues ranging from zoning to cost of building materials. This source of housing shortage is ever popular to discuss, as everyone knows some municipal building or zoning rule that they consider daft. But supply can't be the only driver -- San Francisco has a 9.6% gross vacancy rate and 8,000 homeless persons (>5,000 unsheltered).
Two, is that there is demand caused by low interest rates/asset inflation. Like all forms of investment, it is vulnerable to bubbles, irrational exuberance, and the general problem of searching for yield that tend to become severe in times of high income inequality. Issues of affordability of land certainly go back to the Roman Republic and were a big factor in the rise of Caesar.
But the truth is all sorts of places (like London, Ontario or Fresno) are showing rapid cost increases in housing, both rent and purchase prices. These sustained increases seem to be require a fairly strong driver that explains why now and not before. These housing prices have led to an increases in unsheltered persons and a resulting crackdown on things like camps.
Sometimes the answer is the less complicated one. Real estate, via mechanisms like REITs mean that we are mixing a human necessity (shelter) with an investment class. The recent crisis accelerated income inequality, even overseas, which means that one obvious problem is that you have aligned incentives to make investors want yield. Some of this comes from the exceptionally low interest rates from the central banks but I wonder to what extent you have influential people making nudges in a thousand little ways to preserve asset values.
The bad news for this explanation is that there is no happy ending. An increase in interest rates would be a huge blow to leverage home owners whereas a drop in rates is a huge recession event (right after the stagnation in productivity caused by pandemic inefficiency).
Rome shattered and become an empire. France beheaded the rich. At best you have the consequences of a huge asset bubble popping, in an asset class that nearly everyone is highly exposed to.
It's late and I don't have time to do this justice, but I do want to take a minute and get it in the housing thread, because it concerns a claim that shows up a lot, implicitly and explicitly.
Before the housing crisis reached a boil, the main argument offered by the NYT/Vox YIMBYs was based on the carbon footprint of people driving long distances to their jobs. We might push back on their estimates of the impact of the commuting (particularly in an age of remote work) compared to other green policy changes, but there's no question that having fewer cars on the road driving less would be an environmental win. Nor is there any question that far too many people are forced to make horrifying commutes because they can't find affordable housing closer to major employment centers.
But can we go further and treat housing choice as a simple, straightforward trade-off between commuting distance and affordability? Probably not. There's quite a bit of research around this question that I hopefully will have time to get into later, but for now I've got some interesting counter-examples that are especially relevant to our ongoing discussion.
From the American Community Survey, here are commute times for those who do not work from home. [quick caveat, I'm not familiar with ACS data so it's possible I'm missing something]:
Keep in mind that SF isn't very big and SM is tiny (with a reverse commute). Driving over twenty minutes from anywhere in the latter and more than thirty minutes from anywhere in the former will take you to or through neighborhoods with lower housing costs. If we're looking at a trade-offs between distance and price, this should almost never happen, certainly not the majority of the time.
This isn't hard to understand. SF and SM are tremendously desirable places to live (not my cup of tea, but even I see the appeal). It's not surprising that people are willing to pay more and tolerate slightly longer commutes to live there, but if you accept that this is what's happening, some interesting consequences follow.
Of the people in the Bay Area and LA who would like to live in SF and SM respectively, the vast majority do not work in those cities. If you increase housing capacity in these popular places and hold the desirability constant, we would expect to see acceptable commute times going up. That suggests that some people who had previously considered a forty-five or sixty minute commute a bit too much will change their minds.
And environmentally speaking, that's a really bad outcome.
Yet no private correspondence survives that explains why Bourgeois turned away from filmmaking. Geoffrey Donaldson, a seminal Dutch film scholar, once asked Bourgeois’ second wife about it, but she was unable (or unwilling) to disclose more, other than to say he had “lost interest” in film, preferring to work in the steel business — go figure. All that’s known is that by spring 1916, a restless man with a gift for reinvention found himself working as one of many filmmakers at a large Hollywood studio, with a reputation for animal abuse, a history of injuries and, perhaps, a broken marriage.
Bourgeois, finger to the wind, sensed an opportunity. Among his many skill sets was some knowledge of chemistry. Though his education record is unclear, a 1907 document from a train crossing the U.S.-Canadian border indicated he worked as an electrician in Manitoba. He told acquaintances that he’d received a deferment from service in the Belgian army during World War I because the U.S. Navy was interested in an alloy of his invention, although no record of this exists. In April 1916, he claimed to have invented “iceless ice.”
“Mr. Bourgeois claims that this composition cannot break, unless deliberately chopped up, it cannot wear out and it cannot melt, unless put on a fire,” The Times reported. “The composition is laid down in liquid form and ‘freezes’ over, or hardens, in twenty-four hours.”
Bourgeois secured investment to convert a roller rink and car dealership at 1041 S. Broadway into the Palace Ice Rink. The grand opening was to be attended in July 1916 by the mayor and feature L.A.’s first game of ice hockey. The entrance was constructed to resemble a huge iceberg. Inside were shops that would sell candy, ice cream, cigars and soft drinks.
Vendors paid Bourgeois hefty deposits to secure places in the venture. Cashiers could get a job if they paid $100. Dozens of skating instructors lined up to offer lessons to wobbly Angelenos. Bourgeois needed $17 from each of them to purchase a uniform.
Contractors, still busy through the summer, were paid almost entirely with checks that bounced. The builders sought out Bourgeois to find out how his ice was supposed to work, but he couldn’t be reached. A vendor named Jacques Levi reported him to the authorities, and a warrant was issued for Bourgeois’ arrest on Aug. 4, by which time he, his stenographer and his investors’ money were on their way to Yuma.
If half the population thinks climate change is a hoax and the other half thinks it's an existential threat that can't be averted, on average we have a well informed public.
Antivaxxers' affection for Regeneron is fascinating. It's under an EUA, and is not FDA-approved. It's a new technology. Its clinical trials started just before the trials for the vaxxes, so we have no idea what the long-term effects of taking it are. And yet antivaxxers love it.
I got a half a dozen jabs just to be embedded with US forces for the Iraq invasion, including for anthrax. I’m certain this isn’t the first “serum” he had to “sit still” for. https://t.co/Vc9DrBA6Sl
If you’re a reporter covering the anti-vax movement, please recognize that this (astroturfing, right-wing activism) is a feature, not a bug, and that many of the loudest voices — ie, the people you’re most likely to interact with — are driven by politics, not vaccine concerns.
Marshall is, as usual, right. The coverage of of this story has been extraordinarily bad.
Times is just on a roll. They actually say here that Biden just backed linkage for the “first time”. We’re supposed to forget that there was actually a faux scandal over this a couple months ago when he threatened a veto if anyone tried to delink the bills? pic.twitter.com/8O8oEvMI7L
For combining bombast with inanity this tweet is hard to beat. A level beyond the normal patter of the "win the morning" press. And the full article is... something! All about the views of her allies, but fails to quote or identify a single one. So inside it's almost intestinal. https://t.co/w3TBHYIo7o
Basically we agree that his readers are so brain-poisoned by reflexive partisanship and conspiracy theories that they’ll refuse life-saving medicine for a chance to own the libs. https://t.co/38hSfczirA
Your regular reminder that "depolarization" is only good if both sides are bad. If one side is good -- say, advancing democracy incl. civic equality like Reps during Reconstruction or Dems today -- then depolarization is antithetical to democracy & thus deeply *harmful.* https://t.co/sFNHc1ZzGe
OAN keeps talking ABOUT the recall. "Officials are finishing up the ballot count," different anchors reading the same script said at both 5 and 7am ET. But they're not admitting what AP, CNN, and everyone else reported last night: The recall failed. Newsom prevailed. (4/7)
Important study results from NASA Ames: in simulator testing, drivers using Level 2 driver assistance reported feeling sleepier and showed more signs of "nodding off" than people who drove unassisted. https://t.co/8lIeJM4rKE
"Ozy Media was built on years of lies that together created a woefully false narrative about its business, financials and culture..." https://t.co/m57DsHRYUE
Like the late Rodney Dangerfield, Fresno gets no respect. The name itself has been treated as a joke.
But Fresno is not a small place. It's larger than Sacramento and around 60% the size of San Francisco, and it has also become a major hotspot in California's housing crisis.
The monthly rent for an average apartment in Fresno has gone up nearly 60% since 2017 to $1,469. Fresno’s median home value has risen almost as much over the same time and is now $331,000.
This is not a recent development.
Remember Paul Krugman's theory (discussed here) about high income, high tech enclaves? You don't get much further from that than Fresno. The area is poor. The economic driver is agriculture.
It's not picking up spillover from a major metropolitan area. It's the biggest city for more than two hours in any direction.
Nor can you blame a population surge. The city's growth rate over the past decade is the lowest it has ever been since it was incorporated in 1885.
But here's the part that puzzles me most about Fresno and to a lesser degree, about most cities west of the Mississippi suffering through the housing crisis. Take a look at the city from a distance.
Now let's zoom in to the area just west of the city (though we could pretty much pick any direction except northeast).
Why doesn't Fresno sprawl? I'm not saying it should. That's a debate for another time. I'm asking why it doesn't.
Go a mile or two past the city and there's almost nothing but farm land. Yes, it's amazingly fertile and wonderfully suited for agriculture, but still worth a fraction of what the owners should be able to get from developers.
Fresno County covers just under 6,000 square miles. More than half the population lives on less than 2% of that land. Even when you take away the part covered by nation parks and forests, this still leaves a tremendous amount of space and a tremendous potential for profit. Just for fun, take one square mile, less than a tenth of a percent of the county and play around with the value of that many houses in the current market.
And it's not just the current market. Housing prices have been hot and getting hotter for almost a decade. Why have developers been leaving huge and growing piles of money on the table?
The evils of sprawl are frequently invoked in the housing debate. The mystery of the lack of sprawl, particularly in an age of remote work, goes virtually unmentioned, but it really is the dog that did not bark. In places like Austin, Texas, or London, Ontario, or Fresno, California, the conditions are right and the incentives are there, but it just isn't happening, and until you can explain that, you don't have a handle on what's going on.
One such startup, Gatsby, announced Monday that it has raised $10 million in Aa Series A round of funding.
Backers include Techstars Ventures, Beta Bridge Capital, a network of “super angels” placed by ClearList and an oversubscribed SeedInvest campaign. Previous investors include Barclays Bank, SWS Venture Capital and Rosecliff Ventures.
Jeff Myers and Ryan Belanger-Saleh co-founded Gatsby, a commission-free options and stock-trading app aimed at younger traders, in 2018. The pair had already one successful exit in Dealtable.com, a social data room platform.
I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky it wasn't a competitor to DraftKings.
Robert Kiyosaki, author of the bestselling Rich, Dad, Poor Dad series of financial advice books, is offering his fans yet another lesson in how the rich are different than you and me: they file for bankruptcy not because of ill health or unemployment related issues, but instead as a strategic business move.
Rich Global LLC, one of the corporate arms Kiyosaki has done business under, filed for bankruptcy protection in August, after it was ordered to pay just under $24 million to the Learning Annex and its chairman Bill Zanker.
Kiyosaki was one of the small-time wealth guru mountebanks who made it to the big-time in the aughts by telling his forever falling behind audience that they could get ahead, they just had not learned how. The shtick behind the Rich Dad books was that Kiyosaki was sharing secret money-making strategies of the wealthy with his wage slave readers. The tips ran the gamut from ridiculous to illegal and downright hurtful and included advocating for insider trading, arguing for the purchase of multiple real estate properties with little or no money down and telling followers they could purchase stocks on margin via unfunded brokerage accounts.
Kiyosaki is among the worst but he's not all that unrepresentative. If you feel up to it, the next time you're in a big bookstore take some time to browse the business section. Here and there, you'll find something interesting and intelligent or at least, helpful, but for the most part you'll encounter three profoundly embarrassing genres:
1. The you-too-can-be-rich books like Rich Dad, which tend to target the financially vulnerable and deliver, more often than not, ruinous advice;
2. The guru books. These are predominantly buzzword-rich seminar fodder in the Tom Peters mode with the occasional pseudo-profound business fable thrown in (and no, I didn't make up the term 'business fable'). These are less sleazy than the first category (they primarily target people who are already in business rather than the desperate and dunemployed), but the advice is not that much better and their cost to society may be greater. Directly and indirectly, American business wastes a tremendous amount of money and what might otherwise be productive man-hours on these bozos.
3. The be-like-me books, where someone with a completely inapplicable success story tries to convince you that you can somehow get similar results by following his or her lead. These are probably the least harmful of the bunch. They can also provide some of the most amusing examples.
1. The three biggest cities in the state are Los Angeles (by a large margin), San Diego, and San Jose. Any discussion of the housing (particularly involving densification), needs to focus on those three. The central valley should also be mentioned as well.
2. (or maybe 1b) For most purposes, the appropriate unit for discussing LA is not city but county. With a population of over ten million, more than one in four Californians are residents of the county.
3. (or maybe 2... I'll stop now) San Francisco is not adjacent to or even particularly near Silicon Valley. Instead it's around fifty miles away. There are people who live in SF and commute to SV but it's a wasteful and completely unnecessary practice. San Jose is nearer and cheaper.
4. SF is not only more poorly situated and substantially smaller than SJ; it also covers a fraction of the area. Take away landmarks and public spaces and there's not much open space to develop.
5. For this and other reasons, SF is such a problematic outlier with respect to housing that any state-wide argument based primarily on the city by the Bay will almost certainly be wrong to a significant degree.
6. The housing crisis is very real but that doesn't mean everything you've read about it is true.
7. While building up is often preferable, building out is almost always an option. We have lots of land.
8. And lots of high ground. If you're going to write about sea levels, remember to look up elevations. For comparison, look up your own city's as well and don't forget to factor in hurricanes and storm surges. If you live in an American coastal city facing the Atlantic or the Gulf, you very probably will not be reassured with what you find.
9. The West is country of extremes. It's not unusual for two people both in the city limits of LA to call each other up and ask "how's the weather where you are?" Mountains and canyons complicate housing and infrastructure construction. The sheer scale of places like LA County make sensible seeming arguments absurd in practice.
10. At the very least, spend some time on Wikipedia and Google Maps when writing about places you're not familiar with (and maybe even places you are familiar with). If you don't, you're likely to make an ass of yourself and we'd hate to see that.
