Hacker News: mactrey

New comment by mactrey in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

mactrey — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:24:02 +0000

Did rents in Palms go up because they built housing or because it's a great location in a city with increasing rent almost everywhere?

Or in other words, is there any econometric evidence that building housing increased rents in Palms, or could we be confusing correlation with causation?

New comment by mactrey in "The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

mactrey — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:56:32 +0000

Do you have an example?

New comment by mactrey in "The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

mactrey — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:40:56 +0000

Another factor is smaller households. People are staying single longer and waiting longer to move in with partners, creating more demand for housing even without population growth.

New comment by mactrey in "The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

mactrey — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:38:27 +0000

What are some of the many other, stronger criticisms of the abundance agenda? Maybe Thompson has replied to some of those, too.

New comment by mactrey in "The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

mactrey — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:25:42 +0000

> the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen

Do you have a source for this? Anecdotes along the lines of "they don't make 'em like they used to" are incredibly common but often fail to stand up to scrutiny.

New comment by mactrey in "The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

mactrey — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:17:08 +0000

And zoning restrictions are part of the reason why housing prices "always go up." Constrained supply is exactly and precisely what makes housing a profitable investment.

New comment by mactrey in "A Scaled Down Look at Spending, Revenue, and What's Being Cut"

mactrey — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 18:37:33 +0000

Usually I would agree, but the amount of distortion depends on what portion of DOGE savings are one-off (eliminating grants and contracts) and what portion are recurring annually (workforce reductions).

If DOGE savings are one-off then it would be fair to present alternatives according to their lifetime debt impact, since the presented DOGE numbers would already be "lifetime."

And TFA states "Please note: only grants and contracts posted on the doge.gov website with receipts are counted towards the total saving value. For this reason, the total savings value on the doge.gov website may appear larger, however due to the lack of supporting receipts, this value is unverifiable." So it looks like DOGE's recurring savings are (mostly?) not included here since they are undocumented.

New comment by mactrey in "Nobody cares"

mactrey — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 01:06:25 +0000

Building housing lowers the cost of housing. Requiring some accounting of $ saved on brickwork -> $ spent on homelessness is just another bureaucratic hurdle, which is ironically exactly what TFA is complaining about.

New comment by mactrey in "In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them"

mactrey — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 04:32:25 +0000

Conflating free parking with a childhood core memory, a lake trip with your immigrant father, feels a little disingenuous to me. But I think you understand the core idea: by making something cheap or free, we incentivize the activity but we spend communal resources (tax dollars, or some rival good like space downtown, or space on a lake) to do so. But we as a society get to choose what to incentivize. Cars have externalities (traffic, the space they take up, pollution, their being required is expensive for working families) that other forms of transport don’t, so people are rethinking the various ways we incentivize driving.

New comment by mactrey in "Show HN: Term Typer – Learn a language by typing"

mactrey — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:58:04 +0000

It does wrap automatically if you keep typing. I agree the user experience is not great with that, the word you're typing should always be directly over the guide text.

New comment by mactrey in "Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing"

mactrey — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 18:36:29 +0000

As you note, no two dense neighborhoods are the same. Those experiences would be rare in Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur. I would say that cultural norms dominate density when it comes to explaining late-night partying.

New comment by mactrey in "Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing"

mactrey — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 18:29:00 +0000

A car driver could easily eat the same amount of food as a walker, the extra calories would be stored as fat. This also ignores upfront CO2 output from assembling and delivering the car and increased CO2 output from maintaining car infrastructure vs. pedestrian infrastructure. Not to mention numerous other externalities.

New comment by mactrey in "Amazon Is the Hospital Now"

mactrey — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:23:01 +0000

They aren't comparable metrics. Revenue doesn't represent value added. I can sell a $20 bill for $20, my revenue is $20 but there is no impact on GDP (nothing has been created, no value has been added). Do that enough times and you too can have revenue equaling that of a small country.

New comment by mactrey in "Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value"

mactrey — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 14:37:50 +0000

Then yes, I’ll agree with that. Both can be difficult but valuing just the underlying land is harder.

New comment by mactrey in "Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value"

mactrey — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 20:50:34 +0000

No, you are wrong. The two cases are analogous. Under a LVT, if their tax goes up, it's because their land became more valuable. So when they sell they get more money. And under a LVT, if they spend money to build or improve a house, then they also get a benefit when they sell for a corresponding higher price. It's just that those improvements would not be reflected in a higher tax bill.

New comment by mactrey in "Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value"

mactrey — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 19:04:47 +0000

Well, property taxes in my city are around 1% currently. Does that mean the city will own 100% of land in 100 years? Probably not. For lots of reasons.

New comment by mactrey in "Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value"

mactrey — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 19:01:42 +0000

The point is, currently if you build things then you pay higher tax. The current tax structure disincentivizes building things. We don't know what people would build without that disincentive - maybe still nothing, as you are suggesting.

New comment by mactrey in "Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value"

mactrey — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 18:49:28 +0000

There's not an argument from economic efficiency to tax by rock content.

New comment by mactrey in "Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value"

mactrey — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 18:48:20 +0000

But this problem already exists. Many people live in homes for 30+ years and pay property tax on the land + improvement (physical home) value. Why would it be so much harder to hypothetically value the land without a recent sale (required for a LVT) than to hypothetically value the land + improvements without a recent sale (required for property taxes which currently exist in almost every city in America)?

New comment by mactrey in "Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value"

mactrey — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 18:42:19 +0000

Detroit and most places in the US already have property tax. Little old grandma already has to pay more every year when her property becomes more valuable. And homestead exemptions already exist to prevent kicking grandma to the street.

A LVT would just shift property tax burden more toward empty lots or less-developed parcels and away from more-developed parcels. It wouldn't result in killing little old ladies.