Odds and Ends 3.6.26

The problems with the Georgetown paper are more obvious, so let’s start there. The authors note that low-income households in cities with relatively high rates of housing construction (for example, Houston) still saw their rents go up. But, as researcher Ed Mendoza observes, the report offers no counterfactual: It fails to consider what would have happened to low-income Houstonians if the city built new homes at the rate of a low-growth jurisdiction like, say, San Francisco. It is likely that rents in relatively high-growth cities would have risen by significantly more if they had not added new housing at an above-average clip.

Second, the paper’s authors simply wave away the mechanism by which new market-rate housing production helps low-income households. Of course a new apartment is going to have higher rent, for the same reason that a 2026 Toyota Corolla costs more than a used 2006 Corolla. But adding new housing allows higher-income renters to “trade up,” which in turn makes their former domiciles available for occupancy. This creates what researchers call a “chain of moves,” which is a bit like a game of musical chairs in reverse: As more chairs get added to the circle, the competition for a seat becomes less and less intense.

The Georgetown paper does not engage with any of the research on chains of moves. The authors do discuss the possibility that older housing can “filter down,” or become more affordable, as it depreciates, but they conclude that “this process has stalled or reversed” without considering why that might be the case. In fact, older housing in many cities has filtered up precisely because it has become more scarce relative to demand. The Georgetown paper declares that market-rate housing construction hasn’t had the desired effect without considering whether that might be because most high-cost cities are still not building at a fast enough clip to end the supply crunch.

One well-worn refrain of progressive urban politics is that new, “luxury” housing will not help solve the housing shortage. A 2024 study of U.S. voters found that 30 to 40 percent believed more housing would, instead, increase prices, and another 30 percent believed it would have no effect.

But research generally points in the other direction: More housing supply of all kinds leads to lower prices in general terms. A new study lays out exactly how a brand-new building can open up more housing in other, lower-income areas, creating the conditions that enable prices to fall.

In the paper, three researchers looked in extraordinary detail at the effects of a new 43-story condo project in Honolulu. The building, called the Central, sits right behind the giant Ala Moana shopping center, halfway between downtown and the beachfront hotels of Waikiki. It comprises both subsidized and market-rate units, priced at around $780,000 for the former, and $1.25 million for the latter. What the researchers found was that the new housing freed up older, cheaper apartments, which, in turn, became occupied by people leaving behind still-cheaper homes elsewhere in the city, and so on. A new rung higher up the housing ladder permitted people lower down to climb. The paper estimates the tower’s 512 units created at least 557 vacancies across the city—with some units opening up no empty apartments (if, say, an adult child moved to the Central from their parents’ home) and others creating as many as four vacancies around town.

The national government in Japan created a centralized, simple, and flexible zoning system that supports affordable housing development. While local governments draft city plans and zoning designations, these must conform to the national framework established by the City Planning Act. Prefectural governments usually have the authority to approve or reject these plans and have other influence over zoning. The zoning system is also relatively simple, consisting of 13 categories of zones, including 8 residential zones

In contrast, the United States operates a fragmented and inconsistent system, where tens of thousands of cities and counties create their own zoning codes and where exclusionary zoning is common in higher-income, homogenous areas. Beyond its simplicity, the Japanese zoning system also allows for more flexible land use, where commercial and industrial zones can also accommodate residential uses, thereby promoting mixed-use developments and increasing housing supply. In contrast, the US zoning system often designates each zone for a particular land use only (e.g., single-family detached residence), limiting the potential for multi-family and mixed-use developments and restricting housing supply.

The experts assigned to the case didn’t seem to know what to make of Dominique’s psychology. He “radiated happiness when his family gathered around him,” Douteau wrote. Describing his rigidity and his trouble holding a job, she observed that he “resembles his father in many ways.” But he seemed to resist the thought that he had replicated his parents’ marriage. “During our interview, every anecdote about his father was an opportunity for him to repeat, like a mantra, that he had sworn not to be like his father,” Douteau wrote.

Two psychiatrists reasoned that Dominique’s crimes were possible because he was “splitting.” “This split allows two contradictory personalities to coexist without conflict,” one wrote. “When M. Pelicot operates in one mode, he is unaware of the other.” The second psychiatrist proposed that Gisèle had not sensed Dominique’s other side because “we split with the splitter, so to speak.” We cordon off the parts of our lives that don’t fit the story we believe we are living.

Whether or not a split explained Dominique’s crimes, it seemed to carry over into the family, dividing them, too. Each member ended up with a different version of what had been real. “I admit to everything,” Dominique had said, shortly after being arrested. “The only thing that shocks me a little—my daughter,” he said. “The photos you showed me—the photos mean nothing to me. I never touched my daughter, never.”

As of this writing, we are only 96 hours into this conflict so of course its quite difficult to ascertain where exactly this all goes. But air campaigns rarely end neatly because their operational logic tends to generate their own momentum. Once begun, pressure builds to demonstrate progress, to service more targets, and to escalate incrementally in the hope that the next set of strikes will produce the decisive political effect that the previous ones failed to achieve. The administration has set as much stating that they will have “an escalating series of strikes with off-ramps along the way.” The absence of clear political movement from the target state is therefore rarely interpreted as evidence that the strategy itself is flawed. More often it is taken as proof that the campaign has not yet gone far enough.

In the case of Iran, this dynamic is particularly dangerous because the objectives of the campaign point in opposite strategic directions. If the primary goal is counterproliferation, then the logic of the campaign should be limited and focused on delaying or destroying nuclear infrastructure. Such an effort might require repeated strikes over time, but it would at least remain bounded by a relatively narrow set of military targets. If the goal is regime change, however, the logic shifts toward sustained pressure on the political and coercive institutions that sustain the state. That kind of pressure almost inevitably pushes the conflict toward broader escalation, including attacks on regime security forces, infrastructure, and potentially urban political centers.

In a January podcast, Terry Finley, the CEO of the bookstore chain Books-a-Million, most of whose customers are concentrated outside major coastal metropolises, particularly in the south, said their “core demographic” had changed from a “forty-five-year-old woman, married with two children” to women between eighteen and forty, a very different customer. Similarly the influence of the once-preponderant troika of celebrity book clubbers, Oprah and Jenna and Reese, who once catered to that audience, has begun to wane. (One of Reese Witherspoon’s collaborators told the Times interviewer that they schedule lighter books for December and May—busy months for mothers.) In a 2024 expose for Esquire of how the mighty three made their selections, former Random House social media manager Sophie Vershbow wrote that mixing the scene up with younger and more eclectic tastemakers would be a good thing. (“The male celebrity-book-club market is practically untapped,” she noted.) Terry Finley said the interests of these newer readers are “a mile wide and an inch deep … things that are driving them, the BookTok titles, the romantasy, fiction more broadly, it’s not one author, it’s not one lane.” They are curious and coming into the stores ready to find something new, not like the traditional customer who was driven to a few “tent-pole” bestsellers. (He mentioned that horror seems to be taking over for romantasy. Also perhaps no surprise.) All these avenues for finding reading testify to the age-old marketing power of the personal recommendation, which has a new salience when so much of the information we receive is driven by invisible computation. The “influencer” both is and is not a creature of the algorithm.