@kevinerdmann.bsky.social
I discovered the surprising story of what really happened in 2008 (not enough housing) and accidentally became a housing policy guy. https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/ https://www.amazon.com/stores/Kevin-Erdmann/author/B099P7SN1G
Senator Warren was the leading Congressional figure in the fight to collapse mortgage lending in 2008, so a bill to outlaw the single-family rental homes that families now settle for in lieu of owning is actually a fitting final nail in the American housing coffin that is her legacy.
Trump: "They knocked out 54 ships in two days. I got mad at my people. I said, 'Why the hell did we kill them? Why didn't we just capture them and use them in our Navy?' They said they wouldn't have qualified for that. One of my generals said, 'Sir, it's a lot more fun doing it this way.'"
I can understand why he has complex feeling about paperwork
@kevinerdmann.bsky.social on why banning build-to-rent single-family housing won't help today's renters become homeowners unless Dodd Frank refroms to lending standards are reversed. kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/observatio...
My 2 cents on the investor obstructions in the bill.
Observations on the single-family rental debate re: the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.
open.substack.com/pub/kevinerd...
As a Wickard v. Filburn hater (subsistence farmer had to leave land fallow per FDR programs because grain can hypothetically be traded across state lines), I think there is a better case for this in housing.
The 2008 debacle was caused by interstate migration from housing shortages.
Republicans want to harm families that rent their homes and Democrats want to harm Americans that rent homes to those families. Today, they found common cause, and unfortunately for you, accomplishing either accomplishes both.
reason.com/2026/03/10/c...
A bunch of YIMBY groups have put there support behind a bill that would include a lot of housing reforms and also cap large scale investment in build to rent housing.
Every time I see a news story on a court case, I think, we should make it illegal to show pictures of anything unless it is a charcoal portrait, because in the YOOL 2026, this just makes too much sense.
Charcoal or nothing!
A bunch of YIMBY organizations have thrown their support behind a federal housing bill that would put a cap on the number of homes that could be owned by large rental investors in any given market.
5% is what I'm seeing tossed around.
btw, currently 10% of new SFH are BTR, and growing quickly.
If the red areas fill up, we'll just come back and vote to expand those areas. This is basic democratic governance. There literally is no downside.
One thing we should do is make maps of each market and color code it. The 5% of the region that can be large scale single-family rentals could be, say, red. And the rest of the map could be yellow. And, that would help the large investors know where they were allowed to build new homes. Easy peasy.
I mean, how could putting an arbitrary legal cap on a housing type that is harmless, if not necessary, but that also easily garners motivated or ignorant public opposition, come back to bite us? Seems unlikely that anything like that could happen.
I, for one, can't wait for the econ papers 10 years from now showing that the doubling of homelessness can't have been caused by supply restrictions, because the law allows 5% of the market to be large scale rentals, and many cities are only at 4.5%.
I think a new federal housing law with hard limits on certain types of rental housing is a fitting addition to a century’s worth of unintended consequences, and I don’t look forward to tracking the next one.
”Don’t just do something, stand there” has a long history of being underrated.
If you didn't build your house out of sod, with your own two hands with a pile of firewood you hoped would keep you alive until spring, can you even call yourself human?
Ban corporate ownership of theme parks! Vacations are for families, not corporations!
Ban corporate ownership of grocery stores! Meals are for families, not corporations!
If you run into a "Homes are for families, not for corporations" zombie in the wild, stay calm.
Things like object permanence or theory of mind are going to be difficult for them, and any sudden movements may startle them. Proceed with caution.
open.substack.com/pub/kevinerd...
Also, as a viewer, I think my intuition would be to allow breaking the rules if the surprise was particularly funny. But the rewritten notes weren’t really funny enough to expect someone to break.
The restrictions on build to rent that were put in at the end could be more negative than all the positive parts.
It’s also just based on crappy motivated ignorance.
Salad and Go is such a brilliant business concept. If the current owners run it right, it will be as common as Starbucks someday.
Both my parents grew up on dairy farms. We always kept a stick of butter out. The internet is telling me that it’s unsafe to leave butter at room temperature and that it can go rancid in a few days.
That’s ludicrous. I’m sure I’ve left sticks out for days or weeks. It’s always been fine.
"Biden’s pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties owed to victims or the government. In contrast, Trump’s second-term pardons have forgiven criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion."
www.cato.org/blog/embarra...
Yeah. You're probably right.
Construction didn't slow down in Canada, Australia, etc. Really, the US, Ireland, and Spain are the only major countries that had a collapse.
Mortgage crackdown in 2008. About 1/3 of borrowers served by federal mortgage agencies in the late 20th century permanently lost access to mortgage credit in 2008. It cratered home prices and we're still recovering from it.
Fewer kids. More non-family households.
