Hello, it's the cantankerous one-issue crank. Sorry to bother you again. John Cochrane needed a talking-to, and so I gave him one. John Cochrane on Rent Control open.substack.com/pub/kevinerd...

Almost everywhere in the City of Toronto has fewer people that it did 50 years ago

Typical OU win 2 games: Offense lost 6-21 Defense won 17-0

Is it basically impossible for someone to be a Fed official if their spouse earns a living in any way that involves trading financial securities?

🤷 When everyone else is trading based on Capricorn's position in the sky relative to Jupiter, you can earn alpha just by being ignorant.

'We talk endlessly about the “missing middle.” But the real catastrophe was the “banished bottom”' Good piece! I wish it mentioned that SROs are re-legalized in all multifamily zones in OR & WA substack.com/home/post/p-...

Some housing background and a hot take. open.substack.com/pub/kevinerd...

Bovino: "Whether they were criminals or individuals that were taking jobs from Americans -- you name it, that's what they were doing. And I'll tell you what's gonna happen. We're gonna go even harder on the streets. If he releases those 650, we're gonna apprehend 1,650 on the streets of Chicago."

You have to be careful about how you measure costs under a housing shortage. A housing shortage raises rents and prices on aging, existing homes - specifically on the land under aging homes. Consider this chain of events. (Assume no income growth or inflation): 1/

how about a piece of investigative journalism that accuses a mayoral candidate of fraud based on an application for college he filled out when he was 17 that a neo-Nazi gave the paper because they were racist? you're insulting the intelligence of everyone here to imply this is about standards

Critics say a 50 year mortgage won't help affordability because it will raise prices. That's wrong on 2 levels. It won't raise prices much, and raising prices would not mean that it is a failed policy. If a corporate valuation rises after being listed on a stock exchange, is that bad or good?

Start with the concluding paragraphs here and then read from the beginning. Housing costs are a significant factor driving inequality and the sense of frustration many people have

@steveroth.bsky.social 🤝 @kevinerdmann.bsky.social

Despite trends in incomes, @kevinerdmann.bsky.social notes rent inflation has been much worse at the bottom end of the housing market—the lowest quality homes in the worst locations. And now nationwide instead of just in the richest cities. Low income households can’t even move to escape anymore.

I'm seeing chatter about the rising tide and all boats. And, I really hate to have to say this, but I think in our current condition, it is wrong. Or, at least overstated. kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/im-afraid-...

Folks have been telling me they’ve noticed I’ve gotten “a lot more political” on social media this year. Of course I have. The circumstances have gotten nightmarishly worse, and the consequences of inaction and staying silent infinitely more obvious. Everyone needs to get “a lot more political.”

Among those fired or forced out, the WSJ has reported: Fannie Mae’s chief ethics officer and general counsel, about a dozen members of its ethics and internal investigations unit, and the acting inspector general at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae.

One of many costs to US murder (sorry, no better word for it) in Caribbean: "United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal."

Great stuff, as usual, from Christian. reason.com/2025/11/11/t...

Oh great. For the next few days, everyone’s going to be reminding each other of that thing that definitely happened when the GSEs caused a financial collapse by significantly loosening their lending standards.

Voters were mad about high prices and people freeloading off of government support, so we raised tariffs in order to send everyone $2,000.

A 10-year old chart that already had the whole story, even though in most places, most of the crisis has developed in the following decade. If your avg rent/income is high even with higher incomes, the high incomes are from poor families migrating away. Failure, not success. 1/

Feist and Olivia Rodrigo performing "We're going to be friends" www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-kZ...

SNL just had a joke about how Gen Z doesn’t like cash. My daughter scoffed at it and said they were wrong about that. Gen Z like to get cash, she said. It’s fun to spend it because it doesn’t seem like real money. 😅😅

“I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.” aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

The other thing that is just baffling on this is the certainty that so many otherwise intelligent people have that lowering monthly payments won’t help because it will raise home prices. Monthly payments are hella higher today than they were 4 years ago. How much higher were prices 4 years ago?

Do people who think longer amortized fixed payment mortgages are an artificial subsidy also think paying rent is a demand subsidy? After all, rent payments increase every year and a 50 year mortgage payment would be fixed? 1/

Christ, his farts must REALLY smell

Incredible that in the year 2025 leading housing economists are still entirely ignorant about the effects of eliminatimy most of the sub-740 credit score mortgage market in 2008. It’s like astronomers not knowing about the moon. knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what...

This is definitely a problem in housing. Lots of confused discourse gets puked out in conversations about high costs. The cost of living in NYC is determined by the cost required to get 100,000 families to choose to leave. marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

Good stuff open.substack.com/pub/braddelo...

It’s hard to believe but there was a cartoon about an immigrant mouse and it was seen as totally fine and not controversial and not woke because it was an aspirational and nice thing about America that people could come here and find a better life

Trump is utterly a creature of self preservation and if he continues to sink he’ll find people to blame. May I nominate Stephen Miller.

NEW: Judge Gettleman just ordered ICE to improve "serious conditions" inside its Broadview facility in Chicago. Yesterday, people testified in court that they were crammed into overcrowded and filthy cells for days, with little access to lawyers, and pressured into deportation.

“Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that bad faith is not ignorance but refusal, the conscious act of pretending not to know what one knows, a form of spiritual cowardice disguised as moral surety. The absurdity is the point, it liberates him from the burden of coherence…” open.substack.com/pub/theratio...

Health care prices relative to prices for all personal expenditures.

It doesn’t get more pathetic than this. What a complete loser.

This doesn’t look at all like we’re forgiving any trespasses.

The USDA sent an email to grocery stores telling them they are prohibited from offering special discounts to customers affected by the SNAP funding lapse. I'm aware of at least 2 stores that had offered struggling customers a discount, then withdrew it after receiving this email

DR Horton's earnings report says, "New home demand is still being impacted by ongoing affordability constraints." as a reason why they are discounting from their menu prices. Real estate language is so weird. Kohl's doesn't say their 50% discount coupons are due to "affordability constraints".

Kash Patel was angry about his publicly-available jet logs indicating he’d flown to see his musician girlfriend perform so he forced out a senior FBI official overseeing aviation, Bloomberg reports news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...

God I bloody love economists. This one zeroes in on Rand Paul’s tweet complaining about the number of people on food stamps. And while he doesn’t touch on income inequity vs cost of living, he does explain the cost for SNAP now vs pre-pandemic.

Here's a short video of an Edison Park man confronting border patrol. You can hear others in the background. #chicago

icymi, when people started sharing the Case-Shiller chart 25 years ago, they should have been tagging it #housingshortage What the Case-Shiller Home Price Chart Really Tells Us open.substack.com/pub/kevinerd...