July 12, 2026
Rent drama: pipe dream or real fix?
Profiling the "Abundance" housing bottleneck with real data
He tested the housing shortage with real numbers, and the comments came for his model
TLDR: The post found that rule-heavy cities build far fewer homes, but Vienna’s cheap rents suggest public housing matters just as much as faster approvals. Commenters split between calling the analysis unfair to *Abundance* and calling its math shaky, turning the thread into a mini housing war.
A blogger tried to put the big idea behind Abundance on trial: are homes expensive because the building system is clogged with too many rules? On paper, the case looked juicy. Austin builds far more homes than San Francisco, and that lines up with the book’s argument that fewer roadblocks can mean more housing. But then the plot twisted: when he stretched his math out over time, it started predicting impossible price drops, and Vienna completely wrecked the neat story by staying far cheaper than London thanks to a huge pool of public and nonprofit housing.
That’s where the comments section turned into the real show. One camp basically yelled, “Straw man!” arguing the post was attacking a version of the book nobody actually wrote. These readers said the whole “Yes In My Backyard” crowd isn’t just obsessed with permits; they’ll take public housing, subsidy, zoning reform — whatever builds homes. Another camp was far less forgiving, side-eyeing the post for waving around a model that “immediately produces unrealistic results” without clearly showing the math. Ouch.
Still, not everyone came armed with knives. Some readers praised the clean charts and calm writing, with one dropping the wonderfully dad-like summary: “measure twice, cut once.” Another wanted an even deeper dive into exactly where the system jams up. So the mood was less “case closed” and more messy internet book club energy: good premise, spicy pushback, and one giant fight over whether the real fix is unclogging the pipe, building a second pipe, or admitting the pipe metaphor is doing way too much work.
Key Points
- •The article tests the housing-throughput argument from *Abundance* by comparing permitting and rent outcomes across multiple cities.
- •Austin is described as permitting about 18 new homes per 1,000 residents annually, versus about 2 in San Francisco.
- •Using an elasticity estimate from an Auckland housing study, the author found that long-run extrapolations produced unrealistic results, including an impossible price decline in Austin.
- •The article says San Francisco’s modeled rent decline did not occur; instead, rents rose nearly 19 percent over the past year, which the author links to an AI hiring boom.
- •Vienna and London are presented as a case where similar building rates produced very different rents, which the article attributes to Vienna’s large public and nonprofit housing sector and older rent-control rules.