HelixDab2

I'm curious what areas are seeing the gain in YIMBY; I have a hard time thinking that any of it is coming from La Jolla. And yeah, San Diego really needs more high-density housing. I lived there for a few years in the early 90s, and there really wasn't much at the time.

The problem isn't political will per se, but specifically steamrolling local NIMBYs. The people with the most political power and will tend to push high density housing out of more desirable areas and into less desirable areas. If you wanted to, for instance, but a 100 unit building in Ukrainian Village or Wicker Park in Chicago, you'd have a really stiff fight on your hands from local property owners who want to keep their neighborhood all brownstones. OTOH, if you want to demo a square block near Garfield Park and build there--and I wouldn't recommend doing that--you'll have the local alderman holding a golden shovel for the groundbreaking.

The price-fixing cartels refers to rent specifically, rather than sales. And yes, there is a shortage of units for sale, and that is due largely to market forces. For instance, if I have a house right now that I still have 25 years of mortgage on, my mortgage is probably at a very low rate. Selling that home and buying a new one would mean a new mortgage, at a higher rate, which means bigger monthly payments. This is a problem that older people are running into right now; their homes are too big now that their kids are gone, but they can't afford the new mortgage rates.

Even without rental software suggesting market values for landlords, it's very easy to look at comparables in your general area to set your own rates close to what other people have their at. Similarly, if you list a property at $X, and get 200 queries in a single day, you are likely to set your prices higher because you know that you're listing lower than average. (I sold a car like that; I got 50+ inquiries in just a few hours, because I'd set the price lower than market rate.)

And in places there’s actually a shortage

...Which actually is most places.

IIRC, the gov't is restricted right now, and can't build more without a change in the law. And sure, let's change that. But you're also going to need to change local zoning restrictions that prevent high density housing from going into certain residential areas.

Great! I'm all for gov't increasing housing supply! But, frankly, most of the pushback from building affordable, high-density housing is coming from the local level. If we build high-density, affordable (e.g., low-income only, versus mixed-income) housing in it's own area, rather than integrating it into existing communities, we're only building the slums of the future. As it stands, well-off communities, even in areas that are heavily Democratic (such as, most of California), have been strongly opposed to locating such housing in their neighborhoods, and do everything they can to prevent it.

Katrina was notably bad because of the murders that happened in the name of "stopping looting". We don't talk about Hurricane Sandy, for instance, or the Galveston hurricane in the same way that we talk about Katrina, despite the fact that e.g., Galveston killed 4x as many people.

That would be great! Except that cities refuse to do that, and no one wants to put high density housing anywhere near their cute, historic neighborhood.

If you can build the political will to steamroll the NIMBYs, I'm all for it.

Okay, now you have waiting lists like they do in Copenhagen.

Pretty much every economist will tell you that rent control creates disincentives to building more housing.

This fundamentally misunderstands the way that the market works.

If you have 1000 people trying to rent a 1br apartment, and there are 500 1br apartments on the market, then yeah, the price is going to go up, because there's more demand than supply. But supply is constrained by outside factors, like zoning, and neighborhoods that don't want to ruin their "character" be someone building high-density housing next to their cute, retro bungalow. Sure, you can build your apartment complex out in BFE, but no one wants to rent a place out in BFE because now they can't get to their job in a reasonable amount of time, and have to drive rather than take public transit (or walk, ride a bike, etc.). Plus, that creates sprawl.

If you really want more housing, blaming landlords--including corporate landlords--isn't going to fix it. Blame the cities that won't allow proper high density housing, blame the NIMBYs.

I don't know where people think that more housing comes from; someone has to put up the money. I'm fine with it being the state, but someone has to front the money in the first place.

...And the net result would be that they would charge more on rent. And since taxing at higher rates would deter people from building more rental properties, the housing shortage would get worse.

If they're illegal to sell, then Amazon hasn't gotten the memo yet.

IIRC there's one part on the Shadow II that's known to fail at regular intervals, I think the extractor? It's something that's well known to competitive shooters, common enough that they keep spares on hand the same way that most competitors keep spare optics batteries on hand. I don't know that I'd try running a Shadow or Shadow II for thousands of rounds without cleaning, just because it's got closer tolerances than a CZ-75B. But that's just me.

Oh, and if you like CZ, check out KMR Arms. KMR does some of CZ's manufacturing, and also does their own line. Sadly, they aren't yet generally available in the US due to the general difficulties in importing pistols, but I've heard they're trying to work out distribution. These should be viewed solely as competition guns though rather than tactical or duty firearms; you should probably not be using any of them as a carry gun.

EDIT: A range can probably get away with a little less cleaning, because they limit the ammunition that people can use; they can only sell very clean burning ammunition that won't leave a ton of powder and copper fouling. Most people that practice on their own use whatever is cheap, which may even be shitty Russian surplus Wolf ammo with lacquered steel cases, and corrosive Berdan primers.

Well, you're definitely correct about many PDs using revolvers before switching to Glocks. That goes back to the Miami shootout with the FBI; FBI agents were still using revolvers at the time, and they were significantly outgunned b/c one of the suspects was armed with a Ruger Mini-14 rifle. As a result, the FBI started looking for a better sidearm, and the initially settled on 10mm before adopting the .40S&W. Glock managed to bring a .40S&W pistol to market before Smith & Wesson did (!!!), and then charged below cost for PDs in order to convince them to adopt the then-new firearm.

And after finding an article about it, it looks like the NYPD did want to match the pull of their old double-action service revolvers. Which is nuts.