Top all-time · #12034
Kevin Erdmann
Personal blog · kevinerdmann.substack.comeconomics
Kevin Erdmann writes Erdmann Housing Tracker, a personal blog at kevinerdmann.substack.com about economics. Since 2022, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite Kevin Erdmann's Substack posts and his book Shut Out as evidence for housing supply, density, household size and interest rate arguments.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
How housing costs got here and where they're going.
What Hacker News says?
> At the end of the day, the hard limit in finance is defaulting. Everything outside that is financial poetry (or engineering :-p). You are forgetting all about regulations and taxation (and how to work with / around them). And how to cleverly read documents, and exploit loop holes in contracts. There's so much more to finance. (And for eg stocks or commodities, there's not even any notion of defaulting. Defaulting…
Comment linking /p/subprime-bank-runs-and-the-global
on “New LLM optimization technique slashes memory costs”Submitted Household size and the housing stock as a story · 78 points
HN discussionThe calculation changes if you only include adults in the denominator - there is a lot more adults relative to children compared to the past. The solution is to remove the very much existent density and other supply restrictions - see: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/th... and https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/household-size-and-the-h... which goes into more detail
Comment linking /p/household-size-and-the-housing-stock?r=18smg1&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
on “Who killed the rave?”Submitted The Housing Shortage Is Larger Than You Think as a story · 61 points
HN discussionAgglomeration effects are real. And you are better off building space for people in highly productive cities like NYC and San Francisco, then to force them to toil in obscurity in Appalachia. They wouldn't be paying exorbitant amounts of money to stay in NYC or SF. They haven't in the past, before America stopped building. The distribution of rents used to be fairly 'flat', without the crazy spikes in productive cit…
Comment linking /p/random-notes
on “Analysis of 200M newspaper pages: Sentiment has collapsed over the past 50 years”Submitted The End of the American City as a story · 32 points
HN discussion> Not strawmanning, some people actually belive this. In some limited scenarios or with a limited differences, it can work. Providing there are controls in place to correct any runaway effects. Maybe, but they don't call it 'trickle down' economics. That's only ever used as a slur. > I understand filtering, but it does have limits. If you have too many rich people building houses that they don't need to sell, or wan…
Comment linking /p/the-housing-shortage-is-larger-than
on “Analysis of 200M newspaper pages: Sentiment has collapsed over the past 50 years”Submitted Most real estate value is from inflated old homes, not building new ones as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's all kinds of research showing that supply and demand are very real for housing and that adding supply helps contain prices: * https://cayimby.org/its-only-a-housing-market-if-you-can-mov... * https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/... * https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/we-need-affordable-housi... Just off the top of my head.
Comment linking /p/we-need-affordable-housing-not-market
on “Urban Density and Home Prices”Submitted “Rising Home Prices Are Mostly from Rising Rents” as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> It might be right, but it's far from damning evidence that the housing bubbles are myths. Kevin Erdmann's book 'Shut out' https://www.mercatus.org/research/books/shut-out has a lot more evidence piled up. https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/interest-rates-arent-the... has some interesting recent observations about the topic of housing, finance and interest rates.
Comment linking /p/interest-rates-arent-the-problem
on “A Student-Debt Bubble Fueled a Housing Bubble”Submitted Joseph Stiglitz on Housing in Nevada as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Market Power in Housing Construction as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Housing supply per capita eats your brain as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Who Causes “Problematic” Housing Demand? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Shadows of Non-Filtering in Housing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reassessing the role of supply and demand on housing bubble prices as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Yimby Housing Correction as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Review of Boom and Bust: Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Atlanta as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Rent Inflation and Housing Supply and Demand as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Where would housing expand with broad upzoning? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Unfortunately, production efficiency alone won't make housing affordable as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What kind of good is housing? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What if we can’t expect cities to build more? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted “Reassessing the role of supply and demand on housing bubble prices” (Part 4) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion