To truly understand perf, ideally one should compare many types and sizes of models. I suspect some model types perform substantially better on the newer ANE / OS compared with others.
I think the economy is hitting real, hard barriers in resource extraction, energy usage, and number of people that buy and sell. That’s where stagnation comes from.
The real economy will stagnate. AI can automate some work and intensify future technological discoveries, but that won’t make energy any cheaper, clean our environment, create more humans, or make resources as easily extractable as they were 100 years ago.
The real economy can’t grow too much more than it’s current size, at least in the physical world.
Do I love my 5br house in Seattle that I pay only $3200 a month for? Yes. Low rates and low prices made that possible for a brief moment in 2020.
Will we be here forever? No… I don’t think I want to raise kids in the city. Everything is densifying and that’s not for me. But as rates continue to rise, the financial cost of moving seems increasingly large. We might be stuck here for the entire mortgage term if prices drop below 2020 prices, which is feasible if rates continue to rise for the next few years. Payment a few thousand a month higher, purchase price a few hundred k lower.
I could always rent it out. I really do want to preserve this old house and it would need to go the right tenant that takes care of it, likely for a below market rent in exchange. However, given how absolutely unfriendly rental laws are in Seattle and how little choice I’ll really have in a tenant as a result, I’m very averse to that. Maybe I’ll just leave it empty once enough time passes for the payment to be inflated away to a negligible amount.
I suspect inventory will stay low for these reasons. People either can’t move, don’t have an incentive to rent out their place, or will rent and not sell to avoid catastrophic losses.
An empty house will turn bad faster than a rented out house. Give it to a property manager for the time it's rented, and when you move back in, do a remodel.
With tenants in the house, you'll be doing regular maintenance anyways, especially at turnover. You might find some damage once in a while and repair it over the years. This is damage you probably wouldn't find if you lived in there yourself, because you wouldn't have the "turnover" event triggering a deep check. But also, you might avoid the damage in the first place, who knows. Overall though, it's minuscule expense in comparison and it's not like the house will be ruined out of it. A decade or two later you'll want to do work on the house anyways before you move back in.
I think renting out is actually a lot better than you'd think. A good property manager will help you find good tenants and save you a whole lot of headache, save you from getting yourself into iffy legal situations, etc.
I don't think wear-and-tear (or even outright damage) from tenants is the big concern. The real danger is someone who truly wrecks your property, doesn't pay rent, in a legal environment where it takes you two years to evict such a person, all the while they might continue to do inflict more damage.
Additional legal protection for renters usually decreases the supply of rentals for this reason, and it's the exact same reason why unemployment rates are higher in countries where employees are very difficult to fire.
Seattle seems to have some affordable pockets now, back when we were in the market in 2018, the townhouse we were in skyrocketed in value and the rent kept going up. We finally bought a place in Renton, which was affordable.
Now it seems that Seattle prices dipped (ignoring Queen Anne) and all the neighboring suburban towns skyrocketed: Carnation is hitting >US$1M? Monroe pushing $700k-$800k? Homes in Kirkland have always been high, but looking at $2M-$3M. Insane. I want a quieter neighborhood for my family, but doesn't look like I can move, ever. I feel trapped in, and if I'm not alone in my situation, inventory will remain low, keeping these prices high and unaffordable.
Even if I do retain a profit when selling, we’re going to be trading down to a worse house. Payments for the same house now based on the Redfin estimate and current interest rates are more than double.
Given how bad the tech sector is doing now that the real world is back post lockdowns, I’m not comfortable taking on that much more of a payment.
Yeah, but don’t forget to take in all variables (total cost of ownership as it were) - the mortgage is one factor, taxes, schools, commute all play into it.
Moving to a more expensive monthly payment in a school district where you don’t need to send kids to private school to get a good education can save thousands of dollars, for example.
But I know how it is. I had an underwater house in CA for 10+ years before I could refinance.
Yes, cities are (almost by definition) more crowded. What is subjective is when they become overcrowded. By a pragmatic metric (say, infrastructure spending per capita) that's not happening in cities even most Europeans would consider overcrowded.
They're also louder, but that noise is contained within relatively small pockets. Fans of quiet suburbia need not worry.
The YIMBYs want to move to your neighborhood, so you and your neighbors are obligated to make as much space for them as needed. Oh, you like your neighborhood how it is?
Don't worry, you'll learn to love <relying on public transport instead of cars, no parking, increased traffic, blocked out sunlight, tiny and eventually no yards, large buildings next door>. Your way of living is bad because cars and sprawl are bad and YIMBYs don't like them, they think the walkable urban mixed use neighborhoods are superior, so we're going to remove the zoning to force change. Aren't those things what you want?
No? Well you'll learn to like them, because you shouldn't have power over what your neighbor can build on their property. You say your neighborhood overwhelmingly votes to keep it that way, not just you? Actually, your neighborhood shouldn't have power to vote for this zoning either, because we know what's best for your neighborhood, not you.
You and your neighbors aren't obligated to make as much space for them as needed, you just shouldn't have the power to stop people that would like to make space for them. Zoning changes don't obligate someone to sell their house and build a duplex, they just let someone do that if they want to.
Zoning laws make sure a community stays as the community desires. A community bans large apartment buildings for the same reason they ban power plants; construction benefits the property owner at the detriment of adjacent property owners.
Can I not, as part of my local community, advocate for my right to build what I want on my land? Can the person who wants to have only low density not move somewhere else if the community decides to allow density?
I intentionally left out YIMBY moral grandstanding, because it's usually a shield to hide the real reason they feel zoning should be changed: "I can't afford your neighborhood and I want to live there"
There's no moral grandstanding. Some people just think you shouldn't be able to be so rich. The reason you are is because the masses allow you the privilege. You might as well be graceful about it.
At least be straightforward with the reasoning, then. If the mainstream YIMBY said "I want to live in your neighborhood and I can't afford it, therefore the zoning should be changed", or "you're too rich because of zoning so I want to remove it so we are more equal," I'd have more respect.
But usually it's something about how mixed use neighborhoods are better, or how someone on minimum wage can't afford to live on their own in a very expensive neighborhood. Ok, but those probably aren't the real reasons you're advocating for change. Just be direct.
Language that straightforward is surprisingly hard to find among the YIMBY croud.
We live in a highly competitive individualistic society where money and power buy all, including the ability to dip into playing zoning games using migration strategies. If people don't like that, they should move to a region which has a society more in accordance with their values.
I can agree to leave his property alone. He doesn't own his neighborhood, though. And anybody should be able to build multifamily housing on their own fucking property. Even if you don't like it. And if you really don't want it to happen, then buy the whole neighborhood. Nobody will force you to put apartments on your own property.
It does affect mine. High housing prices have ripple effects across entire regions. I know people that spend 4 hours of their lives in a car every day because of those ripple effects.
Again: Marc does not own his neighborhood. He owns his house. He can do whatever he wants with his house, but the moment you grant him control over the neighborhood, you grant him rights over everybody else's property.
But his neighborhood owns his neighborhood, and they vote to continue the multifamily zoning ban. Clearly if this was only Marc’s preference, it wouldn’t be law.
Surely the solution is to build more places for people to be employed rather than overcrowding existing ones and forcing people to commute from far away. COVID showed us the office centric commuter world is not necessary. I understand some people must be onsite, but still, drastic commute reductions and spreading out of people is a good thing.
It wasn't law. That is why they are objecting to it...cause the law doesn't ban it.
And no, the solution is to build more housing where people want to live, and let all the whiny nimby chucklefucks move to the places where nobody wants to live. That is, after all, what they want. If Marc Andreesen really hates people living near him, he can easily buy 100 acres in the Nevada desert where nobody would ever dare to build an apartment building.
I would consider zoning codes law. To argue otherwise is pedantic.
Sorry, just because you want to live somewhere, doesn’t entitle you to enough units built there for you to afford it.
I’d love to live in Atherton. But I can’t afford it. I don’t try and get more units built there when the community clearly doesn’t want that, so I choose somewhere else.
But this apartment building wasn't against the zoning code. That's why it was being built. It was just not part of some ambiguous plan created by some random dude. To argue that a completely non-binding plan is law is obtuse.
Just because you live somewhere does not entitle you to control your neighbors property.
By that logic, the country owns the country, and the country should be able to force any part of the country to do what the broader country wants, and that is not considered force because, well, the country owns the country.
You've got it backwards. NIMBYs are the ones doing the forcing through government regulation. NIMBYs want to dictate what I can and can't build on my private property.
NIMBYs (the community and vast majority of single family homeowners) don’t want to see their neighborhoods overcrowded and changed completely by density, because they moved to such a neighborhood to get away from density. So they vote as a group to keep their neighborhoods nice low density places to live.
Meanwhile, YIMBY people in dense areas think they should have the final say over what SFR neighborhoods feel like and how they develop, even though they don’t even live there.
It’s never the other way around. No single family homeowner NIMBYs push back against another apartment building in an already dense area in the city nextdoor. Yet YIMBYs feel so strongly about controlling low density townships they don’t even live in that they advocate for state preemption. That preemption forces those places to change to adopt the YIMBY vision of walkability, density, public transport, and less cars, something few to none of the residents in that community want.
Nimbys don't own their neighborhoods. They own their houses, and they are free to do whatever they want with those houses. If they don't want density in the property that they don't own, the they shouldnt move to places where people want to live. Reno is calling out to them.
The neighborhood owns the neighborhood, and they vote to keep it low density. It’s not like there’s a single homeowner voting to control what the entire city builds.
No, actually they don't vote on zoning. No city has zoning votes...they have city planners who are hired by an appointee of someone that is voted in on a platform that is always way bigger than land use code. We're talking several degrees of separation between votes and land use code.
The closest thing neighborhoods have to votes on density are "town hall" style meetings where the crankiest asshole in the neighborhood shows up and pretends to speak for the entire neighborhood. And inevitably they're wrong, because there are always people that don't want to stay for whatever reason, and they rightfully want the highest price for their property, and that price is always going to be higher if they can sell to a developer which will build high density apartments in high demand locations.
Believe it or not, we actually do have a legal mechanism for entire neighborhoods to vote on density, and it actually has more power than zoning boards...it could prohibit density even where upzoning happens, because it can prohibit the density at the level of a deed covenant. They're called homeowners associations. They suck, and everybody hates them.
If Andreesen can't convince his neighborhood to form a homeowners association, and willingly introduce density-restricting covenants to their deeds, then you can be assured that density restrictions on zoning are actually minority rule...not some community decision.
Sure, YIMBYs want to force NIMBY communities to stop forcing individual homeowners from doing what they want with their own land. It's a justified act of force to prevent an unjustified act of force. If a small community got together and tried to legalize murder (an unjustified act of force on a victim), the broader community has every right to force that community to not do that (a justified act of force to prevent the unjustified force).
Whisper small and base are coming in the next release as well, so look out for that in the next week or two.