Noah’s Ark. Wood engraving after a drawing by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine (German painter and engraver, 1845 – 1921), published in 1880.
Getty
Repetition is a device in teaching and preaching. “Let me say it again,” or, “It’s worth repeating,” are phrases that precede restatement of an essential fact, a nail that must be hammered at again and again to join together pieces of a larger idea or concept. In artistic expression, repetition is also typical of minimalism, what the Wikipedia entry on the topic describes as a work designed “to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts.” When it comes to the economics of housing, the nail and the note that must be hit again, and again, and again is, “supply.”
An especially useful article on minimalism in music, A Brief History of Minimalism, was posted almost a decade ago by Fact, an online journal of music. In it, Steve Reich whose work stretches back almost fifty years describes minimalism itself in minimalist terms.
[Reich] outlines the idea of self-determining musical process, music that “facilitates closely detailed listening”. He memorably compared listening to minimalist music to “watching the minute hand of a watch – you can perceive it moving only after you observe it for a while”
The minimalism of preaching and music come together in Reich’s seminal It’s Gonna Rain (1965), a work that many might reasonably argue isn’t music at all. The sounds are taken from a sermon and in Part II the preacher uses the tragic image of the people who didn’t believe Noah and found themselves locked out of the ark, knocking over and over again on the locked door of the ark, doomed to drown because they didn’t believe it was going to rain.
Repetition is annoying, grating on the ear and conscience of the listener. I realized a while ago that I am a housing minimalist. There is a sense each day that I’ve said everything that could be possibly said about housing economics, over and over and over again, especially challenging the notion that somehow taxing, fining, feeing, and restricting housing will somehow make it cheaper.
So the series that follows is an effort to, yet again, call together many of the same phrases: more jobs, more housing, fewer rules and restrictions on opportunity, reduced risk for private investors, fairness, efficiency, supply, the price system, and, of course, emphasizing that the enemy of poor people isn’t the greed of developers, builders, and people who rent their private property, but inflation caused by government regulation at the behest of ideologues seeking to accrue personal and political power.
What will follow is an expansion of a presentation I have made and will continue to make in front of live audiences in an effort to break through the headlines, clicks, and distractions to get to the essence of what we need to change the direction of the country’s discussion of housing and economics in general.
Techno producer Robert Hood is quoted in the Fact article expressing the need for minimalism, a point as true for the discussion of housing economics as it was for music a decade ago.
Minimalism is not going to stop,” he said, “Because it’s a direct reflection of the way the world is going. We’re stripping down and realizing that we need to focus on what’s essential in our lives.”
This is especially true at a time when Yes In My Back Yard (YIMBY) efforts to elide supply side economics with socialism are distracting conservatives and people who acknowledge the reality of the price system from getting on the boat and underway with dramatic and fundamental deregulation of the housing economy.