Apparel markets are much more free and competitive than housing markets, and have basically no restrictions on supply. Yet, the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen. And we get incredibly cheap incredibly low-quality garbage.

These things are much more complex than simplistic single-variable models.

This is substantially better than really bad apartments that are expensive or nice apartments that are very expensive!

It is not actually more complex, you don't spend ~40% of CPI on apparel.

I don't think clothing quality has fallen. Quite the opposite. We are able to buy high quality clothing at a very low price. More advanced materials, more consistent construction, better construction, greater selection, etc.

Much of what you can buy today did not even exist 30 years ago. For example, trail running shoes more or less did not exist. Perhaps you could have had a pair custom made, at a high price, with the worse materials available at the time, but today you can them "off the shelf".

Even the many shirts I've received for free are very high quality and have endured years of abuse.

> the quality of available clothing across the world have fallen

Do you have a source for this? Anecdotes along the lines of "they don't make 'em like they used to" are incredibly common but often fail to stand up to scrutiny.

Circumstantially, the dominance of fast fashion, produced quickly and sold cheaply, suggests that some aspect of production is more "efficient" than historically so. I've seen YouTube fashion experts explain exactly how (lower quality fabrics, simpler and less durable sewing, cuts that use less fabric than would be so in higher quality garments), and while I'm not experienced enough to corroborate, they were convincing.

I mean by that logic wouldn't the cheap house just cost even less? What about housing prevents it from being a race to the bottom like every other product?

Like yes a nice pair of boots costs more and you do get more value out of them compared to Amazon basics boots.. but far more people end up buying the cheap option because it's cheap and available.

When you say "like every other product" - if you're interested in me really answering your question seriously, give me an example product category. I usually use cell phones to demonstrate, but most major consumer products will do.

It seems like fewer restrictions would mean more garbage getting built.

The restrictions, paradoxically, are what cause garbage! when the unit you build is in incredibly high demand, you do not have to build good quality, someone will pay you for it. If you are competing with other people building for the same rental market, you can't get away with that.

Bundling all regulation into a single monolith is a classic mistake.

Some regulations are bad. Some regulations are good.

The abundance types do not want to remove good regulations, like structural integrity or fire safety regs.

They want to remove bad regulations, like parking minimums or building height limits.

Please understand this very important distinction.

Fewer regulatory roadblocks like zoning would lead to more supply, which would lead to more competition, which would lead to better quality and cheaper rents.

At least in cities, it will probably just lead to more high-end housing that's bought up by people who don't even live there. The market doesn't work with so much income inequality.

High end housing takes pressure off of moderately high end housing, which takes pressure off mid end housing... all the way down the line. Housing supply simply takes pressure off the cost of living for everyone.

Depends on the restrictions. Not being allowed to cast a shadow on the neighbor’s zucchini garden or having to pay off permit expediters has no impact on building quality, mandating wood vs cardboard does.

The idea is that there will be more competition.

Well that's what they say, but it seems like there should already be enough competition for people to cause less garbage to be built, and it's not working, they just build it anyway.

My town has a bunch of half empty new buildings that are keeping their prices high instead of competing on price (they're also garbage construction, so they didn't compete on quality either). Apparently it makes more financial sense to the owner to keep empty units instead of competing because of the value of snagging a few tenants at higher rents or something.

More realistically: right now it can take years to get approval to build somewhere, only specific builds for specific places.