4 ms·

That is only going to help more wealthy people move to the cities and take more housing on their own firstly, especially because they will be advertising "new"

That is only going to help more wealthy people move to the cities and take more housing on their own firstly, especially because they will be advertising "new" apartments and thus ask for higher price points. There isn't a very large city without some kind of housing shortage right now. Hacker news seems predominantly upper-class but many articles complain about housing in SF/SV. It seems to me that if housing was reduced, it would just be more upperclass moving to SF/SV instead of the lowerclass. So I don't see how more housing would ultimately fix the issue. Maybe it would help, but fix?

eru 10y ago
Land Value Tax is the answer. Incidentally, it's biggest proponent, Henry George, who kicked of the late 19th century wave of Progressives hailed from SF.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  Proponents of storing wealth in another mechanism other than basically land banking need to work out a more marketable and approachable explanation. I only found Georgism after a multi-decade circuitous, torturous inquiry into why the hell median income-based saving for a house was consistently outstripped by housing cost inflation in all top 50 US cities. In an era where economic value is increasingly defined by cognitive input per unit volume/mass (what I call "cognitive density"), it makes decreasing sense to imbue land with wealth store function.
  - eru 10y ago
    That's a pretty weak consideration. Even if `give people the ability to store wealth' was an overriding imperative, what's wrong with letting them buy a lump of gold or Google stock?
    - yourapostasy 10y ago
      I have nothing against vesting the wealth into gold. I'm not keen on relying upon secondary markets for wealth storage; bond markets for that purpose are more aligned to what I advocate. I'm on the fence with tying energy storage to wealth storage, still reading up on a thermodynamic basis of economic structures. I see lots of negative externalities to using preferential credit instruments in a debt-backed monetary system securing land as a store of wealth, especially for late-stage generations like the Millenials and later are experiencing first-hand. The process takes many generations to play out the stage we're at, so it builds up vested interests until some final set of bag holders gets the sucker punch. They (Millenials and later) are on the wrong side of an asset inflation to wage inflation ratio curve function that looks ugly and not resolvable without tremendous disruption to world asset markets. In an agrarian or even industrial development era, it makes sense that land is a large direct contributor to output profits, and to ascribe wealth storage to it as the improvements that sit on top are enhanced. To my unsophisticated and untrained layman's sense, this reasoning starts to fall apart as industrialization is increasingly mechanized and automated, but there is still a tiny shred of reasoning. I can't find even a slim reasoning for continuing the practice when the land itself doesn't contribute directly to the economic output, which I sense is the case when cognitive effort is the majority input to economic output. Land value then in a commercial real estate context starts to reflect a proximity to supply chain networks where the supply chain is for physically-located talent (SV). That makes sense, though I'm interested to see the impact if VR/AR matures and virtual offices with startlingly-realistic telepresence become feasible (I predict the first 3-6 generations of that tech won't have an impact, and only the later generations will). Where the reasoning really decouples for me however, is residential real estate. There, I would have expected pricing to essentially follow median wages. Effectively modeling median housing prices as a put option: term length the duration of the median mortgage, strike price the wage earner's expected career earnings over that duration lining up with the house price (or some appropriate fraction thereof). That didn't happen, so I'm misinterpreting something, or don't understand something about using real estate as a store of value, or the market is just staying irrational longer than I am expecting. I dunno, just rambling here, please correct what is certainly my poor interpretation of what's going on here. I'm just a layman trying to figure out why residential real estate prices seem decoupled from median local income in so many geographies at the same time. I started wandering down these ponderings when I realized that as a remote worker in the US, only some pretty far out places had escaped the residential real estate inflation, whereas in the 70's driving only an hour out of town led to a drastic 75%+ drop in per acre prices. I ended up staying pretty close to an urban area, and paying off my property as quickly as possible, but I feel terrible for the younger generations getting completely screwed.

eru 10y ago

Land Value Tax is the answer. Incidentally, it's biggest proponent, Henry George, who kicked of the late 19th century wave of Progressives hailed from SF.

yourapostasy 10y ago
Proponents of storing wealth in another mechanism other than basically land banking need to work out a more marketable and approachable explanation. I only found Georgism after a multi-decade circuitous, torturous inquiry into why the hell median income-based saving for a house was consistently outstripped by housing cost inflation in all top 50 US cities. In an era where economic value is increasingly defined by cognitive input per unit volume/mass (what I call "cognitive density"), it makes decreasing sense to imbue land with wealth store function.
- eru 10y ago
  That's a pretty weak consideration. Even if `give people the ability to store wealth' was an overriding imperative, what's wrong with letting them buy a lump of gold or Google stock?
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    I have nothing against vesting the wealth into gold. I'm not keen on relying upon secondary markets for wealth storage; bond markets for that purpose are more aligned to what I advocate. I'm on the fence with tying energy storage to wealth storage, still reading up on a thermodynamic basis of economic structures. I see lots of negative externalities to using preferential credit instruments in a debt-backed monetary system securing land as a store of wealth, especially for late-stage generations like the Millenials and later are experiencing first-hand. The process takes many generations to play out the stage we're at, so it builds up vested interests until some final set of bag holders gets the sucker punch. They (Millenials and later) are on the wrong side of an asset inflation to wage inflation ratio curve function that looks ugly and not resolvable without tremendous disruption to world asset markets. In an agrarian or even industrial development era, it makes sense that land is a large direct contributor to output profits, and to ascribe wealth storage to it as the improvements that sit on top are enhanced. To my unsophisticated and untrained layman's sense, this reasoning starts to fall apart as industrialization is increasingly mechanized and automated, but there is still a tiny shred of reasoning. I can't find even a slim reasoning for continuing the practice when the land itself doesn't contribute directly to the economic output, which I sense is the case when cognitive effort is the majority input to economic output. Land value then in a commercial real estate context starts to reflect a proximity to supply chain networks where the supply chain is for physically-located talent (SV). That makes sense, though I'm interested to see the impact if VR/AR matures and virtual offices with startlingly-realistic telepresence become feasible (I predict the first 3-6 generations of that tech won't have an impact, and only the later generations will). Where the reasoning really decouples for me however, is residential real estate. There, I would have expected pricing to essentially follow median wages. Effectively modeling median housing prices as a put option: term length the duration of the median mortgage, strike price the wage earner's expected career earnings over that duration lining up with the house price (or some appropriate fraction thereof). That didn't happen, so I'm misinterpreting something, or don't understand something about using real estate as a store of value, or the market is just staying irrational longer than I am expecting. I dunno, just rambling here, please correct what is certainly my poor interpretation of what's going on here. I'm just a layman trying to figure out why residential real estate prices seem decoupled from median local income in so many geographies at the same time. I started wandering down these ponderings when I realized that as a remote worker in the US, only some pretty far out places had escaped the residential real estate inflation, whereas in the 70's driving only an hour out of town led to a drastic 75%+ drop in per acre prices. I ended up staying pretty close to an urban area, and paying off my property as quickly as possible, but I feel terrible for the younger generations getting completely screwed.