4 ms·

Sure, maybe the market is working "just as it should," but if it is: why is that an excuse for all of the collateral damage done to waiters/cooks/hosts/cleaners

Sure, maybe the market is working "just as it should," but if it is: why is that an excuse for all of the collateral damage done to waiters/cooks/hosts/cleaners throughout the whole city? It's an objective fact that the vast majority of the service staff cannot afford to live alone in or near the city they work in, much less support their families. Is that success? Is that fair? Should we really be content to let these people suffer the fear of not being able to put food on their table and a roof over their head simply because the equilibrium point of two lines on a graph says so? Maybe the state of the restaurant economy is fine – I don't doubt that – but what about the service staff who make it up and work there daily? Or is the solution just to get a job in tech? If we're advocating for market-based approaches, though: lower the cost of housing by building more housing, and building it fast. Both affordable and market rate. That would solve a lot of the Bay Area's problems.

lisper 8y ago
No one is forcing anyone to live in sf. So this too is subject to market forces.
- thebradbain 8y ago
  Sure, but there are also valid pressures keeping people there that otherwise can’t afford the cost of living: Family and friends. Support networks are vital for every human. Familiarity with local transportation. SF/the Bay Area’s bus and rail network makes it possible to live without the expense of a car, a necessity in most other cities in the US Professional networks and contacts, which exist even for blue-collar workers, and, admittedly with no data to back this claim up, may be more localized for someone who doesn’t hold a college degree and hence doesn’t have a name or reputation to fall back on when starting from a clean slate. Demographics. Sure, many places may be cheaper to live, but most of them are definitely not as welcoming or safe as San Francisco for, say, a trans woman of color or a gay white male And, last but not least (unless you think everything must have some quantifiable value that is): sentimentality. Would you really like to be forced out of your home involuntarily? If you take one of these people out of their community they grew up in and throw them somewhere in the middle of the Midwest, do you really think they would thrive there lacking everything they had in San Francisco? Do you think displacing the problem until it's out of sight is both sustainable and humane? It's a fallacy to think the majority of people who can't afford to live there are the one's moving there – it's usually the peoples whose livelihoods were long established there that are being forced out. A much simpler solution to trying to tackle all of these problems at once is to, well, build more housing.
  - lisper 8y ago
    I don’t disagree with any of that. The only thing I disagree with is the claim that sf restaurants are suffocating. They aren’t.
lotsofpulp 8y ago
Yes, the solution is to get a job in tech. The purpose of prices is to inform participants in a market what to supply.
- thebradbain 8y ago
  The 1:1 ratio of $ to societal value is something I will always fundamentally disagree with, not least because we don’t live in an economic model: life is messy, chaotic, complicated, and there’s a sizable group of the educated population that would argue it can’t be precisely and accurately quantified. Economics is a tool we can use to improve our society in equitable ways, not some omniscient diety we have to worship blindly. And that’s still my belief after studying economics, too.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Then society (government) should try to fix the problem structurally, by shifting the demand curve and supply curves. Increasing supply of housing, of kids who can perform high wage jobs, etc. The prices coming down will be a marker of successful efforts to make society more equitable. And if everyone wants to live on the California coastal region though, since you can only shift the supply curve of ideal real estate so much without affecting its ideal-ness and then it becomes a problem of how to triage, which thus far has been letting people who can afford it, pay for it. Only other option I see is some type of random lottery.

lisper 8y ago

No one is forcing anyone to live in sf. So this too is subject to market forces.

thebradbain 8y ago
Sure, but there are also valid pressures keeping people there that otherwise can’t afford the cost of living: Family and friends. Support networks are vital for every human. Familiarity with local transportation. SF/the Bay Area’s bus and rail network makes it possible to live without the expense of a car, a necessity in most other cities in the US Professional networks and contacts, which exist even for blue-collar workers, and, admittedly with no data to back this claim up, may be more localized for someone who doesn’t hold a college degree and hence doesn’t have a name or reputation to fall back on when starting from a clean slate. Demographics. Sure, many places may be cheaper to live, but most of them are definitely not as welcoming or safe as San Francisco for, say, a trans woman of color or a gay white male And, last but not least (unless you think everything must have some quantifiable value that is): sentimentality. Would you really like to be forced out of your home involuntarily? If you take one of these people out of their community they grew up in and throw them somewhere in the middle of the Midwest, do you really think they would thrive there lacking everything they had in San Francisco? Do you think displacing the problem until it's out of sight is both sustainable and humane? It's a fallacy to think the majority of people who can't afford to live there are the one's moving there – it's usually the peoples whose livelihoods were long established there that are being forced out. A much simpler solution to trying to tackle all of these problems at once is to, well, build more housing.
- lisper 8y ago
  I don’t disagree with any of that. The only thing I disagree with is the claim that sf restaurants are suffocating. They aren’t.

lotsofpulp 8y ago

Yes, the solution is to get a job in tech. The purpose of prices is to inform participants in a market what to supply.

thebradbain 8y ago
The 1:1 ratio of $ to societal value is something I will always fundamentally disagree with, not least because we don’t live in an economic model: life is messy, chaotic, complicated, and there’s a sizable group of the educated population that would argue it can’t be precisely and accurately quantified. Economics is a tool we can use to improve our society in equitable ways, not some omniscient diety we have to worship blindly. And that’s still my belief after studying economics, too.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Then society (government) should try to fix the problem structurally, by shifting the demand curve and supply curves. Increasing supply of housing, of kids who can perform high wage jobs, etc. The prices coming down will be a marker of successful efforts to make society more equitable. And if everyone wants to live on the California coastal region though, since you can only shift the supply curve of ideal real estate so much without affecting its ideal-ness and then it becomes a problem of how to triage, which thus far has been letting people who can afford it, pay for it. Only other option I see is some type of random lottery.