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Your point is the same one I’m making. People come here because FANG and tech generally subsidize that movement. It’s great for tech profits and great for that
by DataWorker 7y ago
Your point is the same one I’m making. People come here because FANG and tech generally subsidize that movement. It’s great for tech profits and great for that one guy from Russia or wherever who can make 140k salary, but it’s a net negative for society. The housing crisis is the result. A greedy growth at any cost business culture, not senior citizens trying to avoid displacement in their golden years; that’s what caused the crisis. If those businesses all went belly up like in the dot com bust, we’d have the opposite problem, a housing glut and falling prices. Yet, if you removed all forms of nimbyism, things would remain almost exactly where they are at now. The housing problem is a problem of demand- the whole world can’t move to San Francisco just because that’s what a bunch of tech companies want. Nor can the whole world move to Manhattan or Tokyo or any other place with high housing prices and too many people.
- ScottBurson 7y ago> The housing problem is a problem of demand Prices are set by the balance of demand and supply. The demand isn't going away. The supply is what we can do something about. Even building expensive luxury apartments helps, unless no one can afford them at all (which is not what the builder wants to happen). The people who rent those aren't taking up spaces others could have afforded.
- DataWorker 7y agoDemand is mediated by policy. Tax corporate real estate to create incentives for companies to locate where it’s beneficial to citizens. That’s one way to better manage demand. And we have to manage demand or we create a lot of failed cities like Detroit. Boomtowns are avoidable with sensible policy. We need those policies to keep people from exploiting humans herd like instincts for profit.