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> Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world? Yes, they do. Read any thread on a vaguely left-leaning sub

• Spivak 5y ago
  If you can’t afford to live in the city where you work then it’s pretty much the definition of “not a living wage.” Like are we really at the point where we’re totally fine with people commuting an hour one way every workday to a shitty minimum wage job instead of just building affordable modest housing reserved for people working in the city.
  • tluyben2 5y ago
    How? If you can travel back and forth and that makes it work, what is the problem? You can hate it, sure, but, at least where I live, people commute 3+ hours/day to make a nice living while living cheap. What is wrong with that?
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      The increase in the world’s entropy is not priced into the commuting costs, so it is artificially cheap living. Assuming an inhabitable planet with clean air and water is a goal, then commuting 3 hours would not be cheap.
      • tluyben2 5y ago
        You are right, but you can stimulate wfh and stimulate companies to spread out more. The fact a lot of people are against that (including here on HN) shows that it's all great, but not in my backyard.
  • nameisname 5y ago
    It's not the wage that needs to change it would be the prices of housing in the city. This can't change because it's not determined by some governing body. It's called gentrification. It's currently happening to me. I could not afford to buy my house now and I just bought it a few years ago. Of course there still needs to be staff in the area working retail etc. but I haven't seen anyone over 25 in a store near me for over a year.
    • fennecfoxen 5y ago
      It’s the natural consequences of policies enacted by many governing bodies. Cities with land use restrictions and onerous zoning restrictions where they are allergic to highways and only build bad public transit run by incompetents, built by corrupt contractors and expensive unions? The prices are substantially the fault of the local governance. This is why people move out of San Francisco and New York and Chicago.
      • ForHackernews 5y ago
        You're almost laughably wrong: Chicago is super affordable[0] compared to those others, and it has great public transit. [0] https://livingcost.org/cost/chicago/san-francisco https://livingcost.org/cost/chicago/san-francisco
    • hi_im_miles 5y ago
      I think absentee ownership and zoning laws have a fundamental impact on the availability of housing. It seems outside of governmental concern because their impact is already so normal. It’s normal for rich people to own/rent land they don’t occupy or use in perpetuity. It’s normal to see almost everything zoned for car dependent, single-family housing.
      • FredPret 5y ago
        Landlordship is older than high rent
    • Spivak 5y ago
  • Jensson 5y ago
    If a city has 1 million jobs but only homes for 800k workers, then you will always have 200k workers who are priced out of homes. Or if you do it the communist way and assign homes with arbitrary price ceilings, you still have 200k people without homes although now it is the 200k most recent immigrants and not the 200k poorest, but the problem is still there. So what do you suggest we do about that except build more homes?
    • rtlfe 5y ago
      > So what do you suggest we do about that except build more homes? Why are you trying to make this complicated? Just get rid of density caps so that developers build more apartments. Problem solved with zero cost to taxpayers.
      • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        >Why are you trying to make this complicated? Just get rid of density caps so that developers build more apartments. Problem solved with zero cost to taxpayers. Because "better a thousand rental units go un-built than let one slum lord construct a substandard basement apartment" or some other garbage like that. Basically people keep trying to set a quality floor that society mostly isn't rich enough to afford and most land can't be developed enough to justify then acts surprised when the actual densification that happens is only a slow trickle.
• antifa 5y ago
  I can't believe people are so detached from reality that they feel entitled to live within driving distance of their job...
  • lazide 5y ago
    Within a specific, ideal job they always wanted and got without having to make hard tradeoffs somewhere, or do a ton of searching? This is what folks are talking about. Expecting things to just fall into place 'just because' without having to do the legwork to actually make/find something workable.
    • hakfoo 5y ago
      It's an entirely solvable problem at the data level. We know where the employers and residential zones are. We could put together a model to minimize average commute time. The problem is that we need to have a grand "rehoming" moment to deliver it. The day where everyone gets assigned a new residence in accordance with the optimization scheme. A day that would doubtless be deferred to long past the heat-death of the universe in endless court challenges by those who ended up on the losing side of the deal in some way. In a way, the fact we still have powerful regimes which aren't tied down to "rule of law", and specifically the "property rights as sacred" segment of it gives me hope; I'd expect to see this day occur in Beijing long before it happened in San Francisco.
      • lazide 5y ago
        100% agree. Most cities in the US (not just SF, but definitely SF) are locked in this bizarre ‘you can’t make it better because you’d stub my toe’ mode that enforces stasis. SF in particular is in this bizarre Byzantine political deadlock where it seems the only thing the city is allowing itself to do is stuff that it knows doesn’t work.
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    In Europe, you could easily get that, except the car or driving part.
• throwawayHN378 5y ago