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>And the "costal cities" mentioned should just be abandoned; there's no hope and nothing will make them affordable. This will basically never happen because th

by gruez 1y ago

>And the "costal cities" mentioned should just be abandoned; there's no hope and nothing will make them affordable. This will basically never happen because the reason why they're expensive is that they're desirable. Supply and demand. Expecting otherwise makes as much sense as "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded" >Instead, all sorts of "subsidies to rich people" should be stopped examples? If you're talking about "affordable housing" programs, aren't those usually means tested?

rayiner 1y ago
That's not quite an accurate statement about supply and demand. It's supply of the thing relative to demand for it. So a pretty niche product can be very expensive if supply is even more limited. So it's entirely fair to say that we should be figuring out how to decouple jobs from these costal cities. Lots of people wouldn't live in NYC if Wall Street was out in Topeka, Kansas instead.
- gruez 1y ago
  >That's not quite an accurate statement about supply and demand. It's supply of the thing relative to demand for it. So a pretty niche product can be very expensive if supply is even more limited. Yes, veblen goods exist, but given that coastal cities also happen to be the most populous cities, and such cities have underbuilt their housing supply for decades, it's pretty obvious that the current housing crisis phenomena is simple supply and demand. >Lots of people wouldn't live in NYC if Wall Street was out in Topeka, Kansas instead. What's preventing Topeka, Kansas from becoming NIMBY and choking off housing supply after it becomes a desirable place to live? After all, silicon valley isn't in new york, it was in California.
Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
> examples? I might consider the mortgage interest tax deduction to be a subsidy to the rich, considering how much you have to be making to buy a house and how much interest you need to be paying to make it worth itemizing your deductions.
- bombcar 1y ago
  The mortgage tax deduction is basically useless to anyone BUT the "well-off" or above anymore, given the SALT limitations and how big the standard deduction is.
bombcar 1y ago
Yes - they are means tested. But why do "poor people" need to live in (insert rich city here)? Why can't the city be entirely filled with millionaires? Because someone needs to work there. So just as Walmart employees being eligible for EBT allows Walmart to pay employees less so does affordable housing indirectly subsidize the city. Without those artificial bandages on the problem, the costal expensive cities would run into a crisis - everyone is a Google or Apple employee, and there's nobody to do any work for under $100/hr. Either they'd have to pay baristas $100/hr, or they'd have to go without, or build a high-speed commuter rail that could bring them in from Bakersfield where prices were reasonable. (By abandoned I mean "stop trying to fix it" and just let the prices go insane.)
- gruez 1y ago
  >Because someone needs to work there. So just as Walmart employees being eligible for EBT allows Walmart to pay employees less so does affordable housing indirectly subsidize the city. 1. How is giving food stamps to walmart employees a subsidy for walmart? Are those people suddenly not going to consume food if they quit walmart? If not, what difference does it make whether they're employed by walmart or not? If the person was not working at walmart and was instead washing windshields at intersections, does that mean that drivers are being subsidized by the EBT? 2. This feels suspiciously like an acceleration argument, ie. "welfare is just a tool of the bourgeois to keep the proletariat from rebelling. We should get rid of it so the proletariat gets angry and starts a revolution!" >Without those artificial bandages on the problem, the costal expensive cities would run into a crisis - everyone is a Google or Apple employee, and there's nobody to do any work for under $100/hr. Either they'd have to pay baristas $100/hr, or they'd have to go without, or build a high-speed commuter rail that could bring them in from Bakersfield where prices were reasonable. ...or they spend 3 hours commuting instead https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-francisco-commute.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-fran...
  - Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
    > How is giving food stamps to walmart employees a subsidy for walmart? If you consider the purpose of a having a job is to pay the bills and buy food, then you're allowing Walmart to not hold up their end of the bargain and then use tax money to fill in the gap. I can already predict your counterargument, because it's one I see a lot on Hacker News. You'll claim "Well that's the wage the worker agreed to", but that's a highly naive point of view. It ignores the fact that workers at the bottom of the economic ladder have zero leverage. They have to take what they can get. Walmart is abusing that position to pay as little as possible while our tax dollars are picking up the slack.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> If you're talking about "affordable housing" programs, aren't those usually means tested? In the dumbest ways possible and usually not continuously. One of my recurring points of advice to founders in New York is to use your year of no income to score a stabilised apartment. More directly, affordable housing is usually used to justify broader construction restrictions. This is why the largest landowning families in New York and San Francisco tend to support them. Other than that, the OBBBA tax cuts, mortgage interest deduction, carried interest deduction and conservation easements should each count as subsidies for the rich.
- gruez 1y ago
  >One of my recurring points of advice to founders in New York is to use your year of no income to score a stabilised apartment. Does this actually work? Aren't the waiting lists years long? Otherwise you don't really need to be a founder to score a rent stabilized apartment. 4 years as a broke college student should be plenty.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Does this actually work? Aren't the waiting lists years long? Yes. I didn’t get it, but a founder I worked with did. Sometimes one gets lucky. And sometimes you spend more than a year broke as a founder. There are also all kinds of head-of-the-line options depending on your race, parents’ college status, et cetera. > 4 years as a broke college student should be plenty You typically have to be a resident to apply. I think they may also explicitly ask about college enrolment.
  - s1artibartfast 1y ago
    I know people that did just that. Get about a million off a SF condo because they were in grad school. About 500K instead of 1.5 million. The trick is you need to have enough money to still afford the reduced mortgage. Basically a perfect fit for a founder with reduce salary, grad intern, or similar. It's almost as if these are the people that designed and voted for these programs

by gruez 1y ago

rayiner 1y ago

That's not quite an accurate statement about supply and demand. It's supply of the thing relative to demand for it. So a pretty niche product can be very expensive if supply is even more limited. So it's entirely fair to say that we should be figuring out how to decouple jobs from these costal cities. Lots of people wouldn't live in NYC if Wall Street was out in Topeka, Kansas instead.

gruez 1y ago
>That's not quite an accurate statement about supply and demand. It's supply of the thing relative to demand for it. So a pretty niche product can be very expensive if supply is even more limited. Yes, veblen goods exist, but given that coastal cities also happen to be the most populous cities, and such cities have underbuilt their housing supply for decades, it's pretty obvious that the current housing crisis phenomena is simple supply and demand. >Lots of people wouldn't live in NYC if Wall Street was out in Topeka, Kansas instead. What's preventing Topeka, Kansas from becoming NIMBY and choking off housing supply after it becomes a desirable place to live? After all, silicon valley isn't in new york, it was in California.

Sohcahtoa82 1y ago

> examples? I might consider the mortgage interest tax deduction to be a subsidy to the rich, considering how much you have to be making to buy a house and how much interest you need to be paying to make it worth itemizing your deductions.

bombcar 1y ago
The mortgage tax deduction is basically useless to anyone BUT the "well-off" or above anymore, given the SALT limitations and how big the standard deduction is.

bombcar 1y ago

Yes - they are means tested. But why do "poor people" need to live in (insert rich city here)? Why can't the city be entirely filled with millionaires? Because someone needs to work there. So just as Walmart employees being eligible for EBT allows Walmart to pay employees less so does affordable housing indirectly subsidize the city. Without those artificial bandages on the problem, the costal expensive cities would run into a crisis - everyone is a Google or Apple employee, and there's nobody to do any work for under $100/hr. Either they'd have to pay baristas $100/hr, or they'd have to go without, or build a high-speed commuter rail that could bring them in from Bakersfield where prices were reasonable. (By abandoned I mean "stop trying to fix it" and just let the prices go insane.)

gruez 1y ago
>Because someone needs to work there. So just as Walmart employees being eligible for EBT allows Walmart to pay employees less so does affordable housing indirectly subsidize the city. 1. How is giving food stamps to walmart employees a subsidy for walmart? Are those people suddenly not going to consume food if they quit walmart? If not, what difference does it make whether they're employed by walmart or not? If the person was not working at walmart and was instead washing windshields at intersections, does that mean that drivers are being subsidized by the EBT? 2. This feels suspiciously like an acceleration argument, ie. "welfare is just a tool of the bourgeois to keep the proletariat from rebelling. We should get rid of it so the proletariat gets angry and starts a revolution!" >Without those artificial bandages on the problem, the costal expensive cities would run into a crisis - everyone is a Google or Apple employee, and there's nobody to do any work for under $100/hr. Either they'd have to pay baristas $100/hr, or they'd have to go without, or build a high-speed commuter rail that could bring them in from Bakersfield where prices were reasonable. ...or they spend 3 hours commuting instead https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-francisco-commute.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-fran...
- Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
  > How is giving food stamps to walmart employees a subsidy for walmart? If you consider the purpose of a having a job is to pay the bills and buy food, then you're allowing Walmart to not hold up their end of the bargain and then use tax money to fill in the gap. I can already predict your counterargument, because it's one I see a lot on Hacker News. You'll claim "Well that's the wage the worker agreed to", but that's a highly naive point of view. It ignores the fact that workers at the bottom of the economic ladder have zero leverage. They have to take what they can get. Walmart is abusing that position to pay as little as possible while our tax dollars are picking up the slack.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> If you're talking about "affordable housing" programs, aren't those usually means tested? In the dumbest ways possible and usually not continuously. One of my recurring points of advice to founders in New York is to use your year of no income to score a stabilised apartment. More directly, affordable housing is usually used to justify broader construction restrictions. This is why the largest landowning families in New York and San Francisco tend to support them. Other than that, the OBBBA tax cuts, mortgage interest deduction, carried interest deduction and conservation easements should each count as subsidies for the rich.

gruez 1y ago
>One of my recurring points of advice to founders in New York is to use your year of no income to score a stabilised apartment. Does this actually work? Aren't the waiting lists years long? Otherwise you don't really need to be a founder to score a rent stabilized apartment. 4 years as a broke college student should be plenty.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Does this actually work? Aren't the waiting lists years long? Yes. I didn’t get it, but a founder I worked with did. Sometimes one gets lucky. And sometimes you spend more than a year broke as a founder. There are also all kinds of head-of-the-line options depending on your race, parents’ college status, et cetera. > 4 years as a broke college student should be plenty You typically have to be a resident to apply. I think they may also explicitly ask about college enrolment.
- s1artibartfast 1y ago
  I know people that did just that. Get about a million off a SF condo because they were in grad school. About 500K instead of 1.5 million. The trick is you need to have enough money to still afford the reduced mortgage. Basically a perfect fit for a founder with reduce salary, grad intern, or similar. It's almost as if these are the people that designed and voted for these programs