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> if I move into a city with a limited housing supply, I'm going to have bid the prices up so I can have a nice place to live. Sorry about that, everyone else.

> if I move into a city with a limited housing supply, I'm going to have bid the prices up so I can have a nice place to live. Sorry about that, everyone else. Why can't you try to get something nice for the "going rate"? And how does money not enable you to make just about any place nice? Use any remaing lack of niceness to fuel your lobbying for affordable housing being built. Not that I want to pick on you, but: Of course it's extremely easy to say, the heck with it. I'm just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority and do the best I can within them. Sure, you can do that. But that's not acting like a decent person. You can walk down the street and be hungry. You see a kid eating an ice cream cone and you notice there's no cop around and you can take the ice cream cone from him because you're bigger and walk away. You can do that. Probably there are people who do. We call them "pathological." On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures we call them "normal." But it's just as pathological. It's just the pathology of the general society. -- Noam Chomsky Just because people are poor, i.e. defenseless, doesn't mean others should be able to have their home automatically. You might as well say "when I ride on a bus that is very full with mostly strong people, I have to pull an old lady from her seat, so I can sit somewhere nice". No, you don't have to. Apart from dying and involuntary muscle reflexes there is nothing anyone has to do.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
For the one who downvoted me without comment: You pick a random web dev forum, and I post there suggesting my business plan of low maintainence (for me), super cheap websites to get a start with freelancing or even disrupt it. People will say I shouldn't undercut market rates. And then I will say what the poster said, "I am a nice guy, and I try to help others on stack overflow, but if I want a nice career, I have to underbid. Sorry to everyone else." You hold the stopwatch and see how long it takes for me to get flamed to hell and back. [the fact that pricing low doesn't really lead to a "nice career" is besides the point btw, you get the idea anyway]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ivanplenty 13y ago
  I didn't downvote you (just catching up to posts), but I wanted to thank you for providing a contrasting view (via Chomsky no less!) to the conundrum: Should I pay the crazy housing prices or should I go elsewhere? I don't know what the right answer is, but I appreciate different vantages. You may be surprised how much of what does get posted here is full of bias (confirmation bias, selection, survival, small sample sizes, etc). We're human, it's normal. I've seen some posts about YC competitors get flagged off the front page while other YC-related firms tend to get more airtime, so-to-speak. Is it intentional or just a reflection of the community? I don't know, but I do know you can't take it personally. Thank you for contributing and helping round out this complicated discussion.
bmelton 13y ago
> Just because people are poor, i.e. defenseless, doesn't mean others should be able to have their home automatically. In all fairness, if he's buying a home, someone else is selling it. I don't see anywhere he suggests that he's nefariously evicting people from their homes so that he can reside within them and laugh maniacally. In short, he's buying empty homes, or homes that the owners are moving out of. He's not displacing anybody in doing so.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  It happens indirectly, and gradually. Doesn't make it any less real, or this discussion wouldn't even exist. If more affluent people outright refused to pay exorbitant rents were jacked up in expectation of their arrival, what do you think would happen? Would rents drop back to the level that was perfectly profitable "yesterday", or would the owners just let them sit empty to spite everybody? One can still live in a really big house/apartment, you know, I'm talking about high rents for small/normal ones in areas that suddenly became hip, obviously - and where new housing is needed, displacement is hardly a solution.
  - bmelton 13y ago
    Yes, but it's only indirectly that it happens as a result of the buyers. The property owners are perfectly free to lease their properties for less than the market will bear. I don't necessarily agree that there's a "bad guy" at all, as I believe the market will eventually correct for this, but if there is a bad guy, it isn't the buyers paying above fair market wages for a place to live, it's the landowners evicting (presumably) perfectly good tenants to capitalize on those above-market rates. Either way, if people truly can't afford to live and work in San Francisco, then they won't, and businesses that need to hire for positions will necessarily increase wages to compensate. If the disparity is as bad as "Eviction Free SF" makes it out to be, then Googlers won't have any complaints about paying $30 for a hamburger to justify the necessary increase in employee wages.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Going as far as "the market can bear" with something like housing to me is a pathological aspect of society. You simply take for granted that it's okay to shuffle people around like that. Also, the market adopts to money, not people. Only if people spend to reflect their peopledom, it indirectly does.
minimax 13y ago
I was trying to put myself in the position of the guy who wrote the article. I.e. someone who is a "progressive" but moved into SF and has a decent income. If I'm moving to SF and there isn't any new construction to buy, I'm going to have to bid against the existing residents for a place to live. It seemed like the point of the article was like "Look, not all us SF techies are assholes because we don't say asshole things" and my point was more that it's the economic consequences of your lifestyle that have the biggest impact on the city's preexisting long-term residents.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  How about this: if you are rich and move to a place where this gentrification stuff probably applies to you, help out the local residents in whatever they do to work for sane rents and for building more housing where needed. Don't be a stranger, you know? Even better if you can inform yourself what "normal" rents are in the area, and try to spot offers that look like they have been recently modernized just to raise rents a lot. Or other ways that involve caring about the people being displaced, instead of just saying "it's all in the game tho", just because technically every step is correct and sanctified, and we are all just very small parts of the end result, doesn't mean we don't have responsibility. I'm not trying to "you have to do that, yesterday, or you're a bad person and I'm not".. I'm mostly asking, can we consider if it would make for a nicer world to live in if everybody did that? If that was "the thing to do", instead of "fuck you got mine" being the norm? I think where people live is kinda integral and important to their whole quality of life. Like, a human right. So I would argue that "being kicked out" is worse than not having found a super nice place and instead just an okay one. If people with money wanted to move somewhere in droves, and couldn't, because they refuse to take part in raising rent for others, how long would it take for new stuff to get build? The poor have no lobby, and if they don't even have solidarity, they are fucked.

PavlovsCat 13y ago

For the one who downvoted me without comment: You pick a random web dev forum, and I post there suggesting my business plan of low maintainence (for me), super cheap websites to get a start with freelancing or even disrupt it. People will say I shouldn't undercut market rates. And then I will say what the poster said, "I am a nice guy, and I try to help others on stack overflow, but if I want a nice career, I have to underbid. Sorry to everyone else." You hold the stopwatch and see how long it takes for me to get flamed to hell and back. [the fact that pricing low doesn't really lead to a "nice career" is besides the point btw, you get the idea anyway]

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ivanplenty 13y ago
I didn't downvote you (just catching up to posts), but I wanted to thank you for providing a contrasting view (via Chomsky no less!) to the conundrum: Should I pay the crazy housing prices or should I go elsewhere? I don't know what the right answer is, but I appreciate different vantages. You may be surprised how much of what does get posted here is full of bias (confirmation bias, selection, survival, small sample sizes, etc). We're human, it's normal. I've seen some posts about YC competitors get flagged off the front page while other YC-related firms tend to get more airtime, so-to-speak. Is it intentional or just a reflection of the community? I don't know, but I do know you can't take it personally. Thank you for contributing and helping round out this complicated discussion.

bmelton 13y ago

> Just because people are poor, i.e. defenseless, doesn't mean others should be able to have their home automatically. In all fairness, if he's buying a home, someone else is selling it. I don't see anywhere he suggests that he's nefariously evicting people from their homes so that he can reside within them and laugh maniacally. In short, he's buying empty homes, or homes that the owners are moving out of. He's not displacing anybody in doing so.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
It happens indirectly, and gradually. Doesn't make it any less real, or this discussion wouldn't even exist. If more affluent people outright refused to pay exorbitant rents were jacked up in expectation of their arrival, what do you think would happen? Would rents drop back to the level that was perfectly profitable "yesterday", or would the owners just let them sit empty to spite everybody? One can still live in a really big house/apartment, you know, I'm talking about high rents for small/normal ones in areas that suddenly became hip, obviously - and where new housing is needed, displacement is hardly a solution.
- bmelton 13y ago
  Yes, but it's only indirectly that it happens as a result of the buyers. The property owners are perfectly free to lease their properties for less than the market will bear. I don't necessarily agree that there's a "bad guy" at all, as I believe the market will eventually correct for this, but if there is a bad guy, it isn't the buyers paying above fair market wages for a place to live, it's the landowners evicting (presumably) perfectly good tenants to capitalize on those above-market rates. Either way, if people truly can't afford to live and work in San Francisco, then they won't, and businesses that need to hire for positions will necessarily increase wages to compensate. If the disparity is as bad as "Eviction Free SF" makes it out to be, then Googlers won't have any complaints about paying $30 for a hamburger to justify the necessary increase in employee wages.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Going as far as "the market can bear" with something like housing to me is a pathological aspect of society. You simply take for granted that it's okay to shuffle people around like that. Also, the market adopts to money, not people. Only if people spend to reflect their peopledom, it indirectly does.

minimax 13y ago

I was trying to put myself in the position of the guy who wrote the article. I.e. someone who is a "progressive" but moved into SF and has a decent income. If I'm moving to SF and there isn't any new construction to buy, I'm going to have to bid against the existing residents for a place to live. It seemed like the point of the article was like "Look, not all us SF techies are assholes because we don't say asshole things" and my point was more that it's the economic consequences of your lifestyle that have the biggest impact on the city's preexisting long-term residents.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
How about this: if you are rich and move to a place where this gentrification stuff probably applies to you, help out the local residents in whatever they do to work for sane rents and for building more housing where needed. Don't be a stranger, you know? Even better if you can inform yourself what "normal" rents are in the area, and try to spot offers that look like they have been recently modernized just to raise rents a lot. Or other ways that involve caring about the people being displaced, instead of just saying "it's all in the game tho", just because technically every step is correct and sanctified, and we are all just very small parts of the end result, doesn't mean we don't have responsibility. I'm not trying to "you have to do that, yesterday, or you're a bad person and I'm not".. I'm mostly asking, can we consider if it would make for a nicer world to live in if everybody did that? If that was "the thing to do", instead of "fuck you got mine" being the norm? I think where people live is kinda integral and important to their whole quality of life. Like, a human right. So I would argue that "being kicked out" is worse than not having found a super nice place and instead just an okay one. If people with money wanted to move somewhere in droves, and couldn't, because they refuse to take part in raising rent for others, how long would it take for new stuff to get build? The poor have no lobby, and if they don't even have solidarity, they are fucked.