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> determined by ... political processes Part of which is playing out here where people of privilege are working out a story that allows them to displace an old

> determined by ... political processes Part of which is playing out here where people of privilege are working out a story that allows them to displace an older population dependent on rent control so that they can get that housing.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
Yes, if you believe that the political process is controlled by the wealthy and you oppose the wealthy, then allowing more construction is your best bet. My concern with the political process is the exact opposite - it doesn't favor the wealthy but it should. In either case, eliminating the malthusian constraints on housing are a solution to the problem. See also this article on moreright illustrating how your view and mine are not strongly in opposition: http://www.moreright.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-tyranny/ http://www.moreright.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-tyran...
- whybroke 12y ago
  How would San Francisco be better with 2 million people than with 1 million? Should it grow until it is as crowded as the cities people are fleeing in order to come to SF? What will happen is not that increased supply will have any effect but demand from talented people will drop as SF becomes as characterless as any other cheaper US city. As crowding rises the value of labor relative to land will fall, something very beneficial to the wealthy and harmful to the employed. On a site where conjecture about immorality pills and "the singularity" abound, how is it supposed that population density can grow forever and everyone be better off for it? Mega-cities are the characteristic of the third world and they are paragons of failure. Or will SF uniquely continue to grow infinitely owing to killer apps and the innate superiority of its people?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    As crowding rises the value of labor relative to land will fall, something very beneficial to the wealthy and harmful to the employed. It's also beneficial to the unemployed who want to go to SF. Saying it's generally harmful to the workers is only true if you ignore those left out by the restrictions.
    - whybroke 12y ago
      Very true. But the unemployed and their (inevitably reduced wages) are the result of a larger failed system. Effectively the market considers them excess population for their area. And as business expenses rise to cover the inflated cost of living (eg rent) there will be fewer and fewer jobs available (eg no unemployed teacher looks to San Francisco). And cost of living will rise with population density while wages fall. Also there are plenty of unemployed people in SF too namely the huge homeless population. As the real value of wages drop their numbers increase. Since calls here for justice and opportunities seems strangely focused on middle class people, I should ask how that new person's arrival would affect these other equally unemployed people. If you believe in "market forces" then unemployment and low wages are not solved by adding more people. Indeed individuals would be happier and communities stronger if they were not often up rooted by market whims. Especially in old age. So the ideal solution for employment, wages and quality of life would not assume people are infinitely portable human resources.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        And cost of living will rise with population density I don't see how you justify this, and therefore the rest of the argument. What mechanism do you see that implies that increasing population density leads to higher costs of living? I think you are falling into a third cause fallacy mistake. While there is certainly correlation between higher pollution density and higher living costs, it's not one that causes the other, but a third factor that causes both: wanting to move there. The reason rents are higher is because people are willing to bid more to live in SF; preventing population density will do nothing to curb that desire. But it can reduce costs of living, by allowing rents to drop and therefore reduce the need to bid higher and higher.
        whybroke 12y ago
        Wanting to move there is also a believable cause of high cost of living. But since housing prices are out pacing wages worldwide, I think not. Indeed the NY Times reports 90 cities as "unaffordable" in the US alone.[1] If there is a theoretical supply and demand argument that building always drives down costs then there is a theoretical argument that excess supply of labor drives down the value of labor. If there is an observational argument that large population densities do not lower wages then there is the observation that high density cities do not have low cost of living. My claim is that the price of housing will rise to at least 30% of wages no mater how many or few units you have. If you really wanted to lower rent rather than shuffling around who is living where, you'd need enormously radical change to land ownership laws and incentives. The things that made the twentieth century unique in history for the relative wealth of ordinary people. Things now being reversed. Another apparently impossible option would be to make other cites into bastions of free thinking diversity, tolerance and creativity so there would be innovation and demand to live there instead of fleeing them for the few cities that have those things and the wealth that comes with them. But the path we're apparently going to follow, deregulation, which will do exactly nothing, could nicely degrade the character of one city after another which would reduce demand and that might slow price rise. It'd take surprisingly little to turn SF into another Huston. But don't expect the people with a choice to stick around a characterless city among a sea of less imaginative people looking just to get rich quick. [1]http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/more-renters-find-30-affordability-ratio-unattainable.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/more-renters-find...
  - SamReidHughes 12y ago
    It would be better, clearly, because now 2 million people have found it the best place to live instead of 1 million.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    Lets look at a list of megacities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul... Bangalore, Istanbul, London, Mumbai, NYC and Pune are all wonderful places and I'd be happy to live in any of them. Mumbai in particular is a place I actively plan to spend at least a year in. (I've already lived in NYC, London and Pune.) I can't say I love Delhi or Hyderabad, but you could certainly do worse. By the standards of the west, Mumbai or Delhi certainly are "paragons of failure". That's the problem with living in a developing country. It's not a failure of density, the low density regions of India are vastly worse.
    - whybroke 12y ago
      So if India and all its cities had 4 times as many people would it be better off? The population is so high that wages are so low that talented people are fleeing the country. Indeed if mega-cities were a good thing then Pakistan, Nigeria and the Congo should be doing better than Japan. Excepting just 6 out of 84, your list thoroughly proves my point; over crowding correlates with societies with suppressed labor value. And by the way, in spite of adding endless supply of housing, none of these cities have cheaper real-estate than the rest of their country.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        Indeed if mega-cities were a good thing then Pakistan, Nigeria and the Congo should be doing better than Japan. If universal healthcare was a good thing then people in Rwanda should be more healthy than in the US. They aren't, so universal healthcare is bad. Find the flaw in this argument and you'll find the one in yours.
        whybroke 12y ago
        41/58 countries with universal healthcare are in the developed world. 84/100 mega-cites are in the third world. I don't know how this could confuse you but feel free to google inductive reasoning.
  - erispoe 12y ago
    People are not "fleeing" other cities to come to SF because it's undense. They come to SF because SF has jobs and it's nice to live here. I'm somewhat unconvinced that more density in SF would make it less nice for all the people coming here. High prices is not beneficial to the wealthy, it's only beneficial to homeowners. A vast majority of tech workers in SF are renters, who can afford high rents but would nonetheless prefer them cheaper.
  - brc 12y ago
    This is essentially the 'too many of you, just enough of me' argument. If you want to cap populations on cities, then do so explicitly and not through back-door means. Otherwise you have to let them ebb and flow as people desire.
- collyw 12y ago
  "it doesn't favor the wealthy but it should" Wtf? How do you get to that conclusion when inequality has been growing for the last 40 years?
  - specialist 12y ago
    Didn't you read the link? Neo-techno-crypto-pseudo-anarcho-cheerios-reactionaryification-antimodernism. Illuminating.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    A wealthy software developer produces a lot of value in an hour, whereas a poor barista does not. If the developer lives 10 minutes from work while the barista commutes for 1 hour, the developer has more time to spend on productive activities. The world is then better off. This is of course completely tangential to the main point, namely that they both can live in SF if we build more housing.
    - ObviousScience 12y ago
      > The world is then better off. This conclusion doesn't follow from your premises, unless you include the hidden premise that more wealth in the world is the only criterion you're using. Once you begin looking at things like wealth distribution or the like as measures of "better", your argument doesn't reach that conclusion.
      - whybroke 12y ago
        He also implies that the firemen, ambulances drives and nurses who protect a city subject to earthquakes shouldn't live in it (and thereby likely be absent when an earthquake isolates it by knocking down the bridges again). But logic must take a backseat to ideology.
    - Lawtonfogle 12y ago
      Business value does not equate true value. People have become rich doing things that have left the world worse off.
ageek123 12y ago
I assume when you said "older population" you mean "people who have lived here longer." Because as you know, rent control applies to a housing unit regardless of the age of the person living in it. But more importantly, I'm not sure what you mean by "people of privilege are working out a story that allows them to displace." As far as I can tell, what's happening is that landlords own property, and they see an opportunity to rent the property to someone who is willing to pay more. I'm not sure what "story" is being worked out by the new renter; by the time they find out about the property, it is already on the market.
- ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  I'm guessing they're talking about here on Hacker News, where young, rich professionals who may want to live and work in SF are upvoting stuff that undermines rent control. Which is convenient as they'd like to use their superior purchasing power to acquire nice SF apartments, and rent control blocks them from that goal. So it helps to have economics on your side, to a) make you feel better about yourself and b) to convince others to join your side. Maybe in this case that's "right", but the fact that we are collectively upvoting the economics that helps us and not approvingly discussing some other economic theory about how importing low-wage software developers would boost the economy makes it political.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    As one of the pro-economics faction, I'm a strong proponent of offshoring and immigration. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9246255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9246255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8884775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8884775
- whybroke 12y ago
  And therefore there is a direct arithmetic connection between rent control benefit and tenant age. The article involves improbable convoluted statistical conjectures yet is incapable of noticing that extremely simple correlation. Perhaps more disturbing than the ethical issue is the unconstrained confirmation bias. The "story" built here and in other articles is the minimal believable tale that gets rid of current generally older tenants to make those units available for people with more money. To reach the front page of HN, it only needs to be believable to those who will benefit from its implementation. Not a very high hurdle and usually easily reach by hand waving some misunderstood "free market" juvenilia.
davidw 12y ago
> that housing That's sort of the problem though - "that" housing. If there were more housing, if it were not the zero-sum game that it is in SF, then it would be less of a problem.
- whybroke 12y ago
  If geography is the only problem then it should be easy to answer this guy's question. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9255710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9255710
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Oh shut up. Everyone deserves housing. Which bloody idiot started telling left-wing people "class struggle" is actually just a zero-sum society configured to the disadvantage of the formerly well-off?

yummyfajitas 12y ago

Yes, if you believe that the political process is controlled by the wealthy and you oppose the wealthy, then allowing more construction is your best bet. My concern with the political process is the exact opposite - it doesn't favor the wealthy but it should. In either case, eliminating the malthusian constraints on housing are a solution to the problem. See also this article on moreright illustrating how your view and mine are not strongly in opposition: http://www.moreright.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-tyranny/ http://www.moreright.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-tyran...

whybroke 12y ago
How would San Francisco be better with 2 million people than with 1 million? Should it grow until it is as crowded as the cities people are fleeing in order to come to SF? What will happen is not that increased supply will have any effect but demand from talented people will drop as SF becomes as characterless as any other cheaper US city. As crowding rises the value of labor relative to land will fall, something very beneficial to the wealthy and harmful to the employed. On a site where conjecture about immorality pills and "the singularity" abound, how is it supposed that population density can grow forever and everyone be better off for it? Mega-cities are the characteristic of the third world and they are paragons of failure. Or will SF uniquely continue to grow infinitely owing to killer apps and the innate superiority of its people?
- icebraining 12y ago
  As crowding rises the value of labor relative to land will fall, something very beneficial to the wealthy and harmful to the employed. It's also beneficial to the unemployed who want to go to SF. Saying it's generally harmful to the workers is only true if you ignore those left out by the restrictions.
  - whybroke 12y ago
    Very true. But the unemployed and their (inevitably reduced wages) are the result of a larger failed system. Effectively the market considers them excess population for their area. And as business expenses rise to cover the inflated cost of living (eg rent) there will be fewer and fewer jobs available (eg no unemployed teacher looks to San Francisco). And cost of living will rise with population density while wages fall. Also there are plenty of unemployed people in SF too namely the huge homeless population. As the real value of wages drop their numbers increase. Since calls here for justice and opportunities seems strangely focused on middle class people, I should ask how that new person's arrival would affect these other equally unemployed people. If you believe in "market forces" then unemployment and low wages are not solved by adding more people. Indeed individuals would be happier and communities stronger if they were not often up rooted by market whims. Especially in old age. So the ideal solution for employment, wages and quality of life would not assume people are infinitely portable human resources.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      And cost of living will rise with population density I don't see how you justify this, and therefore the rest of the argument. What mechanism do you see that implies that increasing population density leads to higher costs of living? I think you are falling into a third cause fallacy mistake. While there is certainly correlation between higher pollution density and higher living costs, it's not one that causes the other, but a third factor that causes both: wanting to move there. The reason rents are higher is because people are willing to bid more to live in SF; preventing population density will do nothing to curb that desire. But it can reduce costs of living, by allowing rents to drop and therefore reduce the need to bid higher and higher.
      - whybroke 12y ago
        Wanting to move there is also a believable cause of high cost of living. But since housing prices are out pacing wages worldwide, I think not. Indeed the NY Times reports 90 cities as "unaffordable" in the US alone.[1] If there is a theoretical supply and demand argument that building always drives down costs then there is a theoretical argument that excess supply of labor drives down the value of labor. If there is an observational argument that large population densities do not lower wages then there is the observation that high density cities do not have low cost of living. My claim is that the price of housing will rise to at least 30% of wages no mater how many or few units you have. If you really wanted to lower rent rather than shuffling around who is living where, you'd need enormously radical change to land ownership laws and incentives. The things that made the twentieth century unique in history for the relative wealth of ordinary people. Things now being reversed. Another apparently impossible option would be to make other cites into bastions of free thinking diversity, tolerance and creativity so there would be innovation and demand to live there instead of fleeing them for the few cities that have those things and the wealth that comes with them. But the path we're apparently going to follow, deregulation, which will do exactly nothing, could nicely degrade the character of one city after another which would reduce demand and that might slow price rise. It'd take surprisingly little to turn SF into another Huston. But don't expect the people with a choice to stick around a characterless city among a sea of less imaginative people looking just to get rich quick. [1]http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/more-renters-find-30-affordability-ratio-unattainable.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/more-renters-find...
- SamReidHughes 12y ago
  It would be better, clearly, because now 2 million people have found it the best place to live instead of 1 million.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Lets look at a list of megacities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul... Bangalore, Istanbul, London, Mumbai, NYC and Pune are all wonderful places and I'd be happy to live in any of them. Mumbai in particular is a place I actively plan to spend at least a year in. (I've already lived in NYC, London and Pune.) I can't say I love Delhi or Hyderabad, but you could certainly do worse. By the standards of the west, Mumbai or Delhi certainly are "paragons of failure". That's the problem with living in a developing country. It's not a failure of density, the low density regions of India are vastly worse.
  - whybroke 12y ago
    So if India and all its cities had 4 times as many people would it be better off? The population is so high that wages are so low that talented people are fleeing the country. Indeed if mega-cities were a good thing then Pakistan, Nigeria and the Congo should be doing better than Japan. Excepting just 6 out of 84, your list thoroughly proves my point; over crowding correlates with societies with suppressed labor value. And by the way, in spite of adding endless supply of housing, none of these cities have cheaper real-estate than the rest of their country.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Indeed if mega-cities were a good thing then Pakistan, Nigeria and the Congo should be doing better than Japan. If universal healthcare was a good thing then people in Rwanda should be more healthy than in the US. They aren't, so universal healthcare is bad. Find the flaw in this argument and you'll find the one in yours.
      - whybroke 12y ago
        41/58 countries with universal healthcare are in the developed world. 84/100 mega-cites are in the third world. I don't know how this could confuse you but feel free to google inductive reasoning.
- erispoe 12y ago
  People are not "fleeing" other cities to come to SF because it's undense. They come to SF because SF has jobs and it's nice to live here. I'm somewhat unconvinced that more density in SF would make it less nice for all the people coming here. High prices is not beneficial to the wealthy, it's only beneficial to homeowners. A vast majority of tech workers in SF are renters, who can afford high rents but would nonetheless prefer them cheaper.
- brc 12y ago
  This is essentially the 'too many of you, just enough of me' argument. If you want to cap populations on cities, then do so explicitly and not through back-door means. Otherwise you have to let them ebb and flow as people desire.
collyw 12y ago
"it doesn't favor the wealthy but it should" Wtf? How do you get to that conclusion when inequality has been growing for the last 40 years?
- specialist 12y ago
  Didn't you read the link? Neo-techno-crypto-pseudo-anarcho-cheerios-reactionaryification-antimodernism. Illuminating.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  A wealthy software developer produces a lot of value in an hour, whereas a poor barista does not. If the developer lives 10 minutes from work while the barista commutes for 1 hour, the developer has more time to spend on productive activities. The world is then better off. This is of course completely tangential to the main point, namely that they both can live in SF if we build more housing.
  - ObviousScience 12y ago
    > The world is then better off. This conclusion doesn't follow from your premises, unless you include the hidden premise that more wealth in the world is the only criterion you're using. Once you begin looking at things like wealth distribution or the like as measures of "better", your argument doesn't reach that conclusion.
    - whybroke 12y ago
      He also implies that the firemen, ambulances drives and nurses who protect a city subject to earthquakes shouldn't live in it (and thereby likely be absent when an earthquake isolates it by knocking down the bridges again). But logic must take a backseat to ideology.
  - Lawtonfogle 12y ago
    Business value does not equate true value. People have become rich doing things that have left the world worse off.

ageek123 12y ago

I assume when you said "older population" you mean "people who have lived here longer." Because as you know, rent control applies to a housing unit regardless of the age of the person living in it. But more importantly, I'm not sure what you mean by "people of privilege are working out a story that allows them to displace." As far as I can tell, what's happening is that landlords own property, and they see an opportunity to rent the property to someone who is willing to pay more. I'm not sure what "story" is being worked out by the new renter; by the time they find out about the property, it is already on the market.

ZeroGravitas 12y ago
I'm guessing they're talking about here on Hacker News, where young, rich professionals who may want to live and work in SF are upvoting stuff that undermines rent control. Which is convenient as they'd like to use their superior purchasing power to acquire nice SF apartments, and rent control blocks them from that goal. So it helps to have economics on your side, to a) make you feel better about yourself and b) to convince others to join your side. Maybe in this case that's "right", but the fact that we are collectively upvoting the economics that helps us and not approvingly discussing some other economic theory about how importing low-wage software developers would boost the economy makes it political.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  As one of the pro-economics faction, I'm a strong proponent of offshoring and immigration. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9246255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9246255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8884775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8884775
whybroke 12y ago
And therefore there is a direct arithmetic connection between rent control benefit and tenant age. The article involves improbable convoluted statistical conjectures yet is incapable of noticing that extremely simple correlation. Perhaps more disturbing than the ethical issue is the unconstrained confirmation bias. The "story" built here and in other articles is the minimal believable tale that gets rid of current generally older tenants to make those units available for people with more money. To reach the front page of HN, it only needs to be believable to those who will benefit from its implementation. Not a very high hurdle and usually easily reach by hand waving some misunderstood "free market" juvenilia.

davidw 12y ago

> that housing That's sort of the problem though - "that" housing. If there were more housing, if it were not the zero-sum game that it is in SF, then it would be less of a problem.

whybroke 12y ago
If geography is the only problem then it should be easy to answer this guy's question. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9255710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9255710

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Oh shut up. Everyone deserves housing. Which bloody idiot started telling left-wing people "class struggle" is actually just a zero-sum society configured to the disadvantage of the formerly well-off?