I hope you have to try living in Mountain View on a minimum wage salary.
Where does this right to live exactly where you want to end? I'm a fairly wealthy software developer who lives in San Francisco, but I can't afford a home in Monterey Heights. If it's rank injustice for someone poorer than me to not be able to afford my neighborhood (Outer Mission) and they have to move to Daly City, is it also rank injustice for me not to be able to live in a swankier neighborhood? What if I really just want that house over there? Can I do that?
These are serious questions -- I genuinely don't know where this line is supposed to be drawn.
It's also about entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people. That doesn't mean lower income people want to point at a house and say "gimme."
Doesn't have anything to do with wanting to live somewhere "swanky." Often it's about neighborhoods transforming from "livable and affordable" to "swanky," which increases landlord profits and is very nice for wealthy people, but also destroys communities.
Aside from that, there are the larger questions... like, how the whole gentrification process is tied up with income distribution... we software developers tend to be relatively wealthy, because of market forces, and this money becomes a powerful reason for landlords to keep increasing rents... etc etc...
If that were true, rent control and Prop 13 would have means-testing, and leave seniority completely out of the equation. Because they do not, they're actually about benefitting the establishment (even if wealthy) at the expense of newcomers (even if poor).
You just contradicted yourself.
Also, what's wrong with "entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people"? The problem is N people want to live there, but there are only K < N houses. N-K people don't get what they want, by simple arithmetic. Why is allocating by willingness to pay a bad way to go?
(There is an obvious solution - legalize increases in K. Good luck with that.)
Whether there's anything wrong with reserving the city core for wealthy people only, I didn't really make any normative claims about that.
There are of course many reasons to consider it problematic: cultural segregation, justice, etc, but you probably don't care about those things, so I won't waste my time.
Oh, and "willingness to pay" is a pretty yucky way to put it.
Buying low and selling high, how awful.
Furthermore, most low income households who own property aren't engaging in speculation, they are simply trying to keep the property they inherited.
The response to someone being forced out of a home they've lived in for their whole life needs to be something more compassionate than "tough shit, you greedy poor".
Is there a point beyond that? Note that I didn't advocate any specific policy, I just pointed out that a specific argument was internally contradictory, which you don't seem to disagree with.
I'm just calling out ahoy for writing a post that's little but virtue signalling and nerd shaming.
You're taking this thread into personal attack, plus slinging a lot of sarcasm around, which has the effect that trolling does. Please stop doing these things.
It's a personal attack to say someone is right and that people might like them?
(I'm assuming since you've singled me out for reply that you have little problem with ahoy's comment.)
> I'm assuming since you've singled me out for reply that you have little problem with ahoy's comment
Quite the opposite, and I'm surprised you'd fall for that non sequitur. The comment was bad by HN's standards. It added noise and indignation much more than it added information.
I replied to you, though, because you've posted more in this thread and because the pattern I described is problematic.
I honestly agree with ahoy that "heartless, dispassionate thought" is likel to cause a lot of people to dislike me and other tech people. (I also think it's more likely to be correct.) You've clearly been following my posts, is this an implausible belief for me to hold?
If I incorrectly interpreted a comment replying to me as as singling me out, I offer my apologies. Perhaps I'm being oversensitive. I was attempting to make a measured response to what I considered a less than pleasant comment.
Is this an ad hom?
What about this bit
In-fill development might slow gentrification a bit, but it certainly won't make San Francisco or Mountain View affordable to people who make $50k per year, much less those who make $25k per year.
If a city wants to have people working there (to run the local businesses: restaurants, etc.), but is so expensive that those people cannot afford to live near their workplaces, and the city refuses to do zoning to support lower-income housing, then the cities where the poorer people live should be able to levy taxes on the cities where those residents work, to help pay for all the transportation issues. Obviously, the federal (or maybe state) government would have to enact this legislation.
This will create a big incentive for cities to do better zoning, and if they refuse, then they'll be transferring a lot of wealth from their own residents (in the form of property and sales taxes) to the places where their lower-level workers live.
For example, you say, "entire city cores become entirely reserved for wealthy people." That's a sentence fragment replete with lineless definitions. What's a "city core"? If I can afford a house one block outside of the imaginary line that bounds a "city core," is that actually much different from my being able to afford a house one block inside that line? What constitutes a "wealthy" person? If the "city core" (however that's defined) is "affordable" (however that's defined) for someone whose income is $60,000, but not $50,000, what does that mean?
I have no trouble with the sort of general intuition that it's a shame if someone can no longer afford to live in a neighborhood that is deeply meaningful to them. What I have trouble with is any way to quantify that intuition and put it into a practical set of policies that actually increase justice and do not diminish it.
For instance in Minneapolis where I live, once they put in a lot of low income housing in, a majority of the whites move out of the city, and into the first ring suburbs. Then several immigrant populations moved into Minneapolis and pushed a lot of the african-american population into that first ring of suburbs where the whites had moved. Sure enough, the whites pushed out into the next ring of suburbs.
This has happened several times and now the ironic thing is they're taking out (or demolishing) all the low income housing and putting in swanky town homes and condos and guess what? All those families (and their kids) that moved out in the 60's and 70's are the prime movers for the new era of gentrification.
My point here is even though communities get shuffled and pushed out due to gentrification, they tend to stick together regardless and create new communities where they move to and find like minded people who have the same common cultural traits as themselves.
As others have said, there is a cycle which develops --be it homogenous pops of heterogeneous populations, in vibrant economies. In stagnant economies, you pretty much get to stay where you were born as there is no upward movement or sideways movement clearing housing stock for others and giving them a chance to move in.
So I both agree that no one has a "right" to live in a particular neighborhood or city, implying that housing should be available at a price affordable to anyone who works, I also believe builders should be encouraged to build for different income levels.
(Hard to say what the just solution is though. As a first-pass filter, changing the rules so people don't have to rent for twenty years might be useful, if there's a practical way to succeed at that).
Life was hard when we had to forage for food.
Life was hard when infant mortality was massive worldwide.
Life was hard when we didn't have a cure for polio.
Life was hard when the economically disadvantaged generally just quietly died out because no programs existed to help them over a bad chunk of time.
And life is now hard when you get cancer, lose your job, or are forced to move because the economics of your town have changed and you can't afford to live there anymore. Worth noting is that sometimes, these three are inter-related. ;)
The hard things are not fixed in stone; they are challenges to be solved. That's why we bother with society; if it weren't worth our time to take on the hard stuff, we'd have stuck with hunter-gatherer life style because it's a lot structurally simpler.
Evidence shows that hunter-gatherer people were much taller (a full foot) than their ancestors who turned to agriculture. It's only been in recent years that we've finally caught up with the heights hunter-gatherers reached: that's around 10,000 years that we've been deficient.
The reason we didn't stick with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is because we humans became overpopulated and ran out of resources. Agriculture was the only way to survive, because growing crops on a farm and herding domesticized prey animals is much more efficient than hunting and gathering in the wild. But it's also a lot more work and has a lot of problems with disease and malnutrition (potatoes and rice have terrible nutritional value by themselves). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had generally superior and happier lifestyles, but they were living in an age when they didn't have a lot of competition for resources; it was like a "garden of Eden". The natives of Hawaii (before European contact) are probably one of the closest cultures in modern times to this.
People adopted agriculture because the forests no longer had enough food. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles were no longer viable. So of course they wanted a more predictable food supply.
Long before this point in time, that wasn't a concern: the forests were full of food, so there was no reason to bother with agriculture. People invented agriculture out of necessity, like most inventions.
Where did I talk about "agricultural mass-starvation"? Agriculture is how people avoided starvation when the resources ran out. But it wasn't as nice as the "golden years" when the forests had plenty of food and there weren't many humans competing for it. But there was no way to go back to that time, just as there isn't now.
"Garden of Eden"
People agreed to rent, perhaps they had no other choice, perhaps they where forced by factors outside their control. But those things happen. When I was younger I had a dear friend move away because his parents got a better paying job somewhere else. It's the same sentiment, he had his roots there and still had to move (if for other reasons than not being able to pay rent).
The short of the story is that when entering into a contract you should switch to a mercenary mode, and get the best deal you could possibly make. Don't lay down roots if you don't own your house. Buy don't rent, etc.
ps, does anyone know the(an) average commute time for someone who is not able to afford a living place next to their employer in these areas?
And anyway, sometimes renting is cheaper than buying. It's not inherently bad and there are certainly circumstances where it makes sense to rent for decades at a time.
Individual on a fixed income that is too low to pay the cost of living in their home and must therefore move, because the fact that the local economy has improved (making things more expensive) doesn't imply their income improves to match it.