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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

Nobody "has" to try living in Mountain View. It's not like commuting to Mountain View from Sunnyvale or Santa Clara or, hell, San Jose is some kind of unbearable hardship.

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.

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Resisting gentrification is not about the right to live "exactly where you want." Often it's about the ability to keep paying an increasing rent in an apartment where you've lived for many years.

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...

> It's also about entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people.

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).

I don't deny that there are other forces at work too... and I'm not only talking about California.

Do you know of any city that uses means testing?

No, but I don't claim that rent control regulations are specifically or well designed for resisting the type of gentrification-induced problems I described.

Often it's about the ability to keep paying an increasing rent in an apartment where you've lived for many years...That doesn't mean lower income people want to point at a house and say "gimme."

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.)

Would you point out the exact contradiction, so I can explain the misunderstanding?

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.

The low income person you describe, attempting to continue living "in an apartment where you've lived for many years" is a poor person pointing at a specific house and saying "gimme".

That's just your ideologically motivated redescription of the situation. Not interested.

Except in the first scenario they actually already live and own the place? It's unfair to compare not wanting to lose [lifelong] sentimental value with just any other house outside their means.

If you own a place you don't need to "keep paying an increasing rent".

Gentrification effects an upward pressure on property values. Property values determine property tax. You're right, that's not technically rent, but it is one of the predominant mechanisms by which people are priced out of neighborhoods.

It would really suck to engage in real estate speculation and then have the value of my investment skyrocket until I sell it for a large sum of money. I sure hope that doesn't happen to me one day!

Buying low and selling high, how awful.

Low income households spend an exceptionally high percentage of their income on housing (http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/hou...). Meaning they are particularly sensitive to price increases. So yes, it would really suck for your home value to increase a couple percent and have to move. But hey, if there's profit involved who can complain!

Furthermore, most low income households who own property aren't engaging in speculation, they are simply trying to keep the property they inherited.

Many(most?) localities have a cap on property taxes for this very reason. For instance, look at the propery taxes for 3 or 4 million dollar brownstones in Brooklyn; it's usually 5 or 6 thousand per year.

Most younger people can't afford to own, often because housing has been made artificially scarce and artificially expensive to artificially enrich the class of older people who bought when it was cheap.

This comment is the kind of heartless, dispassionate thought that makes people hate "tech people".

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".

You are right that tech people are easy to hate on because we often think differently. Unlike the rest of us, you've signaled mainstream virtue with your comment. Congrats!

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.

Signaling an autistic disregard for morality and compassion as everyone else knows them doesn't exactly do your ideology any favors.

I'm not disregarding morality - again, I made purely positive (not normative) claims. If you want to discuss morality then state your principles and we reason from them.

I'm just calling out ahoy for writing a post that's little but virtue signalling and nerd shaming.

You are free to have your own thought process, but please don't project it onto everyone in tech. You don't speak for us all.

> Unlike the rest of us, you've signaled mainstream virtue with your comment.

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.

I don't understand. I agreed with what ahoy said. She said I was out of the mainstream and people might hate me and people like me due to my comment. I said she was right, that she was also in the mainstream and that people might like her due to her comment.

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.)

That's not at all what you said. Please don't be evasive.

> 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'm honestly not being evasive.

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.

> cultural segregation, justice, etc, but you probably don't care about those things, so I won't waste my time

Is this an ad hom?

No, because it's not an attempt at logical argumentation, it's just me expressing that I'd rather not waste my time expressing my political opinions to someone I perceive as totally unreceptive to them.

> but you probably don't care about those things

What about this bit

On a logistical level alone, gentrification forcing lower income people into the periphery when the transit system is already overstretched is very bad. Imagine how bad the traffic over the Bay Bridge is going to be when high rents force custodians and cooks to travel from Richmond, Antioch, Oakland. There are practical reasons for pushing back against income segregation.

Would forcing upper class people into the periphery solve the logistical problems?

Sure, but that's a strawman solution when there are plenty of other possibilities to consider, such as building more housing.

If I had thought of this, I'd probably have put the sentence "There is an obvious solution - legalize increases in K" in the last line of my comment.

Building more housing is good policy, but let's not kid ourselves -- there would be tons of gentrification in any remotely plausible amount of development in in-demand places to live like San Francisco or Mountain View.

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.

I think I have a solution to this: taxes on cities where the jobs are, levied by cities where people live.

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.

Obviously nobody is actually suggesting a situation where you can point at a house and say "I deserve to live exactly there" -- but my point is that it's hard to see any clear line between there and any form of "resisting gentrification."

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.

Well, nor do I have a proposed solution by way of regulation for the problems caused by gentrification and income inequality. At this point in the discussion I'm just saying that there are deep problems with "free market" rental housing. That doesn't imply that what's needed is a quantitative system of regulation. You could also, for example, just appropriate the houses from the landlords, right?

Well, you could, yes, but it's hard to imagine a system of "just appropriating the houses from the landlords" that was justice-positive.

No it's not. Just appropriate the houses from the landlords, justice served, job well-done. Landlording is the world's second-oldest form of straight-up exploitation, right after pimping.

The challenge exists for families on low incomes--cooks, bus drivers, store clerks, janitors, teachers, etc. A lot of these people were born there, they have family there, have a community there, and they don't have the resources to move or get another job.

What I've seen normally happens is that as a community is displaced, they tend to move to the same areas where other people from their community are living.

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.

Isn't what you're describing racial segregation and the creation of ghettos? Historically, a major component of this was explicitly racist housing law, e.g. FHA 1934-1968. But regardless of the implementation, the practical outcome seems to be worse hospitals, education, and political power for the poorer group of "like minded people".

The challenge exists but there are no easy answers to it, beside "stagnation". Giving state control of resources is not an answer (as they are likely to wildly misallocate). China has a lot of poor and they have a lot of rich and the state has a lot of control over building housing and controlling inter city migration, yet they continue to have housing issues.

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.

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