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Comment by VanillaCafe | Hacker News Reader

The article lost me on the first line, "The U.S. is running out of places for people to live."

That's just not true.

An trending increase in the national average monthly cost of rent shows that people are competing more for housing. But, that can be explained by a migration to major metropolitan centers and/or tech centers. Which is a totally different mechanism than "running out of housing".

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Mid-brow dismissal. You're focusing on one phrase and yelling "gotcha!".

Let me make it easier to understand: "The U.S. is running out of places that people want to live."

We're realizing that living in an anonymous suburb on a tract of cheap land a 90 minute drive from where we work is stupid. It's terrible for the environment, it stunts social and business opportunities, and it is boring. More people in cities is good for the environment, good for economic equality, and good for sanity.

There are an infinite number of places that you "could" live, so your use of "running out of housing" is a straw man. By your definition, it's not even possible to "run out of housing".

So the problem is that people feel entitled to live in places they can't afford to live, because they can't deal with the "boredom" of suburbs or smaller cities/towns?

Cry me a river.

What are you even talking about? This issue is about wealthy homeowners using overbearing zoning laws to stop other people doing beneficial things on their own land, like building housing. Who's entitled?

So build more cities.

In my reckoning, we lack the policy to grow dense and sustainable cities.

When cities become attractive, as the Bay Area is now, they don't respond to the right signals to grow, and when they grow, they grow in unbalanced ways.

I think the solution is through a fundamental overhaul of land-use policy, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, we'll have failed cities with a ceiling for growth.

Let people work remote. I would be happy to live in the mountains, but there ain't any jobs there.

I'm planning to look for remote-only companies once I'm ready to leave my current job -- so we can live in the Adirondacks in upstate NY!

I'd love if more companies allowed remote work.

You have my vote for president!

I always get the impression that a large number of techies are into the outdoors / outdoor sports. I am surprised no one has tried setting up companies an remoter places with good access to the mountains. Instead they set up in the most expensive places, and need to pay much more to cover for the costs.

I was in suburban Baltimore for a good friend's wedding this weekend. Housing is affordable and the jobs, while not red-hot-insane like the valley, are solid and offer interesting challenges. (defense can be a headache but they do tackle some hard problems, and research university spinouts can be found here and there)

A mutual friend is renting a 1br in the city (which has some great food options) for $1400/mo. He was my lab mate in college and the best programmer in our class. He has no intent to move out to higher cost cities.

"Shockingly livable" was my takeaway.

Baltimore is a probably the cheapest big city on the East Coast. At one point in American history more immigrants were coming through Baltimore than NYC. I think Baltimore suffered because of it's proximity to DC - most major cities are more than 40 miles apart.

Part of Baltimore's cheapness is that it has one of the highest crime rates per capita. In addition, the dangerous areas are much more interspersed and distributed - at one moment you can be walking down a nice block and the very next block is all boarded up. I've lived in both Baltimore and NYC and definitely never felt unsafe in NYC, whereas there have been multiple times that I had a sudden sense of danger in Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins medical school would routinely post security bulletins about people being mugged a few blocks from campus in the middle of the day.

If it wasn't for Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Medical school there wouldn't be much to Baltimore.

Jeez 1400?! That's insanely expensive for Baltimore isn't it? I pay about that much in the East Bay.

Well I have no idea what things are like there, but knowing him he's likely living in a nice but not extravagant place in a central location in town. Probably the equivalent of a $3500 place in SF.

My mortgage for a 2br house is ~$1200/mo. on the city / county border. Friends are paying 400$ / mo. in roommate situations.

First figure is pretty bad too: "How average U.S. rent has changed relative to median income." ... Why compare mean to median?

Simple example that shows this could be no big deal .

incomes = [2,4,8,500, 500] median income = 8

rents = [1,2,4, 250, 250 ] average rent = 101.4

OMG !!! SO MUCH MORE THAN AVERAGE INCOME.

Average is not mean, it is ambiguous. For that matter, so is "income".

Should've been "Big cities in the U.S. are running out of places to live".

Or perhaps, handful of highly trendy and desirable cities are running out of places to live.

Or perhaps: "too many rich people".

That wouldn't be a problem if they weren't hoarding properties in a zero-sum market.

It's not that far off. It should read "The US is running out of places for people to live and work"

Or just work.

Seems pretty similar to me. There either needs to be more affordable housing where the jobs are, or more jobs where the housing is. You need both to have viable housing.

> The article lost me on the first line, "The U.S. is running out of places for people to live."

Which was followed by:

> land-value taxation...is basically just the idea of giving property tax exemptions for urban buildings.

That is almost the exact opposite of what LVT does.

It is poorly worded but I think effectively it's true. If I understand correctly a 10000 sq ft lot would be taxed the same regardless if it was a 1 story house or a 6 story condo... So effectively it's a discount compared to the way normal property tax is levied that values the cost of the structure on the land... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Well, yes. Though this interpretation only makes sense if "urban buildings" doesn't mean "buildings in an urban area" as most would expect, but instead "high occupancy buildings". It is either wrong or very poorly worded.

It creates the incentives for creating more housing, in that land is most likely to be brought into efficient use.

It won't create more square-footage of land in which people can live, but it makes it more likely that cities will grow in ways to sustain more people.

It lost me on the headline. Only curiosity brings me here to read the comments however I do wonder what it says about the American psyche that 'war on...' is such a prevalent term?

Not only that but recently everything is 'Killing it' 'smashing it' as well

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