Hacker News Reader

Comment by stale2002 | Hacker News Reader

stale2002

Not necessarily. If zoning laws become such that it is possible for anyone to just build 50,000$ per unit homes, no questions asked, then the market would solve the problem.

Or if you don't believe in the laws of supply and demand, then you could just team up with a bunch of other people and pool your funds, and build your own 50,000$ unit. Who cares about the market price, if you can personally fund the building of your apartment yourself!

View on HN

I agree...if you can build enough of these. I can't remember off hand, but I think that you need to build something like 40,000 more units to even start making a dent. Call me skeptical that you can build 40k of these.

You could build 40k of them, it's been done and it's called Silicon Valley. Take a look at the place with Google Earth, it's a perfect example of 50's - 60's dense Western-style suburban development. Even if you could do that, however, I think the cost of land there would be prohibitive, which I don't think was factored into the original post.

Yes, cost of land was factored in to the original post. That's what the whole section about density was about. Keeping land costs at 10k per unit defines how many units you need to put on a given plot of land, based on price paid.

Excluding political opposition the bigger problem could be scaling up the service infrastructure to keep up. I think of some management games where, if you aren't careful while scaling, you have a collapse which triggers a domino effect until everyone dies. It isn't quite that extreme, but probably no one wants to turn the bay area in to a favela.

Another big question is what is the price curve where companies hire more locally rather than branching operations out elsewhere, and then when do other companies start flooding in?

The bay area/SF is at a point where it could become a major global city. It already is critically important, no question. If accessible, the capital would flow in. It may take a major earthquake before that happens.

> If zoning laws become such that it is possible for anyone to just build 50,000$ per unit homes, no questions asked, then the market would solve the problem.

Until you ran out of space to build such homes, in which case scarcity would again be a factor. Of course, if you succeeded in making the area undesirable enough through willy-nilly construction, that might not bring the price up much -- but that's hardly a victory, either.

That's why the article spends so much time on the huge amounts you could pay for land while still building cheap living space. At those prices, you will not 'run out' of space.

Space is not a limiting factor. You will never run out of land, if zoning laws are such that you can build as high as you want.

Also, tall buildings don't make an area undesireable to live. Just go check out the Financial District sometime. Lots of people would love to be able to live there.

We just need more areas in san francisco that are like the financial district.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com