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Comment by gameshot911 | Hacker News Reader

>The existing anti-transit, anti-growth cabal... have been able to grab too much power, and will always vote to side with NIMBYs over modern urban growth and planning. Even the next cohort of supervisors will hold the same values, because the voters will put similar people into power once they term out...

Seems like the people of SF are getting a board that represents their desires. Is that not an example of functioning government? Seems to me it would be far worse if the board consistently voted _against_ the wishes of the populous.

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No matter how hard the people of San Francisco wish, the transit problems will continue to get worse into the foreseeable future. It's an interesting definition of the word "functioning" we have to assume.

They are responding to incentives. If they had to pay the property taxes that prop 13 protects them from, they would start to self-modulate and allow things to reduce their house assessment value.

the thing I don't get: wouldn't subway lines increase house value?

In Tokyo, being a 3 minute walk from a train/subway station easily adds a couple percent in housing value.

> In Tokyo, being a 3 minute walk from a train/subway station easily adds a couple percent in housing value.

"Couple percent" ? More than that - from what I saw in most large cities, home value is pretty much directly proportional to distance from railbound mass transportation nodes.

I'll recommend you to read Cixin Liu Death's End about the desires and rationality of electorate.

This is completely correct. It's one more reason that the cure for our ills is not hoping for local governance to overcome NIMBYism but rather for reform in land-use policies which will achieve more fairness.

"Fair" is a pretty subjective concept. Is it fair for people who don't live in a place to decide how that place develops?

It is patently unfair that people who grew up in the bay area cannot afford to live here because of this anti-growth attitude. Democracy is not the freedom to step on other people, including dictating that others cannot build a multi-family dwelling on their own land. Real Estate NIMBY-ism is the antithesis of democracy, because it is a few entitled people saying they will control what other people do with their own private property.

An economic solution to nimbyism is bribe: as a developer give everyone within one block of your proposed site $200 per month, within 2 block $100 per month, etc, and see how many people vote against your development. Of course, you can structure it as property tax reduction for your friendly neighbors, and find a catchy name for it, like "externality tax abatement" (anyone interested in a kickstarter idea? just kiding)

A Coasean solution to NIMBYism!

I think there's merit in this, but when you expand it to the bigger problem of the landed and the landless, you see how it fails to scale: a Coasean solution to landlessness is equivalent to a Coasean solution to slavery-- but slaves can't exactly afford to buy themselves out of their situation...

If you buy a piece of property in a place that puts certain restrictions on what you can do with it that's all baked into the price.

I don't see that anyone has a right to live in any particular place, and much of what people like about the city is a result of "Real Estate NIMBY-ism". Also, it's hard to see how "a few entitled people" control what people are doing with their property, unless that's become new slang for "the majority of voters".

>Also, it's hard to see how "a few entitled people" control what people are doing with their property, unless that's become new slang for "the majority of voters".

In this case, that's exactly what it's slang for. The only people who can vote for these things are the ones already entitled enough to live in the city. Everyone else that was forced to the east bay and down south has no voice.

I'm okay with that. Why should people in the East or South Bay have a say in how San Francisco governs itself?

Because how SF governs itself has external impacts upon people living outside SF: traffic, pollution, cost of living, etc.

Other people will always affect you. That doesn't give you the right to govern them.

On the contrary, that's exactly why we have government in the first place -- because the alternative is war.

For a primer on the philosophical reasons behind government, I recommend _Leviathan_ (1651) by Thomas Hobbes.

Well, okay. But the result of one group of people being governed by another is also war.

We have different levels of government for a reason.

EDIT: To other points occur to me: 1) I've never found Hobbes very compelling. And 2) If "these other people affect me" is your (not you you, but the general you) idea of a casus belli, you will perpetually be at war no matter how large or small your government.

Yes. Land has to belong to the wider population, not just the people who live there, because there is no practical way to make more and a limit to how much we can improve what exists.

No, the land does not "belong to the wider population". Why would you think that?

Is it fair for the neighbors of a piece of land who don't own it to decide what the owner may build on it?

It is if he bought it under those restrictions.

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