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Comment by rukittenme | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing a lot of "I fear that..." in this thread. I just have to laugh. This isn't a new or unique situation. The only thing that has changed are people's preferences. My Great Aunt lived in NYC with 6 other girls. Roommates were required to survive the high rents of post-war NYC.

California has always been gripped by NIMBYisms and choking regulation. You get what you vote for.

What can you do against the tyranny of good ideas? It's a good idea to make use environmentally friendly building materials. It's a good idea to build earthquake resilient homes. It's a good idea to require certain standards of home building. It's a good idea to rent control the apartments of the elderly so they can continue to live in their home of the past 50 years. It's a good idea to X..Y..Z.

Is it a good idea to create a generation of serfs?

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"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have."

For all the talk of "negative externalities" I see on HN and the valley in general, I never see people discussing the rampant "negative externalities" of the laws and regulations we pass. It's unfortunate there's so little introspection going on, and so much reliance on the monopoly of the Government to further what Group A or Group B wants. (But it's OK, because I agree with Group A!)

> "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have."

A cute saying, but misleading. A government big enough to impose even a modest constraint on violent crime is also more than big enough to take away everything you have; anything weak enough to avoid that threat is not the government and will be replaced in that role but something else that is. So, mitigating that threat necessarily is about managing aspects of government other than its size.

Corporations big enough can have a humongous power to take away everything from you.

Any government powerful enough to enforce property rights is by definition powerful enough to take away everything you own.

I lived in a suburban single-family home with about 20-25 other people for a year when I was in college (each of us had our own bedroom, except for families where children slept with parents). For the most part everyone there was quiet, either going to the college nearby or else working while studying for a professional license or graduate school. The landlord also lived there with an extended family of about 10 people.

We had a couple of rotten apples, but we self-regulated and kicked out people who caused problems in our house or for our neighbors. Yet, we still had people in the neighborhood calling the zoning inspector to "shut us down." Zoning laws make it hard to even live with "6 other girls" these days. Boarding houses are mostly illegal, and people don't really build SROs anymore.

How many bedrooms/acres was that? I can see that running up against perfectly reasonable anti tennament ordinances depending on your answer.

Isn't that the point that GP is making? "Very reasonable" laws ending up hurting people through unintended consequences.

In the city I grew up in they had some arcane law on the books regarding brothels, so something stupid like no more than 8 women could live in one dwelling. Made it impossible to have sorority houses, though fraternity houses were still allowed.

I remember the same in my college town. A group of my aspiring political friends lived in a house of 12 women in blatant disregard for the law and crossed their fingers hoping that someone would make a fuss about it so they could sue on virtuous grounds.

I had that at my university too - only 3 non-related individuals could live in one dwelling. We had 6 in one house since the upstairs was setup as a separate unit with a door on the staircase that was always open haha.

> This isn't a new or unique situation.

It used to be feasible to buy a home on the peninsula for 3-4x the area median income, and that number's now 6-8x at least, so I'd argue that yes, things are worse now, even taking inflation into account.

SF rents have also been increasing 6% YoY or so.

> What can you do against the tyranny of good ideas?

There are a number of practical things we can do:

- Contact the Brisbane City Council and ask them to approve housing in the Baylands. The developer wants to build 4000 units, the city Planning Commission wants to build 0.

- Contact the Mountain View City Council and ask them to build the high-density version of their housing plan, which would add 8000 units instead of 2000 (I have asked YC, a prominent Mountain View business, to help take the lead here).

- Show up to your city council and ask them to upzone their downtown area to support higher density. Ask them to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units (ADU's) and streamline the planning process.

- Call your State Assemblymember and ask them to support SB 35, which removes local control over projects that are near transit and include a high percentage of below market rent units.

- Call your State Senator and ask them to oppose AB 915, which would make it more difficult to build housing in San Francisco.

As well as a number of other pieces... I don't know that there's a magic bullet but at the margin there are a number of things that we can do to mitigate the situation.

Having tried the "Contact the City Council of a city I don't live in" thing in the past, I'd suggest a better use of your time, if you don't live in Brisbane or MV, is to try to find companies that do and persuade their leaders to take action.

Larry and Sergey could fix MV's intransigence very fast. We need to call on tech leadership to take a stand here. It's in their best interest.

+1 to all the suggestions about calling your city council, your assemblymember, your state senator, etc

> ... > Larry and Sergey could fix MV's intransigence very fast. We need to call on tech leadership to take a stand here. It's in their best interest. > ...

Haven't they tried, only to have been denied by the City of Mountain View?

Google, through a subsidiary, is leasing parts of Moffett Field, federal property exempt from local zoning laws, to build housing [1].

[1] https://mv-voice.com/news/2017/05/19/google-relaunches-bay-v...

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