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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

>It's a conscious and IMHO defensible choice by the people who already live here...

This statement smells really, really bad.

As the article stated, she had to leave the SFBA because she was evicted and the housing prices had gone up too much. She lived there, and didn't chose that. As with all gentrification, the population that lived there didn't chose for affluent (typically white) people to move in and raise their rents forcing them further and further away from what had been a home to them for generations.

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Then she and other likeminded people should have organized politically and pressured the government to change the zoning laws before it was too late. Everything going on in the SFBA is the direct result of capitalism and democracy in action. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but I don't see any principled way you could object to it.

[UPDATE] Let me clarify: I can see how you could object to various aspects of our political system. I myself am active in trying to tackle the problem of income inequality and getting Citizens United repealed. But the housing problems in the SFBA are just symptoms of this much larger overlying problem. You can object to those, and I'll be right beside you. What I'm talking about is focusing on the high cost of housing in the SFBA in isolation as if it's a standalone problem that has a simple and obvious solution that the Powers That Be are just too dim to see or too corrupt to implement. That is not the case.

I don't buy that.

What you are saying, is after her building was bought out and she and her neighbors were then about to be homeless, they should have formed a political organization? Where, exactly? I mean, she went to one town, who knows where the other 5/10/50 people went.

That kind of argument comes from a very privileged position of a person who hasn't been gentrified out of their neighborhood.

This is a direct result of greed; not capitalism or democracy (I mean, we aren't even a democracy, but a representative republic).

> after her building was bought out and she and her neighbors were then about to be homeless, they should have formed a political organization?

No. By then it's obviously too late. You have to act before laws are passed that drive your constituency out of town. But there are a lot of places where this has happened and renters have a lot of rights. And, BTW, the city of San Francisco is one of them. I am not a landlord, but I am told that it is nearly impossible to evict someone in SF.

The constitution allows the federal government to regulate interstate commerce because local interests don't line up with national interests. Saying, group X voted for it thus it's OK stops working when group X impacts group Y.

Because of this, I don't think local governments should have control over zoning. The impacts are at least state wide so they should be regulated at the state or national level.

One can have principled objections against capitalism without objecting against democracy.

Or vice versa. What we have is a small committee of people you've never heard of deciding to reject deals that both renters and contractors are desperate to make. If we had a plebiscite on housing density, the outcome would be much better for most people.

Right. Because the ease of political influence is evenly distributed between people making 150k+ and people that have to have multiple jobs to stay above water. Even leaving the influence of money in politics aside, sheer availability of time is a significant factor.

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