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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Housing problem. There's not enough of it, and the people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here.

It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking.

All of California's inequality problems go back to that. High salaries for some people help make it stronger, but the greed of the NIMBY homeowners is a far greater cause of putting people at risk for going hungry, because they have been trying so hard to keep them out of housing.

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It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking.

It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct.

And if you're going to be fair, you'd acknowledge that ultimately it presents a set of tradeoffs, with both positive and negative impact.

All of California's inequality problems go back to that.

Inequality is a very complex problem, with many forces and actors at play. Any analysis that attempts to reduce it to a single causal factor will instantly fail.

Zoning is not natural, the way the law of gravity, or even the idea of liberty, is natural.

Zoning is invented by people, as you correctly noticed, to balance several trade-offs. Maybe in 1950s it was adequate; since 2000s, the balance of trade-offs has shifted drastically.

Maybe it's time to rebalance things. The problem is that those who profited form it most (the old realty owners), due to that very fact, can also afford to spend most resources (as in time, money, and lobbying efforts) to resist it.

> It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct.

No particular implementation of zoning law is a "natural construct", and USian zoning laws have an extremely particular focus on preventing the construction of high-density housing (hell, some jurisdictions even criminalise roommates in pre-existing housing). There's nothing natural or inherent about that; and plenty of other countries have more sensical zoning laws that provide for adequate and dense housing supply while still having zoning (and they have lower rents and less problems with homelessness and housing-cost induced poverty, gasp).

Oh, not every ordinance (or planning department directive) is "natural" or reasonable, of course. But zoning generically is a pretty well established and generally understood practice by this point - on par with the idea of "democracy", or for that matter, this business land "ownership" in the first place.

Or that is to say, "natural".

people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here

Well that cuts to the very heart of democracy doesn't it? Why would the government of territory X not answer to the taxpayer-voter of X, over people who merely want to live there?

There are reasons why they might of course, enumerate those reasons and the real dynamic will come to light.

There is a fine line between democracy and mob rule.

The Nash equilibrium for any sufficiently stable democratic system is for 49.9% of the electorate to be treated as subhuman. Democracy inevitably becomes tyrannical if civil institutions fail to defend the interests of the minority against the interests of the majority.

A big part of the issue is what level the decisions are made— in Japan, zoning is largely set by the national government, and in Ontario, at provincial level. In Silicon Valley (and most of the US), the decisions are made at the level of small suburbs consisting mostly of single-family homes, even though such decisions have can have huge impacts on the national economy.

It also cuts to the core of property rights. If somebody is building something according to local laws, why should neighbors be allowed to stop that legal construction? That is what happens now, and it drives up construction costs dramatically, further driving up costs of the very very little new housing that gets built.

What rights go along with property? Does it include the right to stop your neighbor from changing and improving their property?

>Housing problem.

Well this is part of what keeps tech workers from making as much as they'd like to and it definitely contributes to the plight of unskilled workers but not as much as this board seems to think it does. There's no realistic zoning changes in SV that are going to make a big enough dent. Unskilled workers will still be spending absurd amounts of their paycheck on shelter except now they'll be living under a restaurant exhaust system or above a noisy bar.

The real winner of zoning changes is going to be well-paid professionals who can buy up real estate with their savings and become the NIMBYs of tomorrow.

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