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Comment by tomohawk | Hacker News Reader

Price controls always end up creating artificial scarcity. The solution to lower housing costs is more housing, not less.

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Maybe we need something deeper than that, you have 3/4 of your country that are almost a wasteland and you insist on cram all the people in 4 or 5 cities. Maybe we need to start to incentive moving people to other more empty places...

It's not really a wasteland, though. My wife moved here from New York to Kansas City, and her old friends act like there are cows walking down the street or something.

If you're willing to live with diversity of political affiliation (it's a pretty even mix of Democrat and Republican around here, and I've heard people on HN say they'd be absolutely unwilling to live somewhere like that), you can get a 2200 square foot house in a nice neighborhood for around 250,000. We have an airport, IKEA, two art museums, and all sorts of interesting exhibits to see and things to do year round. I plan on having at least four kids, if I went to work for Google to have a house the same size would cost something like $2,800,000? (from a quick Zillow search of somewhere like Sunnyvale if I wanted a similar commute) So 11x more expensive? It seems like madness to me.

I know a guy who lives here but works for a big company on the coast, and he lives in a mansion in one of the nicest neighborhoods around, and even the local mid level tech jobs easily pay 6 figures.

I mean, I guess the weather is nice, but other than that I don't really get it.

I recently looked at jobs in the Bay Area. I currently live in Southern California, so it's not cheap where I live. To have a sub 20 minute commute (current commute: 7 minutes) to any of the jobs I was looking at would have added about $40k per year in costs. I probably could have been able to get an offer at $40k more per year, but it would be moving the whole family to break even financially.

If I could talk my wife into living somewhere with winters, then we'd probably move to Cincinnati, since we have friends there. At my current pay we could probably retire there when the kids are in HS.

I think I understand this perception to be the product of youngish, upwardly-mobile, well-educated people who are able to build enormous, fluid, flexible social/friendship/dating networks throughout their 20s living in L.A. or NYC that they couldn't build in St. Louis or Kansas City.

They're actually mostly right about that. [0]

The problem is that the perception remains well beyond its usefulness. Mid-sized Midwestern and Southern cities have everything a married couple in their 30s with (or without) a couple kids could possibly want -- all the stuff you mention and a lot more, really. And they provide it with a COL-tradeoff that can't be ignored.

I have a fairly good idea what people in New York think of my hometown and other cities like it and, frankly, they're wrong far beyond otherwise reasonable differences of opinion (as in they hold what are inarguably factually incorrect views (about, say, the size of Midwestern economies, the availability of jobs, the number of cultural institutions, the experiences of people of color and homosexuals (in urban centers, admittedly), the prevalence of ethnic restaurants, and on and on).

[0] I think it's exaggerated (especially in the sense that it's not for everybody), but real.

Cramming people into cities is more efficient from an energy and environmental footprint standpoint, and if there's enough vertical construction, it can be plenty comfortable.

Environmental advocates I have spoken to are generally of the opinion that vertical building is better than sprawl and less number of cities are better than building in every nook and cranny of available space in the country. (of course we have to balance health, open space, happiness and other concerns)

Many people in SF, Chicago etc. depend on public transit. Wastelands do not have it, usually.

That's how we got suburban sprawl, tens of thousands of people killed per year by cars, social isolation, and massive carbon footprints.

So maybe more should be done to incentivize vertical construction. From what I understand about San Francisco, though, it's actually kind of discouraged because of historical preservation stuff. I can also imagine established landlords without the capital to do large construction projects would still oppose measures to incentivize it, as well.

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