Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

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The market didn't "Just work," in Seattle. There is a long history of things not going right. The city had to do a lot to get this current housing boom to get going, including a lot of subsidization.

They also got a lot wrong (no where near enough low-income housing .. and a lot of the decent low income housing requiring you to be below the poverty line -- leaving the middle class in really tough spots paying Amazon employ rent while barely making enough to pay it.)

It's still not really working. The homeless problem is still insane. There are still a ton of one unit dwellings that no one is bringing up to code; the ones that use to house the very low income around places like Belltown.

Another thing that didn't "just work" was Amazon giving new employees discounts in certain condos. Turns out someone in HR didn't realize these types of deals were illegal, since private groups can't offer housing discounts or subsidizes or it violates various Fair Housing laws.

> The market didn't "Just work," in Seattle.

It is literally illegal to add to the housing supply in most of the city; a majority of Seattle land is zoned exclusively for detached single-family hones.

I wonder, if you count agents in a market economy as having not just money to spend making rational purchases, but also political power as a sort of alternate currency (represented by a vote each), is NIMBY really a rational market reaction. If you start in a fully free market state, and enough actors combine their political power to limit the market, then that results seems just as important, if not more important, than one where there is a limit placed on the system to prevent such actions. Even the US Constitution, which could be considered a very strong limiter in what combined political power can do on a city, state, or even federal level, can be modified by enough people combining their political power.

I wish more people though this way.

If something is a rule then the majority decided it should be that way. If you don't like it, then you are in the minority. If that surprises you, then you may not be accurately measuring the real majorities and minorities, and it would benefit all of to try to understand what the real rules are.

Not quite sure what this comment means but it feels like you are saying “these rules exist Because a democratically influenced process came up with them so we shouldn’t change them”, which if true is not great reasoning for the following reasons:

1) things change over time, policies that at one time protected people move on to be things that increase inequality or worsen outcomes.

2) Politics has a long history of excluding less powerful voices. Right now in cities, there is a movement to “re-enfranchise” the people whom have often been ignored, minorities and renters. Often times the will of the people changes because those who were locked out of the decision making process 10/20/30 years ago now hold much more political power and able to influence outcomes.

3) if your bias is “current policy is best policy” then you are biased to favor the voices of the moderately wealthy white home owners who created modern urban land use policy over the past 50 years at the expense of renters and minorities.

>If something is a rule then the majority decided it should be that way.

Few systems are direct democracies. Isn't it more likely the people decided the rule maker should be who the rule maker is (or makers are) and the rule maker(s) then decided what the law should be. And that is just some of the political systems you can model.

Think of like how congress like a <25% approval rating but most of them keep getting voted back in.

There is a field of political economy called collective action, which has been around in its current form for roughly a century now, which aims to study exactly why what you just wrote is so frequently not true. Check it out.

Yes and no:

- People often want to limit housing in their particular city/neighborhood, but

- They agree that there should be more housing built somewhere, just not near them

It's like being for pollution regulations, except that you demand that you yourself (and your buddies) be exempt. Normally that wouldn't work in a democracy, but imagine that only the polluters get to vote: that's how land use regulations get decided (because the beneficiaries of lower housing costs would be largely potential residents, and you have to live there to vote).

In practice, the solution is to have zoning decisions made at a higher level; at the metro area level is probably the best one, since they tend to function as economic units, and that mimics how people tend to choose housing.

> I wonder, if you count agents in a market economy as having not just money to spend making rational purchases, but also political power as a sort of alternate currency (represented by a vote each), is NIMBY really a rational market reaction.

The problem comes when you realize what you have to do to get a vote, which is to buy a house. If you can't afford to live there then you can't vote for policies that will reduce housing costs there because you aren't a resident. And once you have a vote because you own a house, now you want housing prices to go up rather than down.

There is no way for the people who need less expensive housing to vote for it, and the opposite incentive for the people who could vote for it to actually do that.

> The problem comes when you realize what you have to do to get a vote, which is to buy a house.

The franchise isn't restricted to homeowners; renters too can vote.

> The franchise isn't restricted to homeowners; renters too can vote.

Only if they can afford to pay the rent there. Which is difficult in an area zoned almost entirely for single family homes, because hardly anybody can afford to rent an entire house but not afford to actually buy it.

Especially because we have a whole collection of policies to encourage people to buy rather than rent, which causes disproportionately many of the people who can afford to live in areas with high housing costs to be owners rather than renters and therefore vote for policies that keep prices high.

Renters can and should vote.

I think this is one reason why smallish homeowners are not comfortable with developers bringing in lots of high density housing (at whatever price). They feel pretty well aligned with their neighbors and don't want the balance of power to shift. Maybe a proportional representation system at the council level could help defuse tensions in some markets.

I was more just thinking about how political actions/will/impacts can be simulated as a second resource in an economy much like how we simulate money. Think simulation/exploration/explanation of the idea, not recommendation.

I've developer a few simplistic economic simulations in the past for fun, some of which included land ownership, but I never considered adding each agent having the ability to modify the law of land ownership as part of the simulation. The comment made me think of what would the impact of adding it be, and if there is less validity of models which don't include it.

It wasn’t Amazon giving those discounts. It was the apartment companies themselves, and they were often available to employees of any major employer in the area, including Google or Boeing.

http://time.com/money/4018717/seattle-rent-discounts-tech/

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