Comment by Endama | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Endama | Hacker News Reader

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This is a wonderfully thought out and articulated counter-position. I applaud the thoughtfulness of your comment.

I agree with your statement that "cultural heritage is worth preserving, it needs non-market-driven measures to preserve it in some form". However, I think that given situations in which the choice between access to the market and the preservation of culture are fundamentally at odds with one another, access to the market must dominate. I think the downstream effects of the preservation choice are devastating and counterproductive. Let's take an extreme example, if 50% of a given, highly productive, landmass is marked as culture heritage, that would mean that suddenly the available supply to meet housing/commercial demands is now artificially constrained to the remaining half. If the supply does not adequately increase in density to meet this demand, prices shall no doubt increase and people will be priced out of that area. I think this is what is happening across a whole slew of cities across the US and is contributing to homelessness, increase in crime, loss of access to high quality education, etc.

I don't think that this is a zero-sum situation, nor that the example I just gave is the canonical experience. I'm just saying that if I was forced to make a tradeoff, I think the preservation of cultural heritage must be placed as a secondary (albeit very important) value.

Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, but I do disagree with the premise: market forces should not always have the dominant hand, if only because it will always be the dominant hand. A more fluid balance can and should be established. Sometimes the market needs should prevail, but I would argue that the balance we have today is far too imbalanced.

Your example is a good one of the extreme of that position; I think SF is the canonical example of what can happen if you do a poor job of prioritizing which parts of the local culture you're going to preserve, and market forces act on the rest. That points to one of things that I think the market is pretty ok at: pricing goods by demand. However, creating new supply to fill that demand in an unrestrained way would see many of the things I imagine SF residents love about the city like its extensive parklands fall to new development.

I do think a happy medium can be struck a lot of the time. In Austin we certainly have voices that want nothing to change, which are countered by voices who think the market is an all-powerful god who will lead us to the promised land of perfect pricing. But most of us fall into the middle. We like a few historical homes to be preserved, a neighborhood or two with a few extra zoning restrictions about how and what you can build that affects the character of the neighborhood, and looser restrictions in most other places. (We also have an advantage in that we're not surrounded on 3 sides by water, so its relatively easy to increase supply at the tradeoff of a commute.) But what we're not doing a good job of right now is working to ensure that those getting the wrong end of the gentrification stick aren't economically depressed and primarily communities of color. I think there's a lot of things that can soften that but right now the city is mostly paying lip service to the idea, and that has to change. Doing so would move us a lot closer to what I think is more of a balanced game between market forces and non-market-based values.

So, I alluded in my reply to OP that I suspect wealth/income inequality is hugely at play in many of these scenarios. Do you think that a more equal wealth distribution would allow citizens to use the market to balance their desire for culture with the needs of current residents and newcomers?

> access to the market must dominate

The market itself is dependent on certain conditions for it to function. As a good example, take environmental efforts: solutions "price in" the externalities of pollution and "close off" the loopholes that were previously used to skirt around the pollution cleanup.

On the other hand, wind power is resisted by property owners who insist the energy company "price in" the intangible loss to their view, their property value, and they try to "close off" the loopholes the energy companies would use to skirt around a debate such as eminent domain or state mandates.

The entire conversation gets ratcheted up to 11 because neither side listens very much to the other. Small neighborhoods listen to each other -- it's easy to become acquainted with a few people -- but big cities are blind to those around them because we get overwhelmed by the number of people.

All I wanted to point out was that:

Markets rely on good communication to find an agreement everyone can be happy with. Save the environment? Build wind power? More people moving to Austin? These are more indications of miscommunication and misunderstanding than anything else (in my opinion).

This has further application to a lot of the news that appears on HN's front page each day.

I'm not naive: full rapport of all parties is unlikely. But I find this paradigm often can explain what would otherwise appear to be senseless destruction by well-meaning people.

Preservation of what culture anyway?

You can't prevent people from buying existing housing, as one example, so what happens if you try and preserve the form by not constructing any new housing, is that wealthier people win that particular game of musical chairs...

... and you've changed the culture anyway, if not the form, because you have a new set of people there.

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