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Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

Yep.

VC -> Startup -> Employee -> Landlord.

Everyone blames tech workers, but they're not the ones raising the prices. Most of their money disappears into rent.

If they’re the ones demanding housing at a rate that outstrips the supply, then they are the ones causing prices to rise: they’re just not the ones editing the listings.

The demand for housing is not the problem. It's the supply that is the problem. The supply is being kept artificially low

Because if you're a landlord with significant property holdings, what would you do? You'd lobby the government not to increase supply, of course.

No, you would build more if you could.

Landlords do not build they own. Contractors and developers build. If you could own one building and charge $2500 or own 5 building and charge $600 each, what would you choose? You would make $500 more owning more buildings, but you would also have more overhead and work managing them all.

Is this a trick question? I would build another one AND charge $600 each. Developers build for clients with money, like landlords.

The dominant factor driving house prices is mortgage credit inflation, not supply and demand, both the hypothesis and the data for this are very strong.

See for instance: https://seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4161999-mother-deflatio...

Why not both? This is classic Supply and Demand curves.

Sure, but in normal markets both supply and demand shift to reach equilibrium. In urban housing markets, increasingly supply is approximately illegal, so what would be manageable demand for any other resource drives runaway price growth like we see here.

The argument for not blaming high-salary tech workers is that when they demand anything other than housing (nootropics or standing desks or whatever other stereotype we might choose), prices don't react anywhere near as strongly.

Increasing supply shouldn't be that hard. High rise apartment buildings can house thousands of people using a small amount of real-estate. Opposition to them is mostly political. They do make it more difficult to design your city services, but that's not an insurmountable problem either.

The Bay area should look a lot more like Manhattan, not that Manhattan is the gold standard in affordable housing...

startups also pay insane rent for their offices

Not their fault; other than in a high rent area, where can you find people who blow most of their dough on rent? Those are the smart ones!

Landlord -> Property taxes -> Government benefits receivers, service providers and employees

The real beneficiaries are the people who gain from the increased tax revenue.

What happens when the source of the tax revenue decides they had enough and leave?

I thought Prop 13 prevented taxes from rising with property value?

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