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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Can you survive in a city with no one but bankers and tech people? No police, no resturaunts, no firefighters, no cleaners, app because the closest place they can afford is 4+ hours away? Are you going to take turns with your co-workers to clean the bathroom everyday, take out the trash, and clean the floors? Are you able to pull the long hours tech jobs require and still have time to cook food everyday? How would you even get that food if supermarkets can't keep employees around to stock the shelves?

This is all the extreme end of the situation, and we're not there yet, but it's the path we're on in many cities with San Francisco being at the forefront.

You can't have every worker specialize in to a narrow niche and then suddenly remove half of those niches from your society with no replacement and expect it to run smoothly

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Wow what a nice strawman you have here! All the horrors you've described in so much detail can and will be fixed very nicely by market pressure (if no one is there to clean the bathroom, suddenly janitors will be in high demand and command a nice salary, etc).

Forcing 'the right mix of people' _reeks_ of totalitarian state. Who gets to decide?

Are there going to be income/education quotas? Male vs female? Racial quotes?

Market pressures aren't fixing it, at least not fast enough to prevent a lot of pain to actual living humans. Yea in the long term it might be fixed, but in the here and now people are hurting. When I was out of college and stuck in retail I had to decide whether I was stealing food or medicine that week or going without, because those jobs don't pay enough to live. I am lucky enough to be talented enough at software to get a job doing it, but you can't expect everyone in the population to have those skills.

Expecting market pressure to take care of everyone is condemning people to die. I agree that the market is more efficient, but that efficiency comes without any sort of humanity. There are people who have no talents that are worth enough in our current economic configuration to earn enough to live at market clearing wages. Should we just let them starve or go homeless because of it?

I also agree that planning a 'right mix' of people does reek of totalitarianism, but the other choice isn't any better.

I don't see how letting the rich choose who gets to live a decent life based on whose most useful to them is any less totalarian when our society is channeling more and more wealth everyday to a small group of people.

(1) The usual argument against below-market housing here isn't "screw the poor". It's "this is an ineffective show at a fix for a problem that the market would resolve if we could build to the higher density that current zoning prohibits".

(2) Even if you have only market-rate housing, that doesn't mean the people who can't afford it end up homeless. You can just give them or their landlords money. In the USA, that's Section 8.

Economists generally like Section 8. It gets a bad reputation, because the apartments tend to be shabby; but that's a question of the amount of the subsidy, not the delivery mechanism. For a given total to spend, I'd rather put two people in a run-down $1.5k apartment each than flip a coin, put one of them in a $3k apartment, and leave the other on the street.

> I'd rather put two people in a run-down $1.5k apartment each than flip a coin, put one of them in a $3k apartment, and leave the other on the street.

Do you want to get USSR? Because one committee plays God and regulates who lives where. Then some other committee, no doubt well-intentioned, will apply the same logic to groceries. And cars. And salaries. And this is how you become USSR.

We're discussing this in the context of people who can't afford market-rate apartments. If the government doesn't step in, then some fraction of these people will work harder and strive, and make it on their own. A different fraction will die on the street.

I don't want people dying on the street. I think more permissive zoning laws would solve a lot of our housing affordability crisis, but not all of it. For the rest, I think subsidies for market-rate housing (like Section 8) are the most efficient and transparent solution, and much less USSR-like than what the linked article describes. What do you think?

Ah, I thought you were just saying the market should sort it all out. Yea giving money to people whoever need housing so they can find the best fit for themselves does seem like a better choice than just having a few winners and the rest get nothing.

The real answer is that more housing needs to be built if demand is this high, but for various reasons that seems politically unfeasible for most US cities

I don't honestly believe "we'll just end up paying janitors more" actually works out.

You pay teachers more, you pay policemen more, and your taxes go up. You start paying all the waitresses more, the supermarket workers more, the janitors more, your cost of living just goes up.

Wage isn't really an absolute, it's a ratio to the cost of living. So in response to all their food getting more expensive, their taxes going up, etc, you end up paying all your darling tech/finance workers more. Then you're right back where you started. You've solved absolutely nothing, you've just embiggened some numbers.

No, I couldn't live in such a city. If there was nobody to take out the trash we would have to raise more money to increase salaries for garbage men, etc. Some of it, I could live with less of, and some I'd pay more for.

Letting the economy balance itself seems a lot smarter than trying to control it and I think history provides many examples supporting this claim.

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