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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

Surprised this comment is getting downvoted, because it is dead-right. The core "problem" is that the Bay Area has experienced a gold rush unlike any other in human history, and it's happened so quickly that some things can't keep up. Yes, there are regulatory problems that have compounded this, but those problems are just tangential and I doubt fixing them would do a ton to completely alleviate housing affordability.

The problem is that Silicon Valley is awash in money.

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I think the issues with the comment is the implication that the wealth creation is the problem. That framing leads to solutions that tend towards reducing the wealth creation. That seems a bit like cutting off our nose to spite our face.

We want society to be more wealthy, and the tech industry has been a huge creator of wealth. The other thing about the tech industry is it's fairly unique in how widely it distributes that wealth. What other industry gives stock options to low-level employees? Sure tech founders get a disproportionate share, but look at a different industry, and it would be rare to see any ownership extended beyond higher level employees, but in tech, stock compensation is ubiquitous.

(this may be due to a labor shortage, and yes you can point at things like Amazon's warehouse workers as a counter example)

The trouble is now we have quickly raising housing costs, and a large portion of the population who's quite wealthy, living next to many who are not doing nearly as well. Crime and general unhappiness are not necessarily linked to poverty; it's highly linked to inequality. This is likely why we have so much property crime in San Francisco. Income inequality. When you see the person next to you is doing much better, you get mad.

Frame this so it's not about limiting wealth creation, but about limiting income inequality.

Massive wealth creation in a very small geography creates inflation. I don't see how this is controversial in any way.

Ask the citizens of Portland why they are so angry at Californians moving into the area. It's because a small number of Californians are moving into the area, and they are considerably richer than Portlandians, so they drive up the housing prices for everyone. The exact same phenomenon is happening right now there, and Seattle where rents and house prices are skyrocketing because of wealth.

By concentrating all of the wealth creation in the Bay Area itself, isn't that also a form of income inequality? As opposed if companies spread themselves geographically, thus distributing the wealth generated and the beneficiaries? There ought to be income equality both in the Bay Area and outside of it.

When you create a website, and it gets users, that's what you want, right? But now your massive number of users become a problem. You need to scale to handle the number of users.

Same thing with wealth creation. Too much wealth creation is the problem, the same way having too many users is the problem. It's a good problem. It's a problem you're delighted to have. But it is a problem, and one you have to solve.

Disclaimer: I have very little idea how to get SF to scale. I don't even live there.

The number of users is not the problem, the lack of scaling to support them is the problem. Scaling sf would be easy - just approve housing development projects faster.

Housing is only one part of the problem. Infrastructure and public services also have to be scaled up when population increases. Otherwise you end up with third-world type cities.

> What other industry gives stock options to low-level employees?

I'm genuinely interested in which companies offer stock options to their cleaning staff, security staff and receptionists.

The first company I worked for in Silicon Valley during the dot com boom gave stock options to their receptionist, and after IPO she had enough money to quit and buy a vineyard.

Yahoo?

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