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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

The charts at the top are eye opening. More and more of our income is going to pay for pieces of land. Unlike computers, TVs, and even troublesome areas like healthcare the land is not getting better and better. It’s instead a purely zero sum game.

We probably can’t eliminate the scourge of land rents altogether but we can stop making the problem worse by putting in place more and more policies designed to raise housing prices rather than lower them. Such policies are exactly the opposite of what the government should strive for.

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Because we can make more computers, execute more healthcare services, etc. Land is a zero sum game; we have a fixed amount, and while it's possible to create more, it's prohibitively expensive to do so.

Add to it, land is the primary method by which "old money" remains in that category.

The US isn't particularly space constrained. In city cores the lack of space is significant. For most of the country, there's plenty of room to build.

Distance costs money or time (basically the same thing at the macro level). When you have things spread out people need to eat the large opportunity cost of forgoing jobs or other opportunities that are far away or spent a lot of time and money commuting. If cities prioritized making it easy to commute in and out that would make distance cost less, effectively the same as increasing density. The problem is that there's many decades of pent up demand for both housing and transit infrastructure. There's no cheap way out of the situation. It's going to take a hell of a lot of either/both in order to measurably improve people's quality of life.

Instead of trying to put cheap homes where the jobs are, we could also try to put jobs where the cheap homes are. People constantly talk about the former, but I almost never see people talk about the latter.

Jobs that require "facetime" can't do that. The only ones that can are remote work. I'm in favor, but most companies resist even when feasible.

Not to mention a city is more than housing. It's nice to walk to the corner pub, go to a theatre, sporting event, etc.

The former problem is much easier than the latter. In order to accomplish it we just need to governments to stop actively blocking it from happening. We have no idea where to even begin with the latter. The best we can do is throw a whole bunch of untested ideas at the wall and hope one works.

> The best we can do is throw a whole bunch of untested ideas at the wall and hope one works.

You're such an optimist. Governments around the world have been trying to relocate employment and labor for centuries and the best they have come up with is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've talked about it, but I seem to be the only one...

In any new suburb or city you are not allowed to put jobs where the people are. There is exactly one house within comfortable walking distance of my office: the farmhouse that was here before the area was developed. If I bought a lot in this office park I would not be allowed to put apartments or houses. A couple miles away there are lots of houses, I wouldn't be allowed to buy a few and put in an office. A few miles in a different direction is a shopping mall that is failing. If I bought the mall I wouldn't be allowed to rent space for offices or apartments without first doing a zoning change, and then I'd have to choose either apartments or office, I wouldn't be allowed to put a house in the parking lot that is bigger than either apartments or offices would need.

Homes are cheap by definition because not enough people want them in the area. The closest thing we have to that is the Military Industrial Complex and setting up locations to ensure votes. They have the most influence per dollar by going to areas which have fewer other jobs.

It’s true that it’s inherently a zero sum game. As I said I don’t think we can eliminate the drag altogether. But there are lots of interventions at all three levels of government that make the problem worse. And worse yet these aren’t unintended consequences, it’s governments’ policy to try to increase the costs of housing.

Various cities have tiny band aid programs under the rubric of affordable housing but the low hanging fruit is to stop actively intervening to make the problem worse.

> Land is a zero sum game; we have a fixed amount, and while it's possible to create more, it's prohibitively expensive to do so.

Yes, but that sum in the US is huge. Drive around the midwest or any region outside of an urban core and its empty space as far as the eye can see.

The problem is large-scale economic and demographic changes. The US used to have:

* A culture that prized living in suburbia away from dense areas.

* Labor-intensive agriculture that provided a lot of jobs in rural areas.

* Labor-intensive manufacturing that provided a lot of jobs in a large number of smaller cities.

All of those forces encouraged the population to spread out. Those forces are evaporating. The suburbs are now seen as soulless sources of miserable commutes. Automation and consolidation has dramatically reduced the number of farm employees needed for a given square acre of land. Automation and cheap imports from other countries have eliminated manufacturing jobs.

Without those forces counterbalancing things, there is a strong trend towards consolidating into large metropolises which can't absorb the growth that quickly.

We can try to stuff every more dense housing in those cities and gradually turn them into concrete boxes. Some amount of densification is good. But instead of investing almost entirely in that, I really wish the US was working to try to make small and mid-size cities more desirable too.

> large metropolises which can't absorb the growth

They choose not to.

> more dense housing in those cities… turn them into concrete boxes

A "US NIMBY-like" viewpoint. Paris is denser than the average city and lovely, as are many EU cities. US cities designed before the car took over usually nicer and more space-efficient as well, but are few and mostly on the East coast.

why? just because you grew up that way? stop fighting it. lots of sprawl/small-cities is bad. to put it a little (but not a lot) hyperbolically: we should retreat to megalopolises and declare everything else state parks.

Suburbia is a short term and unsustainable model. The long term costs of purposefully watering down your economic activity per infrastructure dollar is horrible.

Land is zero sum (which is why a Land Value Tax is such a good idea), but housing, which is what people actually consume is not. We have the technology to build more housing, just not the regulatory regime, which is what this article is about.

That is the most significant comment here. People keep going on about land when the real problem is housing. US housing density is awfully low. Our country's major population expansion took place after the car and our model of building cities went horizontal rather than vertical.

For a long time there was a roughly equal balance in the US between the amount of money paid out as wages and the profits that go to capital. Recently that balance has gotten skewed with 60% going to capital. But basically all of that skew is due to rising rents and housing prices.

A big part of it is wage stagnation too. The average American hasnt had a meaningful raise since 1973, that's half a century. Not good. Growth of the labor supply and repeal of trade protections for industries that employ low-skill workers have caused it.

This metric is comparing returns to capital to total returns to labor, not the median returns to labor. Median wages haven't been doing too well recently due to rising inequality but gains by the best paid professionals would be enough to make up for that on this metric except for rising housing costs.

I dont see how a low median return plays no role in total returns. If the median were higher surely the total would be higher no?

All things being equal, raising the median wage income raises the mean wage income. But the mean wage income can also rise form things that don't raise the mean income, like people in the top quartile being paid more. And you get the total wages paid out by multiplying the number of wage earners by the mean wage, not the median wage.

Governments aren't striving for ideal outcomes - government is necessarily a bunch of scoundrels whose chief goal is to stay in power, which is achieved by giving sufficient bungs to donors and voters:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-...

Sorry to ruin your day ;-)

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