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High housing prices and the economic inequality they help feed are the great hypocrisy of the "blue states." Most predominantly Democratic or liberal states have unaffordable housing, at least in urban centers, with flagship "blue states" like New York, Massachusetts, and California being among the worst. These high prices are a direct result of anti-development zoning laws and a general mindset that opposes construction.

I think an argument can be made that Texas, Oklahoma, or Kansas are actually more liberal than California because in those states a working class person can afford a place to live.

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General political comments like this, even if they're meant to be insightful, have a completely predictable effect of sparking political flamewars. Since this is completely predictable and this isn't a political flamewar site, please don't.

Common tactic here on HN is to call politics you disagree with "political." I was even banned for this reason: for leaving "political" comments in political threads. Why not just be honest about it being different from your politics? One way to prevent all "flamewars" is to prevent all opinions that can be deemed offensive - and doesn't a quick appraisal of history reveal the issues with this oppressive strategy?

Even in tech companies, you silence opposing opinions about how a technology should work and you potentially ruin the company. I've seen this in startups many times - the problems that we read about after a startup has failed were raised early on by certain members, often who were ignored, fired, and ridiculed for having such opinions.

It's a common tactic to declaim grandiloquently about why one was banned but never supply the links so people could make up their own minds (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=linkless%20martyr&sort=byDate&...). If we were really as arbitrary as you claim (edit: or whatever it is you claim), the pattern would be the opposite: people would be rushing to post their links, revealing how badly they were treated.

You were banned for posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17491521 and ignoring our requests to stop. Any fair-minded reader can see that comments like "who brainwashed you bro" violate the site guidelines independently of your political views.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not claiming that it is arbitrary; quite the contrary. There is a very narrow range of acceptable views on HN - and your reply only underscores that fact. People call posts "political" in a political thread when they disagree - and rarely feel the need to present evidence for their own views.

And since you brought it up - in a manor so truncated - that post of mine that got me banned was 90% about how biological gender does exist. This emphasizes my point about how narrow the range of acceptable opinions are here on HN. None of the words composing the portion that you've quoted are even mean or offensive - and yes, I was implying that propaganda must be used to make someone argue so confidently without evidence against what even establishment biologists overwhelmingly believe (that biological gender exists). And furthermore, since you bring it up, another post of mine on a similarly "political" topic was met with with this supportive reply: "Speaking as a gay minority, I totally agree with your comment."

So within the code of conduct, I assume you are referring to, "Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

I started off sarcastically, but you ignore the rest of my post which is substantive. The comment I replied to began with the words, "race does not exist." If you search on scholar.google.com for the terms 'race' and 'biological' you get 2,640,000 results. And is it really so radical that I met a comment dismissive of the discussion within 2,640,000 peer-reviewed search results with sarcasm?

But admins decided to cherry pick support or lack thereof for my comments, and then censored me. I don't know if this will be seen either since I am shadow banned - and the commenter who alerted me to the fact that I was shadow banned was then banned as well (for making that comment). After being banned I Googled for other people banned from HN from posting outside of the acceptable range of opinions and I found a load of them - and I don't think HN audience would appreciate that you're deciding to follow this censorship tread that we're seeing on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and many more. HN is framed as a more open community, but my experience here reveals a safe-space of increasing proportions.

You were banned, or rather your troll account was banned, because of a long history of posting crappy comments (by the standards of the site guidelines, which include no political criteria) and ignoring our multiple requests to stop. It's just that simple, and anyone who bothers going back through the history can see it.

It's not uncommon for people who were banned to fancy themselves a political dissident and go on about how repressed they are. But the truth is less glamorous: moderation is janitorial work, and the stakes are trivially low.

I'm confident that the HN community supports how we sweep the barn, because if they didn't, we'd never hear the end of it. And what we see is just the opposite: the community flags comments like these ones, from all political quarters. Even your comment upthread was flagged after I unkilled it, so I had to unkill it again.

Lets just completely ignore the Republican governors in California's history to set a narrative.

How can you simultaneously blame New York, Massachusetts and California for housing prices when they all have different housing strategies? You're clearly just pushing an anti-liberal message with no substance.

Their strategies all have a common component: lots of government involvement in what people build and do on their property (the presence of regulation is but one aspect of involvement, how that regulation is implemented matters a lot, see TFA for examples).

Not wanting lots of government management of something is only anti-liberal because modern "liberals" in the US have hitched their horse to the big government wagon.

CA and NY don't have more significantly regulations about what people can build and do on their property than Texas and Oklahoma. We simply have more reasonable zoning restrictions, like not allowing housing in areas designed as floodplains, or schools and housing within a few hundred feet of an oil refinery or fertilizer plant or other industrial facility susceptible to explosive accidents.

Parts of California, like the SF Bay Area, have more restrictive zoning laws. This is not true of the state as a whole, and generally the restrictiveness of zoning laws is highly correlated with the per capita household income of an area, not with its political leanings. (In LA, for example, the most restrictive zoning laws are found in Palos Verdes, the most conservative part of the city but also one of its wealthiest. Commercial buildings are generally limited to 2 stories in the few areas where they even allow commercial development. Contrast that to Beverly Hills, an equally wealthy neighborhood that leans significantly leftward that allows for significant commercial and mixed-use developments. )

lots of government regulation of what people build and do on their property.

That's an inevitable result of population density.

Regulation and involvement are two different things. Many cities are basically shall-issue when it comes to permitting. Others hand out variances like colleges hand out condoms.

I don't see how your response has any relation to what I wrote. It looks more like moving goalposts to me.

I'm saying that regulating zoning in an of itself is something all cities do but they do it to wildly varying extents (e.g. SF vs. Houston) and it doesn't correlated as directly with population as you're saying it does. It's also possible to regulate something (i.e. have zoning rules) but still take a very hands-off approach.

  the Republican governors in California's history

Except for one term in the mid-90s, where Republicans had a brief 1-seat majority in the Assembly, Democrats have had complete control of the Legislature (and therefore, policy and spending) for almost 30 years.

My intent was to expose hypocrisy. Housing policies that implement de-facto economic red-lining are not liberal.

While there is some truth in what you say, it isn't very strong. The Red States typically have just as much zoning. They just have a smaller population and a much larger undeveloped area. (An ocean next to your city cuts the amount of land near your city in half. Mountains on the other side do the same to a lesser extent.)

NIMBYism, greed, and hypocrisy can be found everywhere, regardless of political party. It is consistent throughout human history. Combating injustice is an everlasting struggle.

Regardless of if theres a equivalence there or not, he's right that Texas and Georgia are in the unusual position of both having a ton of jobs and very reasonable housing market.

Granted SF is space constrained, but there is no excuse for other parts of Cali to be so expensive.

There's enough exceptions to this broad constraint though that partisan lean may not be a terribly relevant factor. As an example, Kalamazoo, Michigan is one of the cheapest cities according to several surveys, and the city is a modest left lean in a modest left state. (I actually can't think of too many hugely expensive cities in the Midwest, to be honest...)

Basically, without data comparing several possible relevant variables along with the actual statistical correlation the factor represents, these types of discussions are IMHO useless.

SF is not currently space constrained, only area constrained. They could build upwards if they wanted, but most of the city doesn’t allow buildings over 4 stories. Building up and having a functioning public transportation system would at least allow more people to live in SF, if not solve the housing price problem.

> SF is space constrained

Paris has a population density 3 times that of SF. Manhattan has 4 times.

Sure those places are “liberal” unless a working class person is also a gay man who is afraid of being beaten to death in the streets.

I associate the housing crisis not really with liberal hypocrites but rather with ineffectual old ways of being “green”. Tons of Boomer environmentalists think you can save the planet by recycling, driving a Prius, and not wearing furs. That’s why the hot issue in Berkeley is plastic straws when they are undergoing a severe housing shortage. The fact is that installing a family in an existing dense, walkable city is the greenest thing that can be done. Being a NIMBY and having your Prius serviced by a mechanic who commutes three hours each way from Turlock is not green at all.

You won't be beaten to death in Red states. They will make you feel unwelcome/uncomfortable, but they are not so violent as to beat you to death.

Yes some people are that violent. However such people are everywhere. You are more likely to find them in the blue states just because the population density is higher.

The FBI seems to disagree.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/tables/table-11

https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2016/tables/table-12

Note that the tables seem to differentiate between

The state with the most hate crimes was California, at 931. California's population is 40 million. Next up is New York, at 595 incidents over 20 million citizens. Pretty close per person to California. (.000023 vs .000029, someone check my math).

Next up... Ohio, 442 incidents to 10 million citizens. .000044. Michigan, 399 to 10 million. Kentucky, oh Kentucky, 206 to 4.4 million.

I'm sorry but I am from Oklahoma and you are incorrect. Gay people are regularly beaten, threatened, have their houses burned, and are even murdered. It has been less than a year since drive-by shootings at LGBT organizations in both Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

"In March, the Tulsa headquarters of Oklahomans for Equality was the victim of a similar incident. Security camera video caught a white truck drive by and fire more than a dozen times at the center early in the morning on March 6."

Even if homophobes are just as present, blue states have a more accommodating legal framework to prosecute them.

LGBT persons are not a protected class at the federal level: look at a map of states that include it as a protected class, and nearly all the states that don't include it are red. http://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/non_discrimination_laws

> Sure those places are “liberal” unless a working class person is also a gay man who is afraid of being beaten to death in the streets.

As a gay man from Idaho I’d love it if you could chill out with the hyperbole.

"Steven Nelson died after he responded to an online ad promising a sexual encounter. He was instead attacked by Kelly Schneider, who yelled homophobic slurs while kicking him repeatedly with steel-toed boots, then stripped and robbed him in the pre-dawn darkness near Gott’s Point, prosecutors have said."

And yet here you are responding to a person who said that he was actually gay, and telling you that you are exaggerating. How about you let the people you are talking about speak for themselves?

That was kind of my "meta" point. Social liberalism and economic liberalism have diverged. "Blue states" are more socially tolerant and liberal but have become strongholds for Plutocrats where everyone below the upper middle or "professional" class is paying >50% of their income to real estate or is priced out entirely. "Red states" tend toward the socially reactionary but offer an economic environment that's overall better for average working middle class people. You can afford a place to live and the general cost of living tends to be a lot lower.

This is an over generalization. Red state or blue state, where wealth centralizes, poor people are priced out. Notice that the cities with the highest wealth gaps are not exclusively in blue states.[1]

Likewise, expensive blue states like MA and CA have plenty of places to find affordable housing, they just don't happen to be in the middle of Boston or San Francisco.

[1] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/06/21/25-US-Cities-Worst-...

But this has nothing at all to do with social issues or land use policies- the land is cheaper, simply because the demand is lower and the supply is higher.

LA has been building a lot of housing the past few years; DTLA itself nearly 50,000 units built/being built over a 3 year window. The problem wasn't zoning.

Unlike Texas, Oklahoma, or Kansas, we have these things called "earthquakes" that can cause significant amounts of damage and death and our building codes are more rigorous to minimize those risks. This also makes it more expensive to build housing--but that's a good thing. You don't want a ton of people living in shoddy houses that will collapse and kill them.

Oklahoma, Kansas and parts of Texas have tornados but those states have enough self-restraint to not regulate trailer parks out of existence.

When was the last time a tornado caused 3000 deaths, as happened in 1906 quake?

Per the ACS, Los Angeles County had 3.49 million homes in 2016, and 3.45 million homes in 2013. If your numbers for DTLA are accurate then nowhere else in the county is building anything.

(Just to keep up with US population growth Los Angeles County needs to build over 30k homes every year.)

I was not aware that it was still 2016...

While a few notable buildings opened up in downtown during that 2013-2016 time period (i.e., 8th and Grand, One Santa Fe in the Arts District, the Whole Foods Lofts, the Last Italian Fortress), most of the units in downtown have only recently come onto the market, i.e., in 2017 and 2018.

Some of the biggest developments in the Arts District and South Park are still under construction, and the biggest developments only broke ground this summer.

The Census doesn't have data later than 2016 but other sources lead me to believe that things haven't really changed.

https://la.curbed.com/2017/4/13/15288974/la-metro-housing-co...

If you look at Los Angeles you can clearly see that the problem is zoning. The only high rises are in the downtown area. It looks almost comical. The vast majority of the city is zoned for single family homes.

That's FUD.

LA has no single center of gravity. We have high rises in Downtown, along Wilshire in Korea Town, in MidCity/Beverly Center, Beverly Hills, Century City, Culver City. LA has hundreds of multi-unit apartment and mixed use buildings. Between downtown and the beach, most of the area is zoned for multi-unit residential with multi-unit buildings scattered between single-family blocks. Only a few neighborhoods are entirely single-family homes.

Yup, when it comes to housing, nothing has caused more harm than terribly planned regulations and zoning.

While ineffective zoning is part of the problem, I would argue insufficient land taxing (Prop 13) is more to blame.

I agree. it creates a lot of very perverse incentives.

They’re a direct result of being places where people want to live and can make a lot of money.

Liberal doesn't imply that they care for the working class; in Marxist terms, they're still bourgeoisie, just with a somewhat socially liberal bent. Money is still more important than anything else.

Sure. But do you think Marxists care for the working class and the poor?

I disagree, intent matters a great deal. My conservative friends in Texas don't actually want poor people / immigrants / etc housed, it's a part of their value system - "If they want housing, they should work for it!" thinking. My liberal friends in San Francisco hold the opposite mindset, they want everyone housed, working or otherwise, even if it's done in their own neighborhood.

Policy needs work, I agree. My conservative friends like to mock me, blame the Democrats, or just the entire concept of liberalism, for every problem in San Francisco. Maybe they're right, but I've heard strong arguments that many problems we face are hangovers from old-guard republican policy:

http://www.sfweekly.com/news/the-great-eliminator-how-ronald...

I've also heard arguments that a lot of this boils down to just Prop 13, sponsored mostly by Republicans, particularly anti-tax activist Howard Jarvis but also Paul Gann.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Jarvis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gann

Anyway, I think finger pointing is boring and useless, and as someone who's social circle is split in third between the deep south, the not so deep south, and the capital of liberalism in America, I've learned to address these kinds of discussions with "point your finger at what you think the solution should be instead." Saying "blue states suck at building cities" is just another form of Ad Hominem - what specifically is the problem, and what specifically do you think the solution should be?

> My liberal friends in San Francisco hold the opposite mindset, they want everyone housed, working or otherwise, even if it's done in their own neighborhood.

That may be true for your friends, but the revealed preference of SF residents as a whole does not agree.

Perhaps, then, SF is not as liberal as people assume?

It's really not. SF public policy can barely be counted as liberal and seeing people on HN calling it "leftist" is maddening.

"No true Scotsman"

Lots of people in the bay area think the techies caused the housing crisis.

I was invited to a tent-covered block party in SF by a friend active in politics and the Asian-American scene. I was told that the party was being thrown by a Chinese family that owned something like 30% of SF property. I have no way of verifying this.

My point being that money, in one way or another, caused the housing crisis, and it may not have anything to do with liberal vs conservative, zoning, regulations, or prop 13. SF is an iconic city, and money will always flow there. Meanwhile, virtually everyone I knew in SF was a renter, and most of them were in tech. The only ones I knew who owned had pre-IPO Google money or made it to Google Staff positions.

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