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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

But then... SF still wouldn't have housing, Oakland would. It's in another county. Come on, there's no reason to limit buildings to as short as they are right now. It's as if the city of SF has given up on change entirely.

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This is like beating a dead horse. People move to SF, complain there isn’t enough housing, do this for a few years and either leave or realize it’s not going to change. It is the way it is, it’s not changing in a year a or two. This is a generational thing that will take at least a decade if not longer to change. The End. Don’t believe me? Check this comment in five years.

Call it NIMBY call it whatever you want but there is _no_ incentive for long term SF residents (10+ years) especially home owners to support more housing, especially for tech transplants.

Their actions have a moral cost and the people who pay those costs aren't the tech transplants, they're literally every other kind of person who slowly finds themselves unable to live in a place that is just as much their home as the owners of property. Schoolteachers, firefighters, garbage truck drivers, restaurant workers, people who lost their job, people in temporary unemployment and in need of retraining.

I understand that the problem feels intractable, but it's because we treat the people make it so like something that simply is. It is not a thing that simply is, it is a moral choice made my hundreds of thousands of people over and over again and it is their failure.

Morality is a spook. There are no "moral costs".

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