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Comment by cfmcdonald | Hacker News Reader

This is not a fair argument. Why should you assume that condos is the 'correct' thing for this land and factory is the 'wrong' thing? Isn't that for the market to decide? What if I told you someone was offering to buy the property to replace it with an orphanage, would you say this woman is denying poor, helpless children a place of refuge?

Isn't this woman exercising her property rights in a perfectly fair way within the market economy that we have, in exactly the same way that so many developers have exercised their rights to tear down X and replace it with Y, where many people might have preferred to keep X?

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She is an irrational actor who is preventing a more efficient allocation of a scarce resource.

If she weren’t so notably irrational, the New York Times wouldn’t be writing an article on her.

She's not "preventing a more efficient allocation of a scarce resource." She's "preventing reallocation of her own resource." Good for her!

Only she knows what's best for her property. There's nothing irrational about doing what you want with what you got. It's the opposite that's irrational.

>Only she knows what's best for her property. There's nothing irrational about doing what you want with what you got.

Wait, so is it supposed to be the market deciding or this one lady?

There is no difference? The market is the sum of the decisions of individual actors.

Actually... She is being irrational, because her decision is clearly made on emotional grounds.

But it's her right. I hope it bites her, but it's her right to be irrational.

Though that's the story being portrayed (because "fully rational person does fully rational things" doesn't get many clicks/much interest), it's quite possible that the actual strategy is as suggested here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19119286

she is not rushing to rent it out. Before seeking a new commercial tenant, she wants to find the right way to dispose of all the old equipment, file cabinets and other workplace detritus.

Rushing into things, taking the first offer, etc. This is irrational. Finding the right way to "dispose" of equipment, i.e. finding the highest bidder or, failing that, the closest scrapyard, before finding a new leasee, is not irrational.

> She is an irrational actor

Human beings are deeply irrational, not everything has to be tweaked for maximum output / productivity / efficiency / optimisation.

There is a nationwide housing crisis in city centers, so yes, this could stand some tweaking for more efficiency.

Sounds like an inevitable problem of too high of a population density. We have plenty of land elsewhere, maybe we should be looking at fixing our transportation systems and incentivizing work outside of these areas so that we don't have to all pile together like cords of wood.

Few American cities are very dense at all. Density is more efficient, cheaper in hidden infrastructure costs, better for the environment, and promotes walking for better health.

Irrational if all you care about is money. Pretty rational if you care about preserving your heritage and history.

Luckily we don't live in a society where people are forced to allocate their resources to where other people think they are most efficient.

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