Hacker News Reader

Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

What's the alternative?

To aggressively build housing. But this requires local politics to cordially ignore the calls to keep the status-quo. In many places, it isn't possible. :/

Raising LVT proxies (e.g. property tax) would make the NIMBYs quieten.

Untaxed land -> higher property values -> NIMBYs start getting agitated about proposed housing developments taking chunks out of their home equity by increasing supply

I like the approach Houston has taken: no zoning. Many say it won't work, but it does. HOAs pop up in some places if they really don't want commercial.

OK, but isn't the existence of zoning basically the same as the existence of HOAs, in that people have chosen to enact these policies locally, much as HOAs enact hyper-local policies? You seem to be OK with HOAs but not zoning laws, so my question is why are zoning laws bad when it is the choice of their residents (through representative democracy) that they enact policies that preserve their area's character and quality of life?

Basically, HOAs are smaller scale. Also, there's a big difference between a bureaucratic gov't doing it and a bunch of residents doing it. Here's the thing about zoning: the people on whom it is enacted probably have a part of one vote in the city council. The decisions are mostly made by the rest of the city. This is especially true in a city as large as Houston.

It's the classic problem of tyranny of the majority, which is best solved through hyper-locality (i.e. HOAs).

I disagree with the framing of this as 'tyranny of the majority'. The size of the group of people which is allowed to enact policies is entirely arbitrary, and I don't see a principled reason as to why HOAs would be OK but cities would not. I feel those who are OK with HOAs but against city-level policy-making that constrains growth are likely just drawing the line in a way that matches their own interests or ideologies.

I also don't understand why you are framing government as inherently bureaucratic as part of this argument. If that's the case and it justifies not having policy-making left to public governments, why not apply the same logic wholesale and say that we don't need city- or state-level governments at all?

> city-level policy-making

How would you propose to do this? Houston is an incredibly large and diverse city, and different places have different needs. It's much easier for people from the actual place to come to a resolution than bureaucrats in a council chamber, many of whom have essentially zero specific knowledge of the area or problem at hand.

> why not apply the same logic wholesale

I think we should. The more sovereignty we can reserve to individuals, the better. That which must be given up should be given first to as hyper-local an organization as possible, growing in scope/scale only as needed.

> why not... say that we don't need city- or state-level governments at all?

Because obviously some things (like, say, some city issues) can't be handled well by a government smaller than a city. This doesn't mean that everything needs to go to them. You're deliberately misunderstanding my arguments to try to discredit them.

The implication of that framing is to somehow overcome: "Local political culture limits natural housing supply growth"

via - ignoring NIMBYs or at least reducing their influence, rezoning for density, deregulating to allow smaller/denser/cheaper constructions...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501

The alternative is:

Make towns growth into cities. A lot of heartland available. A lot of people wants to own their house. Good Mortgages. Good construction credits. Industries can have tax benefits to be there.

Land value tax.

Zoning enough housing to meet demand.

There is technically a second option - better transit to handle it but it is usually a worse one and like landfills they have to be built somewhere. And of course the most efficient, scaleable, and clean transit benefit from higher density housing. And of course people resist that as well. The problem with rent isn't that we don't have a cure but that people don't want to take their medicine.

Rent subsidies. https://www.harris.senate.gov/news/press-releases/amid-risin...

By the same logic as how LVT decreases rents, subsidies are simply a net economic transfer to landlords.

They might be a reasonable very short-term emergency measure for a few, but long-term, this exacerbates the problem.

Wrong. Long term, subsidies encourage building more housing. Rent control has the opposite effect. On top of that, subsidies can be directed to bring the most benefit to the city (teachers, for example), while rent control benefits whoever happens to be renting at the time it is instituted. There are better long term options, but the political reasons for rent control are because the short term problems can't be ignored, so they aren't actual alternatives to rent control.

Subsidies encourage more housing as much as any other demand-increase does, which is to say, not at all, where supply is effectively constrained. Existing actors in the landlord, real estate, and finance markets all benefit from constrained supply and price inflation.

See: https://web.archive.org/web/20190115035057/https://plus.goog...

You've got to break that logjam, and LVT is one of the most effective ways to do that.

Remember: they're not making any more land. You can build out (sprawl, congestion) or up (density). Low land taxes or high improvements taxes both discourage density and encourage sprawl. You cannot change land-use by adjusting demand parameters, long-term and large-scale, only supply and holding costs.

Land value tax.

Land value tax requires a constitutional amendment in California. Once again, with feeling: it does not solve short term problems and is therefore not an alternative to rent control.

Also, you've ignored that renters are still encouraged to increase housing supply with rental subsidies. If they have enough votes to enact rent control, they have enough votes to increase housing supply for the long term solution.

Your first point is, sadly, very true.

Your second remains economically invalid for the reasons already stated.

Nope. New landlords are incentivized to build housing. The only thing that could stop them is regulations from existing landlords, but in a place with enough votes for rent control or subsidies, existing landlords do not have the votes to stop them.

Counterfactual: San Francisco has rent control and subsidies (Title 8). Landlords have the votes to stop construction.

Plus; the probem is *regional8. It's the Bay Area as a whole which is chronically short new housing. SF alone cannot absorb all new demand. Similar dynamics affect most constrained markets.

Again; your economic understanding is flawed, as is your grasp of historical facts.

It is not a counterfactual. Once you have rent control, existing renters will no longer be in favor of building new housing. You're confusing having the votes at two different times, among other things.

Do nothing and let the market sort it out. It's time to try some actual laissez fair now that intervention has failed, as was predicted by most economists.

Minimal zoning, minimal taxes, minimal codes. Just boil it down to the raw essentials and give a legal guarantee that every building permit application will be processed in 6 weeks and furthermore legally guarantee that for new buildings all of these new rules are immutable or 10 to 20 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com