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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing wrong with not letting The Market optimize every square meter of real-estate you care about. Not to mention the selective application of what The Market entails - aren't zoning rights just as real as property rights, that The Market respects? Why not allow The Market to respond to high property prices by redirecting development elsewhere?

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> aren't zoning rights just as real as property rights, that The Market respects?

No. "zoning rights" are not rights, they are rules applying to property that people own _and are subject to change_ much more fluidly than the ownership itself.

As I understand, by buying property, people get a vote on if the zoning should change, much like buying shares in a company gives you a vote on its decisions. So why are zoning rights, or rules, not part of the Market?

Zoning rules are defined by the city council.

And the ability to do so is granted by the state. Thus efforts like SB 50 or Oregon's HB 2001 to take away some of the right to exclude different types of housing.

Only if it changes. I think the point is that if people are buying under current zoning, the market has already spoken. As such it becomes weird when people want the market to handle things, but not if they don't like what the market is saying.

Quite frankly, saying “The Market™ has spoken,” is a bullshit answer. The Market™ is merely the outcome of the rules we’ve setup. We decided as a society to establish certain regulations. People intentionally shaped it. To then turn around and act like this is some sort of natural occurrence and that the outcome is now somehow sacrosanct, is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened. If we picked different rules, a different outcome would have happened. And if the outcome isn’t what we want, then we can change the rules, and a get a different outcome.

That's a fine point but would you please stop arguing aggressively in the flamewar style on HN? I feel like we've had to ask you this a lot. It isn't necessary to vent toxic fumes when making your substantive points: it makes your comments and this forum worse, and it isn't fair to your fellow HN users who restrain themselves from doing the same. You may not owe better to The Market, but you do owe better to the community you're part of here.

There is nothing wrong with my comment.

I don't disagree. I think the point "deogeo" was trying to make was that YIMBY often say that zoning should be removed so the market can take care of housing. But in effect the market already says that it doesn't value affordable housing. We might not like that, and want to change zoning, but that is still intervening in the market and should be recognized as such. But then you would also have to recognize other ways of intervening in the market as legitimate, like rent control. Which is something people usually don't want to do.

The market != the set of people who vote in a jurisdiction.

The former is much, much larger. The latter is more like 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who's for dinner.

And never, never forget that a lot of zoning and land use regulation was basically created to replace outright racist policies like redlining.

Well, yeah, I mean if you don't care about your fellow human beings or the environment, the current policies are working great.

Homeless people, moms and dads driving 2 hour commutes, people who would benefit from a more tolerant climate unable to live there, people unable to take good jobs... the human cost of people's NIMBYism is real, and it is staggering.

The environmental cost is pretty big too: https://www.redfin.com/blog/why-dense-housing-is-green/

It amazes me that alternative solutions are never mentioned:

1) (short term) Make remote work much widely accepted, especially for software roles.

2) (long term) Build offices/centers (e.g.) jobs outside of Bay Area and CA. This is much more scalable and beneficial for the country than having one or two super concentrated centers. Why not have 20?

Those things aren't bad ideas. However:

Teachers, nurses, janitors, waiters and so on can't work remotely.

Splitting things up that naturally group together likely has some costs. VC's might not want to invest in a startup in, say, Tulsa, OK. I've read that some are changing their minds, and it'll happen some, but clusters do happen for a reason, and fighting that may create some problems.

I've had a lot of similar thoughts. If VCs here want to tell their startups they have to be here, that's one thing, but I don't see why some of the tech mega-corps don't open more offices with a few hundred positions in places across the country. A few MBA-types I've talked to told me that just won't work but they didn't offer much of an explanation beyond some mumblings about looking for "only the best talent".

zoning rights are not as real as property rights, in fact they are the opposite. Zoning rights are your ability to limit what the actual owners of a property can do.

Which... might make some sense when we're talking about maybe not having that oil refinery next to a school.

But when we're talking about a 4-plex next to some single family homes because you don't want less wealthy people near you? That's a perversion of the idea in my opinion.

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