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Comment by hashberry | Hacker News Reader

If affordable housing is an issue, then perhaps the government should provide it for its citizens, like building huge high-rises in Berlin.

I used to rent in an expensive city but bought a cheap house in the suburbs (thankfully I work remotely). Everything is cheaper out here, from gas to utilities to food. But I did experience classism from my friends and family: there is status living in a world-class city. And having wealth or a high-paying job in the city is part of this status. But many people want the status without having to pay the $$$.

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> But many people want the status without having to pay the $$$

It's not just about the status. Every city needs people who do lower paying jobs. Someone has to clean those office buildings, someone has to take care of sick people at hospitals, someone has to drive taxis, buses, ... By not supplying those people with affordable housing within the city they're lives only become worse (more money and time spent commuting, less time spent with family and friends).

> Every city needs people who do lower paying jobs. Someone has to clean those office buildings, someone has to take care of sick people at hospitals, someone has to drive taxis, buses, ... By not supplying those people with affordable housing within the city they're lives only become worse (more money and time spent commuting, less time spent with family and friends).

They can live in the suburbs. Nobody has a special right to live in a specific place. They can commute like everybody else.

The suburbs (literally "bacon belt", wealthy exurbs) are even more expensive (after rapidly getting cheaper after 40-50km out from the city, but 2 hour commutes one way are very hard to sell at German salaries). Plus there's insufficient transport for getting the masses into the city already. Moving people more outwards won't work because these issues may get addressed after 10s of years.

This is just literally privatizing the cost of reproducing the city onto its lowest paid workers, i.e., entirely regressive. Why should those guaranteeing the very basic functioning of a place (janitors, firefighters, nurses, etc) bear not only the burden of lower wages, but now also terrible commutes? There’s no sane logic behind this kind of sentiment besides “might makes right,” which is fueling the rise of “eat the rich” populism.

Then it should be skilled, talented workers who should live in a place without public transport, buy expensive cars and gasoline and spend hours in traffic jams?

No. Cities should be invested in and planned to make themselves affordable and accommodating to all of the labor they need to exist, instead of “skilled, talented workers” shoving off all of the misery onto lower wage workers just because they can get away with it. It’s not zero sum. Look at cities in developed countries like Japan, Austria, Singapore, or the less Capitalist parts of Europe.

< less capitalist parts of Europe.

If you want socialist paradise see Cuba, Venezuela and the rest of Latin America. Come live here and you’ll see how well it works. Government doesn’t have a special power with future vision, nobody does. Let people decide their life, where to live. Move to other places if you want cheap living costs.

Nonsense. Japan is doing a good job at expending housing because they actually have a capitalistic approch to expention of houses in large cities. Its easy and cheap to build more buildings. The exact thing all of these socialist style regulations depress and systematically restrict.

And their is ZERO evidence that 'less capitalistc' parts of Europe do a better job. For the most part those parts are cheaper because nobody wants to live their and the population moves to the more capitalistic parts and that's why prices are going up there.

The pay for "lower paying jobs" will rise, assuming the city actually needs them.

Right, except they don't. It's higher than rural areas, but that doesn't mean it's in line with the general cost of living in the area.

I promise you, if you go to any major world city there are people living there who are poor and barely scraping by.

That is the trade-off they are making in exchange for things such as access to more employers. At some point though, they will demand more money or move out, assuming their quality of life relative to other places they can live drops to a sufficiently low level.

There are people who are poor and scraping by everywhere, not just cities. Low paying jobs are low paying because the demand is not high enough relative to the supply.

Also this cute "demand more more or move out" idea isn't even close to reality. You just said there's poor people everywhere. Why move out of a city to be poor when you're just going to be poor somewhere else? To be away from what support network you might have? Because you feel like incurring all the costs associated with moving?

Also, your original post implied that the city doesn't "need" these jobs. People need janitors and food service workers for their companies. Why these people aren't paid wages where they can afford to exist is a whole rats nest of economic theory that we don't really need to get into.

I'm just pointing out, that the idea that a single individual will be able to demand more money if their job is "important" runs contrary to what we've seen historically.

>Why these people aren't paid wages where they can afford to exist is a whole rats nest of economic theory that we don't really need to get into.

It's not a rat's nest of economic theory. People are paid what it costs to replace them, aka opportunity cost. Obviously the very existence of businesses and workers means someone is willing to work for those wages, which means they can afford to exist...since they exist. Whether or not it's a quality of life worth having is a political problem that needs political solution (i.e. basic income).

Based on the experiences of my businesses and people I know who have businesses in cities experiencing rising rent, wages are going up significantly for blue collar work, but at the end of the day, there will always be someone at the lowest end of the pay scale, and that will be the person who is doing work that many others are willing and able to do, which is usually food service/janitorial/security/etc.

But there is limited amount of apartments in good places like city center. Are you suggesting they should be for people with low salary and talented people with good pay should live in a suburb without public transportation and spend hours in traffic jams? And tourists won't be happy with this too.

That's one of the things being done. Problem is that for a while they didn't (that's what happens when you get people who think the market magically fixes things in power) and building new ones takes time. To get that time a stop gap measure was needed, hence freezing prices for five years for existing houses, no price freeze on new houses.

The "market" would like to fix it. But it is not allowed to. Because, well, politics or: "people in power" :-)

> Government should provide it for its citizens

And how do you expect government to pay for that? How do you decide who lives in these houses? It's not that easy. Government isn't a magic entity.

One of the biggest costs of new rental construction is financing costs (on a 30 year loan it's often half of the cost). Given that it's cheaper for the government to borrow money than the private sector you can have the government simply build market rate housing, but wouldn't need to charge as much in rent.

In this context, the government can essentially be a magic entity.

So you'll force tax payers to pay for it? Government doesn't have free money. Why should people be forced to pay for the construction of such housing?

Tax payers wouldn't have to pay for anything, the only impact would be potentially on credit ratings of the government and possibly also certain interest rates in a minimal way. You can create market rate housing with government subsidized loans that don't come from tax coffers. Hell, the US federal reserve is technically the backer of hundreds of billions worth of mortgages.

We know how the mortgage crisis went. Government isn’t a magical solution.

Government bonds. The affordable rent would go towards paying off those bonds. Tenants would be selected by income level and lottery. If cities can build huge stadiums, they can build huge housing complexes.

The problem is they shouldn't be building stadiums either. You expect a lottery? So random luck will be the way to go.

There are a lot of avenues for taxes, but right now the most ethical tax any western nation could implement is a carbon tax.

Using a carbon tax to guarantee housing to citizens regardless of means, with development planned according to present and forecasted demand, could be this centuries guarantee of clean water or electricity.

Through a high tax on the unimproved value of the land:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

That will only push prices even higher. The cost will be pushed to the consumer, like every tax.

That's actually very difficult to do with a tax on the unimproved value of land. The LVT has very interesting properties. In theory, it should drive the cost of land down to zero, eliminate speculation in land, and encourage denser development.

Last thing I heard, high buildings are mostly infeasible in Berlin due to the unstable underground. You can't build New York everywhere...

I doubt that high buildings help, no matter how many people you square per cubic meter, in big cities it will never be enough to allow affordable living...

Yes but we can at least grow the city up to the 6th floor. There's so many building that barely reach the 4th.

Japan and Korea have managed to build some of the densest cities in the world on active fault lines. For a first world world power economy like Germany reinforcing prime real estate in their capital in the 21st century is not an infeasible economic obstacle.

> If affordable housing is an issue, then perhaps the government should provide it for its citizens

We already pay very high taxes in Berlin and not really getting much back from it (police, firefighters, cleaning services, public transit, even government offices are heavily underfunded). This idea would only make the taxes higher or take away much needed money from other areas.

What about issuing bonds and using rent to pay off the bonds?

> But I did experience classism from my friends and family: there is status living in a world-class city.

Can you go more into depth on that because I've never seen that and some of my extended family lives in small cities/farms in the midwest. If anything, they laugh because I pay $300 a month for parking. Then again, maybe chicago/seattle/san francisco aren't status bearing world class cities.

Many people treat their city as the center of the world. NYC is infamous for this. "Flyover states" is a common pejorative classist term. Every tech company sets up offices in large cities not just for the talent, but because people want to live in the city, not in the "boonies" or "in the sticks" with a bunch of "townies."

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