Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

This piece verges on daft or disingenuous. The major problems are major cities (SF, NYC, Seattle, LA, and so on) that have artificially restricted housing since the '70s (https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-...) and yet we've also seen increasing economic returns since then to those superstar cluster cities (The Triumph of the City is a good and readable description: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/Silver-t.htm...).

So yeah, there's no housing crisis in Eastern Oregon, but there are also no jobs and none of the economic clustering and spillover effects that one gets from superstar cities. So you can try to live in cities and first-tier suburbs where the jobs are, but where exclusionary zoning has made housing ungodly expensive (https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/exclu...), or you can live in the boonies where there are no jobs but (relatively) cheap housing.

Those of you who are going to reply about remote work: remote work is lovely, but it doesn't generate knowledge spillovers and has a bunch of other problems as well. See again the Glaeser book. It is not a practical, mass solution, although I'm glad it works well for you.

Part of this problem can and should be solved at the state level, but DC should also tell states and municipalities that, if they don't end exclusionary zoning, they're also not getting federal highway funding and other federal transit funding. That's the stick DC has.

The article cites well grounded aggregate statistics. Eastern Oregon doesn't affect the statistics because not enough people live there. So Eastern Oregon and all the other very low population places are a red herring. Please argue with the points presented not some other issue entirely.

Drum specifically calls out the high cost cities. But the aggregate statistics show that these are exceptions to the general pattern. We should not argue from our personal experience when the statistics show it is not typical.

This is policy relevant. If the Feds are going to intervene, it is very important that they intervene in the actual problem, not some misunderstood version of the problem where intervention would be at best a waste of resources and political capital, and at worst further proof that "government intervention is always bad."

A question with potentially constructive answers: "What federal interventions would potentially be helpful given that the housing crisis is mainly in a few high-rent cities?"

>The article cites well grounded aggregate statistics.

That's the problem, it's in aggregate when the problem is very localized.

The nation is producing a ton of high paying jobs but only in places where rent and property values are skyrocketing, which is in a tiny sliver of American cities. That's the problem and why aggregate statistics will never capture the problem.

My wife works in biotech. I work in tech. A year back we asked ourselves if we wanted to move to the mid sized American city where my parents live. Homes are very affordable there and if we had children, we could raise them near my extended family.

One factor in choosing not to move is that there's only one employer in the entire metropolitan region that hires in her specialty of biotech. I would have to take a pay cut or work remotely, which I'm okay with, but we might be totally ending her career altogether which we are less okay with.

So instead we're now renting at 3500 a month (3 bedrooms) and saving up for the enormous downpay we will need in greater Boston

>A question with potentially constructive answers: "What federal interventions would potentially be helpful given that the housing crisis is mainly in a few high-rent cities?"

Parent already offers an answer, tell states to end exclusionary zoning or lose federal transit/highway funding. Exclusionary zoning is born out of a dark period of American policymaking (redlining) so personally I'm on board

Something this reply chain suggested to my brain:

If the hyper concentration is part of the problem, then won't forcing SF or other popular hubs to build high rise just make them even more popular and further increase the gravitational pull that will send another wave of migrants from the 2nd tier cities and we just repeat the same cycle with higher buildings?

Isnt this the same as making streets wider because of traffic? Now even more people decide to drive.

That's what Tokyo is; increasing in population despite Japan as a whole falling. People in cities have smaller greenhouse gas emissions than people living rural or suburbs; they don't need cars because things are close and mass transit is affordable and convenient because there are enough people sharing it. The US can't get there until they enforce standards of conduct in the public sphere and stop exclusionary zoning.

>forcing SF or other popular hubs to build high rise

Just a note but I find it highly disingenuous to conflate eliminating restrictive zoning with mandating high-rises. Eliminating restrictive zoning is just allowing the free market to better utilize land, which may mean high rises, or it may mean tightly packed townhouses or single family homes like in many Japanese suburbs, and only where the demand exists. If you own a standard American SFH, nobody is forcing you to demolish it.

>just make them even more popular and further increase the gravitational pull that will send another wave of migrants from the 2nd tier cities and we just repeat the same cycle with higher buildings?

Absolutely, without a doubt. There's a limit (globally it seems to be around a population of 30 million in the metropolitan region), but there's no doubt that if market forces brought reasonable prices to the Bay area at the very least the gentrified and priced out would return, those who fled to the exurbs and drive in for 70+ minutes would return, and at the very least a bunch of techies in other cities who could never imagine paying 3600 on a single bedroom would give the Bay area a try.

Essentially, the region would likely boom much in the way that New York boomed in the industrial revolution, or more recently Shanghai and Beijing boomed. Whether you view this as positive is obviously debatable but I find it undeniably fair that we stop stacking the deck in favor of the rich and landed

Given your analysis, the policy solution needs to address concentration of businesses & jobs in high-rent areas, much more than lack of housing.

Interestingly one of the arguments of the anti-growth folks in these high-rent cities is that more housing will just aggravate concentration. Unfortunately they don't offer alternative proposals.

I would like to hear about alternatives to increase employment opportunities where people can afford to live. Are there ways to encourage businesses to relocate to low-rent locations? Or to allow remote work? Or ??

But that has little to do with this. You are paying market rate in an area with a lot of high paying jobs where housing is expensive because it is valuable. Of course everyone would like to pay less, but that is a different problem. That is about opportunities, fairness or equality. It has little to do with housing as such, which is what the article is pointing out.

Looking at the glut of empty affordable housing in Oregon, compared to the mass of homeless people encamped behind a San Francisco Home Depot? I'm gonna have to call your red herring comment irrelevant to the evidence.

If it were only Oregon, that'd fly. But we have nearly everywhere in the country that's more than 1-2 hours' travel from a major metropolitan area.

While we can discount some farmland, there's a fracked-land house I can sell you in Ohio for as little as $5K, $10K tops.

The only internet available is dial-up. The planned $150/month 10Mbit-down/1Mbit-up cable internet deal for the county with Comcast fell through back in '11.

The only water is well-water - and you'll have to pay more for a filter system than for the house. The power company will charge you more than a mortgage payment to keep the place surviveably warm in the winter.

And the only jobs? The Walmart closed back in '11. And being from out of town isnt gonna help. But if you're nice to a guy I met at the Denny's about 40 mins from the place, he can get you $8/hour at the Walmart distribution center 90 minutes away on the highway.

Food? There's a Dollar Store about 20 minutes down the road at "downtown." There's a gas station, a McDonalds, and a couple of pawn shops and antique dealers that are effectively interchangeable - that's where you can buy "farnature" if you cant build your own from cord-wood that you buy from neighboring farms. And a gun store that popped back up after the Walmart closed. And the one church left, where the whole town will expect you. And the bar, called "bar's".

If you hear chanting on one Saturday night of the month, accompanied by faint light from the woods out back, that's just the Klan rally where the locals go to blame immigrants and African Americans for taxes still existing. Local Government has effectively collapsed from lack of funding. But the county Sheriff gets to use "Civil Asset Forfeiture" on unwary travellers to put his kids through boarding school.

The house itself? Is a shotgun shack. From the way you talk about people, I expect you have currently closets this size. If the fridge and stove still work, they're still from the 70s. The place probably would have been condemned if the 5-county inspector handn't passed on about five years back.

But hey, its almost the cheapest house in America. Its been on the market since before the housing collapse.

From the post:

> Now, there’s no question that a few specific cities have seen big rises. The Bay Area is obviously one, Denver is one, and Seattle is another—though the market has responded recently in Seattle and housing development is now increasing. But if you look at big cities more broadly, there’s not even a generalized urban rent crisis.

The author's contention isn't simply that there's no housing crisis in places like Eastern Oregon, but rather that there's no housing crisis anywhere outside of a few major cities. He's also got a bunch of numbers to back up the assertion.

Now I'm inclined to think Drum's staked out a position that is too extreme in one direction (I live in one of those major cities!) but I feel like your position is too far in the other direction. I think we want to accurately characterize the problems we're trying to solve. Here in Seattle, housing supply is a big issue. But back in my hometown of Tulsa, I suspect housing is pretty cheap, and the problem is more likely a lack of good jobs.

What the article largely says is that there isn't really a housing crisis if people make more money and pay more rent. Is it realistic to pay hundreds of dollars per month in rent when Microsoft pays hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in Seattle? Not from a market perspective. People paying what they can afford isn't really a housing crisis. That is essentially the market working, pricing valuable things highly. It might certainly be some other crisis however, like society favouring property over work.

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