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Comment by dgzl | Hacker News Reader

I'm a renter in Oregon and I've been outspoken about this long before the laws were passed. From my experience, people who support heavy laws, regulations and taxes don't spend enough time considering potential side effects. They feel like with enough support, they can just force anything they want to happen, while completely disregarding the market.

I feel like an amount of the general public just wants Big Daddy government to come in and authoritatively force everyone into an unnatural framework, which is pure ignorance.

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What constitutes a natural framework?

IMHO, there is nothing "natural" about land ownership. Land ownership in the USA isn't actually what most people think it is. It's not an inalienable right and is largely at the pleasure of the public by way of legislation that can be changed.

The natural framework of relevance is more to do with housing as a good or service than with land.

>> From my experience, people who support heavy laws, regulations and taxes don't spend enough time considering potential side effects.

This is basically everyone. On today of all days, we see what the PATRIOT ACT USA has done to this country decades later, and people are quick to point that out but not consider it for laws that have not yet passed.

You know I was neutral on this stuff, studied economics and some business law, have actually read Adam Smith rather than just little excerpts. When I was younger most of the 90s working as a tech in and around the financial sector, so while I don't consider myself an expert I do think I'm quite well informed. I spent about 25 years giving market economics and the investor class the benefit of the doubt.

I've changed my mind.

Why?

Because of the problem described in this story and discussed in this thread, among other things. I feel like that would be the obvious inference to draw.

I'm not following you... What did you believe, and what has it changed to?

I believed in giving market economics and the investor class the benefit of the doubt and now I don't. You can interpret this in the context of the larger discussion and the news to which it is a reaction.

The market is simply a tool. It's not infallible. It is a very powerful framework, and enables amazing things. However, left unchecked, it will also create undesirable outcomes or side effects. Negative externalities are a real thing.

In this specific case, perhaps you are right, I can't say.

But your wide-sweeping declarations and general tone reveal your own harmful ignorance.

We’re talking about rent control, a system designed to attempt to dictate that supply and demand doesn’t exist via a law. A system with no economic foundation that creates worse housing everywhere it’s implemented.

Well, i disagree with your opinion. Silicon Valley has been attracting a lot of people from lot of states, who all need housing. Remember , size of California is fixed. Housing in Silicon valley doesn't grow at the same rate as number of people coming here. Added to that, foreigners living in foreign countries ( who have never visited USA, who have no intention of living in USA) are able to own land/houses in silicon valley , and do that purely for monetary reasons, ie get more money out of the property , jacking up prices even more. An ordinary American who wants to live in California is suffering as a result of this. rent control or low income housing are essential tools to make ordinary Americans’ lives better.

The solution is more housing, not deincintivizing apartment construction.

> Housing in Silicon valley doesn't grow at the same rate as number of people coming here

Bingo. And why not?

Bingo. And why not?

Because California property owners don't want it to. The artificial scarcity drives up property values. Take a look at Brisbane, they fought residential development tooth and nail claiming that people should just work in Brisbane but live in San Francisco.

Not true. We have a house and commercial rental property in Sunnyvale California. I’d love to tear down my commercial building and build something with an additional story but zoning won’t allow it. And is welcome all single family zoning being upgraded to 2 family zoning. I’d build a second unit in a heartbeat.

Existing homeowners don't want their living space turned into downtown Manhattan because there's a temporary exorbitant demand for ad click optimization and pic sharing networks.

There's a whole spectrum between single family homes and "Manhattan". It's not a binary!

The Bay Area's population has grown by 8.5% in the last 10 years. [0] Please, that's not "Manhattan". That's one person on your block converting their garage into a rentable unit.

Those "existing homeowners" are really messing things up for everyone because they don't want Bob to turn his garage into a rental? Somehow I think there's more to it than that.

[0]: https://www.kqed.org/news/11741275/map-the-bay-area-leads-ca...

Full quote: The population of the nine-county region grew by over 600,000 people since 2010 — a nearly 8.5% increase — outpacing the growth rate in any other part of California, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released Thursday.

600k people is about as much as Seattle proper. Which happens to span 83.94 sq mi. In less than 10 years. That's _a lot_ of construction.

Huh? 600,000 people in the Bay Area's 7,000 square miles -- I don't see how the Seattle comparison of "83.94" square miles is related.

No residential neighborhood in the Bay Area needs to turn into "Manhattan" to house 600,000 extra people. If every block added a house we'd have extra housing to spare. Zoning prevents a ton of development, and everyone pretends they're fighting "Manhattan".

At Manhattan densities, the Bay Area would house 468 million people. That's not what's happening, and no one is advocating for that.

We don't need to build Seattle in the Bay to house everyone. We just need cities to stop dragging permits out years and every planning committee to stop saying "no" to any small increases in density.

How much construction it is isn't super relevant -- if it's profitable, it will happen!

Then they shouldn't vote in the office space?

Unfortunately for you San Francisco hasn't been a sleepy little fishing village for nearly 200 years. Its popularity isn't a temporary trend.

Of course I wouldn't mind becoming more like Manhattan in some ways. Compared to how pedestrian hostile the Bay Area is, Manhattan is heaven.

Housing in California is fixed because of zoning and construction regulations. Also, more people can't move here than can be supported...and how does putting arbitrary limits on maximum rent increase the amount of people that can live here if we're already dealing with the limitation of too many people wanting to live here? That will just increase the demand...

Otherwise, there is a natural equilibrium. Many people want to live here, housing scarcity goes up. Prices go up, less people want to live here (this is already happening). What you're left with is the price reflecting precisely the degree to which people are willing to pay to live here.

Housing in California is fixed because of zoning and construction regulations.

And who decides these zoning laws? Typically cities and counties. Unfortunately Prop 13 has incentivized building out retail properties (sales tax revenue) over all else. So let's start by doing away with Prop. 13 protections for everything but primary residences. Then, change the statewide zoning laws to encourage/require available housing before non-residential property can be built. Want 2,500 office units? Fine, but if you don't have 2,500 residences available those need to be built first. Or maybe have the state keep 75% of the property tax revenue of new developments until the housing requirements are met. That money can then be used to subsidize affordable housing.

I mostly agree, but we should get rid of prop 13 completely. Just put a lien on the property rather than having the state seize the property if the "concern" is that we don't want people kicked out of their homes for property taxes.

> Housing in Silicon valley doesn't grow at the same rate as number of people coming here

To be clear, the population is growing faster than the housing stock.

> Rent control or low income housing are essential tools to make ordinary Americans’ lives better.

How exactly does this address the problem that there are more people than housing? It addresses it for some (the select few low-income residents who were lucky enough to get a below-market rate unit and people already renting), but squeezes everyone else into even fewer units. It doesn't even help "ordinary" people; it helps two specific groups.

>Remember , size of California is fixed

Yeah, fixed at ~164 thousand square miles (~400,000 km^2). Are you for real? Los Angeles and New York City proper (not the metropolitan areas) are interestingly nearly identical in official area at around 468 square miles each. But LA has a density of around 8000/mi^2 while NYC is well over 27000/mi^2. If LA merely matched NYC that'd cover another 10 million or so population by itself. The size of freaking California is not remotely a limiting factor, the limiting factor is not enough high density buildings.

While your are technically correct, there are significant issues getting water. Just because there is a spare part of land also doesn't mean it's not in the middle of one of our huge deserts or is connected in any meaningful way to roads. Empty land doesn't equal inhabitable land.

Nope, as long as almonds are still being grown in CA, there is plenty of water. Residential water consumption is nothing compared to farming.

YMMV, but in my experience people who use phrases like “Big Daddy government” and accuse everyone else of “pure ignorance” are typically not arguing in good faith.

This is a fair criticism, but attacking his credibility is irrelevant. He had no credbility to start with, this is an anonymous forum and nobody knows who that guy is.

A strong counter here would include a counter-argument, and ideally even some support for that counter-argument.

He's also not making an argument that requires any credibility:

> I feel like an amount of the general public just wants Big Daddy government ...

He's just stating how he feels personally. I would think most humans are for the most part qualified to analyze and describe their own feelings.

That’s definitely the general mentality in Portland, so I’m not surprised.

I fear Portland is close to some kind of serious breakdown, and I feel like they're not going to learn anything from it, only blame others who don't vote for hyper-progressive laws.

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