Apple's $2.5B Home Loan Program a Distraction | Hacker News Reader

Apple's $2.5B Home Loan Program a Distraction

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18 pointsbenologist7 comments

I feel it’s misplacing the blame to accuse Apple of creating the housing problems by increasing demand through employing people. Unless you are fundamentally against companies employing people.

It’s not like the politicians have been completely blindsided by the fact that companies hire people and that people want to live near where they work.

Now the USA is relying on these massive mega-corporations resolve the problems they created in the first place, and all these corporations are giving are empty platitudes and band-aids...

Both yourself and Bernie say that the companies created this problem. How? It used to be that if a company brought in a bunch of high-paying jobs, governments would fall all over themselves, sometimes to a fault, to bring that company to their town/county/state.

But now we can cast 20-30K workers making over $100K/year as a "problem", relieving local government of responsibility for poor zoning and taxation policy. And the "tax evasion" angle is just a distraction that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. So my question to you (and Bernie) is: how does providing a lot of well-paying jobs make a company responsible for the local housing market? As a follow-up question, what is the suggested action that a particular company take to solve this problem?

That is a fundamentally flawed misunderstanding of the NorCal housing shortage. The causes are largely governmental and can be discovered just about anywhere.

I don't think the problem is lack of loans. The problem is the price of assets. This is a structural problem (this used to be something we used to tell developing countries and here we are)

Essentially, the asset prices need to match economic activity. Another way to think about this is that house prices should be affordable to the median household (teachers, nurses, office staffs, blue collar workers)

The reason it is not affordable is because of laws and unequal taxation.

Access to loans is NOT the problem!!

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