Hacker News Reader

Comment by tvchurch | Hacker News Reader

"The Housing: San Francisco has deeply conservative tendencies for such a liberal city. Its housing supply isn't growing fast enough to keep up with rising demand."

Restrictive housing is more of a liberal phenomenon than a conservative one, wouldn't you say?

View on HN

"There's a group of people I don't like. There's a policy I don't like. Therefore, the group of people I don't like are responsible."

I'd say that's the extent of deep thought and analysis on this one.

It doesn't appear to be a statement of political alignment but of risk-aversive behavior.

The left stereotypes the right as willing to build, build, build with no thought to consequences as long as the dollars continue to flow.

The right stereotypes the left as standing in the way of progress, where "progress" is defined as commerce.

So I'd say both parents are correct, and the author of the "Thoughts" on SFO is letting his politics cloud his objectivity.

The author gives a shoutout to Palladium mag, whose EIC has some "heterodox" opinions on certain ethnic groups[1], as a cool SF philanthropy project. If the author is a liberal, strange bedfellows indeed.

[1]https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation...

"For such a liberal city?"

"Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." - Robert Conquest, apocryphal.

I would guess that the overwhelming majority of SF homeowners would self-identify as liberal / Democrat voters. But on the topic of local housing policy, they would like to conserve the status quo.

Yes, and from what I can see, the desire to conserve the status quo has little to do with political conservatism and everything to do with ordinary self-interest.

I don’t think you can really personally blame someone for wanting maintain the character of their neighborhood (and inflate the value of their home). It’s perfectly rational behavior. The problem is that the preferences of this relatively small cohort are overriding the social and economic health of the city as a whole. Ideally, a democratic majority would overrule these narrowly self-interested concerns and force more development, more homeless shelters, etc., but for whatever reason this doesn’t seem to be happening in SF.

I don't think of this as a matter of politics in the traditional "left vs. right" sense. Merely that a lot of homeowners in SF have an "I got mine, screw you" attitude that extends into policy decisions in order to protect and increase the value of their property. It's conservative only in the literal meaning of the term, that they're resistant to any change that they fear could cause their home values to decrease. I expect this phenomenon is quite bipartisan in general, but yes, obviously there are more people on the left than right in SF, so likely many "liberal" people are "conservative on housing".

The literal meanings of conservative and liberal: conserve and liberty. Which one would you apply to SF housing?

As a conservative here on HN:

I think the author is using conservative in the more direct sense: the people are fighting to keep things the way they are in terms of housing. This is at odds with the way the city is normally thought of in terms of being "liberal" (more accepting of change).

I don't think it's a statement on whether or not left or right wing policies contribute more to the issue.

I also thought that's what conservative meant in politics too, but you can correct me here.

If you go back far enough, it's where the term comes from, but it doesn't make sense today. That would nominally make it an oxymoron for a "conservative" party to ever propose any kind of change, but clearly they do.

It's a fairly common outcome for political words to get stuck to changing movements rather than identifying unique positions and policies over the course of decades and centuries.

Restrictive housing is literally people trying to keep things the same. That seems like a definition of "conservative" if I have ever seen one.

You can argue that "Conservatives" (note the capital letter, denoting that his means an actual group) would be against rules on housing, but if you actually look at the rules in Republican leaning highly urban areas I bet you will find similar rules.

People dislike dealing with the effects of large scale changes. That really is not a Liberal or Conservative thing (note the capital letters).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com