Comment by mrkstu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkstu | Hacker News Reader

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I've lived in multiple states in cities that were at the top or near the top for annual population growth over multiple years- and it was fine.

Where I am now is #1 [0] and while property values are going up, there is plenty of housing being built, and since so much of Texas taxes comes via property taxes, there is an incentive for capping top end housing costs.

The city council has been approving higher density housing than the area has had historically, despite some grumbling from the SFH owners. The master plan is oriented around mass transit in an area historically devoid of it.

People complain about regulatory capture, but California has been captured by incumbent property owners and is now drowning in perverse incentives of their own invention. For a state that owes its success to innovation, there is zero innovation, let alone basic competence, coming out of the state/local government.

[0]: https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2020/07/26/austin-ar...

Reading through the 2 above parents, I was having similar thoughts. Problems are evident and if not addressed effectively, they become pretty serious. The solutions are not effective. Why not? The region is chock full of many of the world's greatest problem solvers.

It seems that the 'root cause analysis' is many times simply superficial. Too many homeless people? Give them homes. Too many addicts shoplifting to fund their habit? Decriminalize shoplifting. Cost of rental housing too high? Impose rent control.

This may be a consequence of the amount of time a politician is in office vs. the amount of time it really takes to solve these intractable problems. If a politician's term is 4 years, and it takes 12 years to solve a problem, actually identifying the root cause and devising a solution would be the end of their career in politics.

I'm pretty sure that if San Franciscans could elucidate what kind of a city they want San Francisco to be, no one would say they want it to be a haven for drug addicts and have the world's highest rents. And there are enough neighborhoods that just about all environs they'd list could be implemented somewhere within the city limits.

Given that San Francisco is not the kind of city that San Franciscans want it to be, I can only chalk it up to ineffective leadership by the persons setting and enforcing the rules. That's not solely the politicians. I'd guess it starts with leadership trying to satisfy everyone's issues without triage for practicality or an investigation of possible unintended consequences of their solutions.

Too many homeless people? Give them homes.

Has this actually been attempted?

Yes Salt Lake City has done it to much more success than SF. Of course, Utah and SLCers in general tend to also be more charitable than SFers, so it's hard to say what would happen in SF if they were to do this, given that the population is full of seeming misers.

Thanks for the information. Your version seems very plausible to me; that's why I questioned GP's trivial dismissal.

Austin as a larger metro area has an order of magnitude the amount of land that all of the peninsula has, with no water in the way.

Supporting housing growth through suburban sprawl is a story of most cities in the midwest & south in the US, and has completely different problems. I don't think the comparison will hold up.

The amount of livable land in a city like Mountain View is 12 square miles in city limits, Palo Alto is a massive 26! Austin is 271 square miles.

I agree the tax situation for private housing is nuts in the bay, but we should not pretend the bay and Austin face the same housing problems.

Curious - where are you now in TX that has this?

"The city council has been approving higher density housing than the area has had historically, despite some grumbling from the SFH owners. The master plan is oriented around mass transit in an area historically devoid of it." ?

Austin?

See link in my OP.

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