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Comment by patagonia | Hacker News Reader

Solution: Require persons owning 2nd or 3rd homes in high density areas to convert those homes to rentals.

Solution: Require neighborhoods of single family homes to be replaced with high density high rises when a certain density is reached.

Solution: Force owners of undeveloped lots to sell to developers.

I actually don’t agree with any of those. Just like you shouldn’t have the right to take my property to create additional housing, you also don’t have the right to tell a community to change its character or compensation. That’s really what the government is. It’s the community. And if the community doesn’t want new development, that should absolutely be allowed.

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> Just like you shouldn’t have the right to take my property to create additional housing

That's fair enough. But the federal government provides a ton of incentives to promote home ownership. If a local community doesn't want to meet its endogenous demand for housing, it's essentially offloading the problem to other parts of the country.

A local government that artificially restricts housing should automatically lose all of these federal incentives. Because when supply is inelastic, it doesn't actually increase home ownership, just makes the existing landowning class wealthier. If a community refuses to build housing that's fine. But homes in that community will never be eligible for Fannie or Freddie mortgages. Homeowners will not get a mortgage interest tax deduction. In fact they should have to pay income tax on the value of imputed rent. No more capital gains exemption on their primary residence.

I expect some communities will still choose to keep their policies in place. But I think the vast majority of states and municipalities would change their tune pretty quick.

On of the biggest state incentives in CA that allows communities to be exclusionary without any draw back is prop 13. See how quickly opinions will change when they suddenly have to pay their fair share on local road improvements, parks, and schools. People who are late into their careers, likely making well into the mid to upper 6 figures, are borrowing from kids 20-30 who are struggling to afford rent because a duplex will 'kill their communities character.' The sudden increase in property taxes will enable cities to build the infrastructure to handle the increase in residents easily.

> you also don’t have the right to tell a community to change its character or compensation.

Sometimes you do though. There are real cases where the acid rain produced by City A falls entirely on City B. Surely in that case City B should be able to tell City A to change its character? Local government alone will never solve a problem like this.

The people who pay the price for SF's character are not people who live in SF, but people who commute a long way from outside the city limits, or who don't live in the Bay Area at all but would if they could. The SF government should care less about them than about current SF citizens, but their interests aren't zero. Which is why you need a higher level polity like the CA government to overrule the local government .

Solid take. I don't personally like NIMBYism, and I don't personally like the parasitical nature of landlords or the scheming they engage in to drive their own property values up.

But my personal distaste should have absolutely no bearing on the norms a foreign (to me) community chooses for itself.

Individuals have rights, and communities are nothing more (and nothing less) than collections of individuals. If the entire community wants to violate the rights of a single individual, a just government should stop them. Socrates should not be forced to drink that hemlock.

Should Socrates be forced to wire his electric according to fire codes?

Those fire codes were created a century ago for the laudable purpose of preventing death from avoidable house fires. These days, now-outdated fire codes are just another of the many impediments slowing the creation and adoption of prefabricated homes built in a factory by robots.

We need a way of sunsetting rules that no longer make sense when technology makes radical change possible. We also need to remember that competitive companies don't succeed long-term (i.e., in timespans of decades) by producing things that intentionally kill their customers. (Ford hasn't done too well in the decades after the Pinto!)

A "company" might only exist for a few months during a construction project. When the project is over and the house sold, the "company" disbands.

The idea that we don't need fire codes because company owners or employees care what happens decades down the line is misguided.

the solution is a land value tax. instead of taxing properties based on how much the building on it is worth, tax properties based on how much a theoretical building could be worth on that same piece of land. if you want to have a bungalo but the market wants a skyscraper, that's fine, but you have to pay the same tax as a skyscraper would.

it encourages your solutions without "forcing" anything.

This makes total sense for incentivizing development, as you can essentially price out the locals to get access to their land.

It's definitely a double-edged sword with no right answer, though. You can encourage the efficient use of land with high land taxes to bring in development of badly needed housing, but you will be altering the ability of previous residents to stay in their homes.

Likewise, it's not unreasonable to see local governments reflect the will of their constituents saying "We recognize that these actions mean that new people and businesses will not be able to move in here, and we're all fine with that."

It seems like this is directly a tradeoff between the rights of current residents vs. considerations for prospective residents. Neither one of those groups is intrinsically more valuable than the other. While land tax is really great at making places more livable for new residents at the expense of current occupants, restrictive zoning and current-valuation taxes are great at preserving the neighborhoods that people already live in, at the expense of new people being able to join those neighborhoods.

it's only a tradeoff in areas where residents are not landowners, so the landlords profit off development. which is one of the problems solved by a more equitable distribution of land, like a land-value tax promotes.

in any area where the residents are the landowners, they're being paid a fair price for their land and so the development is not "at the expense" of anybody.

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