Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to hear you say that, moments after coming from a thread where people were explaining why California is so terrible.

I feel like the symbol of the 2020s is Chesterton's Fence[1], people chafing against restrictions and then having to reinvent them. I'm sure that some people are indeed fleeing California, and will then immediately start reinventing it.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. The reinvention could be like a clean-sheet reimplementation that's better than maintaining a smelly old code base. But that only works if you know all of the reason those code smells are there, and don't simply re-start the same process to recreate the same bugs.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

View on HN

What's strange to me is how people, particularly those in California, think that banning non-competes were somehow a California idea or that CA is the only state that does that. Yes banning non-competes is one of the things CA got right. People who complain are concerned about the things it got wrong. The idea that if you want non-competes then you must also accept insane regulatory burdens isn't really tenable when you look at the other states that ban non-competes and don't suffer from the same problems as California. There are low-regulation red states like Montana, Oklahoma, and North Dakota that have the same non-compete bans that CA has and many other states such as Utah and Texas place severe limits on them, whereas there are high-regulation states such as Massachusetts that allow non-competes.

Please don't try to turn the non-compete issue into a california good-or-bad issue because it's just not a california thing.

Note that MA somewhat recently passed legislation that more tightly limits the power of non-compete agreement: https://www.laboremploymentlawblog.com/2018/08/articles/non-...

I didn't know that -- it's good news. From a free market point of view, you obviously don't want to restrain trade, so that is the right-wing justification for bans. The left wing justification would be about increasing the power of labor. For both right and left leaning states, there seems to be an ongoing battle about non-compete agreements, and there is no reason for the pro-compete side to frame this as purely a left or right issue as there are allies to be had on from all sides of the political spectrum.

It's perpetually curious to me when people blame CA problems on a lack of upzoning and then ... move to much less dense places with plenty of NIMBYism.

Sure, you're getting away from the problem, but not because anyone there has a solution - just because they haven't been hit by the same problem to the same extent yet, because "sprawl outwards" works for a long time when you have less geographical boundaries.

Those people probably either (or both) of do not understand the nature of the issue(s) and/or are just as happy being somewhere where they won't be issue(s) for a long time as somewhere that's managed to prevent them in perpetuity.

Because you don't need (though it can still be good) upzoning if the population is low and housing cheap.

That doesn’t seem odd to me. People do what’s best for them, and even if they underatand the dysfunction of North American urban planning well they’re not in a position to fix it.

> People do what’s best for them

People have many motives, including themselves, their communities, their businesses, their countries, their co-workers and neighbors, strangers on the street, etc. If they only acted selfishly, there would be no community, country, business, etc.

Perhaps “people need a place to live” would have been a better way to phrase that.

Any solutions to North America’s urban planning woes will take decades, if they happen at all. I don’t fault anyone who can’t wait that long.

Maybe we could keep the protections for labor and drop the many additional protections for landowners.

I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc.

I don't know how much the issue is with the rest of Silicon Valley. There used to be a lot of undeveloped area not too far from Palo Alto.

Texas may want to avoid the wrong kind of over-dense housing, since they've got plenty of land, though there are also reasons to encourage people not to commute multiple dozens of miles per day.

>I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc.

I'm going to push back on this. Manhattan is less than half the size of San Francisco and has nearly four times the population density. The Bronx is roughly the same size and has double the population density. It isn't that San Francisco can't expand, it is that it doesn't want to.

You know what Manhattan has that SF doesn't.

Subways[1].

Sure developers would love to build more chicken coops for tech bros. But they absolutely don't want to kick down coin to pay for the subway system needed to support that density.

[1] Oh yea SF has BART which was built 50 years ago and not expanded since. And the central subway which is 1.7 miles long, not open yet after ten years of construction and 20 years after it got the green light.

I agree, which is my underlying point: they don’t want to expand! The lack of public transit is a problem plenty of people have been yelling about for decades, as you mentioned. Developers, citizens, and the city council have all proven over the years they are unwilling to do what needs to be done to make expansion possible.

The famous legend of NYC is that they had the vision to build infrastructure beyond current needs.

Now, it's trendy to view any investment by democratic government as wasteful, and to reduce the taxes by which the community makes that investment to nothing.

What will happen to future generations, who have us as their forbears rather than the visionary New Yorkers.

There's plenty of investments. It's called suburban sprawl, and some people even think it's a tax ponzi scheme.

2 of the 3 subway systems in NYC were built by private companies.

It was only later that all were merged into one publicly-managed one.

That was also when expansion basically stopped.

> You know what Manhattan has that SF doesn't. Subways.

Well, yes. And deep bedrock and fairly stable geology that makes them possible.

If Japan (earthquakes) and the Netherlands (built on swamp) and Shanghai (swamp) can do it so can San Francisco.

Shitty soil and earthquakes in combination is a bad combo.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/earthquake-expert-san-fra...

Well and there is also the old Bart tunnel and more modern Central Subway. And then there are the subway tunnels they have built/building in Los Angeles.

Snippets I've read over the years seem to say that subway tunnels and deep foundations don't tend to fail in earthquakes because they to move with the ground around them. And because they are already structurally strong.

Basically the lack of mass transit to support higher density is because of lack of willingness to pay for it. Unwillingness to pay for public infrastructure is due American economic ideology. Not anything specific to San Francisco.

California is really great in a lot of ways, but the issue that really drives people away from it is cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com