Hacker News Reader

Comment by grillvogel | Hacker News Reader

i never understood how newcomers are more entitled to live somewhere than the people who already live there

any counter arguments, or just downvotes?

You’ve got it backwards. The newcomers will come - if rich people want to move somewhere, they’ll easily outbid any poor people currently living somewhere when it comes to finding a place to rent. The existing population will be displaced if you do nothing.

The options are:

1) rent control, plus a lottery or waiting list to determine who gets to live there. This is similar to what they did in sweden, where they have nine year waiting lists. That would be catastrophic for the growth of the city, so it might not happen.

2) allow the market to build new housing, so the rich newcomers will have somewhere to go that doesn’t require displacing existing residents

Of course, if you don’t care about locals being displaced, you don’t have to do either of these, you can make apartments illegal and watch land rents go up and do nothing about it. That’s the choice SF voters have made, up to you whether you think it makes sense

Prop 13 makes it more difficult for rich newcomers to outbid established owners. Has a similar effect to rent control.

If California made any existing rental property only eligible to retain Prop 13 tax status by expanding the number of available bedroom units on the property, the rental price problem would be solved almost immediately.

I suspect the downvotes are more about your passive-aggressive reframing of the subject, and also your bullshit "I never understood" opening. Act like a child and you'll get treated like one.

> Act like a child and you'll get treated like one. reply

+1. Succint, and great response

hey it could have been much worse, i.e. drawing a connection to colonialism

so what you're saying is you don't have an argument. i genuinely have never understood the claim that residents of an area are obligated to change it in order for more people to move there and change their existing quality of life

You keep posting strawman after strawman, and that's why you're getting downvoted.

> newcomers are more entitled to live somewhere than the people who already live there

Nobody said that besides you.

> residents of an area are obligated to change it in order for more people to move there and change their existing quality of life

Again, nobody said that besides you.

the entire premise of the article is literally about how those mean single family home owners prefer to keep single family zoning and how the california government is advancing a bill to go ahead and increase density anyway

And it neither gives it "more entitlement to newcomers than to current owners" nor does it "obligate current residents to change it".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com