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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

I feel that these efforts to increase housing supply --especially in the Bay Area-- can only scratch at the problem, and very slowly. You would have to raze entire neighborhoods, entire towns, and rebuild them with high-density housing, to meet the demand.

So why is there never discussion of reducing demand instead of increasing supply? As in, put a limit on how many employees can be hired in the Bay Area by any company. Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, and all the rest bring in many tens of thousands of employees (and their families) every year. They crowd out the nicer apartments, making them unavailable and unaffordable to low-wage employees. And eventually the tech worker cashes in their fantastic stock growth and over-bids on a house, driving prices up.

The suggestion of capping hiring in the Bay Area seems to be a taboo suggestion, not sure why. Seems to me, when your house is flooding from a broken pipe, first thing you do it cut the main.

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> why is there never discussion of reducing demand instead of increasing supply

There is discussion of reducing demand, primarily by attacking the tech industry. Example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/02/palo-alto...

Obviously, implementing such a policy at such a regional scale has major side effects, both on the tech industry and on America. The jobs and people have to go somewhere, and we are already exporting our housing crisis to other tech cities (Austin, Seattle, Portland) at an alarming pace. Eventually this will become a national problem.

> The jobs and people have to go somewhere, and we are already exporting our housing crisis to other tech cities

I hear you, but we are out of space in the Bay Area. Still lots of land in other parts of the country. And quite simply, there's too much money in the Bay Area --with that inequity leading to homelessness in the lowest wage earners-- and too little money circulating in other parts of America (with therefore no low-wage employment opportunities in all the necessary support roles).

> we are out of space in the Bay Area

This could not be further from the truth. Consider: the Terraces at Lafayette, a proposed new apartment building that would replace an empty field. The City of Lafayette delayed the project for almost a decade entirely on spurious grounds. We are not out of space, it just feels like it because we refuse to allow our space to be used efficiently.

Eh, your example is on the other side of the hills, where yeah there's space -- and also horrendous traffic bottlenecks to get to/from the bay-surrounding cities. Which are out of space.

They're not out of space. There's a lot of yard and a lot of altitude to fill. There's empty fields all over the south bay. Luckily, some near my previous place in Sunnyvale recently-ish got turned into town houses. My current house is adjacent to two empty acres.

I'm not sure how to say this, but have you ever been to the sunset? There is nothing but space in large swaths of the city.

Because it’s way easier to just build more housing than enact draconian policies to prevent freedom of employment and freedom of movement. Think about what you are suggesting for a second.

If you can upzone housing, you can downzone offices.

Why isn't anyone building brand new cities shaped the way they want, instead of trying to force people out of where they live? I'd much rather live in a blank slate city designed the way I'd like, than constantly fight people who don't want me around.

That's a great question, have you got any thoughts on why?

The topic has come up once or twice on HN before, so maybe try searching for "new cities" or something like that.

- All existing land is already claimed by someone, or by the government. There are insanely large parcels owned by individuals or small groups.

- Most existing water is claimed by someone hundreds of miles downstream.

- The overall US mindset (there are definitely exceptions!) has changed over the 20th and early 21st century from one of maximizing tangible accomplishment, to maximizing financial gain and minimizing loss. We're playing musical chairs instead of making more chairs.

- Mass media (Disney -- kid shows, superhero movies) creates the impression that the current geographic and cultural structure of society is the only possible structure of society, by making a few views seem ubiquitous, and everything else the domain of pure fantasy.

- Prior attempts eventually got ridiculed, like EPCOT (ironically enough also Disney). People won't leave you alone -- they'll insist that any hope of new ideas is unforgivable hubris, and do whatever they can to make their ridicule a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sure, but nobody at the local level wants to downzone offices. Those are their jobs. And they bring in tax revenue without requiring much expenditure by the local municipality. And their proximity skyrockets the price of all of the nearby real estate. There are perverse financial incentives that cause every city to want to be the city that people from the surrounding area commute to work in, but don’t actually live in. So downzoning offices isn’t going to happen at the local level. And it’s not going to happen at the state level either, because frankly it’s a silly idea to cripple your own economy.

The word "draconian" is entirely subjective, and has no value in your argument.

Your comment that I should think about my suggestion "for a second" is dismissive and assumes I haven't put any thought into it. Again, this has no value in furthering your argument.

I’m dismissive because I find your nativist “sorry, we’re full” (or more appropriately, “fuck you, I got mine”) attitude to be contemptible.

Since you are the one in favor of curtailing the freedoms of businesses and people, the burden of proof should be on you to demonstrate why we cannot simply build our way out of this problem.

Again with the insults and dismissals. "Nativist"? "Fuck you, I got mine"?

I have no burden. I already stated: it would be far easier to restrict hiring for the very large, high-salary companies, than scaling out housing to accommodate for the yearly influx of tech works with explosive earnings.

You made an assertion with zero proof. Do you think that dictating what businesses can do in terms of hiring has zero costs? That it won’t have a chilling effect on people establishing businesses in the area?

You seem to be underestimating the difficulty here by quite a bit. Cities can’t achieve a policy proposal like this, especially the large number of small legal jurisdictions that make up the Bay Area, and it would obviously have zero traction at the state level. The premise is ridiculous.

I think it’s frankly as ridiculous as anything believing we can build enough duplexes to bring down the $1.8MM median house price (SF).

Price curves are very nonlinear, especially surrounding the point where supply = demand. Housing prices in the Bay Area have about doubled over the last 10 years, while the population has increased by about 10%.

Anyhow, the point of all of this legislation isn’t that duplexes alone will necessarily provide enough housing. It just gives cities a fair chance to meet their housing targets via duplex building and preserve some local zoning preferences. If they fail, the state will step in to void local zoning laws and approve dense apartment buildings.

How quickly do you think big companies could start hiring contract workers from smaller tech companies that are also in the bay area? Because they already hire a lot of employees as contractors. Limiting only large companies would simply cause that behavior to increase.

The Bay Area is a desirable place. Even if you limit tech workers wealthy people will buy property here.

Desirability isn't a fundamental property of nature. It's the aggregated choices of individuals. And individuals, and aggregations, can make different choices if given reason and opportunity.

Geography usually dictates desirability the most throughout human history. So yes, in a way it is a fundamental property of the natural environment. The only thing the Bay Area could lack in the future is fresh water.

Iconic landscapes, nature, and almost perfect weather make it expensive.

California's housing shortage is due to mass immigration into the state and not natural increase. However immigration is sacred, and any observation that even hints of criticizing it is taboo. Observe.

> California's housing shortage is due to mass immigration into the state and not natural increase.

Is it? Certainly lots of people have moved to California, but lots have also left. Since 2000, California's population has grown by 17%, while the US has grown by 16%, and the world by around 27%.

I only know the numbers for San Francisco, but it’s 37.7% from California, 25.2% from other states, and 35.6% from outside the US (62.3% total from outside the state)[0]. I’m sure the fraction from outside the Bay Area is even higher. Anectodally, I’m the only one on my team at work born within 6000 miles of here, and we can’t say with a straight face that tons of super highly paid immigrants (and even more open job posts) don’t affect housing demand.

I’m from here, and have a lot of friends who left. The primary factor for most of them is wanting to afford a single family home, which is easier elsewhere. Restricting movement would be insane, but two thirds of the population being from migration is a huge factor in pricing my friends out, and it does kinda rub me the wrong way when someone from thousands of miles away complains that there isn’t cheap space for them here, and demands that we change the area to accommodate them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

You are going to be downvoted because your comment will imply racism, but I think it's worth an honest discussion.

In the Bay Area in the last 20 years, I think I can count the number of non-hispanic gardeners I've seen, on one hand. The number of non-hispanic custodial workers, maybe on 2 hands. Restaurant workers, regardless of the cuisine and regardless of the restaurant price range, are also most often hispanic.

Some people scream that hispanic immigrants are "stealing our jobs." I think, they're doing the job that white America now refuses to do. Without them, business couldn't survive. But as businesses have thrived --especially tech-- they're the first to get fucked by rising prices.

https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-stalled-population-gro... . A clear majority of California's population growth in the past 1, 2, and 3 decades is natural growth, not migration. What's interesting is that it is a result of international immigration into the state and domestic emigration from the state. Regardless of that, though, an international immigrant or a native californian still consume housing. The housing shortage is not caused by immigration.

Certainly you could make the argument that if not for immigrants to the US settling in California it would result in less population growth here, but I think a housing policy which can't even keep up with very little net migration is broken.

California’s population is about one quarter foreign-born, but it’s been at that ratio for 30+ years. Mass foreign migration isn’t a plausible explanation for the shortage of housing when the foreign-born percentage of the population is relatively stable over long time scales.

California's housing shortage is about 30 years old. The Reagan amnesty is just a bit more than 30 years old. This is why there is still the occasional widow of a plumber or other blue collar type who owns a house in Laguna or Coronado. They bought longer ago than that.

And naturally when we talk about housing shortage we always mean in desirable areas. Even in California you can get land for dirt cheap today if you don't mind being in the middle of nowhere.

But the housing shortage has been worsening over the last 30 years, while the foreign-born share of the population had been steady.

And when you say “desirable areas”, what this means is where jobs are located. Unemployed people living in the middle of nowhere are not good for society.

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