Comment by ambrozk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ambrozk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Cities and their existing residents have a right

Palo Alto is a charter city. As such, it has special rights only insofar as those rights are delegated to it by the state of California. California has every right, legally and morally, to change the current arrangement. As things stand today, Palo Alto enormously benefits from economic growth caused, not primarily by its residents and policies, but by the residents and policies of other portions of the state of California. As such, the residents of California have every right to tell the residents of Palo Alto that they must rezone to allow denser housing. The state has the upper hand both legally and morally.

Palo Alto is happy to see the economic benefits of increased commerce to the Bay Area, but it doesn't feel any responsibility to aid in housing the many thousands of new workers that increased commerce requires. A tiny minority of wealthy homeowners benefit at the expense of a great mass of residents. This is not a tenable situation long-term. Small municipalities in the Bay Area cannot internalize the benefits of economic growth while externalizing the costs indefinitely.

> California has every right, legally and morally, to change the current arrangement.

I am not knowledgeable enough to discuss the legal angle, so I’ll set that aside. I disagree on the right claimed from a moral standpoint. It’s dystopian to think that the rights exercised by individuals or individual cities are only delegated to them by higher powers. At best, a situation where local powers are overridden by others at the state level amounts to a tyranny of the majority. In my opinion, locality of power and decision making is important. Palo Alto is not the only city on this continent. People, and companies, can go elsewhere - including into the interior of the country outside of California.

> Palo Alto enormously benefits from economic growth caused, not primarily by its residents and policies, but by the residents and policies of other portions of the state of California.

Another way to look at it, is that residents of Palo Alto made a smart investment, or a lucky one - but that’s okay, and they’re allowed the spoils of that choice. Or maybe they don’t care about those economic benefits and economic change just happened to take place, around them.

> it doesn't feel any responsibility to aid in housing the many thousands of new workers that increased commerce requires.

Why do the residents have a responsibility to aid new workers? If those new workers don’t have a great situation with respect to cost of living in the Bay, they shouldn’t take those jobs. There are many open jobs across the country, in many different locations. If those other jobs don’t provide the same pay or other conditions - well, that’s just life. No one can be entitled to only have a specific job in a specific city.

> This is not a tenable situation long-term. Small municipalities in the Bay Area cannot internalize the benefits of economic growth while externalizing the costs indefinitely.

High prices discourage continued population growth. Companies looking to hire and expand can set up in communities that have room or that welcome growth. Workers will go there, home prices in the Bay will change, the economy will be more distributed, and things will rebalance accordingly.

> Why do the residents have a responsibility to aid new workers? If those new workers don’t have a great situation with respect to cost of living in the Bay, they shouldn’t take those jobs.

That would also work against local landowners' interests, though. If all the new (and potential new) workers decide they are getting a raw deal and live elsewhere, all the economic gains the locals have realized (including their inflated property values) will evaporate.

It seems like landowners want to have their cake and eat it too: reap the benefits of the economic expansion, but not take responsibility for its externalities.

> In my opinion, locality of power and decision making is important.

If you believe in locality of power, why stop at the town level? The property owner is the most hyperlocal possible unit, so they should have the right to build whatever they want on the land they own. They are local to their own property, their busybody neighbors are not.

That’s a reasonable argument. My feeling, which is a bit arbitrary, is that governmental power makes the most sense at the lowest layer (local government) and should be increasingly thin and limited in scope the further it gets from the layer of individuals. This is what allows many people of different backgrounds and perspectives to coexist peacefully in a nation, with local communities that are more tightly knit, while sharing some fundamental rights and very basic services like a military across different communities. Unfortunately the ever-ballooning size and scope of government at the federal and state level has threatened that decentralized notion of sovereignty.

> My feeling, which is a bit arbitrary

And there's the crux of the problem. You want to base housing policy on your arbitrary feelings, not on things that actually make for good and successful housing policy.

> This is what allows many people of different backgrounds and perspectives to coexist peacefully in a nation, with local communities that are more tightly knit

I'm sure you aren't intending this, but that's just another way of saying that segregation and red-lining should be legal. Because that's the end result when you allow these types of decisions to be made at a local level, without allowing interference from a county, state, or federal government.

The way for people of different backgrounds and perspectives to coexist peacefully is to refuse to allow subsets of those people to impose their values on others.

I agree, and hopefully we can all transact using cryptocurrency, making our money decentralized and sovereign as well.

In what world is a city deriving its charter from the state "dystopian?" Californian municipalities are wholly creatures of California state law. They derive their authority from the constitution of California, which grants them the power to enforce only "regulations not in conflict with general laws." If the California legislature wants to pass a law saying, "No more single-family zoning," the municipalities don't have a special constitutional right to ignore that, any more than they have the right to pass a law saying their residents can't sell a house to a disabled person, or that their citizens don't have to pay state tax.

There are some matters which are of enough interest to the entire state of California that the state narrowly prescribes how local institutions may interact with those resources. One existing example is the issue of water, which, as a scarce resource, is heavily regulated by article X of California's constitution [1]. Among other restrictions, article X straightforwardly makes water distribution a state concern: "The use of all water now appropriated... is hereby declared to be a public use, and subject to the regulation and control of the State." The consequence: if a city wants to pass its own particular water regulation, and the state of California disagrees, the city is out of luck.

Another issue the state might have a compelling interst in is the issue of housing. Like water, housing is a human necessity, and a scarce resource. This is especially true in the Bay Area, which is not contained in a single municipality, and which is thus subject to the rule of a number of governments whose competing and parochial interests naturally restrict housing supply in the entire region. Specifically, every locality wants to house the Bay Area's jobs, but it would prefer that neighboring localities house the Bay Area's people. The state of California is the only legal actor capable of fairly adjudicating this issue in such a way as to further the interests of residents of the entire region. This is why it would be perfectly legitimate for California to write laws forcing Bay Area cities to abandon overly restrictive zoning regulations.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...

"Tyranny of the majority" Sounds like something Louis XVI might have said before he was beheaded.

There is something as protecting minorities. But wealthy nimbys aren't a minority that needs to be protected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com