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Comment by VRay | Hacker News Reader

People are fighting the wrong fight when they attack this guy (or attack the people attacking this guy, for that matter)

It isn't SF Bay Bros'/foreigners'/companies' fault that houses are too expensive. It's because of strict zoning laws and a lack of building enough housing to match supply with demand[1]. Demand keeps going up way faster than supply, nationwide, and we're all feeling the squeeze

[1]: A great example of this is the super low housing costs in Tokyo. My mother in-law and sister in-law are renting a 3 bedroom apartment right now, 20 minutes outside Shinjuku (one of the "Giant Bustling Megacity" parts of Tokyo) for $1300/month, which they can comfortably afford while working part time doing low end janitorial work. More info here: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...

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Main thing I see people attacking this guy over is the “I did it and so can you” mentality more than anything. It’s survivorship bias at its strongest. No different than the FIRE post trending here as well. Dude literally saw his NW double in a year and income go up 50% cause of stock appreciation. Along with incredible starting salary and overall close to top tier comp the entire way - and no kids or what not.

I think people just really hate these “stories” because it’s not realistically repeatable. Someone will make it happen but it’ll be based off luck and nothing else. Even the dude in the fire thing wishes he did startups for 6 years. Mindlessly ignoring he’d get paid way less but oh wait - of course his story would only be posted if he joined a company that IPO’d and he got 8 figures out of it.

It’s just so annoying to see this shit on HN all the time. It’s some weird capitalism fetishism porn.

HN is part of a Silicon Valley venture capital incubator. It exists to be capitalism fetish porn.

>"I did it and so can you"

What is the antithesis here? "You won't succeed, so don't bother trying. Become an employee, rail against capitalism and wage slavery."

Dismissing it as luck can only work if the author succeeded on the first try. Did everyone succeed on the first try? Before it can be called "survivor's bias", you need to survive. If you croak at the first unforeseen and perhaps unfair hardship...

What is missing from many of these stories are the concepts and ideas which were eliminated by failure or analysis. It would be unusual for the first idea that pops into someone's head to come to successful fruition.

Maybe it would be illustrative if the author listed all of his failed endeavors and how he reasoned his way through them. Undoubtedly, it would make for much longer-form content and perhaps ramble off-track from his chosen subject.

Persistence is an unspoken companion to what you flippantly dismiss as luck. Trial and error, iterative improvements and self-sacrifice are also key ingredients.

Of course, you don't need to listen to that. It is much easier to lay blame than manifest the change you wish to see.

> Dismissing it as luck can only work if the author succeeded on the first try.

This is wrong, or your definition of "luck" is different to mine and most other people, I assume.

Winning 50 coin flips in a row is lucky. Winning 50 coin flips out of 100 is persistence.

Quitting after 3 coin flips because the flipper sneered at you is called being a quitter. Maybe it was unfair and unlucky that he sneered, but the reason you didn't get 50 wins isn't because the world is unfair or that you are unlucky. It is because you didn't flip a coin 100 times.

Certain ideologies empower you for success. Others turn you into a victim.

Not everyone can or wants to be persistent enough to do this kind of thing. In isolation these stories are interesting. As policy, these stories argue against changes to housing and zoning in the US, which are obviously needed. Like, "live in and remodel a shed and wait to capitalize on a historically bad housing market wipeout" isn't useful advice, much less a housing policy.

Agreed. I'm not advocating for a housing policy in this observation.

Waiting for housing policy to fit with your ideal of a just world isn't reasonable advice for everyone. There are things which for practical intents and purposes, are beyond our control. If you are looking for change, it is better to focus on the things within immediate control.

Super agree, but I will say I have a hard time ignoring the feeling that more and more things that used to be in my control are now beyond it.

Isn't that one of the problems with the pessimistic lament at the top of this thread?

Conditions are rarely if ever static for extended periods of time. The entrepreneur must adapt to the opportunities presented. The popular idiom is, "Where one door closes, another opens".

The observation about 2008 housing prices was telling. A market can stay depressed for extended periods of time. Pessimists could have experienced that same market and missed the opportunity. When evaluating in hindsight the uncertainty of imperfect information inside the moment can be overlooked.

Not only are opportunities constantly changing, but each individual brings unique knowledge to any given situation. Therefore the opportunities in a given situation are differ from one individual to the next. From this point it is easy to see to the value of adaptation and innovation. The man in the article didn't just accept the world as it is, he thought out of the box and created solutions where others saw problems.

I agree that things have changed and that doors have been closed. Some of them may never open again in our lifetimes. Yet at the same time I feel optimistic. There are incredible opportunities all across the Internet. Many here have the technical skills to realize them, but they lack the entrepreneurial vision.

I mean, we can keep restating our positions here:

aww_dang: there's always an opportunity somewhere

camgunz: that may be true, but it can also be true there are fewer opportunities, which I find worrying

aww_dang: but what does that matter if there's always one

camgunz: I think the total number of opportunities matters

aww_dang: I don't

That was your takeaway? Mine was entirely different. Here are some things I took away: ADUs and in-law units are great. It’s too hard for a group of friends to buy an apartment building. They had to masquerade as a slumlord to do it. That’s probably a failing in laws and policies. Buying property is a viable strategy to rise in this society. Buying land and building a house is possible, but harder than it should be. It’s possible to buy damaged property, make it livable and rent it to people who want it without selling your soul.

I’ve got some money in the stock market that would probably serve humanity better if I bought some unlivable property and spent the time and money to make it livable. Not sure if I want to be a landlord, but the first part appeals to me. We need more housing and I’d love to put my resources behind that effort. Yes, we need sweeping policy changes too. Link me your proposal and I’ll give it a read.

I'm not saying those things aren't in there, but they're pretty niche. Like, how often is a group of friends trying to buy a multi-unit building?

The big bad here is lack of housing supply brought on by NIMBY-ism and a shortage of tradespeople (maybe this also speaks to our inability to evolve housing construction as well), and the danger is more or less that policymakers and voters will read this story and think "see, all you have to do is <list of ridiculous and lucky things> and you too can own a home in one of the most expensive places on Earth."

For policy and such, the problem is complicated. Going to housing site:vox.com in DDG isn't a bad idea. But secondarily, I'm interested in prefab and modular housing. A lot of it is better suited to modern housing needs (more efficient--not just 2x4s, fiberglass and Tyvek, cheaper, less construction waste, way less build time on site, smaller and thus higher density, etc).

Living below your means is repeatable (and desirable). Riding a bike instead of driving a car is repeatable (and beneficial). Buying land and building a house, buying distressed property and carefully investing time and money to rehab it… all repeatable. All things that benefit society.

This isn’t capitalist fetish porn.

I think some people find it frustrating to see that the system does in fact work; that the narrative they’ve chosen to believe is just cynical and wrong. That a person on a house cleaners income can find a way to own property in SF as well as around the country. And be good about it by finding properties that need some love and investing in them.

I thought it was a great story about a person that saw the vast opportunities in front of them and used a bit of grit and smarts to make happen the future they wanted.

lol - did you not look at the prices they were dealing with? They bought an apartment building with friends and their share of the mortgage was only $900/month - half of which was shared with their partner. $900/month is a joke - even for back then. They bought land with cash that was even remotely near SF as well - unfathomable now.

This person bought before prices in SF were so above and beyond what anyone near that level of income could ever afford.

This is just survivorship bias mixed with a bit of “I did it during a time when prices were nowhere near what they are now”.

Story sucks because it’s not a story of grit and smarts. It’s a story of unrepeatability.

This person was able to buy cheap in 2008 because they had cash instead of debt. Imagine if they had all their cash in stocks in 2008...

You're not wrong that they did it during a better time. But the move to get a bunch of friends to essentially move in and take over an apartment building and then buy it (in a non-forced manner) was pretty clever.

I think my issue with that is that it’s not going to be easy to do in the current market. Back then - it was more doable. They were able to buy under market value (when that likely wasn’t very much to begin with) and manage the loan with each other. Now where each person needs to make $250k+ to afford buying the apartment - you’re getting into territory where you’re unlikely to find people who want to buy that apartment and move into one whole place with you. Maybe it’s doable but the virtue of it being so expensive and the incomes required being so high means that it’s very unlikely to be reproducible unless you only associate with very high income people and those people also like apartments.

I find high income folks generally want to move away from apartments as they age and they want to do so at a much faster rate than someone in a much lower income bracket would.

Remember when there was a drastic exodus of renters from SF about a year ago? Multi unit apartment buildings were selling for remarkably affordable prices. A friend of mine was looking at a property that fit in the mentioned cost profile. There was a brick wall that either concealed a good foundation or a colossal problem so he passed. If he’d persisted and drilled a hole it could have been a winner. That part of the story was repeatable in the last year. It’s not unreasonable to find a buildable lot for $40k within two hours drive of SF (I’ve looked) that part is repeatable. I found a house in Sonoma county for $450k. Needed work, that part is repeatable. I imagine you could find property to rehab and rent in Wisconsin if you tried. Maybe what you mean is “this sounds like more effort than I’d be willing to put in”

Increasing housing increases demand on alot of other resources (medical, kindergarten, streets, public transport, schools,...). how do you orchestrate such a rise in demand in a densely populated city like san francisco quickly (dense in the sense of non-used land, not by population)?

City planners have a wide variety of opinions about this, and all of them are pretty useful. Most of them will mean a decline in effective property values, which is almost ALWAYS strongly opposed by the public.

I live in SF. The resources you mention are not currently a limiting factor.

Medical: is provided by private companies like Kaiser, who have proven their ability to grow as their customer base grows.

Kindergarten: the school district has excess capacity, as # students has shrunk from 70k+ to fewer than 50k. They will probably need to close some schools to increase utilization.

Streets: the streets in San Francisco are way less crowded than anywhere else I've lived.

Public transport: the last few times I've taken the bus, it's been easy to find a seat. The last time I took the BART it was nearly empty.

Schools: see comment above.

How much of those stats are pandemic related? (i.e. were true in 2019).

I'm ex-bay area since 2016, but I recall standing room only BART and shoulder-to-shoulder CALTRAIN can't add another body when heading to south bay. Although I didn't take SF bus, or send kids to Kindergarten.

The stats I quoted (drop from 70k to 50k) are not pandemic related. The drop has been gradual, as SF has become less hospitable to people with kids (costs, safety, school quality).

The enrollment dropped from 2019 to now, but by something like 5k (on my phone and don't have the exact stats handy).

My anecdotes about the last few journeys I took are recent, not from 2019. But, even in 2019, my experience of public transport in San Francisco was that it was far less crowded than that in London, New York or Beijing.

SF's roads are not congested. If buses were to become crowded due to increased population, we could just buy more buses and increase the frequency. This would keep crowding at current levels, whilst reducing wait times, thus making buses far more convenient than they are today.

Regarding Caltrain: if SF had more housing, fewer people who work in SF would need to live outside and take Caltrain in.

I can't comment on Kaiser or SF, not familiar with either. But great if Kaiser can just create GPs and consultants localised in newly built areas like that. well done them. To be honest, I forgot the private aspect of health care in the US. I wonder how city planners are planning around that.

> Public transport: the last few times I've taken the bus, it's been easy to find a seat. The last time I took the BART it was nearly empty.

if that is the case, SF has either the most amazing public transportation already or the most under-used public transportation. or you are simply cheery-picking.

school, kindergarten and medical need to be in close vicinity though. the overall capacity is meaningless for the first two if you build housing for an additional 15k within a few blocks and then have no GPs (and to a lesser extend consultants) within a few minutes of walking or no hospital within a quick driving distance. and if that 70k to 50k (i assume it is not covid related) is uniformly across all kindergartens, it is pretty meaningless for housing

"I can't comment on Kaiser or SF"

The comment to which you replied was specifically talking about SF so I assumed (reasonably I think) that you were commenting about SF, too.

"if that is the case, SF has either the most amazing public transportation already or the most under-used public transportation. or you are simply cheery-picking."

Those are not the only explanations. And, given I said live in SF, maybe it's reasonable to assume I'm reporting actual observations, unless I've previously demonstrated some pattern of exaggeration.

Mind sharing some other explanations?

Some potential explanations off ghr top of my head...

- I happened to get lucky on my last 5 journeys

- Many people how have more flexibility about when they start/end work, even if they're not working remotely

- People are avoiding public transport due to worries about COVID and increasing crime

- Outside of peak hours, buses still need to run with some minimum frequency to be a viable option, so they often run empty or with only 1-5 passengers

You could come up with others...

> kindergartens, schools and medical offices.

Where exactly do you think schooling and medical practices happen or children are taken care of?

>Public transport

How hard is to coordinate to double the number of trains or buses?

> Streets

I don't know what you mean by the demand of streets increases.

Most times solving the housing problem is a lack of will or coordination, and the solution is muddled/deleted/delayed indefinitely by arguments like this.

And alot of times, especially with mass transit, there are economies if scale.

So it's even more efficient with higher population.

> Where exactly do you think schooling and medical practices happen or children are taken care of?

in close vicinity of the housing. not sure i understand the question.

> How hard is to coordinate to double the number of trains or buses?

running a bus during peak hours at twice your current rate (unless the rate is completely ridicilous) does not sound easy. why do you assume it is? at that rate, for SF at least, you are talking subway.

by streets i meant the higher volume during peak hours that need to be sustained (walking, cycling, driving, busses, trams, parking etc).

"running a bus during peak hours at twice your current rate (unless the rate is completely ridicilous) does not sound easy"

The 14R (the fastest bus from my home to downtown SF) is scheduled to run every 10 mins (on average) during the morning peak.

Running that bus every 5 mins (which presents no special difficulty) would double the capacity, and reduce average wait time by 5 mins.

Can you please back up the claim that doubling every bus and tram does not present special difficulty? I would genuinely love to read an actual analysis of 'just doubling the frequency', does not even have to be San Francisco per se.

I didn't say every bus.

I didn't mention trams.

I wasn't making a general case that's applicable to every city.

I was talking about specifically about SF, which has relatively uncongested roads, bus lanes that are mostly empty, and where the busiest bus stops receive buses no more than ~10 times per hour.

You said this:

> Running that bus every 5 mins (which presents no special difficulty) would double the capacity, and reduce average wait time by 5 mins.

the problem with public transportation among other things are connections. running specific buses with a higher frequency does not give you a lower wait time (on the journey) but only on that stop.

> I didn't say every bus. > I didn't mention trams.

ok i don't get it. why did you bring this up at all then?

A lot of these things can scale vertically rather than horizontally. If you allow denser housing by building higher, schools and hospitals can also build higher.

I've looked into moving to Japan. My family has a house in Setagaya, which had severely distorted what I thought Tokyo living to be. It turns out, a typical one bedroom apartment is like 20 sq meters.

Separate from that, I don't believe zoning has anything to do with housing shortages. Housing has "induced demand" similar to traffic. You can look at heavy traffic over a bridge and think, "if only we had another bridge, that would alleviate the traffic." But it turns out, when you do that, more people end up using both bridges and traffic becomes as bad as it was before. Housing is similar. If you build more houses, even more people want them. Look at places like NYC, which has extremely dense housing. It's still expensive.

Houston's housing isn't expensive though. It has few zoning laws and is not land constrained though (unlike NYC or SF).

There's also an awfully short list of places in the US that sprawl more than Houston.

I'm not arguing that sprawl is inherently bad, but it definitely does add the need to own a car (for most people) and spend a lot of time in it (ditto).

This is absolutely wrong. Pretty much every single piece of evidence we have shows that zoning has a massively impactful effect on the supply of housing. Similarly, the vast majority of studies looking at the issue show that induced demand doesn't occur for housing (that is, adding housing supply does lower prices, rather than simply causing people to consume more).

With regard to NYC, even though it has added around 250-300K housing units over the past fifteen years or so, it has added around three times that in jobs. If housing supply isn't increasing in line with people, you will see increases in prices.

Some links:

- https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-cast-in...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w

- https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/supply-skepticism-ho...

- https://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/SOC_2017_FOCUS_Changes_i... (the key quote here being: "In 2016, NYC had 8.2 percent more housing units, 11 percent more adults, and 16.5 percent more jobs than it did in 2000.")

Your sources contradict themselves. For instance, the Furman Center article states that adding luxury housing does not make housing more affordable. The paper from Northwestern states the opposite (luxury housing decreases surrounding rents). Just from looking at the paper from Northwestern, their area of study has significantly lower rents than their control group. It’s not as clear cut as you make it seem. Also, jobs growing with housing supply could possibly be an example of induced demand.

You're right that housing supply is an issue, but second homes and investment homes are a major issue as well. Too much housing stock sits empty and the ultimate end result is that a very small portion of individuals get richer, meanwhile millions of people are desperate to buy their first home.

Both problems need to be solved, one with more housing, one with tax incentives.

Out of curiosity, how big is a 3 bedroom apartment in Japan?

Bigger than a homeless guy shopping cart.

It's tiny by US standards, but they use different types of furniture, so it's comfortable. They tend to use a lot of wall hooks, tons of tiny drawers, smaller convertible beds, etc.

I was living there with my wife and her two family members and had no trouble at all. That place was about 700 square feet, but it felt like an 1100 square foot place would in the US with giant furniture and large open floor spaces. I had a ~150 square foot room set aside for my office and VR space, the in-laws had a bedroom with tatami mats, there was a large-ish living room/kitchen with a big TV and couch, and then a bedroom for me and the wife

Tokyo is somewhat good example, but brushes off things that houses are much smaller and IIRC you don’t own land below it.

Capitalism inherently exploits economically unequal systems, and thus incentivizes them in both the private and public sectors (especially in the US where politicians are basically owned outright[1]). So, yes, it is "companies"... or more specifically, large wealth-owned profit-takers, that are the root cause of the supply-demand curves AND the zoning AND all of the other contributing factors. The fact that there are different sets of capitalists (rent and investment exploiters versus labor exploiters) who have varying influence on politicians is secondary to the fact that the politicians are primarily if not solely doing the bidding of capitalists. Attempts at corporate externalizing of risk happen in multiple contradictory directions, thus causing inconsistent public policy. Regardless, privatized-profit motivated externalization of public risk is the core problem. GDP-centric increases in productivity mean precisely fuckall for working class quality of life until we solve for the fact that the entirety of increased productivity gains have gone to the wealthy in the past 5 decades[2]. I do think as a society we should build more affordable housing in densely populated areas, but allowing capitalists to hold the reins for that would accelerate all of the problems of late stage capitalism.

Lastly, Japan has succeeded where others have failed because of a cultural difference which highly values new builds over old homes. They dispose of their homes and rebuild, as often as the US disposes of old cars and builds replacements... So political leverage by real estate investors is less of a concern there, a 30 year old home might be considered close to worthless. At the same time it creates other risk externalization problems like a colossal amount of inefficiency and waste. The only way to get a similar result of reasonable pricing in urban areas where real estate is profit-driven as opposed to use-driven, would be though affordable public housing as a counterbalance. We've seen time and again that capitalist housing development will naturally result in more capitalist-driven inequality. Investors will continue to buy making the bubble worse, then when the bubble pops the rich buy even more stock as disproportionately middle class and poor investors are forced to liquidate, as happened in the 2008 bust.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

[2]:https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16112368/pi... (or the same chart any of dozens of places)

I mean, don’t the people who live in a place have the right to decide they don’t want to invite in population until their homes are turned into a megacity? And if people don’t like the prevailing political opinions of a place that doesn’t want to change its nature to suit them, aren’t there plenty of other places to go?

The market its screwed up in the Bay Area because they in way more jobs than they wanted to let in housing, that’s a problem, but I don’t begrudge people that want to put limits on density because they want to live in a certain kind of place.

No, they don't.

Ifbyou want control over who can move in somewhere, or what can be built somewhere, you have a simple solution, buy the land in question.

People who rent also have voting rights for electing local governments in many places in the world.

True, but they still don’t have as much influence on local government as much as more affluent residents. The prime example would be Palo Alto. It’s the NIMBY capital of the world. Even Stanford University has trouble with development on land that they own.

That is mostly their fault for not voting (renters are less likely go vote and thus don't matter). Also their fault for not realizing property tax that the landlord pays comes from rent or lack of maintenance (complex because supply and demand sets rent prices, so tax is a second order effect)

yeah, I wonder if there's anything we can do about this situation

All I can think of is to spread the word about zoning laws, since currently we're still in a situation where renters mostly just get angry at foreigners, rich people, corporations, etc.

Tokyo probably takes things to an extreme that Americans wouldn't like (all the zoning laws are restricted by the national government, as I understand it). I just think it'd be nice if everyone stuck renting overpriced crapholes in the SF Bay Area would start showing up and voting for denser housing

The last time that was possible at least in Palo Alto was before they split from what is now known as East Palo Alto. Even if all the renters voted, they only represent 33% of Palo Alto's population; so no it is NOT their fault.

Lots of people on the outside seem to only like self determination for a population when their decisions agree.

When you realize that in a democracy the poorest don't vote at all and that we are represented by millionaires, it all seems so pointless to vote. Self determination my ass.

Democratic process isn’t coming to conclusions I agree with -> democracy is a scam -> an authoritarian solution is required because I’m more correct than everyone else

It seems like too many people only have ideals about politics when those ideals result in everyone agreeing with them. Otherwise the whole thing is a rigged scam and not worth the time.

democratic process isn't actually happening -> it's a scam to call it democracy -> a technocratic solution that meets the needs of the burgeoning disenfranchised population is required because the degree of inequality that we're dealing with is creating severe social conflicts

>a technocratic solution that meets the needs of the burgeoning disenfranchised population is required because the degree of inequality that we're dealing with is creating severe social conflicts

I'm sure that the non-elected technocrats wouldn't be susceptible to the "represented by millionaires" problem that you bemoaned about earlier.

Exactly. Technocrats are just oligarchs branding themselves as smarter than everybody else.

i'd be much happier to have healthcare policy be shaped by family practice doctors than by parliamentarians and bill gates

> buy the land in question.

NIMBYs will argue that, in a certain sense, they did: they bought the land their houses stand on decades or centuries ago, when the area was farm land, and then promoted a city charter for a certain type of community, together with every other citizen in the area. They paid taxes for local infrastructure, schools, time and effort to organize and solve community issues, inconvenience when a new water mains or bypass was built etc. etc.

This whole communal development is what made the area desirable, it's not like they are hoarding limited farmland. It's the combination of private property + working community rules that create property value.

Some owners in the area would now opt out of those rules outside the democratic process pre-agreed to their change, by simply building a large condo building on their plot, depreciating the value of nearby single family homes and pocketing the cash. You can imagine existing owners will fight tooth and nail to maintain the agreed rules.

While i don't 100% subscribe to this point of view and there is much to be said about the exclusionary and down right racist behavior it can enable, the issue of urban development is not quite as clear cut as you make it out to be.

How does new apartment construction impact nearby home values? Usually positively. There can be other issues, of course (more people!) but it’s not right to present increasing density as ripping off the neighbors.

https://www.sandyjournal.com/2021/10/04/370780/how-does-new-...

The value of land increases with density, but the utility of existing properties decreases.

What's an example of decreased utility? Less parking?

My biggest issue with increased density is shit design. Like, when they spent all the money on lawyers to get approval and stiffed the architects. When it is a nice 5 story building I love it.

I have been pondering this recently, and I feel the most fair solution is to simply reduce the of landowners to have input on what other people do with their land.

I believe the comparison to limited farmland is actually much more appropriate. Land in SF or Seattle is a very valuable and scarce resource. It can help a lot of people when used efficiently.

If you take Seattle for example, the land isn’t valuable because NIMBYs did such a great job running the city. They’ve done an awful job. Every possible mistake has been made. The land is valuable because it’s close to Amazon or Microsoft.

I don’t think that a decline in my property’s value should be a basis for legal restrictions on another person’s right to use their property. That seems like a hijacking of the legal system for my own personal wealth at the very real cost of others.

If a wealthy landowner in Seattle wants a yard and hates the look of skyscrapers, they can sell their land for millions of dollars and buy in a community more suited to their tastes. Nobody likes to move, but making it illegal to use land efficiently for one’s own convenience is frankly pretty disgusting to me.

> No, they don't.

> Ifbyou want control over who can move in somewhere, or what can be built somewhere, you have a simple solution, buy the land in question.

That seems contradictory. The existing owners did by definition buy that land they own. So you're saying thus they get to decide, but also that no they don't.

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