Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsnk | Hacker News Reader

This analogy is quite lacking.

You should also mention that this medicine rich people are collecting also has dozens of other alternative medicines with hundreds of thousands in volume because other cities exist.

Also you should mention that some of these rich people are not rich people at all, but working class people who's lived in a location for decades which has become a desirable location in recent years thanks to some other people who generated wealth in the area.

Also you forgot to bring up the local government ran by some of these rich people who are blocking any measure to increase the supply of the medicine in the area. This certainly can crash the entrenched medicine cartel in the city, but some of these cities are North Korean style de facto one party system where no other opposition may challenge the status quo.

View on HN

Cites are not fungible, I hate that this always comes up. I have relationships here going back to my childhood, I sometimes visit the grave of the person I am named for, I spend every sunday afternoon cooking and eating with the 97-year-old who took me in and nursed me back to health decades ago. If I move to another city these things aren't coming with.

Now you can dismiss these things as inherently less meaningful than, and therefore rightly subjected to, the economic desires of asset holders. That's a much more radical position than I think you're wanting to take here though. When you say or imply people facing unaffordable housing can just move somewhere else, this is a position you're endorsing.

The analogy doesn't have to cover every nuance of the situation to be valuable. A necessity of life has become a competitive investment vehicle, and the people most hurt by this are told that it is good and correct and they should accept it by wildly upending their lives for no personal benefit.

I love your comment, and this way of thinking.

> A necessity of life has become a competitive investment vehicle, and the people most hurt by this are told that it is good and correct and they should accept it by wildly upending their lives for no personal benefit.

I agree also with your other comments that this view is fundamentally inhuman. So many people in this thread are responding with, “Don’t like it? Move!” To the extent that is a humane viewpoint it is either privileged or defeatist. Society is us. We have chosen social policy which turns the fundaments of life into investment strategies for the over-propertied. We can choose differently.

If I had to describe the migratory patterbs of half of humanity I would describe it as "they are following tge money".

When african nations import manufactured products from europe that money leaves the local community. This means african countries must export their resources to the countries they are selling to.

Alternatively they can move to europe to work there so they can manufacture products to export to africa. Except in europe they will get insulted that they are economic refugees and should get lost. As if europeans ren't running an economy that benefits from this arrangement.

> Society is us. We have chosen social policy which turns the fundaments of life into investment strategies for the over-propertied. We can choose differently.

no we cannot, because it's not a choice. It's an effect. A different "choice" to have a desirable effect of your choosing is both hard, and can (and will, i bet) have undesirable consequences. A choice for example, could be to switch to a command economy instead, but i bet that would create housing projects that noone wants to live in.

Scarcity doesn't go away just because we wish it would.

> A necessity of life has become a competitive investment vehicle

My perspective is that a necessity of life (land) has started bumping up against the limits of nature. Population has drastically increased, and for various reasons such as increased access to information, economic agglomeration, etc, certain areas of land are in far more demand than others relative to supply.

Allocating scarce resources (sufficient land to have a detached single family home and a driveway) in such a scenario will always lead to some people getting what they want, while others do not.

Some options are (not exclusive to these)

-letting certain classes of people have higher priority than others (such as California’s law that keeps property taxes artificially low for those who were there before others)

-letting the amount of money determine who gets to live where, due to increasing house prices and commensurate increases in property taxes.

-changing zoning laws so that areas are modified from low density to high density housing, increasing the supply. This one causes various knock on effects, hence it is fought against in popular places that have reached its limits under the existing scheme (such as Bay Area and SFH)

There are no options where no one has to sacrifice. The investment vehicle aspect of land is negligible and more of a consequence of the extreme variations in demand of land in different regions.

> My perspective is that a necessity of life (land) has started bumping up against the limits of nature. Population has drastically increased, and for various reasons such as increased access to information, economic agglomeration, etc, certain areas of land are in far more demand than others relative to supply.

I think this is another all-too-convenient scapegoat, similar to "we just need more houses." I would again suggest that perhaps the problem really truly is that people are using houses as collectibles rather than as places to live.

As an illustration of how different the supply/demand situation is across the US, see this data:

https://www.redfin.com/news/?p=73975

All the data I see does not indicate that people are buying regular houses as collectibles in hot markets. There is simply that much demand and basically no supply, especially in western cities. I do not have hard data on how many of these sales are owner occupied or not, but from personal experience over the past 10+ years, none of these neighborhoods seem empty for part or all of the year.

Then we should absolutely stop and do our best to reverse immigration. Under your model immigration is how 3rd world countries export their unsustainable behavior.

> Cites are not fungible, I hate that this always comes up.

Yep. Why should we tell people "cities are fungible, just go live somewhere else so we can buy all the collectible homes here" instead of "cities are fungible, just go buy collectible homes somewhere else so we can live here"?

Thank you!

This comes up a lot when people argue in favor reforming how real estate is taxed.

When real estate isn’t for sale, it’s “value” is synthetic.

I wouldn’t actually sell my house for less than 400% what similar homes are worth.

For some people that means the value is 400% that of similar homes.

Thankfully the real estate tax folks don’t see it that way.

I actually want tax valuation to work like an offer - the tax man can choose to purchase your home for the valuation you use for taxation (you don't pay the tax in that case), or accept the tax payment.

if you value your house too high, you'd pay more tax than you'd need of course, but guarantee that it isn't going to be immediately bought up by the tax man. If you value it too low, you're risking a sale. So the ideal is to value it at market price - where the tax man will have no incentive to actually buy it out.

In practice, wouldn’t this be regressive (tax poor more and rich less)?

Imagine a homeowner who uses public transportation, sends their children to public schools, and and supplements their income with public assistance.

They need to create a price for their home. They live in an area with good public transit and good public schools. These public services figure heavily into the price of the house, pushing it up for tax purposes.

Imagine the same house being owned by someone who sends their kids to private schools and drives everywhere. The quality of public schools and transportation doesn’t affect the value of the house.

In practice, people who are poor are less mobile than people who are wealthy. This tax system favors people who are mobile (and don’t consume public services).

How important is it that you stay at your current residence? The more you make, the easier the move (moving costs money too).

Also, because public assistance doesn’t change with the value of the home, the larger the tax payment, the greater the fraction of the tax bill it is.

This sounds nice, but is ultimately a tax on people who aren’t mobile.

> I actually want tax valuation to work like an offer - the tax man can choose to purchase your home for the valuation you use for taxation (you don't pay the tax in that case), or accept the tax payment.

> if you value your house too high, you'd pay more tax than you'd need of course, but guarantee that it isn't going to be immediately bought up by the tax man. If you value it too low, you're risking a sale. So the ideal is to value it at market price - where the tax man will have no incentive to actually buy it out.

I use to think this too, but it looks too easily gamed, and over many iterations the taxman would be left selling a bunch of properties lower than the price they paid for it.

In effect, this would be passed off onto the taxpayers, so the net effect is going to be that the taxpayers are paying for the profits of private speculators who purchase from the taxman and sell or rent the property for a profit.

But what if that number isn’t near what anyone would actually pay for the house?

Say, I live next door to my child’s school, and an elderly parent I care for.

I might not sell for anything.

The “market price” has to include what people are willing to pay for the item, not just what they’re willing to sell for.

> If I move to another city these things aren't coming with.

This is the reason for things like California Prop 13. It gives a benefit to long-time locals to continue living in the same place. Which on the whole seems like a good thing. People can set down roots and become "locals" instead of having a city of ever-changing population who then don't really care so much about the area because they are transient and will be moving away soon.

But most housing threads on HN favor the idea that incoming outsiders should be able to efficiently displace locals as long as they have more money to do so, and thus oppose prop 13.

People who are born and grown up in an area but can't stay as adults are also "locals" that are hurt by prop 13.

Do people put roots down and become locals in the other 49 states?

They aren’t fungible to you, but to other people moving into your city from somewhere else because of economic opportunities they are (or they wouldn’t have moved so easily).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com