Hacker News Reader

Comment by ricree | Hacker News Reader

>It's just another redistribution scheme

More starkly, it seems to me that it's a redistribution scheme that exists primarily to enrich those who already have abundant capital. Who's going to be building and owning those high density structures afterwards? Not the people who are getting displaced from their homes, I suspect.

In short, it feels as though we're being told that it is right and just that you should be driven from your own home, so long as there exists some millionaire who would like to tear it down and build an apartment building in its place.

View on HN

People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived. They are pretty successfully standing athwart capitalism’s most powerful firms, going toe to toe with people who have hundreds of billions of dollars on the line (in terms of Silicon Valley’s capacity grow and add headcount, not just the real estate firms who would participate in that) and conceding a battle here or there but largely winning the war. At the same time their wealth increases tax free year over much more than a FAANG senior engineer or middle manager makes pre tax. These are not sympathetic underdogs.

> People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived.

This is about as far from true as it can get.

Ordinary working class people who just happened to buy a cheap house in a place that many decades later became a hot-spot of real estate development.. are still ordinary working class people. Often very poor, even.

I’m sympathetic to the view that having millions of dollars “doesn’t count” when they’re all tied up in living in an ordinary home. But then we would have to apply the same cost of living adjustment to tech workers, which most people think is ridiculous. (“I’m not rich, you see, there is no money left after I have spent it all.”) They have the option to walk away with millions. They choose not to. That is a form of spending. These millions are both absolutely larger than what “high income” workers can accumulate, and from a higher-class source (investment and politics vs. labor).

> are still ordinary working class people

I don't agree. If you own an asset worth a million dollars you are not working class. You may choose to work, but you are not forced to. IMO working class means you need to work to live. Choosing not to sell you home is not being forced to work in order to afford necessities.

And the trillion-dollar real-estate investment firms who will happily extract rent from an enormous, new, permanent rental class, in perpetuity?

I’m sure they appreciate your support.

I hope they do. They're great. I make sure to work with these firms and not local families for my own residential needs because I don't want to put money in the pockets of evil people playing anti-social strategies. It is stomach-churning to know that many of the same people who line up at the microphone on Wednesday night to block development would then call me back on Thursday morning to respond to my inquiries on their rental listings. With the corporates I am at least paying someone to fight against entropy to bring homes into existence, not just to maximize what they can extract from what they bought in the 70s.

> People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived.

If you imply "all" then I simply need to find one counter example to prove your statement wrong. I know people who have sold their homes in the middle of a city to make way for high density housing and they are not "the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived".

The end game of these LVT policies is that we will all be living in apartments and paying rent in perpetuity. When we die our kids will take on the burden of that rent. This is how it works in Switzerland today. All apartment buildings are owned by private investment firms. A key feature of the USA is the ability to build generational wealth through land ownership.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com