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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

> Do people think they’re entitled to private apartments in the most expensive cities in the world?

Yes, they do. Read any thread on a vaguely left-leaning subreddit that even starts approaching discussions of renting, or landlords, or landlord-tenant relations, and you'll get flooded with comments so detached from reality it will stun you.

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I can't believe people are so detached from reality that they feel entitled to live within driving distance of their job...

Within a specific, ideal job they always wanted and got without having to make hard tradeoffs somewhere, or do a ton of searching?

This is what folks are talking about. Expecting things to just fall into place 'just because' without having to do the legwork to actually make/find something workable.

It's an entirely solvable problem at the data level.

We know where the employers and residential zones are. We could put together a model to minimize average commute time.

The problem is that we need to have a grand "rehoming" moment to deliver it. The day where everyone gets assigned a new residence in accordance with the optimization scheme. A day that would doubtless be deferred to long past the heat-death of the universe in endless court challenges by those who ended up on the losing side of the deal in some way.

In a way, the fact we still have powerful regimes which aren't tied down to "rule of law", and specifically the "property rights as sacred" segment of it gives me hope; I'd expect to see this day occur in Beijing long before it happened in San Francisco.

100% agree. Most cities in the US (not just SF, but definitely SF) are locked in this bizarre ‘you can’t make it better because you’d stub my toe’ mode that enforces stasis. SF in particular is in this bizarre Byzantine political deadlock where it seems the only thing the city is allowing itself to do is stuff that it knows doesn’t work.

In Europe, you could easily get that, except the car or driving part.

> except the car or driving part

Don't threaten ME with a good time!

At half/third of the salary maybe.

Why is that relevant? The cost of maintaining a reasonable standard of living is what matters, not the amount listed on your paycheck (as long as the latter is >= the former).

Still better off if that third actually enabled living within driving distance of said job.

I live in a place with very good transit and people just complain about their 45 min one-way commute by train.

If you can’t afford to live in the city where you work then it’s pretty much the definition of “not a living wage.”

Like are we really at the point where we’re totally fine with people commuting an hour one way every workday to a shitty minimum wage job instead of just building affordable modest housing reserved for people working in the city.

It's not the wage that needs to change it would be the prices of housing in the city. This can't change because it's not determined by some governing body. It's called gentrification. It's currently happening to me. I could not afford to buy my house now and I just bought it a few years ago. Of course there still needs to be staff in the area working retail etc. but I haven't seen anyone over 25 in a store near me for over a year.

It’s the natural consequences of policies enacted by many governing bodies. Cities with land use restrictions and onerous zoning restrictions where they are allergic to highways and only build bad public transit run by incompetents, built by corrupt contractors and expensive unions? The prices are substantially the fault of the local governance. This is why people move out of San Francisco and New York and Chicago.

You're almost laughably wrong: Chicago is super affordable[0] compared to those others, and it has great public transit.

[0] https://livingcost.org/cost/chicago/san-francisco

> This can't change because it's not determined by some governing body.

It actually is. Rents are expensive because zoning laws severely limit density and require lots of car parking.

The parking requirement is just a symptom. The problem is everyone with some stupid pet interest tries to use the zoning code or other local laws as a backhanded way of legislating a monetary bar to entry. They don't want triple deckers, they want classy luxury apartments. They don't want a distribution center. They want a white collar office park. They don't want industry and jobs, they want high end retail and dining. But you can't go from suburbia to downtown without the middle steps so of course no meaningful development happens.

If we just respected property owner's rights to do as they see fit we wouldn't have these problems or not nearly to the same extent.

Even in cities that don’t require that, rents are still expensive (with the exception of Tokyo where you can rent a 2.5 tatami sized apartment, shared toilet, no central heating, for $300/month).

> Even in cities that don’t require that, rents are still expensive

Maybe you've got some good examples from other countries, but here in the US the only major city with reasonable zoning is Houston which has quite affordable homes.

I wouldn’t mind living in Tokyo, Houston doesn’t tempt me at all. I assume much of its affordability is related to demand, and the fact that given a lack of zoning it can sprawl forever (also reducing its appeal). I met a homeless person in Seattle from Houston, even the homeless don’t find the city desirable (though it might be due to weather?).

In very few places in the US would "no heat and no toilet" be acceptable, regardless of price.

No heat seems bad, but I'd bet SROs with shared bathrooms would be extremely popular in NYC if they were legal.

I'm not sure what happened to them, but there was a startup trying to do this: https://www.curbed.com/2021/03/brownstone-shared-housing.htm...

“In the city of New York there were laws passed to push the private sector out of the SRO business [and eliminate SROs] on the theory that SROs were inhumane. Consequently, people sleep on grates outside.” — George McDonald

SROs, residential hotels, boarding houses and the like were all banned in the 1950s (and the surviving ones dismantled through the 1980s), a loss of about 100,000 units of affordable housing.

Consider this lovely e-book for further reading: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...

Or this lovely Simon and Garfunkel song about the NYC homeless on the streets of SoHo, contemporary to that era. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCVnPIE3juc

"Acceptable"? It wouldn't even be code.

I think absentee ownership and zoning laws have a fundamental impact on the availability of housing. It seems outside of governmental concern because their impact is already so normal. It’s normal for rich people to own/rent land they don’t occupy or use in perpetuity. It’s normal to see almost everything zoned for car dependent, single-family housing.

Landlordship is older than high rent

Tomato potato. If you make policy that lowers the cost of living then the living wage goes down and vice versa. I don’t think we’re at all in disagreement.

How? If you can travel back and forth and that makes it work, what is the problem? You can hate it, sure, but, at least where I live, people commute 3+ hours/day to make a nice living while living cheap. What is wrong with that?

The increase in the world’s entropy is not priced into the commuting costs, so it is artificially cheap living. Assuming an inhabitable planet with clean air and water is a goal, then commuting 3 hours would not be cheap.

You are right, but you can stimulate wfh and stimulate companies to spread out more. The fact a lot of people are against that (including here on HN) shows that it's all great, but not in my backyard.

If a city has 1 million jobs but only homes for 800k workers, then you will always have 200k workers who are priced out of homes. Or if you do it the communist way and assign homes with arbitrary price ceilings, you still have 200k people without homes although now it is the 200k most recent immigrants and not the 200k poorest, but the problem is still there.

So what do you suggest we do about that except build more homes?

> So what do you suggest we do about that except build more homes?

Why are you trying to make this complicated? Just get rid of density caps so that developers build more apartments. Problem solved with zero cost to taxpayers.

>Why are you trying to make this complicated? Just get rid of density caps so that developers build more apartments. Problem solved with zero cost to taxpayers.

Because "better a thousand rental units go un-built than let one slum lord construct a substandard basement apartment" or some other garbage like that.

Basically people keep trying to set a quality floor that society mostly isn't rich enough to afford and most land can't be developed enough to justify then acts surprised when the actual densification that happens is only a slow trickle.

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