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Comment by kiernanmcgowan | Hacker News Reader

It’s easy to espouse a basic idea of “build more housing”, but the truth is that when you get to the nitty gritty of doing it there’s suddenly disagreements from all sides.

Get a room full of engineers who “want a consistent style guide” to agree on the particulars of one and you’ll see this dynamic in action.

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This isn't a "nitty-gritty" issue. Wealthy suburbs forbid the construction of any kind of multi-family dwelling through single-family zoning rules. The "disagreement" is simple: everyone says they want more housing, as long as it's least 30 minutes away from them. There's a simple fix: stop dignifying those objections, and mandate relaxation of zoning rules statewide.

Communities are allowed to decide how they are composed.

This is obviously not true in a variety of ways, and it inevitably won't be true in the way we're talking about here either, because the status quo doesn't work: it guarantees that every viable suburb is overwhelmingly SFZ, almost mathematically.

Why should they if their preferences negatively impacts everyone else?

In the same way San Francisco allows ice cream shops (or any business) to object to new competitors in their area, yes many “communities” also write rules that monopolize land in order to keep their property values high.

See: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...

No, they obviously are not allowed to decide that at all, unless you think communities can decide that no Asians may buy houses within their borders.

That's disingenuous, race is a protected class. High density housing isn't.

Sometimes we seem to like the idea of democracy, sometimes we don't. That's the tension here.

High density housing isn't protected because we choose not to protect it. But that's changing, thankfully.

How is it disingenuous? OP asserted that communities are "allowed to decide how they are composed," and they obviously are not. Which decisions we allow communities to make is the entire question.

Protected classes are already protected, so it is absolutely disingenuous to try and suggest that if we allow communities to have a say in their own composition we would have to allow them to discriminate based on race.

They aren't allowed to decide that in other countries, just here, and almost everything that happened as a result of that was bad.

Been to Japan? France? Pretty nice places.

Aren't those some of the most expensive countries on Earth for housing?

No, housing isn't expensive in Japan, certainly nowhere near how bad it is in US cities. Housing prices are more or less flat in Tokyo over decades, even, because they constantly build more of it. (It's cheap in the rest of the country, but that doesn't mean much because nobody wants to live there and there aren't jobs.)

Not saying it's great; Japanese wages are too low and their landlords are abusive (moving is expensive, you have to pay a lot of "key money", and they're free to discriminate against foreigners). But the housing crisis is an Anglo problem - it's bad in the US/UK/Canada/Australia.

Not sure about France specifically, I was just saying Paris is a nice city.

The state of California is a community. The United States is a community.

Sadly, no. If you're a community of people who want to develop your land in Atherton you won't be allowed to because a whole bunch of others (including Andreessen) want to stop you.

Exactly this. This is a cultural issue, more than anything else.

Countries like Japan have taken a profoundly different approach to urban development, and have more mixed-use zones (single-family, multi-family, high-rise, etc).

https://youtu.be/wfm2xCKOCNk

This is literally what happens to California’s (particularly SoCal and LA’s) public infrastructure all the time. Liberal California will vote for extended mass transit, homeless housing, low cost/public clinics, etc and then when it comes time to build them NIMBYism leaves them in perpetual limbo.

I love my home, but this is easily one of it’s biggest hypocrisies and the thing most strangling it.

All analogies are flawed but this one doesn't even register to me as useful.

Style is inherently subjective so obviously there's going to be personal preferences, and consistency means enforcing one and only one version of preferences onto others.

That's not exactly the problem with more housing. It's not a question of style or character. People use those words when they talk about "the character of their neighborhood changing" or "these ugly concrete monstrosities", but really it's always the same thing:

1. I don't want my housing prices to go down. I want my house prices to only go up.

2. Lower priced housing will be populated by more poor people who are more likely to bring crime, and I don't want crime to increase in my area.

The thing is, they're not even wrong. They exaggerate, sure. But you can sympathize with both factors.

On 1: The American dream has been sold to everyone that housing is a guaranteed investment that should always go up. For many people it's the only retirement hope they have or any inheritance they hope to pass to their children.

On 2: Income IS inversely correlated with crime. Because our modern capitalist culture decided not to optimize for a social safety net, the only solution we've thought of so far is deep segregation (not racial, but economic)

So, in isolation, individuals making the classic "I want more Housing but Not In My Back Yard" argument is entirely logical. But in the aggregate, it only contributes to a vicious spiral.

And there is NO good reason for a billionaire to dare make that argument. He can afford a small dip to his housing value. Holy shit, leave some crumbs for the rest of us.

Segregation actually probably causes crime, because crime is strongly associated with concentrated poverty.

Of course, you can't get rid of concentrated poverty without spreading poor people into rich areas, so no progress has been made there.

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