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Comment by salmonfamine | Hacker News Reader

The discussion here regarding how fleeing SV workers is disrupting property markets in other cities in the US brings up an uncomfortable but, I think, unavoidable point: local housing policy has nation-wide consequences.

If SV and SF allowed for the construction of additional housing, there would not be a downstream housing crisis in Denver, Austin, etc. The policy decisions of a handful of city councils of the suburbs on the West coast has had a huge impact on these cities -- and has indirectly displaced residents, disrupted local economies, and pushed many people into homelessness.

Housing policy in major economic zones in the US is a national issue, and should be treated as such.

This doesn't even touch on the wider problem of income inequality itself.

If we're being completely honest, the average American would be much, much better off if SV had never produced a single unicorn.

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How about those other cities build the housing that SF won’t? There nothing stopping them. And those cities could benefit from the new high income residents. How can “we should all be poorer” be a good solution to high housing prices? There’s always the supply side of the equation and people need to live somewhere.

It takes many months to develop new housing in the U.S. Even when you have local political support, there's a lot of custom manual work and so forth.

It's also very hard to find examples of long-term successful large-scale (town-scale) growth. So we can't just move substantial fractions of people from our largest cities to mid or small-sized cities in a matter of months or years (and get satisfactory results).

Undoubtedly NIMBY forces around the U.S. are partly to blame, but the Covid/WFH exodus is surely the more important factor at this point in time.

> It takes many months to develop new housing in the U.S.

Applies to SF and SV too - and to the other citied

Yes, they should build more. But again, that's just pushing the core problem away from SF (one of the most notable cities in the US for over a century, with a history of economic booms and high migration) to what was until recently a large-ish college town known as a haven for slackers.

Having lived in one of those cities as a low-income resident, a medium-income resident, and now a high-income resident, I assure you that the high income residents do much less for these cities than any other group. And no, taxes do not make up for it.

Those same reasons you listed why other cities can't fix the problem also apply to San Francisco. Despite being world famous, San Francisco is quite provincial - nothing like NYC. Their population doesn't even break a million, and it's also geographically limited - the infamous "7x7" miles. Mass migration has affected San Francisco in the same way it has for your city - many high income earners coming in from other states/countries to get a job at a startup or Google/Facebook/Apple etc. These people from other cities are complaining about getting a small fraction of San Francisco's outflows - Why would SF be able to handle it better than your city, when they've had the same problem you're having, multiplied by 10?

Would you encourage your children to go into a homebuilding trade? Which is the kind of question I think about when I wonder who is supposed to build all the houses.

Local housing policy, and more importantly city planning, is just as bad if not worse in Austin than SV. I don't really see city councils on the West coast having any impact on Denver or Austin as the influx of people to Denver and Austin could (and probably does) come just as easily from any other location. Point being, don't let local government in Denver and Austin off the hook for their failure to adapt.

Yeah, Austin and Denver et al have also failed in their housing policy, for pretty much the same reasons as SV. No argument there. But it's hard to deny that SV's wealth explosion and exodus has not contributed to the problems in these cities.

That wealth explosion is a major factor. Oil boomtowns are also notoriously bad places to live. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/06/boomtown-oil...

Perhaps one of the reasons these places are desirable is that they don't allow for "no zoning/housing aggressive" policies like say...Houston?

> the average American would be much, much better off if SV had never produced a single unicorn.

Is this an envy thing? The average American isn't really affected by SV's housing prices at all.

The average American is greatly affected by SV in many ways, hardly any of them positively.

Authoritarian regimes across the Pacific Ocean have consequences on American property demand too. So does migration across the southern border. In fact I think you would be hard pressed to name a thing that happens anywhere in the world that doesn’t downstream from it have an effect on the American property market.

Clearly the solution is for US to annex the Earth like we annexed the Moon and then nationalize housing policy. /s

Our local housing policy does suck, but this is not a constructive direction. You’re simply replacing one power structure with a different one in the hopes that maybe it’ll be better, when what you want to make are specific policy arguments.

Yes they do. But we -- that is, our nominally democratic government, a "power structure" which you have arbitrarily equated with a collection of private corporations -- have placed restrictions on immigration, and some light restrictions on foreign ownership of real estate itself, for precisely this reason.

Secondly, Canada, whose real estate markets have been even more seriously disrupted by authoritarian regimes across the Pacific Ocean, have already placed outright, albeit temporary, bans on citizens of those regimes from parking their capital in the domestic real estate market.

Your characterization of my argument is specious and straw-man-esque. You are assuming that globalization is a given, that borders are always porous, that neoliberalism is the only way of looking at the world. I am kindly inviting you to reconsider your point of view, in light of evidence that it has made housing more unaffordable for the many Americans, disrupted their livelihoods, and dissolved their communities.

Or you can keep making colorless jokes to yourself about the property markets on Mars, up to you.

> -- that is, our nominally democratic government, a "power structure" which you have arbitrarily equated with a collection of private corporations --

Are you responding to me or someone else?

> Your characterization of my argument is specious and straw-man-esque.

Your argument was to effectively transfer local zoning power from local government to Federal government because as you put it, it’s a national issue. True in a way, but the solution isn’t constructive, and you had no policy proposals to accompany this transfer. The one you propose here about limiting foreign ownership of domestic property by citizens from authoritarian countries (PRC, KSA just to name a couple) is something I’m actually on board with.

However, perhaps you think my characterization was inaccurate and uncharitable, so could you clarify the following for me:

>> Housing policy in major economic zones in the US is a national issue, and should be treated as such.

What does treating it as a National issue entail? A broad reading of this is direct Federal intervention into municipal policy which would be a direct power transfer. Could you narrow it down for clarity with actual policy proposals to convey a better understanding of what exactly you have in mind?

I don't really have to propose solutions, actually. My point was the problem, and its inconvenience for many assumptions many Americans have about housing, cities, markets. I don't have to have a ready-made policy prescription on hand to recognize that.

Here are some potential solutions anyways.

Some of these would be unpopular, but we could consider;

1. National standardization of zoning (like Japan) 2. Federal funding for local rail instead of highways (this would probably be the biggest one) 3. Municipal incentives for densification 4. Federal laws regulating the lobbying power of neighborhood associations 5. Beheading local gentry at the guillotine before inevitably being placed in its open maw ourselves (vive la révolution!)

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