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Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

> but quality of life is worse

Care to elaborate on this a bit? I imagine things like bad traffic are due to poor urban planning and lack of transit-oriented or walkable/bikeable design.

I imagine a lot of misdirected blame towards the economic boom instead of NIMBYism.

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Anytime a bunch of people move in with way more money than you (or existing neighbors suddenly have way more money than you, and than they used to), you are going to have quality of life problems. They can outbid you on anything you both want that has any sort of scarcity. We haven't eliminated scarcity.

Housing's been shit since before the first dot com crash and has always been unaffordable, but other than the freeway being a parking lot at Shoreline Amphitheater at rush hour, and Safeway on Rengstorff being a shit show, can you be specific in what ways having both Google and Facebook (technically Menlo Park) has affected you?

Not the OP, but Fishscapes, Bierhaus, Milk Pail, Sprouts, LazerQuest all gone, couldn't afford the rent. And that's just Mountain View. Retail that residents loved has been replaced by establishments exclusively for tech bros.

Edit: Forgot about Game Kastle and Lee's Comics. Really I could go on all day. These community establishments are gone and never coming back ever, as long as Google lives.

Instead of scarcity we can create our own inflation. We can buy $50 khakis or $900 khakis.

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