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Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

>So in some sense the huge influx of these new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents

No one is forcing grandpa to sell his house by rezoning the land (the property tax won't go up due to pro 13). If your argument is that the house will appreciate in value and that grandpa is "forced" to sell his house because he likes money, well I have no argument.

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Grandpa gets forced out because of a combination of the following:

1. Massively increased rent, if he is renting 2. Massively increased cost of local goods and services and change in who those services cater to 3. Predatory tactics by real estate developers targeting lower income individuals in the community, if he owns the property 4. Loss of friends/community due to cohort being forced to leave by 1-3

So you are arguing that residential densification and a increase in housing supply will lead to

1. Rent increase

2. Consumption price increase

3. Big real estate will use thugs and trickery to force people to sell

4. More people in the community leads to less friends

Grandpa gets forced out by increased rent, yes.

Increased housing supply almost universally decreased housing prices.

If you don't want renter Grandpa to be forced out, build more

Grandpa's groceries, medical care, and everything else go up due to increased cost of labor associated with cost of living.

eh these developments often ruin neighborhoods. a few people sell and then a development comes in that ruins the street etc.

Whether it's Manhattan, Brooklyn, or even Paris... none of them would exist as we know them if we cared about "developments often ruin neighborhoods".

Neighborhoods change. What was once farm land and a few houses becomes suburban. What was once suburban becomes medium density. What was once medium density becomes dense city core. That's how cities have always worked. As the value of the land changes existing owners cash out and developers infill or rebuild. As density grows the justification (and budget) for city services like subways and parks grows.

Excessively restrictive zoning cuts off that natural process after the farmland-to-suburb step.

In free market terms if you cared so much about what your neighbor does with their own property you should have bought an interest in that property. Who are you to tell someone else they can't build a bigger building on property they own?

In reality there are few true free markets and externalities exist but in property rights terms zoning is a rather large government imposition to benefit other landowners often without any compensation to the owners who want to build. In an ideal world people who want to keep single family zoning should be paying land value fees to their neighbors who want to build density to compensate for the restriction. You couldn't possibly make such a scheme work in the real world though.

> In reality there are few true free markets

Because it turns out there are pesky uncontrollable externalities that keep popping up. Like, you can't buy some random lot in suburbia and turn it into a nuclear waste dump or a trash incinerator site, no matter what you pay the neighbors, because of regulations like zoning.

It doesn't ruin neighborhoods, it creates housing for a lot more people to live in, bringing down housing costs citywide, and it makes the neighborhood better and more vibrant with more people.

More people may make a neighborhood more "vibrant." It can also increase traffic, congestion more broadly, make goods and services more expensive, etc.

So add people and remove cars.

There would be very little point in living in the Bay Area for me if I didn't have convenient access to nature, which requires a car.

I lived in Munich 7 years and could take a train to Garmisch in less than 90 minutes, then literally walk from the train station to any of dozens of hiking trails that cover several mountains, or to several Gondolas.

Are you suggesting we should prevent other people from living in the bay area so you can have more convenient motoring?

I don't live in the Bay Area. But I certainly wouldn't consider doing so to if "removing cars" were a requirement for doing so.

"Ruins" in what way?

I lived on a quiet street that became an optimized shortcut (no stop lights, fewest stop signs) for all the new-construction dwellers, most of whom had zero regard for speed limits.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but the benefits likely outweigh the drawbacks.

FWIW, the most the township would do is setup a radar trailer (zero enforcement) and new stop signs were not allowed for traffic control purposes. I never got them to add one for safety purposes either, even though a speeder clobbered a mailbox one house up from the school bus stop.

This is a great illustration of how we can address this by adding people but removing cars. Make the street narrower, remove parking, add transit, add bike infra, etc.

Crime, traffic, noise, blight.

Hire more cops[0], build sane public transit, invest in acoustic insulation and adjust your notions of what 'blight' is, to focus on blight-by-design of cookie-cutter suburbia.

[0] https://thecrimereport.org/2022/09/14/the-u-s-is-under-polic...

The insulation might help when I'm in the house, but not trying to, for instance, read a book in the back yard.

Does anyone not think that broken down cars growing literal trees in them, broken glass, and garbage in people's yards are not blight? That's what I find just a mile from here where there are duplexes and apartment buildings.

Two of those are caused by cars, not people.

More density, more cars. The people bring the cars with them. It's not like the cars are autonomous... yet.

People can live without cars. It's easier in denser places.

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