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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

I think it's ok to have to choose between renting in Toronto and eating dinner.

Thanks to decades of the boomer generation's "build nothing" housing policies, millions of young people can't afford to live near where they work. Yet that same generation feels entitled to take up space in one of the most in-demand cities on the planet for their retirement life of socialising and volunteering. They'll complain about being "forced" to move out of a home they've lived in for 10 or 20 years (and paid below-market rent the whole time!) when the rest of us are lucky to be able to hold onto a place for half of that. And their response to their unaffordable lifestyle catching up to them is to ask for more and bigger handouts, funded by those same working people who they're keeping out of the city.

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> I think it's ok to have to choose between renting in Toronto and eating dinner.

Hard disagree on this part, it's a short-sighted take. Do you want to live in a city which might effectively kick you out when you're 70, cost of living has gone up and your income has gone down? What's the collateral damage done by this sort of policy? Loneliness in old age is already epidemic in advanced countries - I can't imagine a more effective way to make it worse than asking someone to uproot at that point.

We can disagree on the manner and degree of support or reform, the implementation etc. but my point is a city which doesn't try to address this is actually a pretty shitty city for everyone. It's a shitty place to put down roots. The fact that a small number of cities have so much economic gravity in the modern era is bad economic policy. It's antidemocratic and highly correlated with wealth inequality. These cities suck in thousands of people from other cities because they've got all the jobs, and then tell those people they can't live there anymore when their career is over. This is inhumane, it's a problem which will affect all of us as we age and it should be addressed.

> Do you want to live in a city which might effectively kick you out when you're 70, cost of living has gone up and your income has gone down? What's the collateral damage done by this sort of policy?

What's the collateral damage done by not having it? When we rent-control that money is coming from somewhere.

> It's antidemocratic and highly correlated with wealth inequality.

It's particularly antidemocratic because so many of the people working there can't afford to live there.

Plenty of people already can't afford to live in Toronto, wouldn't be able to afford to eat if they moved there. But somehow those people don't get to make it someone else's problem.

Is rent control the only solution here? Why not build more housing? Build out and up until the price goes down.

Long term I think the solution is to figure out how to structure the national economy so it isn't dominated by just a few cities. This was not always the case and doesn't have to be a given. If the economy itself is less centralized and monopolized the cities will evolve as well.

> Is rent control the only solution here? Why not build more housing? Build out and up until the price goes down.

Exactly. At the risk of being accelerationist, rent control is an anti-solution - it prevents the generation with the most political power from feeling the pain, and also removes some of the profit motive to actually fix the problem.

> Long term I think the solution is to figure out how to structure the national economy so it isn't dominated by just a few cities. This was not always the case and doesn't have to be a given. If the economy itself is less centralized and monopolized the cities will evolve as well.

The main way to avoid it being dominated by a few cities is to give them some competition, by allowing other cities to grow to compete. But unfortunately that hits the same problem of it being functionally illegal to build anything anywhere people want to live.

This article is about living in Toronto. Doesn't sound like these people are living very large. Canada is suffering from decades of housing policy failure.

> Doesn't sound like these people are living very large.

I bet there's a long line of people who'd love to live where they do, even paying more for it - and if those people would enjoy living there more, that's all the more reason they should have priority over these people.

> Canada is suffering from decades of housing policy failure.

Yep. And who voted for it?

You misread the article, it says "North York", which is in Canada

Thanks, edited - point stands though.

I paid more in rent than she does, in Red Deer, Alberta. It was not a large city; suffice to say, rent is too high everywhere. Focusing on the city is a bit misleading, IMO.

Sure, we should just construct 'poor towns' for those priced out of cities by financial speculation.

Financial speculation is an easy scapegoat but has very little to do with it. The fundamentals of supply and demand matter more. (Though, if you hate property speculators, the best way to burn them would be to suddenly legalize massive amounts of homebuilding. It's win-win).

I have a lot of sympathy for those priced out of the cities - that's exactly why I think there should be more homebuilding and better prioritisation of the limited supply, rather than those who were fortunate enough to be born earlier getting to hold onto subsidised housing units forever at everyone else's expense.

This person is in North York (Canada), not New York.

Thanks, edited - point stands though.

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