Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

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We're talking about people looking at $1,500+/month rent with multiple roommates... if they're lucky, for the rest of their lives. That is not offering people a future. There is no viable path to prosperity. There is no path for lower-class folks to achieve a private residence with a spouse. When these people increase productivity, rents will capture that wealth.

Why should people play by these rules? A tiny condo in SF is over 10x median income before taxes... and we have a very high median income.

The entire system of intentional real estate shortages we have is effectively a cartel. It's a zero-sum game, which is extractive by nature. We need housing for lower-middle class people. We need housing for poor people. We need people to have a future to lose. We need people to have a path to build wealth. Right now, in most liberal urban areas, we just don't. We make up every excuse in the book to preserve the faux-utopia for the incumbent homeowners who set up the system decades ago and have all literally become multi-millionaires from it.

I don't disagree that SF has a major problem with housing affordability. I also think that problem was self-imposed by the use of restrictive zoning and ordinances that made it nearly impossible to construct high-density housing of any kind. (Look at Bob Tillman's struggle as one example.) I also think this conduct by state and local governments are hypocritical, odious, and disgusting.

That said, I also don't see how these things can justify one's decisions to steal from others in the same place. At the very least, you're still free to go to another location where the rent isn't $1,500+/month with multiple roommates. There are honest ways to exercise your disgust and unwillingness to stay within the confines of a system that's stacked against you. Within a few hundred miles of SF are tons of options.

There are honest ways to exercise your disgust and unwillingness to stay within the confines of a system that's stacked against you. Within a few hundred miles of SF are tons of options.

If you are homeless and completely destitute, the big cities are where you can find enough soup kitchens to survive.

SF is already the second most dense city in the USA. Sure making SF as dense as Manhattan will make SF as cheap as Manhattan, but that be progress?

Increasing supply only works if demand is fixed. But...what if increasing supply only induces more demand? Tokyo is the only city doing well in this category, since they have a lull in demand due to demographics.

>That said, I also don't see how these things can justify one's decisions to steal from others in the same place. At the very least

When the system is literally rigged against you with things like... and I can't stress this enough... literal inherited tax advantages. Again, I think it's hard to argue that the legal system isn't bordering on tyranny.

Thankfully we can already see changes moving forward at the state level, but I see the increases in property crime as something akin to the beginnings of a type of political revolution.

I live in this area. I am quite well off. It's still quite difficult for even me to find or afford a place to live.

>Within a few hundred miles of SF are tons of options.

This is just ridiculous. There aren't any serious economic opportunities 100 miles from SF. If someone is trying to make their way through life as dishwasher, expecting them to travel 200 miles per day is an absurdity.

I want to be very clear here, I'm not a bleeding heart. I'm just saying, we look back at the great depression, we see hoovervilles. We are living through an extended post-depression era where we never had a New Deal or WW2 to give jobs and homes to the less well off. Instead they turned to opiates and meth, and this is what happens.

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