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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

You make it sound like the opposition to expansion don't know that there is housing demand in their areas - that the solution is "simple" and they are just dummies. But this feels kind of dishonest. There is a conflict between people who want to live in an area and people who don't want that area to become overcrowded (and then there's the myriad of second-order problems that stem from those two outcomes). That's the problem statement in a nutshell, and it's unfortunately complex both logistically and emotionally (and therefore politically, too), which is a disastrous combination. One of the hallmarks of that combination is that each side at even the highest levels of discourse tend to exhibit very little respect for the other (no sympathy, no benefit of the doubt, etc).

One of the few things both sides should be able to agree on is that it's awful when wealthy outsiders start buying property.

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Sorry, that is a very narrow point of view that's only popular as of relatively recently.

People who block housing in cities because they don't want the cities to be "overcrowded" are ridiculous because:

1. Cities are by definition dense areas

2. If you don't want to live somewhere dense, move where fewer people want to live

3. Your right to your own property doesn't extend past it

4. You are destroying productivity and allowing landlords to extract excess productivity from the whole population, so the effect is almost definitely not the one that you think it is.

For smaller communities in ecologically fragile areas, there are more nuanced arguments, but even then those people should prefer managed density because:

1. Density keeps sprawl at bay and is better for the environment

2. Residents won't be able to afford to live on their little patch unless they own the land

3. Even then their area will become a museum around them and they certainly won't be able to preserve the idyll they wish to.

In any case, most of the supply problems can be solved without major changes to what people often refer to as "neighborhood character". Everything from ADUs to just allowing a few extra stories does quite a bit to increase the capacity of an urban area.

This is exactly the perspective of folks that aren't feeling the pain from the housing crisis (and are in fact benefiting from it).

>There is a conflict between people who want to live in an area and people who don't want that area to become overcrowded

Yes. Obviously.

>That's the problem statement in a nutshell, and it's unfortunately complex both logistically and emotionally (and therefore politically, too), which is a disastrous combination.

This is already a bipartisan issue. You can see folks like Darrell Owens arguing for it on the far-left, Ezra Klein from a moderate-left position, and Chuck Marohn arguing for changes on the right.

It's only disastrous if your goal is to preserve the status quo of low density (sub)urban housing in the face of massive inequality in this housing costs. This is a classic scenario of a political minority (non-homeowners) facing a ton of pain that is trivially politically solvable, but not being able to do anything about it unless they become they eventually become the political majority... and now they are. And, more importantly, this scenario is does not lead to mean-reversion. We are in the middle of a political cascade. As the millennials become the dominant voting demographic, we should expect the pendulum to accelerate rapidly in the other direction... and that's exactly what we are seeing.

For those homeowners who are suddenly feeling uncomfortable about the political winds on this topic... buckle up. If this is really a cascade (and I think it's obvious that it is), we should expect these changes to accelerate for the foreseeable future. I believe it would be prudent start planning for the changes instead of fighting them.

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