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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> They want to maintain the social prestige they have from living somewhere fancy and they want to keep the poors away from their home.

.. which they will literally state in terms of property value.

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Sure but what GP said and what I think is a common perception is that wealthy people oppose development because they want the value of their house to grow in the same way that you would want the value of a stock to grow. I.e. so you can turn it into more money later. I don’t think they care so much about turning it into more money later, but more about the other factors I mentioned. Of course indirectly preserving or enhancing the other factors may result in also being able to turn it into more money later, but that is not usually the goal when opposing development around one’s primary residence IMO.

I don't think property value is the root of it. Rather, property value is the polite face they put on it, while their real concern is things like crime, whether it be petty vandalism and litter or more serious crime. It might not be fair for them to associate low income housing with crime, but I think this association is intuitively obvious to many if not most of the rich people living in exclusive neighborhoods.

While there may be some material value to a property, as the saying goes: Location, location, location. In other words, it is the things like crime that ultimately define a property's value. That is why property value decline is of concern to property owners. It is all the same at the end of the day.

You don't think people in low income areas are concerned about crime in their neighborhoods?

I didn't say that, did I? Why do you believe I think that?

TBF you didn't say it - It appeared that way if you followed the logic at the time regarding the gp you responded to two posts up about keeping poors away.

>> property value is the polite face they put on it, while their real concern is things like crime

It's polite to be concerned about money and impolite to be concerned about crime?

Almost all street-level crime (burglaries, robberies etc) is caused by degenerates (homeless, mentally ill, 'professional' criminals) and there's often a race component to it (even outside of the US).

You can't really talk about those things in polite company, so house prices are the euphemism used instead.

Crime is a factor in many cases, sure. But then so is emergency access/egress. If there is a wildfire near this neighborhood, we only have two ways out, and over 900 homes to evacuate via those two ways. Consider the traffic jams that we saw during the Steiner Ranch fire years ago.

Now, make each one of those properties dual family housing, and suddenly you’ve got twice as many people to evacuate, but you haven’t upgraded the roads or any of the other utilities. And that’s very bad news. Unfortunately, that is exactly the situation that the Austin city council has created.

Property values are certainly going to go down as they cram more and more housing into this space. But the cost will be in human lives when the wildfires do hit.

Can we prosecute our city council for manslaughter? Or even murder? How long do we have to wait for these deaths to occur, so that we can finally prosecute for them?

Where did you ever see that? In particular for the actually wealthy? "Oh no, my house went from $10m to $9m, woe is me"? At most, it's a proxy for the above. As a not-so-wealthy, but well-to-do techie, for me the exclusion is absolutely about keeping poor people out. People are just too timid do admit it.

Now I do have to say as a semi-libertarian I support YIMBY, building up everything and making most zoning illegal. Sorta against my self-interest.

But at the same time, I strongly dislike US poor. It's almost an oxymoron that the more meritocratic the society, the better the sorting, and thus the worse an average non-immigrant poor people are. US, compared to most places, is pretty meritocratic. An average person at the same percentile poverty level in Russia (or, I bet, Mexico or China or Nigeria or whatever) is a much better human being than a corresponding non-immigrant in the US (any race). If the way to keep the latter out is to keep local property unaffordable, so be it. I don't really care about broad property values otherwise - I don't want to move and if I do I'd probably buy a similar house.. in fact given the transaction costs, cheaper housing may make moving cheaper.

I believe the US “poor” could be made to behave better if standards were raised (more and better policing). Nobody seems to have the stomach for that so coddling is the solution.

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