Hacker News Reader

Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

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.

>> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com