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Comment by dluan | Hacker News Reader

Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash.

But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left.

It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL improvements as a mission, is now so deeply forked from the base that sprung today's results. Politicians like Zohran won't be bought off by Palantir money. So, what's Peter Thiel and Gary to do? Where is Marc Benioff going to park his money? Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, Michael Moritz, Reed Hastings, Eric Schmidt, Laurene Jobs, Ben Horowitz - all of these people aren't doing the normal pay for play donations, they are interested in shaping the party in their image. Well, Zohran doesn't look like you.

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> Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash.

GrowSF is a conservative group with a right-wing policy platform trying to pretend it's progressive, so I'm not sure why that would be surprising.

The SF tech millionaires/billionaires are not progressive. They may have claimed to be in the past, but that was either opportunism, or they lost it as they made more money and saw people like Trump and Musk gain power.

The 2010's was the moment of SV emerging as a political donor cornerstone combined with Obama's peak, when up until that point, tech had been relatively hands off (80s through to 2010's). It was then that QE and low interest rates become part of VC strategy, and so SV got comfy with its image as supporting mainstream liberal candidates and policies. They all threw money behind the Dem machine (Obama, Hillary, Biden) until they realized they weren't actually getting any decision making power for their purchases, so the ones who felt some amount of urgency switched to Trump by showing up to speak at rallies or inaugurations.

Grow SF really only exists to go after city council members or school board members who get into twitter fights with a certain someone.

That may be so, but how far do you think viral radical left wing populism is going to get you towards regaining people who voted for trump?

Pretty much a clean sweep for the dems today including a trashing on prop 50. In general I think only something on the fringes can draw away people attracted to the fringes.

It's already established that they swing for viral radical populism ... so, perhaps less of a challenge than you imply.

well Prop 50 to redraw California's district lines passed by a nearly 30% margin and counting right now. That's an absolute spanking leading up to 26 midterms.

The story tonight isn't about Trump at all though, it's about millennial DSA types beating the establishment Democratic institution - in NYC, Detroit, Mississippi. In 24 everyone was astonished at the lack of response - "what is DNC going to do about losing to Trump, twice?". This is the beginning of what will be the eventual answer.

Also it doesn't need to be said, but the mobilization of 1M+ votes for Zohran's campaign today renders the fringes meaningless. He's now automatically in the conversation for the Presidential primary for 2028.

Zohran is literally never eligible to be President without a constitutional amendment.

Zohran will be the kingmaker is what I infer @dluan is trying to say.

Doesn't matter because it doesn't need to be him. It can be any of the younger American white dudes that are emerging who can co-opt the same message.

> He's now automatically in the conversation for the Presidential primary for 2028.

I'm really happy he won, but this will not happen

> He's now automatically in the conversation for the Presidential primary for 2028.

He was born in Uganda, so that ain't happening.

Err sorry not President, unfortunately.

You don't need to get them back, you just need to motivate the more normal voters and demoralize the weird ones.

There seem to be people who voted for Trump as an anti establishment candidate. Now, they're obviously completely unmoored from reality, but perhaps they'd like another anti establishment candidate?

Peter Thiel and Mamdani are more alike than you may think.

https://x.com/aphysicist/status/1937879912221667792

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-peter-thiel-warns...

Nobody wants to hear this because it departs from the 'billionaire bad' trope. But Thiel has been remarkably consistent in his criticism of housing being the center of all of the Millenial economic woes.

They may agree on the existence of the problem, but they... don't agree on the solutions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...

Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Thiel: Uh ——

Douthat: You’re hesitating.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——

Douthat: This is a long hesitation!

Sure, Thiel is identifying some of the same problems, but the solutions he's proposing are basically the opposite of the ones Mamdani is. Unsurprisingly, he's proposing solutions that benefit billionaires rather than everyone else (e.g. just les us build whatever wherever we want, of course we'll build cheap housing that brings property houses down! Who could ever imagine we'll build luxury mansions that keep property prices high?).

How many times must it be explained that building luxury mansions still brings property prices down. Nobody ever voluntarily builds crappy low income housing. That’s never how development works. You let people build the new fancy buildings they want to build with all the margins and high prices. Then, when a bunch of rich people move in, that’s people that are no longer chasing all the other apartments. Eventually, way down the road, these swanky apartments will be tomorrow’s old and crappy ones in the neighborhood that’s not hip anymore, and low income people can rent them. This is how things actually work, and it’s fine.

What is NOT fine is when you have banks and private equity bullshit chasing homes purely as an asset to flip. That’s the thing we need to curtail, because it’s just money laundering at the expense of the American homeowner.

> Then, when a bunch of rich people move in, that’s people that are no longer chasing all the other apartments.

Maybe? Seems to me that there's a certain level of wealth where this no longer is true. Housing has (unfortunately in my eyes) become one of those black boxes that you put money in and money comes out; it's an investment. But what you're telling me goes contrary to what I know about the housing market: no, actually, houses depreciate in value because they'll have to ask poor people to buy / rent the place at some point. Can I go buy a mansion built in 1930 for a bargain price?

(I do agree about the private equity part, just the first bit doesn't pass a sniff test from me)

Oh, understood, the housing will "trickle down", right?

How many times do we need to learn that trickle down economics doesn't work? Making the rich richer and happier will never "trickle down" to the poor, it will stop at the rich.

With land, this is particularly obvious. There is a finite amount of land. The more of it is occupied with luxury mansions, the less land will be available for high-density housing. Building 1 new luxury mansion removes land from the pool that could house dozens if not hundreds of people. And rich people don't move in from cheaper housing to more expensive, they just keep both, or they buy the new mansion as a vacation home.

Property is an investment, and there are huge vested interests in keeping property values going up - and not just from rich people, but virtually everyone who owns their own home. You have to fight a lot of these interests to force prices to go down. "Just build more" doesn't work, the space in and around a city is limited.

Building a luxury mansion on top of unused and uninhabited marginal land - sure, that can bring prices down. But building a luxury mansion for one family by replacing dilapidated, and therefore cheap, high-density housing which used to house a dozen families brings prices up. And in practice, that is what is happening in cities. Old low-rise multi-family buildings in nice neighborhoods are being modernized and then converted into single-family mansions.

More housing, regardless of type, is directly correlated to cheaper average rents [0]. So Thiel is right in that regard, the red tape for construction and opposition from NIMBYs must be curtailed.

[0] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/733977

NIMBYs typically oppose especially lower cost housing, so it's not surprising that cutting red tape does help reduce housing prices, or at least slows down the rise.

The question is if it is enough - and I would be quite certain it's just a band aid. Unless you impose the construction of cheap housing, cheap housing will tend to not get built - almost every interest is opposed to it.

Good thing Mamdani is doing both, cutting red tape and constructing new housing, at least that's his plan, we shall see what others in his governance think about it.

I mean thiels policies are in effect in Austin Texas which is one of the few jurisdictions seeing decreasing rents.

I'm sorry, the city run exclusively by Democrats and that went 68.7% blue in 2024 is using "Thiel's policies"? Since when? Which policies?

Yeah, that's correct. Democrats aren't made the same. Austin has built the most housing. YIMBY-ism is just free market conservatism economic policy dressed up in liberal language. Most people vote based off of vibes, not actual policy. If you restate the case for YIMBY-ism in conservative terms, you get conservatives to vote for you and liberals shy away. If you restate it in social justice terms, then you get liberals, and conservatives shy away. Policy is the same. The people are stupid.

His views are... a little more extensive than "build housing".

Peter Thiel being pragmatic about housing to avoid the proles from getting uppity in his desired future isn't much of a flex.

You got to have a Zohran that is also going to be tough on crime and homelessness but our political separations don’t allow for that right now.

From a non-american perspective it seems to me that in the US the problem of homelessness often gets mistaken for a problem with the homeless, maybe changing that narrative is a starting point?

With drugs in the mix things get complicated. Many cities tried giving these people free homes/rooms but because drug laws were strictly enforced there the homeless chose to stay on the streets. You’re not going to get rid of the fentanyl and meth addicted homeless unless you do it by force.

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