Comment by diogenescynic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diogenescynic | Hacker News Reader

Wow it's almost like the law of supply and demand is in fact accurate. Who would have thought basic economic 101 would be proven out? It's almost like when you allow supply to increase to meet demand the price equilibrium can move down. Shocking.

I say this with a bit of righteous anger though because the moronic democrats in California want to virtue signal about housing and homelessness but they make it downright as difficult and expensive as possible to increase housing supplies. The democrats in California have done nothing but make our problems worse, even as there are states we can look to with proven examples to solve our problems. Nope... more housing lotteries and BMR units will be required instead of just making it easier to actually build..

I'm with you and feel your anger. So tired of California's useless virtue signaling about housing and homelessness while no progress is made for decades. California, stop messing around and start living up to your virtue signals! It's infuriating to live in California, hear all day about caring about poor people, then do nothing at all for the bottom line and in fact endeavor to make it harder and discriminate against poor people as much as possible.

And then they'll act so surprised when the populists without a plan show up and win the national elections.

Some of the problem in California is that the population of want-to-buyers is all focused on a small number of extremely geographically constrained areas.

Their answer is always "more density" but more density isn't going to solve it - the demand is not fixed and density will not alleviate it, so there is natural pushback on ruining the area and not actually solving the problem.

The real answer here is that the valley needs to extend further south, as in the 1990s plans for companies to start building campuses in Silver Creek or further, which would require the government to incentivize such moves.

Had the dotcom lasted another two years or so, IBM, Cisco, and many others would have done the capital investment in campuses further out, and the viable housing area would have increased dramatically, but it didn't work out that way.

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