Hacker News Reader

Comment by gigawhat | Hacker News Reader

I'm no libertarian, but how about market forces? As fewer blue-collar workers can afford to live in or close to SF, the labor pool will shrink and wages will go up.

View on HN

Part of the argument here is that if government regulation has created artificial scarcity: if market forces were at work then more living spaces would be built.

On the other hand, the market isn't everything, especially in the near-term. The market, for instance, won't create diversity in the city; it will create a monoculture of whatever is working that decade. So, right now, in SF, it will create a monoculture of tech workers as, in Manhattan, it almost created a monoculture of finance workers in the '80s/'90s. Monocultures lack resilience and if NYC hadn't traded its finance economy for a tourist-driven one, it could have been hard times. Booms and busts may be okay from a Liberal philosophy point of view, but it's hell on the people caught in it.

The other thing about diversity is it's part of the reason people move somewhere in the first place. One of the reasons tech has moved from the Valley up into SF is that SF has more diversity, so it's not all tech all the time. It would make sense to try to preserve what it was you wanted in the first place (even if, a la any gentrifying neighborhood, it may be a bit of a lost cause.)

Part of the argument here is that if government regulation has created artificial scarcity...

Is NIMBY-ism "government regulation"?

I would expect government regulation to be a common strategy for people who want to keep certain things from being built near them.

NYC traded finance for tourism? Something like 1/3 of the cit is still employed in jobs tied to the financial industry (and it pays over half the wages in Manhattan). I literally can't remember knowing a single person working in tourism when I lived there.

Scientists are trained to look at the data when confronted with a hypothesis.

In this context it's worth looking at Aspen, CO. Wages for service workers there have not gone up, and 60-mile commutes on mountain roads are common. I have no theory for why that is, but I do not expect a different outcome for SF.

Scientists are trained to despise anecdote.

Not sure what science has to do with this anyway; this is basically a matter of public-policy/politics/economics.

Well, a scientist (or other person concerned with the underpinning of fact claims) might note that the supposed exodus that is the factual premise around which the value-based arguments here revolve is not evident except in anecdote, and that in fact SF's population is growing rather than showing signs of an exodus, while Oakland, the supposed destination of the out-of-SF exodus, is shrinking.

Market forces will definitely apply, but my concern is that the market will react too slowly. That by the time the market can react and raise wages the labor pool will be shrunk too much and either services won't be available, or they will be too expensive for even those who could otherwise afford to live in the city. You can't just get a labor force to move back to an area overnight (just like these problems aren't going to appear overnight). So, in order to compensate, the market will swing wildly until it can stabilize.

That's what I'm worried about. Populations shift, people move, cities grow. But, if you're running a city, you want growth to be stable and predictable. If you drive out all of your lower-income workers to other cities and "import" your labor, you are setting yourself up for an unstable labor market in the future.

These things need to be planned for, and it doesn't seem like there is a lot of thought being put into it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com