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Comment by onedev | Hacker News Reader

Do I complain about not being able to afford living in Manhattan? No. It's historically one of the most important areas in one of the most important cities in the world.

In the same way, why are people constantly complaining about not being able to afford living in San Francisco? It's one of the hottest cities on the planet right now. I don't get where this entitlement is coming from that people feel that they SHOULD be able to live there without paying the price?

I'm not saying there aren't real societal issues in San Francisco, but I think the entitlement from the people who can't afford to live there doesn't make sense to me.

Yes, we should try to make San Fran affordable as possible. Yes, more housing should be built, etc, etc. However, the entitled way in which the less fortunate approach this situation is what baffles me.

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The entitlement argument is completely stupid, and really is only made from a perspective of entitlement. This is a matter of history and establishment.

Back before the tech boom we see today, these people, who are now facing eviction, were just moving into their neighborhoods in the city. At this time, they did not face a choice of whether to rent or buy, as some stupid people on HN may be arguing. They only could afford to rent, and rent they did for decades. But these people didn't just park themselves in a bed at night, they established themselves in the neighborhood, building a vibrant community and culture. They opened businesses and started sports leagues and cultural preservation groups. They had kids here, who are now in the local schools. They gave the neighborhoods the very soul that is now so attractive to us tech workers.

Fast-forward to present day, and they are facing challenges from all sides and are fighting to defend the roots that they've planted and communities they've worked hard to establish over the decades, it really has nothing to do with entitlement at all. This isn't a fight over whether someone gets to keep land, regardless of whether they own it or are renting, this is a fight to defend what they've worked for. Really I see the other side as the entitlement fight. We techies think we're entitled to the communities these people established only by paying higher rent. With this attitude, soon enough these very neighborhood we talk about will have no culture, and won't be as desirable.

Really the only solution to this is to build more, so go yell at the people blocking new construction. Screaming entitlement is just making you look like a moron.

> This isn't a fight over whether someone gets to keep land, regardless of whether they own it or are renting, this is a fight to defend what they've worked for.

This sounds ridiculous. If they (the renters) don't own it, the owner decides who lives there (that's the essence of property). Why should renters get a say in what happens to someone else's property?

Well now we can have a more productive debate.

The "essence of property" as you state it of having absolute authority of what an individual can do with their property doesn't exist legally -- zoning laws are the first example I can think of that refutes the claim or ideal.

So there's already a legal basis for us as a society having say in what people do with their property. Quite frankly I think a lot of these laws are overstepping their bounds and encroaching on personal freedom. BUT I think there's a perfectly legitimate line to draw when it comes to using your property to provide housing for other people.

When you decide to use your property to make money by renting it out to other people, you are essentially taking on a huge amount of power over their livelihood, and this cannot be stated lightly. So to me this is where we as individuals and as a society need to decide how to govern this territory in a way that's fair for both parties involved, as it is certainly not fair to widely restrict the amount of money someone can make from their property, and it is certainly detrimental to people and communities to upheave members from their homes and established roots. This is where striking a balance makes the most sense for the strength of the community, and the individual stakeholders, and will produce a strong society as a whole.

To me, making the claim of absolute property rights is simply weak. I don't want to deride the most important point, as stated above, but absolute property rights don't really make logical sense to me either, as property is often a hugely restricting resource, and one completely established by precedence rather than contribution per se.

I don't see how the "money should trump everything" argument is less entitled. Of course I'll think this will change if the fortunate side becomes reserved for the very fortunate, like has happened in some other cities.

What criterion do you suggest to determine who lives in SF, besides "let people come to mutually beneficial arrangements among themselves"? Keep in mind that the most common alternative policy, rent control, is widely acknowledged (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-...) to turn rental markets into basket cases.

There are currently a host of policies that keep people from doing what they would otherwise very much like to do, which is building new higher-density housing and living in it. That would result in net gains, whereas arguing about who gets to live in SF is pretty much zero-sum. Yet people really seem to like to argue over the latter, and are weirdly quiet about the former.

I don't have time to do this largr discussion justice, but if you can't tell I think value associated with stable, and preferably cheap, housing is important enough to protect. Regardless if it's preventing a housing market crash, having rent control or forcing increased development.

Sure, and the question is how you achieve those aims. If you can read an op-ed by one of the most highly respected progressive economists in the world, whose message is:

> Rent control in SF has had perverse consequences for tenants. Don't go in for rent control.

and your conclusion is

> Maybe we should go in for rent control.

I'm not sure what else to say.

Rent control is one of the tools, I've never said anything about it in relation to SF. I'd like to see anyone argue that rent control doesn't work as a price ceiling for the rent controlled units.

Well, that really depends on what you consider a price: if a law prevents a landlord from renting to the tenant offering them the most money, they have to decide on the basis of some other criterion. In SF, you apparently had people showing up to open houses offering to pay the (legally stipulated) rent a year in advance. (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary NB: the author is apparently sympathetic to rent control) Moving a year's worth of future rent up to the present costs money in the form of interest rates, and is a cost. Landlords in rent-controlled units are notorious for dragging their feet on repairs, since the tenant is unlikely to look elsewhere and even if so, another occupant will always be ready to take over the lease. Just searching for a place in a rent-controlled district takes more time. All of these are costs, arising from the fundamental fact that if you make it illegal to allocate a resource on the basis of price, you still have to allocate it some other way.

You shouldn't be worried about rent control failing to function as a price ceiling-- you should be worried about it functioning exactly as a price ceiling.

You used the word 'important' for 'expensive'. That, in my opinion, is a fallacy.

It is expensive. That's different from important.

But don't you agree that the reason an area would increase in value (which often converts to the monetary type) to a lot of people is because it holds some sort of importance to them?

Whether it be intellectual importance, industrial importance, creative importance, etc

To wrap the varied values of an area up into a single word - 'importance' - is a gross oversimplification to the extent that it can even be considered incorrect.

It is, however, and undeniably, expensive.

No reason it can't be both. One usually leads to the other.

> why are people constantly complaining about not being able to afford living in San Francisco?

Think of someone like a cook who has lived in SF for years. They came to the city, honed and practiced their skills, and in their own small way helped make SF one of the best food cities in the world. And their reward is "MOVE OUT", or at least live in a crappy situation. And that change happened really fast.

It is human nature that someone in this situation would complain.

It didn't happen really fast. It's been ignored for several decades, probably since that person moved into the city.

I honestly see little difference in the human mentality that lead to the national housing crisis that and the SF housing availability crisis. Yeah, you can say the national housing crisis started very quickly in 2008 and got bad fast, but the truth is that the seeds that lead to that unstable situation were planted long long ago. The same is true for SF's housing crisis.

Rent control is a prime suspect in all this. In the case of NYC, rent control probably makes sense because it's largely hit the limit of how high a city can be built (it's easy to remove a 1-3 residence building in place of a 15 residence building, but hard to remove a 15 residence building for a 30 residence one.) It's easy to argue for 5x increases in housing for a given plot of land, but much harder to argue for 2-3x increases.

Economists generally all agree that rent control fucks up housing markets and reduces the quantity and quality of housing [0]. Most importantly for SF, it removes entire swathes of the existing middle class from demanding more and more housing over the years as the city grows. When you build up your life around 1994 rents, you ignore the housing problem in SF and hunker down in the home you happened upon in 1994. If for whatever reason you're rooted up 15+ years later, the rental rates have changed so much that you can't even afford to stick around and lobby for a solution like making more affordable housing available by eliminating building restrictions and rent control. Worse yet, you're likely to make the market even more distorted by arguing for more tenant protection laws. Had you been participant to the problem since 1994 because you had no rent control, you would have also been participant in the debate asking for more housing to be built each year. This is the exact same mentality that causes banking crises: introduce some extreme distorting policy that disproportionately benefits you in the short term and ignore what is going to happen when the chickens come home to roost in 10-15 years time.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-...

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