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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

By choosing one at random, perhaps?

More realistically, through an arbitrary emotional choice.

There's a reason stories of housing discrimination generally center around communities employing rent control. When faced with more tenants than they know what to do with, landlords have way less financial consequences from doing all manner of unfortunate things.

What an inefficient idea. Better to give it to the person who values it the most, as signified by the price they are willing to pay.

If you make someone pay more for the same thing that was worth less before, did you increase the value of the thing or decrease the value of money?

I don't think "you" did anything. It was the preferences and decisions of millions of cooperating parties that affected underlying value.

Yeah, Chapter One of any economics textbook makes clear that it takes two to tango.

Actually, a lot more than two.

Screw "efficiency." Why should rent in urban areas be $3500 for one person just because someone can afford it? People on HN love to talk about how suburbs are destroying the planet, then others turn around and claim that impossibly high rents in urban centers is "efficient"?

Rent is $3500 because special interests are artificially suppressing the supply of housing.

Charging lower rent in urban areas wouldn't create more of them to live in. You'd have the exact same number of people living in suburbs.

Yes, but you'd have a more diverse mix in the urban center to run the place, more of the consumer surplus would be distributed more widely, and a strong pressure against class mobility, housing and transportation costs, would be reduced for those lucky enough to be selected for a high demand area.

And then they'd sublet to the highest bidder.

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