Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if driver's licenses were treated the same way cities treat taxi licenses and liquor licenses.

The number available is limited, so if you want a driver's license you have to wait for someone to die, and then buy the license from the estate. Since it's artificially scarce you'd have to pay a pretty penny to get one. Some companies might step in and buy up driver's licenses to rent them to drivers for only a few hundred dollars a month...

Treating any form of license as transferable private property seems to be against the public interest.

View on HN

Singapore has a quota system for vehicles. The cost of a 10-year vehicle license under their auction system can exceed the value of the vehicle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Entitlement

The situation isn't the same as your hypothetical situation though. The licenses aren't perpetual or (for the most part) transferable.

Incidentally, the traffic flows pretty well there.

Singapore is a different case, because it's such a small country. Between the size of the island and the climate (hot/humid) they can't afford uncontrolled growth of car usage. It's also a place (like Manhattan) where you don't need a car.

Frankly, I think car usage should, ideally, cost 2-3 times what it costs in the U.S. to account for all the externalized costs. (Those taxes could be used to modernize the train system and public transportation.) That wouldn't be practical, unfortunately, as the country is set up now.

Public transport and trains don't do anything to help the many folks living outside cities. Singapore is very different to downtown Texarkana.

Try telling bill the farmer that his truck is gonna cost 3x more to run this year to help fund light rail in The city. Singapore and the US is an apples to pork chops comparison.

Australia has a system whereby "bill the farmer" (and miners) can claim a tax credit for fuel excise taxes, whereas inner city drivers can't.

The UK has a system where inner city drivers have to pay congestion taxes.

Both of these systems make some progress towards limiting congestion and subsidising public transport in dense areas without hurting those outside the cities. Personally I think they should both go a lot further.

Plus there are many ways the Singaporean government gives advantages to the very wealthy. Providing them with roads that everybody pays for but they don't have to share is but one of many.

My primary memory of my first Singapore visit a few years ago is how nearly impossible it was to find a taxi in the afternoon/evening. Ended up spending an hour walking back to the hotel instead.

It flows pretty well in Pyongyang, too.

It is very much so. It's a form of capturing rent. Look at how crazy the taxi companies go to protect this revenue stream. They keep this because they are tenacious 1 issue voters. (And in NYC, the current mayor was elected on the basis of unions and 1 issue voters like this)

In my view the taxi licenses should be of fixed length. It's ok to say "The roads only allow for 13K (or however many) taxis." It's wrong to give people a lifetime annuity based on it, and create a barrier to entry in the industry. Better to have a fixed term like 5 or 10 years. Long enough that it's worth investing in the business. Short enough that others can enter. And the total # should be flexible, perhaps linked to traffic and population.

Sounds like Singapore (vehicle registration/COE, not licenses, but essentially the same thing.)

If you're going to argue against taxi licenses or anything else, please explain why you think the reasons why some people believe the good outweighs the bad are wrong, rather than just pointing out that there is bad.

rent stabilization seems to fit that bill.

New York's rent stabilization isn't that bad, but it also doesn't have a major effect on rents, either for those who have it or those who don't. (Rent-stabilized apartments can go up by a few percent per year.) It's the 1947-era legacy rent control that is patently ridiculous.

Most people underestimate the harm of that program because they don't understand price elasticity. It's true that only ~1-2% of apartments are under that system. However, 1-2% supply destruction can actually double prices. (See: oil shocks.)

Another problem is that this country is run by scumbags and pussies who allow foreigners to own real estate (many countries don't). Now, I'm all for a reasonably open immigration policy, and letting foreigners live here is not the issue. (The people who move here to live here don't have a major effect on the rent, and are good for the country overall.) But the types of foreigners who buy U.S. real estate are usually corrupt officials who want a place to live if their own country brings them to trial. (In China, corruption is a death-penalty offense.) This is the real reason why Silicon Valley is so expensive: every fucking Communist Party scumbag in China and murdering Russian oligarch and Arab slave state billionaire has bought a place (even if it goes uninhabited) in California. It doesn't affect a large number of houses, strictly speaking, but it's enough of a margin to have massive impacts on the price level.

I am amazed at Americans' willingness to be "patriotic" about stupid things and get into nonsensical wars... but then we go and let corrupt, murdering dictators and billionaires from all over the world buy California and Manhattan real estate. It's fucking disgusting.

Do you have any evidence to back-up the claim that foreigners are driving up the cost of property? I can't find the source now, but from the data I've seen, foreign purchases amount to less than 10%. What really drives up housing pricing in the bay area is speculation where contractors purchases homes for cash and flip them.

The other thing to think about is, do you really think "communists from china" are buying 1-bedroom apartments in the Mission? No, they are buying the multi-million dollar homes in Russian Hill. For the average American those homes were never within budget.

Vancouver is a good case study in how foreigners can drive up property prices.

Vancouver is a great example, but the evidence doesn't seem to back it up.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/scant-e...

I think you could argue that foreign money is driving up home prices in Vancouver, but it's certainly not the main factor raising home prices.

The simple fact that cities don't scale beyond a certain point is driving up prices.

Cities scale just fine. They become more efficient as you build up. That goes until you're at about 50 stories, which is more average height than most US cities by far (New York has a lot of prime real estate at 3-5 stories, such as in the Village).

The problem is people. People usually fight against "ugly" new development and "Manhattanization" and change of all kinds, and while they make arguments based on urban beauty, they're really just trying to protect their obscene premiums on real estate by blocking new supply.

I actually think urban home ownership makes no sense for most people. Ownership is about a sense of control. If you live in the woods and sit on an acre of land or two, you can be pretty sure that no one's going to block your morning sun, or set up a nightclub next door. Cities can't afford to grant those assurances. It's just better, from that standpoint, for most people to rent. Why make your primary investment something that another person with more power and more money can easily fuck up, just by buying space near it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com