tmh79

moving 4 million people here would create the money to allow the infra changes

I do a lot of housing policy activism outside my daily work in tech and I entirely disagree with you. On a large scale, real estate associations and "landlord" associations are an incredibly influential lobbying coalition in the state of California, and on the whole, they exert a hugely negative influence o housing policy. I don't think there is any reason to advocate punishing landlords where "punishing" is throwing them in jail, but the problem is that 99% of landlords will say that anything that you might do that lowers the growth in value of their assets or increase taxes on them is punishment, and they lobby in sacramento on that basis. The reality is that most of the policy changes that California needs (zoning reform, property tax reform, vacancy taxes, etc) will have the landlord lobbies against them on the basis that they are "punishing landlords".

On a larger scale, something like 85% of the state legislators in Caliifornia are themself landlords (they own a unit/home that they lease to someone else) and are profiting off the housing crises not just by owning their own home, but by profiting of the exorbitant rents of others. On some level, the housing crises in california is caused by the state legislature fighting for their own class interest and their own personal financial interest as landlords.

There is a natural population growth in the bay area from people having and raising children here. Our housing growth rate is slower than the rate of children coming of age. The unoccupied units that current residents are moving into can theoretically be occupied by the children of the current residents as they come of age.

"What proof do you have for that?"

rural areas are depopulating and cities/metropolitan areas are rising in both population and inflation adjusted real estate prices, both in the US and around the world.

Say you have 2 options...

This is a false framing. For most, the choice is between lower density area with a long usually car based commute or a higher density area with a shorter non car based commute. Things become more complicated when you have a life partner and you both have jobs, then you need to minimize the commutes while maximizing the job opportunities for both of you, and that happens best within cities.

"shoved like sardines into a 20 story high density apartment building"

this is also false framing. Some of the highest density neighborhoods in the united states are filled with 3 story buildings, like triple decker homes (ex: somerville MA) that are essentially 5k sqft homes 3 story homes subdivided into 3 units, one on each floor.

"What's the point of high density living"

The point of high density living is that it takes you less time to get to the things you want to do, it allows you to live without using a car to get everywhere, it allows for higher specializations of places, ex higher densities can support a niche board game store and gathering place, it allows a higher group of people to live within your commute shed so that you have more opportunities to make friends.

The past 5000 years of human history has included a nearly universal and constant theme of people moving from the countryside to the city. Post WWII America was a slight abberation from that, but we're back on trend like the rest of the world.

yea, I mean there have been large periods in human history in which land was not bought and sold. Many indigenous cultures don't have a strong concept of land ownership. In many modern socialist countries (Singapore, china), you cannot "buy land" you can lease it from the government for a long period of time (usually 99 years). In the united states, "education" is a good/service that transverses a weird line between "marxist commodity"/"non commodity" as we have education as a public good and we also have public schooling.

I want to be clear here that I'm not making any value judgements with my statements about capitalism vs socialism/marxism, and I agree that the "commodification of housing" IMO doesn't explain why its expensive, but to be fair, the people making that argument are generally not making an argument on values (housing aught to be...), and values are kind of a "first principles" type thing that you can't persuade or prove wrong, they just are.

PS, if you're interested in learning more, the wiki article is nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodification

To clarify, the issue is that in the 60's, both cities had much looser zoning and allowed dense housing development. Policy changes in the late 60s and early 70s tightened the zoning/reduced a cities ability to create dense housing.

You're speaking past each other. In marxist economics literature "commodification" means something is able to be bought and sold, not that it is a commodity in the broader ecconomic sense (an undifferentiated good with broadly elastic demand). "Honor" isn't commodified, "dignity" isn't commodified, "food" is commodified, and "rare collectible art" is commodified.

The reason we have a housing crises is because people want high density living. Our market crises is a literal refutation of your proposed solution.

If you look at the data for SF, 95% of brand new units are first occupied by people who have lived here for a at least a few years. New housing serves people who are already here.

What causes people to migrate to the bay is the office creation, not the housing creation.

Yea... there are way more than 20k units needed in the bay area (all 9 countie), its closer to 1m. You need to account for the huge amount of office space growth in the past 15 years and the next 10 years, as well as our historical trend of underbuilding due to regulations for the past 40 years.

In california, landlords largely did get us into this mess though. Like not on an individual scale, but as an organized political constituency they lobbied for the policies that have caused the problems we're experiencing and they're generally lobbying against the solutions.

a lot of the markets they operate in have had large recessions that they have done well in (IE Brazil). Operating theory is that on the margin, (for riders) people decide to own cars less and use alternatives more as cars are expensive and require large upfront costs but things like uber do not and (on the driver side) people have less alternatives to make money (higher paying, more stable jobs with benefits) so the uber driver gig is more appealing and driver acquisition costs are lower.

RE: eats incentive spend. Its a cash bonfire with Doordash and UE competing domestically, and a lot of other softbank funded delivery groups including uber eats competing in south america. It seems like that late stage financing has dried up so likely to see rationalization in this vertical.

Forecasting EBITDA profitability by Q4 2020

Deplatforming totally works, it quarantines the toxic people/ideas and doesn't allow them to spread further. Its fine if they move to voat or whatever, voat has orders of magnitude less people who use it casually, so there is a much lower opportunity for their message to spread.

Strong disagree, the solution to affordable housing includes a very large amount of private/free market housing, but the free market won't really address the needs of people below 30% of the median income. Additionally, good affordable housing is one of the best anti poverty tools that we have. IMO the long term solution is robust private market housing construction for the middle class, and a robust public housing construction system for those who truly need it.

White people didn't leave cities because of the threat of nuclear attacks, they left because there was an incredible amount of racial unrest, violence, and rioting. There is a lot of research on the issue [0].

Climate change is a much larger threat to anyone under 30 than nuclear annihilation is, and the balance of evidence we have says that urban lifestyles (car free/car light, living in a multi family home) has a smaller carbon footprint than traditional suburban living.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

Senior citizens in the other 49 states are doing just fine.

There are problems with increasing property taxes on elderly folks on fixed incomes, the solution isn't to say "you never own any tax on the appreciated value" the solution is to say "you can pay the tax on the appreciated value when you sell your home" which is an insane liberal tax and spend policy practiced in the hippie haven of the... state of Texas.

Additionally, the lions gain of the benefits of prop 13 don't accumulate to the working class elderly living in appreciated homes, it goes to giant corporations like Walt Disney (yes, Disney Land is protected by prop 13), golf courses, extremely wealthy property investors, and the heirs of people who have owned nice homes and then died who then bequeath both their house AND their insane tax rate on to their children.

"building new housing doesn't really drive the prices down" there is a lot of empirical evidence against this claim, and almost no evidence for it. Rising costs in cities are due to a few factors: (1) lack of new housing, (2) changing economic conditions in which high paying jobs are moving from the suburbs to the cities (to be fair, there is a small factor in very few cities of super rich people buying housing and not living in it, but that is largely confined to Manhattan, London, and suburban Vancouver, but is not broadly an issue in housing affordability) From after WWII through the 80s, American cities were largely in this strange largely racism induced recession (white flight to the suburbs) which caused a historical aberration of cheap housing and commercial space in cities. That trend was a very short counter trend blip in the 5000 year history of real estate in cities. The way forward is to build a lot more housing in cities, as its eminently clear that lots of people want to live in them, that living in cities is better for the environment than the alternative, and that our economy would be doing much better if the desired urbanization was actually allowed.

They have seen a "boom" relative to 2009-2012 when literally zero new housing was built, they have not seen a boom relative to 1900 - 2009, especially when accounting for business cycle. I understand that you are seeing what you perceive to be a lot of housing construction, but relative to historical trends and population/household size trends, there is very little housing construction happening in NYC.

NY has not been putting up housing at an insane rate. Housing in NY is actually being constructed at one of the lowest rates in the last century. Adjusted for business cycles (we're in a peak now), NY is building less housing than they have build in ~100 years, and Manhattan is at its lowest density since the 1890s. The current period is only a "boom" relative to 2009-2012 when basically no new housing was constructed.

to be fair, there are very few residency spots in the bay area in any specialty anyway. My wife went through the residency match program last year and the bay area programs are ultra competitive because it is a desireable place to live. Adding more residency slots is a good idea, but they're going to be spread across the US.

> There's no good reason for homeless shelters and other charitable services to be located on extremely valuable real estate and in NIMBY neighborhoods

There are tons of good reasons. The primary reason is that "place" is a huge determination of societal outcomes for individuals. Homeless individuals in a nicer neighborhood will on average have better outcomes (rehabilitation, returning to normal life, seeking mental health treatment) than homeless individuals in rougher neighborhoods.

> there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck

This isn't true, at least in any sense of the word we would agree with. (Wife works in medicine, is a doctor at this level, we run in these circles). They are "living paycheck to paycheck" in the sense that they've set their stock brokerage to automagically deduct 10k usd/month from their bank account, and they pay 10k/month on a mortgage (which accumulate equity) and their checking account doesn't grow in size and their monthly float is the same. Some of them pay for private school which means they only save 3k/month instead of 10k/month, how oppressive. Their checking account "funny money they allow themselves to spend on anything" isn't growing and is the same, but their net worth is growing 15k/month.

> As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument...

I think its a lot more complicated than this. Yes, men and women can be jerks. The bigger issues seem to be when a team is 80%+ one gender or another, and the issues aren't about "being mean" the issues are about the dominant group being blind to and then not accommodating the nondominant group's needs.

A huge problem is that we have a lot of 6 person tech teams with 5 guys and 1 women and the women naturally feel alienated and either aren't actually able to do well or are at least perceived as not doing well due to their situation. This holds back women's career development as a group and reduces the numbers of women in higher ranks in corporate life.

> Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US?

They are de facto banned though. ~99% of all land in urban and suburban areas has FAR requirements and setback requirements that make it impossible to build a new rowhouse.

I mean, I am not an industry shill, but I also believe that modern zoning and building codes (not the safety codes, but things like parking) make the kind of places that I would enjoy living "illegal to build today". There are a lot of bad regulations in the building codes today. Fireproofing, egress, and siesmic stuff is great, absurdly low FAR in urban areas? 2 parking spaces per unit? That ruins any chance of walkability.

I have some VC friends tangentially related to the deal. Apparently the original demo was wild, like real magic bonkers. Everyone who tried became a believer. The projected light streams onto the user's eyes so instead of seeing an image overlayed in an intermediate layer as in most AR, the image was projected onto your retinas through this very advanced technology and optics. The issue is that the advanced technology demo used an entire room of computers and sensors for a single user, and it didn't allow the user to move around at all, just sit in a chair and have this thing projected onto your eyes. The goal was to scale this working crazy but impractacle thing into a consumer experience but they just weren't able to, so they pivoted to being another "smart glass" maker. Their tech and patents still actually work, they just aren't able to make a product out of it.

"Doctors" are an enormous field of work. Are you talking about primary care physicians, which are widely being augmented/replaced by nurse practitioners? Are you talking about specialists who are able to work out treatments plans for conditions you have that are definitely more complex than you can self treat, or are you talking about surgeons, who have an insane amount of training and stress in their job and you definitely cannot perform your own surgery.

so you support rent control below CPI?