[superuser2]

I am aware of the market-is-God talking points. The Bay Area's regulatory restrictions are doing exactly what they were intended to do: protect the views and increase the property values of existing owners by preventing new construction. In this case, regulation works as intended. It's just that the intentions were wrongheaded.

Removing the regulation would move us further towards "people with money can get housing." I want a livable city for everyone, including those without the resources to outbid me, and that requires different kinds of regulation.

[abfan1127]

thats certainly a valid opinion, however, with those regulations come housing shortages and conditions like in the Bay area. You've chosen an optimization, and like all optimizations, there are trade offs, and some of those trade offs are hard to accept.

Not to fully respond to your trollbait, but the market isn't god. Its just smarter (i.e. crowdsourced) than a few government officials about establishing what society wants.

[superuser2]

>establishing what society wants

When market participants are playing with roughly similar amounts of money, or at least roughly normally distributed amounts of money, sure. Markets give us the best consumer products. Part of how they do that is slicing the "budget" and "luxury" segments away into their own little worlds, where they don't do too much damage to everything else.

Inequality in the Bay Area housing market is so extreme that the best use of capital (in a market sense) is to exhaust it on the luxury segment and leave everyone else out in the cold. This might be "what society wants, weighted by salary" but that is importantly different from "what society wants" in this case.

Imagine if general income inequality was such that the auto industry found it optimal to produce only a few thousand Bugatti Veyrons, leaving everyone else in the cold. At the very least, we'd have to force it to produce some tanks and aircraft engines in case of war.

[crdoconnor]

"thats certainly a valid opinion, however, with those regulations come housing shortages and conditions like in the Bay area."

These are scapegoats. If the city started building social housing the shortage would be over.

If those pesky zoning regulations were eliminated property developers would flood in and build thousands of luxury apartments which would be bought by Chinese investors and left empty much like all the other property they've bought.

[abfan1127]

we have a word for that - its called the market.

[crdoconnor]

Markets unencumbered by regulation are only magically efficient and/or arbiters of society's needs if you're a neoliberal fundamentalist.

For everybody else it's a (rather poor) allocation mechanism that implicitly favors monopoly power, wealth and corruption. Great if you happen to have a lot of wealth thanks to your connections in the Chinese Communist Party I guess, and are looking for an American bolthole. Not so great if you're an American primary school teacher who grew up in the Bay Area.