| HN Mirror

I am not saying that they should go on breaking the laws. The laws are clear. But at certain times, the laws have been deliberately lobbied to create a hindrance for any new players in the market. Like in this case, applying for a permit to rent out apartments should have been much easier than the current cumbersome process is.

Like NY Taxi Medallions. Before Uber, Lyft or other ride-sharing apps, there was only 13,587 yellow cabs in the city of 8.5 million people. Currently, there are an estimated 100,000 cabs in the city which resulted in a drop of medallion prices from $1.4 million in 2014 to just $140,000 now. It was an artificial bubble created by the taxi drivers community (and government) to keep the medallion price inflated. It is easy to see why they were against ride-sharing apps.

Or California housing zones. We all know that California has a housing crisis and one of the potential solution is to have multi-story buildings. For that, we need easy rezoning of residential zones to allow multi-story building redevelopment. However, most of the community members refuse to allow for that since it would bring down the rent and property prices. So the community is not interested in allowing easy development of multi-story buildings.