[nikomen]

As a white-collar professional and a software developer, what's something that we can do to lessen our effect on this phenomenon? I don't current live in a large city, but I've considered moving to one if I need to find work in the future. I've been lucky to work remote for most of my career, so living in a metro area with fewer tech jobs hasn't been an issue. However, if I were to move to one of the big tech cities, obviously I would be contributing to the pricing problems that already exist.

[dsfyu404ed]

Stop paying too much for housing because the commute is 15min or the schools are good. Stop buying hipster beer and eating at those stereotypical gentrified restaurants that charge too much for everything. Buy your groceries somewhere other than Whole Paycheck.

Basically just live below your means.

But that is going to be hard for most people in tech to do because most people in tech were raised upper middle class and they simply don't know how to live below that and a lot of the rest are not from the US and they're mostly just going to do whatever makes them fit in.

And unless you can get everyone with money to live like they don't (which you can't) that's not actually going to solve anything. Telling everybody to just change their lifestyle is not a real solution to anything anyway.

[tathougies]

The last thing one should do to solve housing inequality is to intentionally buy a lower priced home that could have formerly been afforded by a family with lesser means (thus forcing them to attempt to afford a higher priced property) in a sanctimonious attempt to avoid doing just that.

Ultimately, there is nothing an individual can do to help housing affordability. That is a societal problem.

If you really want to help housing equality, buy ana apartment building, not a house, and add more units

[dsfyu404ed]

>The last thing one should do to solve housing inequality is to intentionally buy a lower priced home

And driving demand for luxury condos (or whatever) is better? Then you're giving an incentive for some developer to bulldoze the cheap "blighted" homes and apartments to make more luxury condos or overpriced new townhouses, or whatever.

There's no winning here.

[tathougies]

> And driving demand for luxury condos (or whatever) is better? Then you're giving an incentive for some developer to bulldoze the cheap "bliAnd driving demand for luxury condos (or whatever) is better? Then you're giving an incentive for some developer to bulldoze the cheap "blighted" homes and apartments to make more luxury condos or overpriced new townhouses, or whatever.

No you're not. If you buy a luxury condo, you have reduced demand for luxury condos, since there's one less individual who both wants and can afford a luxury condo. If they build enough luxury condos as people who can afford them, then eventually it's no longer profitable to build luxury condos, and they'll have to concentrate elsewhere. However, the false restriction of the market enabled by policies such as 'neighborhood preservation' and lack of funding for rapid public transit means that development companies can basically make their entire year's profit only meeting the demand of the rich.

(Also, every new development is going to be branded as a 'luxury condo'. No one sells a 'boring old condo', ever).

> There's no winning here.

Yup. If you define 'winning' as 'I don't want my purchase of something to affect the price of similar things', then certainly, you cannot win.

[scarface74]

Also, every new development is going to be branded as a 'luxury condo'. No one sells a 'boring old condo', ever

This is true everywhere. Builders are not going to build cheap houses. My wife and I were looking for a house three years ago. At the time, it was only three of us - including my 15 year old step son. We were looking at buying in a county in the Atlanta burbs. We had two choices - old small houses being sold by the relatively few people who lived their or buy in one of the many neighborhoods where builders were building new houses. We purposefully chose the cheapest, smallest floor plan offered by the builder - and even that was over 3000 square feet, five bedroom. I’m not trying to humble brag. It was less than 330K all in and we only needed 5% down. Any software developer with 5-7 years of experience could easily afford it - especially a dual income couple.

[creatornator]

That's a backwards interpretation of demand. Buying a good has the effect of increasing scarcity and thus increasing price.

You could just... decide not be in the market, despite being able to afford it. Market price is defined by what people are willing to pay for and sell for. If you are not willing to pay anything for a luxury condo, that reduces the price for everyone by making it less scarce.

You don't have to buy all the luxury condos in existence to eliminate the market. If people decide not to buy them, there is no demand, by definition.

[jonathankoren]

Housing trickles down to an extent, for lack of a better term.

Luxury condos lose their luster, and then become just regular condos. Regulars become cheap. It's effectively entropy. Also, people that can afford to live in a luxury home, don't want to live in a meh, or even crappy home. Yet, if they can't get a luxury home, they settle the meh one. Since they can pay luxury prices, the meh one becomes more expensive, and the less well off get frozen out, because they can't compete.

If you build at the high end, or more accurately "market rate", not only can developers recoup the cost of construction, but you're also taking pressure off the meh and crappy houses, because the people that can afford luxury prices, take the nice home. Also, those currently live in what was considered "nice", upgrade to the new luxury home, because they're now in downscale, thus freeing that house and and lower the prices.

https://ggwash.org/view/68496/why-are-developers-only-buildi...

[adrice727]

Why does this seem to be different with software as opposed to other areas of engineering? Is it a generational thing?

Before jumping into the tech industry, I worked in the automotive industry and spent a lot of time around engineers. They were mostly all over 40 and they mostly all fit the stereotype of the frugal engineer. I don't see too many of those engineers in the Bay Area.

[PavlovsCat]

> But unless you can get everyone to do that (which you can't) that's not actually going to solve anything.

It solves the problem of contributing to it.

[dsfyu404ed]

That is true. But how many people actually care to do that? Sure you you can personally not litter but without the massive public awareness campaigns of decades past concerned individuals would never have been able to solve the problem of littering. The public at large needed to be on board. Ditto for "socioeconomic littering". While I'd really like to see some solution that doesn't involve regulation getting the upper classes to not spend their money improving their quality of life doesn't seem like a tractable approach. What's the point of having the money if you can't use it to better your life?

[scarface74]

So he should make his kids go to a bad school as a social experiment?

[KeenFox]

Systemic issues require systemic solutions. The only thing an individual can do is advocate and vote. Even that might not be enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

[thrower123]

Self-flagellation doesn't help anybody else, either

[TomMarius]

How exactly should we vote supply and demand out of existence? You propose a left-ish solution but the same left-ish people that would enact it also support housing regulation, and due to supply and demand, your goal simply can't be met. This is not a systemic issue in most places where the program exists, it's an issue of current regulation (and the people that created it).

[TulliusCicero]

> How exactly should we vote supply and demand out of existence?

You can't, but there are things that can be done to compensate or mitigate:

- Anti-union regulations like "right to work" laws are an anti-market intrusion that weakens the power of labor. Vote against them.

- Support works councils (they've worked well in Germany) for more democratic governance, which right now I believe are illegal in the US (read this in a Bloomberg article earlier, though haven't verified).

- Support things that make bad jobs less bad. For example, there are benefits offered by 'better' companies, like good health insurance or paid parental leave, that could be provided by the state or mandated by the state.

- Support land use and transportation changes that would allow more people to participate in the economies of 'superstar' cities without ruinous housing costs.

Note that two of these things are even market-oriented, not all the positive changes have to be about more/bigger government.

[vonmoltke]

> - Anti-union regulations like "right to work" laws are an anti-market intrusion that weakens the power of labor. Vote against them.

How is forcing me to join a particular union pro-market?

Also, how am I supposed to vote on this or any of the other things you mentioned? I get one vote per legislative body every 2 || 6 years and that one vote has to cover dozens of issues like this that come up in the interim.

[threatofrain]

I always though the right way to do things in a democracy is to talk to your neighbors and reach consensus (campaigning). The purpose of a democracy isn’t so individuals can say “I voted”; voting is merely democracy’s technique for communal action. One could even convince enough people to buy an ad.

It should be obvious given that a person has one vote.

[TulliusCicero]

> How is forcing me to join a particular union pro-market?

A contract stipulating joining a union for a job is no more anti-market than a contract specifying work hours or clothing requirements or how much vacation you get. If that's how the business has decided to run, the free market perspective is that they should be allowed to. It's market forces that can compel a company to agree to such a setup, after all.

However, a regulation saying that this type of contractual obligations is illegal is very obviously an intrusion on the market. Not that I think all intrusions are bad, but I don't see a compelling reason to support this one, given that corporations already tend to have the advantage over workers and this reduces workers' collective leverage.

Agreed that it's hard to vote narrowly on this topic. But no different from any other political subject, really.

[tathougies]

Certainly businesses today are free to mandate union involvement, even in right to work states. However, it is actually anti free market to stipulate thar businesses must do this. There's no way to spin that as anything other than authoritarian

[nikomen]

I assume this would mean trying to vote for politicians that would remove the artificial supply and demand in somewhere like San Francisco where, if stories are correct, the local population doesn't allow for dense development. I'm not sure what you do in locales like New York where development is already dense in many areas.

[TulliusCicero]

NYC has some similar problems, albeit not as severe. IIRC much of the existing housing in NYC is 'illegal' in the sense that current zoning would prevent it from being built today due to density restrictions.

For a counter example, you can look at Tokyo as a place that's more of a free for all, and indeed while it's still fairly expensive, it's much less so than the bay area or NYC.

[jtuente]

Rent alone accounts for the majority of the difference in CoL, but that may also depend on your expectations for the living space.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

[TulliusCicero]

Even if you compared studios in NYC to 1br's in Tokyo, Tokyo would still have a huge rent price advantage.

[rmbryan]

What a great question!