[edgyquant]

You’ve completely skirted the question with most of this comment

> Whose goals are considered "democracy" here

The people who actually live in the area where decisions are made. People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.

[tyg13]

You're missing the point. The people in the area often do support building new housing, they just don't want it where they are. This is a fundamental paradox, as it has to be built _somewhere_, but seemingly none of the people who agree there is a problem want to disadvantage themselves to fix the problem.

Anyways, can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"? Seems like a hysterical reading of the situation.

[bhauer]

> Can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"?

Yes, please do say this.

If anything in the system is tyranny-adjacent, it's zoning. Not to say I am against zoning holistically, but zoning is others telling you what you can and cannot do with your property. To characterize a liberalization of zoning as tyrannical is a great inversion.

[cbozeman]

He's not missing the point - everyone else is.

There's only so much highly desirable real estate. There are only so many beachfront properties. There's a shitload of millionaires out there. There's an assload of multi-millionaires out there. There's quite a few billionaires out there now.

If you make $100,000, you're not living on a beachfront house in Miami. You're not going to live in Downtown San Francisco in a nice home.

That's life. Life's not fair.

Too bad.

Poor people are going to have to reconcile that they can't afford to live in the cities. They're going to have to be content with the suburbs, because the affluent people want to live in the cities, and they don't want people around them that are going to bring down their property values, period.

Those affluent people, especially in places like NYC / SF / LA don't have the goddamn moral courage to just say, "I don't want a buncha poors around me, doing poor people shit, that's going to reduce the value of $4,500,000 home. This isn't just my house, it's an investment, and I cannot and will not allow you to tank my investment just because you want to live where I live."

Now that's the truth.

People should accept it, because you're not gonna change it; you're not gonna change it because it's human nature and you aren't going to change human nature without a lot of pain and suffering.

There's entirely too many people in Big Tech that don't want to accept this. "If we just XXXXX, we can fix XXXXX!"

No you can't. Evolution fixes these issues, not your money, not your regulations. We have to evolve into better angels - there are no shortcuts.

[fragmede]

So in this version of NYC / SF / LA, where do the service workers live? Who tends bar? who runs security at the door? who's sitting at the reception desk? Who cooks the food? Who delivers the food? who teaches the kids? who cleans the toilets? Who roasts the coffee? who delivers the Amazon packages?

Those people (clearly you are not one of them) need to live somewhere. They don't need to live in a luxury condo in downtown, but they do need to live somewhere, and if they all need to live in Yonkers / Fresno / Riverside to afford rent, they're not going to commute into your city of aristocrats.

we're seeing this in sf, with restaurants unable to hire, so self-sevice kisoks aren't a choice for the restaurant to use, they're sometimes the only option available. which is neat if you have a technology fetish, but sometimes we want a human person to talk to who understands something that hasn't been programmed into the computer.

[tyg13]

Can we just stop with the nonsense about "people wanting to live where the rich people live" as if a good majority of the people who are fighting for affordable housing aren't people who _already_ live there and are fighting against being priced out of where they grew up?

Your only response is an absurd defeatist appeal to human nature and trite clichés like "life isn't fair", ignoring that legislation is very capable of addressing this particular issue. That is currently the plan, and the plan is being executed by the state of California. If you think individual rich homeowners are more powerful than the state, then I think it might be you who is out of touch with the state of reality.

[piperswe]

Wonderful, but if you make $100,000 you can't afford a nice house in the suburbs of SF either.

[riversflow]

> People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.

This is ludicrous. Just like no man is an island, no city is self contained. Should the city be able to dump whatever pollutants into the river it sits on? Burn whatever, whenever as much as they want? Nobody else gets a say?

Other people share the same regional, state, and national identities with people who live in the city, should those people not get a say in how the place they actually live is run?

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Fortunately we don't just have cities: we also have counties, and states.

Every city needs teachers, firefighters, service industry workers, etc., and if they're not providing a place form them to live that they can afford with their current incomes, then they're not a real living, breathing city: they're Disneyland.

The state is well within her rights force cities to build housing for the people that are required to keep that city running, rather than externalizing their problems and forcing these folks to overflow into neighboring cities and endure inhumane commutes.

[partiallypro]

Seems like the government and residents blocking use of land that neither of them owns it more tyrannical than building a new housing development.