[aprilthird2021]

I moved from Memphis, TN to Silicon Valley and it took me 10 years of working in software to be in the market for a home. Meanwhile my friends who worked odd jobs in sandwich shops or theatres or filming / taking photographs for magazines all had homes a few years after we graduated.

It's a failure of the government that they allowed the old, senile landed gentry in parts of our country, especially California, to effectively be able to veto all new building while paying no property tax to fund our public services.

[guywithahat]

Is it the old people? It feels like it's the new, young people moving to the city that do this.

When people do investigative reporting on the SF housing market, they find a bunch of people who have been spent 8 years trying to convert dilapidated buildings into an apartment complex, but have been getting blocked by environmental reports on what shadows the building will cast, or other bureaucratic nonsense.

This is a famous video demonstrating that point; where even if you're rightfully zoned to do something, it can take years and years of fighting bureaucratic nonsense if you haven't bribed the right people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4

[aprilthird2021]

Yes it's the old people and their descendants who inherit titles from their ancestors allowing them to bypass tax payment and shovel more tax burden on productive members of society. Only in the city which has built much of the modern internet did we need to reinvent literal feudalism.

If you don't believe me. Just find some seniors in the bay and ask them. They are majority opposed to "changing" the area and taking away its "character" without realizing that the character is something they do not pay to maintain at all, and instead almost all young people (except the landed gentry) have to fund and don't agree to fund anymore.