Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eli_gottlieb 4640 days ago
Well, if someone was born, grew up, and spent their whole life in SF before being forced out by rent increases... why not? Should we just say it's perfectly fine that housing markets keep forcing the middle and working classes further, further, ever further out of the urban cores?
3 comments
Symmetry 4639 days ago
As long as new people keep being born, they're going to have to live somewhere. You can choose the Greenwich Village route which SF seems to be doing and maintain the outward appearance of the place at the cost of that place becoming ever more exclusive, or you allow as much new development as there's demand for and the place starts looking different but doesn't become any more exclusive. It's worth emphasizing that this doesn't have anything to do with Capitalism. In a command economy you'd see the same thing with the powerful using their influence to get slots in the city, and the same sort of outflow of existing residents.

Maybe if SF succeeded from the US and California and ran a tight immigration policy you could make stasis work, but somehow I don't think that's in the cards.

link
nattaggart 4639 days ago
It sounds like you are suggesting a rather perverse sort of inheritance where the "right" to San Francisco stock is granted to those who are born into it irregardless of that man's wealth, merit, or ability.

Allocating resources this way would be bad enough if housing stock was a public good, but it's not. It's owned by landlords who are then required to subsidize the lifestyle of the beneficiaries of this "right".

link
MrMorden 4639 days ago
If TPTB wanted affordable housing, they'd get out of the way, ditch rent control, let developers build more of it, and subsidize rental for the poor.

There's one showstopper problem with a more free-market approach--the overriding purpose of rent control is to subsidize rich parasites like Charlie Rangel. It would be a lot harder for such people to have their housing paid for by others if subsidies were explicit and means-tested. Sure, poor people wouldn't come out worse, but they're not the ones making the rules.

link
eli_gottlieb 4638 days ago
It sounds like you are suggesting a rather perverse sort of inheritance where the "right" to San Francisco stock is granted to those who are born into it irregardless of that man's wealth, merit, or ability.

Hmm... owning a city as a cooperative? I don't see why not. There are certainly institutional frameworks in which it can and would work.

Further, you could take inheritance tax from the value of the urban citizenship when someone inherits it by coming of age as a citizen/resident of the city. If someone couldn't pay the tax (which could be charged as a portion the market price of rent/purchase in that city), they would be forced out of the city, as today. However, when their citizenship/residency right would be outright sold, the tax would be less than 100%, so they would at least partially recoup on a financial level the loss of their home.

Sounds like a bizarrely good idea. Thanks for thinking of it.

link
DanBlake 4639 days ago
So long as you live in a system called capitalism, yes. Thats the basic premise of supply and demand.

If not, sign me up for a place in Aspen or Greenwich though.

link