Ok, but please don't post this sort of shallow/generic flamebait in HN threads, especially not on divisive topics. It turns the threads into shallow/generic flamewars, which are much less interesting (and nastier) than what we're hoping for here.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
The number one thing that voters anywhere do is to prop up sin eaters like Dean Preston. Then everyone is all like "The problem is DEAN PRESTON" as if one moustache twirling guy with an 8 year term could possibly be responsible for 40 years of policy.
That's being unfair to him, there is tremendous local market for millionaire homeowners that still want to think of themselves as socialist revolutionaries as long as the value of their home never ever drops, and he is merely filling that demand
1 person and their lawyers held up bike lanes for YEARS with lawsuits.
The city isn't a monolith, its not all 1 person, and fixing it isn't always easy: state and federal laws have primacy over certain things, and lets face it "permitting reforms" is hardly the ballot box getter.
But things have gotten better, the parket situation got a lot better, new bike lines, walkable streets, etc. All it took was a deadly global pandemic! Yay progress!
It's always been "progress for me, not for thee" type of thing. "Let's solve homelessness, but keep them out of my neighbourhood!" When conservatives complain about the "coastal left" this is what they're talking about. People who are wealthy and hypocritical in the extreme.
There is nothing contradictory about wanting to solve homelessness and wanting them out of your neighborhood. In fact, that is exactly why many people want to end it
> There is nothing contradictory about wanting to solve homelessness and wanting them out of your neighborhood
Yes there is. If you want them housed, but not in your neighborhood, then you either want them out in a forest somewhere, or you want them in someone else's neighborhood. The former isn't actually housing them, and the latter is the contradiction.
Then build housing that is accompanied by parking, mental health facilities and rehab facilities.
Building _only_ housing, and leaving it derelict when the mentally ill eventually trash it leads to a drop in quality of life and safety for the entire neighborhood.
I don't think any proposals have been obstructed on the grounds that opposed neighborhoods felt like more facilities should accompany the shelters in their neighborhood. I'd be satisfied to see that though.
I was choosing one word to refer to a contiguous population of people. I could have chosen to call them formerly-homeless, but the distinction felt moot, because typically we are referring to people unable to provide their own shelter as homeless, whether or not they havea place to stay (hence the term homeless-shelter).
Just look at the SRO scene in the tenderloin. Owned by non-profits funded by the knob hill crowd to keep the chronically homeless (mental illness, drug addition) warehoused in one small area.
Hence the need to spread the population out into everyone's neighborhood, rather than strong arming under represented, low-income populations, and forcing them to take the entire burden in their neighborhood.
This is not an issue that can be summarized in a HN comment, but you're not going to get anyone to agree to the extreme end of either spectrum (peak NIMBY or peak progressive), it just won't work.
waves I consider myself a YIMBY, and I also consider myself pretty progressive on most issues and certainly not a libertarian...so you know at least one now.
I've found SF is nothing like what conservative pundits describe. I don't mean better or worse, just different. It doesn't fit the narratives of national politics.
What blows my mind traveling around the country is that, on the ground, Iowa or Texas are egalitarian paradise compared to NYC or SF. I can’t stand to be in those cities these days because of the yawing wealth and racial divides.
I really wonder how much of the progressive drama results from these highly educated folks working in overwhelmingly white/Asian industries and living in places like SF or NYC where nearly all the Black or brown people they meet are working service jobs for them.
There's been a lot of articles lately talking about how all those previously easy to live areas have become less livable due to... well people moving there.
The root cause is demand > supply. That's it. Everything gets more expensive, and those who can get paid a lot do, and everyone else has to make do.
Texas yes, but tell me about Austin... and how it has all the same problems of the bay area now, entirely because people moved there.
The equation has two terms: supply and demand. So it’s not just “people moving there” (demand), but also how easy it is to create housing (supply). Texas makes it much cheaper and easier to create housing than does California. If it was demand alone then California housing prices should be going down because people are moving from California to Texas.
It’s also about what kind of industries each state chooses to cultivate. Economies based on knowledge work magnify class and racial disparities because they have high barriers to entry and tend to produce winner-take-all stratification. That directly produces the highly stratified and segregated environment you see in SF and NYC.
Do you think it is people moving or do you think it is people moving and then voting in people to enact the same policies as the location they moved from?
If person A leaves a location because of crap/idiotic policies/laws, moves to a new location, then votes in people that will institute those same crap/idiotic policies/laws the just fled again, is person A not the problem?
Off the top of my head, Texas. Texas was a majority solid red for a long time. Now a massive influx of has made multiple seats that historically have been safely red, competitive, or even flip to blue.
Look at the places people are moving to in Texas then look at those locations elections.
I understand that there is a demographic shift in urban centers outside of the coasts. I meant: can you point to any policy changes after these demographic shifts which have lead to an up-tick of NIMBY/anti-housing regulations in these areas like what is seen in SF?
I honestly don't pay close attention to NIMBY/anti-house regulations anywhere outside northern California to notice. I should have been more clear I was not specifically talking about that.
In this case I was thinking primarily of crime and some of the DA in Texas's big cities. Dallas in particular I remember a DA was elected that pissed off a lot of people on the right by stopping prosecution of lesser offences and setting low bails. The right argues that leads to more crime until its a common place.
The median home price in Dallas is comparable to most cities outside of LA and SF in California, and higher than that of Chicago. Austin? Don't even bother looking it up. You should have said Houston. :)
The fact remains that Dallas and it’s surrounding suburbs is a vastly more egalitarian and less stratified place than SF or NYC. It has tons of affordable areas near the city. A key problem is that the industries powering NYC and SF (tech and finance) are massive drivers of inequality. They create a huge upper middle class that just sucks up all the resources. That’s exacerbated by the difficulty of building housing, but both sides of the equation are the problem. Northern Virginia where I grew up is a place where it’s easier to build housing, but has a similar problem. The middle class has been driven out as knowledge industries have taken over.
Iowa is even better lovely because there is basically no upper middle class. Even the farmers who might have tens of millions in land are pretty cash poor.
New York is bad. California is pretty rough too. But Louisiana and Mississippi both have higher Gini coefficients than California. It's not tech and finance that made Louisiana and Mississippi the 2nd and 3rd least equal states in the country.
Further: if you dig into Gini by cities, your hypothesis gets even weaker: one ranking I found goes:
1. San Juan
2. Atlanta
3. Miami
4. New Orleans
5. New York
6. Cleveland
7. Cincinatti
8. Dallas
9. Tampa
10. Chicago
(I'm playing with the actual ACS data from Census.gov now, but haven't figured out how to get it broken out by major city; if you do by "places", which include every city no matter how small, the leaderboard is dominated by small rural cities).
No California city even appears in the top 10, and the list is dominated by non-finance-centers in red states.
San Fransisco is the epitome of visually seeing what is so messed up about our current breed of Capitalism.
Orlando was very similar when I lived there - with Disney World literally on the other side of the highway from extremely derelict project housing. I would drive through I-437 and just shake my head in sadness.
It's an eerie reminder of how fragile life is and how little we collectively care about solving these problems above making money for our individual selves.
I fail to see how the housing issue in SF and the issue you mentioned in Orlando is related to capitalism.
I think people with capital would love to develop housing in SF which would ease the housing problem in SF. In fact, people with capital really are the only people that may be able to solve the housing problem in SF. And the reason why they can't do this is the local government. How is this some sort of problem with capitalism?
>> I fail to see how the housing issue in SF and the issue you mentioned in Orlando is related to capitalism.
Then I can only logically concede that you are either blind, or intentionally ignorant of the blindingly obvious correlation.
Whether it’s Disney and projects across the highway or something like skid row in a state with the largest collection of wealth in the country, it all boils down to the same ‘I’m comfortable and I don’t want to have to think about not being comfortable’ attitude that allows this country to have billionaires and do absolutely nothing to help these people.
Communism isn’t a perfect system, but fundamentally; it’s supposed to care about the individual in a way capitalism has shown it is fundamentally incapable of.
It seems we currently have no political system that seems to balance progress with the needs of the people - but this preposterous 1%-bullshit capitalist system is so destined to collapse that if it wasn’t for said 1% so desperately clinging onto it so they can maintain wealth and power, it would have long ago.
It’s only greed and selfishness that powers the current American political and economic system.
To say it’s ‘disturbing’ would be an extremely shameful understatement.
People do what they can to prop up the value of the properties into which they've invested their capital. The last thing they want is competition in the property market, hence their support for local government rules to hinder development. This is capitalism shutting down the free market.
Capitalism is when you exploit government policy to exclude others people from a market, in order to make more money?
Being incentivized to make money is not all it takes to make it capitalism. If the policy is a net-negative for the market as a whole then the market will work to get rid of the policy, because there will be more people excluded than benefit. The only reason it would stick around is if there are motivations excluding capital/market aspects, such as equity, altruism, and social good.
Government policy is far from the only way to exclude others from the market, so you'll want to pursue other strategies as well: dumping to destroy small competitors, merging to incorporate them, deals with peers to avoid competing head-on, etc. In theory these are all illegal, but in practice they are commonplace, so don't neglect them.
> Being incentivized to make money is not all it takes to make it capitalism.
No, but strong property rights and perpetual private ownership of land are very much capitalism things, as is tilting the power equation away from "people" and towards "owners." In theory this incentivizes good stewardship and investment, but in practice it also incentivizes cornering the market.
> If the policy is a net-negative for the market as a whole then the market will work to get rid of the policy
Why on earth would you think that? "Monopolize resource, drive up scarcity, profit" is a quintessential capitalist hustle. It leverages the same machinery used to incentivize types of investment that are actually productive, but it's a lot easier than being actually productive. You just have to get in early.
> The only reason it would stick around is if there are motivations excluding capital/market aspects, such as equity, altruism, and social good.
Lol, so homeowners who don't want to see their property values tank have nothing to do with the problem? NIMBYs are just a bunch of misguided altruistic do-gooders who need to be persuaded of the merits in free market capitalism?
Certain markets in the US may incentivize anticompetitive behaviour to a sufficient degree to cause such problems.
Though that’s only for dynamics in the domestic market. In the global market such behaviour simply weakens the position of the US overall and thus the global market self corrects, eventually. Typically this is done by the global markets via boosting another rising country or bloc to displace the position of the countries with less competitive markets.
Of course this is a very long term process that could take centuries, but there was never a guarantee that market forces would resolve itself within a single human lifespan.
Its textbook definition and how it actually manifests itself in reality are never going to be the same thing.
The GP had an issue with a particular "breed of capitalism". Capitalism is an ideal just as much as socialism, and humans aren't great at living up to ideals. "Particular breeds" are all we are ever going to have - our best bet is likely to fix the "breed" rather than attempt to replace the system entirely. Social democracies that can harness the wealth-growing capabilities of capitalism tempered with a degree of socialism so everyone gets to enjoy the benefits seem to work pretty well in much of the developed world.
Capitalism rewards effective producers by routing capital for them to expand. When consumers conspire to force producer shutdowns, the problem is politics rather than capitalism.
Except that those consumers are doing so because they believe it's the best way to expand (or at least protect) their capital.
Such a position wouldn't make any sense in a non-capitalist economy, so at least part of the problem is how to actually ensure capitalism works effectively given human nature.
Every single land owner in SF, big and small, knows that a huge chunk of their net worth is directly due to the housing crisis and will do anything to avoid seeing that wealth evaporate.
California is complete nightmare state. if weather and geography wasn't there, the state would be unlivable. The legal system there has gone so much to the other extreme that if you ever have to interact with it, you could be the party in ruins. For example, if you ever get divorce in California, you can be turned into ATM slave for your ex for life.
The nightmare state full of high salaries and high life expectancy.
California's housing situation is incredibly bad, there are some other bad parts too, like the water/fire situation, but there are some huge advantages to the state as well.
The high salaries is concertrated in very small part of the state. It is also purely accidental and due to historical reasons. On median basis, the state is among the poorest in the nation. Fire/water is only tip of the issues. The list goes on with school quality (outside of few pockets of ultra-rich neighbourhoods), enormous tax burden, bismal transportation, consistently failed multi-billion $ government projects etc.
High life expectancy, high salaries/strong economy, excellent weather, ethnic/cultural diversity, huge range of beautiful nature/geographic diversity, relatively progressive tax burden compared to other states, some labor-friendly regulations like parental leave and ban on non-competes, great food scenes in LA and the bay area, great public colleges/universities, lots of pro sports teams if you're into that.
