It's ironic that the same people who want to prevent gentrification are the actual "bootlickers" after all. I ended up leaving San Francisco over this sort of stuff to go to my hometown with a cheaper cost of living.
Here in Louisville, we have fewer things going on than most metros. Yet every time a new apartment complex comes up a good amount of people scream bloody murder that it will raise rents unless 30% of it is marked "below market rate". This causes developers to spend their time building elsewhere, so that new options don't emerge to drive down rents. The city is objectively less wealthy than most other metros in the USA.
Nobody has ever said "stop farming, all that food is allowing more people to live, and now food is more expensive", yet they will repeat it time and time again with housing. Instead they correctly think, "farm more, if we get more people on Earth they can help us farm even more food. Also we can finally have enough people to have doctors."
Funny enough my state has 80% of the doctors per capita that California has, and 60% of the doctors per capita that New York has[1].
It's very frustrating to see people here fighting to stunt growth, and force their own young out to nearby cities with more open minds that let people make choices. For example, the state is debating between prioritizing poorly allocated pensions and lowering our tax rate. We're currently committed to lowering the income tax from 5% to 0% over 10 years but it's continually framed as theft to benefit the wealthy by opponents. Meanwhile Tennessee and Texas continue to have a 0% income tax and take our children and new businesses. The limited job market + wages and new business formations here reflect this. Everyone thinks of Kentucky as a poor state - people don't know we have one of the higher tax rates as well.
The only thing these anti-growthers are accomplishing is making sure the same elites who made these people's lives meek stay relatively powerful by upholding the very structures that enrich the elites. Maybe the elites are the ones driving the conversation?
I know I'm soapboxing here but wealth, a clean environment, ample jobs, and the ability for your own children to make a living in your region is as much a choice as anything else in this life. I'm thankful that San Francisco chose to let jobs develop there, but sad they chose not to allow me to settle there. I proudly work remotely for a CA company, and hope other states can copy the choices CA made to allow businesses and workers to flourish, and learn from their mistakes which are currently sending them away.
If you choose to stop chaining your neighbor good things will flow.
It's a very common mindset -- one of wealth being zero-sum. If you believe that for whatever reason, it's very easy to be against growth, because you think growth will come out of your own pockets.
Wealth is not utility. There are very strong reasons to think that the greater the level of absolute wealth, the greater the impact of relative condition vs. absolute condition is on what people actually experience, and that therefore, as the overall level of wealth increases, growth with poor distributional features goes from being beneficial (yes, some people are getting much richer, but a large mass of people are going from starving to less starving) to neutral to a net negative in social terms as the baseline moves up.
Now, of course, the best solution, if and to the extent possible, is to keep the growth and lose the distributional problems, rather than the other way around.
It's ironic that the same people who want to prevent gentrification are the actual "bootlickers" after all. I ended up leaving San Francisco over this sort of stuff to go to my hometown with a cheaper cost of living.
Here in Louisville, we have fewer things going on than most metros. Yet every time a new apartment complex comes up a good amount of people scream bloody murder that it will raise rents unless 30% of it is marked "below market rate". This causes developers to spend their time building elsewhere, so that new options don't emerge to drive down rents. The city is objectively less wealthy than most other metros in the USA.
Nobody has ever said "stop farming, all that food is allowing more people to live, and now food is more expensive", yet they will repeat it time and time again with housing. Instead they correctly think, "farm more, if we get more people on Earth they can help us farm even more food. Also we can finally have enough people to have doctors."
Funny enough my state has 80% of the doctors per capita that California has, and 60% of the doctors per capita that New York has[1].
It's very frustrating to see people here fighting to stunt growth, and force their own young out to nearby cities with more open minds that let people make choices. For example, the state is debating between prioritizing poorly allocated pensions and lowering our tax rate. We're currently committed to lowering the income tax from 5% to 0% over 10 years but it's continually framed as theft to benefit the wealthy by opponents. Meanwhile Tennessee and Texas continue to have a 0% income tax and take our children and new businesses. The limited job market + wages and new business formations here reflect this. Everyone thinks of Kentucky as a poor state - people don't know we have one of the higher tax rates as well.
The only thing these anti-growthers are accomplishing is making sure the same elites who made these people's lives meek stay relatively powerful by upholding the very structures that enrich the elites. Maybe the elites are the ones driving the conversation?
I know I'm soapboxing here but wealth, a clean environment, ample jobs, and the ability for your own children to make a living in your region is as much a choice as anything else in this life. I'm thankful that San Francisco chose to let jobs develop there, but sad they chose not to allow me to settle there. I proudly work remotely for a CA company, and hope other states can copy the choices CA made to allow businesses and workers to flourish, and learn from their mistakes which are currently sending them away.
If you choose to stop chaining your neighbor good things will flow.
[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/this-state-h...