> which is also why it's unfair to call it "bad faith."
It doesn't have to be bad faith, sure. It's just been my experience with the people putting the argument forth that they're making it in bad faith. Or maybe intellectually lazy is a better descriptor: they give the impression that it's a serious suggestion, but upon questioning it becomes clear that they haven't applied the least thought to it; it was just a reflexive "I don't want them here" masquerading as a policy proposal.
> as a homeowner, I would recognize that inelasticity and price my rent accordingly. There is no "bad faith" there - just rational economics, where one market understands that the other refuses to correct itself.
No idea what you're talking about here. Nobody's disputing that if demand is high and supply is low, it makes sense to charge high rent prices. At least, I'm certainly not arguing that.
> A "Google Salary" doesn't mean anything if you take home a small fraction of it, and what's left is eaten up by higher prices of the same goods; anywhere else, you can take home more, and those remaining $dollars can get you more.
Whether this is true depends on what those goods you want are. If you want to dump your money into international travel, seeing shows, buying cars and electronics, then high cost/salary places make more sense than low cost/salary places. If you want to own a big house with a lot of land, then the cheaper places are better.
> It's at the point now where I recommend to my employees / friends / colleagues that they shouldn't move to the valley unless they're getting 2.5x their salary, as that _might_ get you the same standard of living vs. our current spot.
It sounds like you're engaging in a common fallacy of assuming people value the same things you do, which is probably a big home, since otherwise needing 2.5x the salary wouldn't make any sense, as there are few other major goods that are impacted that hugely by cost of living (well, there's also childcare).
> It's not necessarily classist or anti-environment for homeowners in a community, who _own_ the land, to band together and dictate what should go on in that community: how it should look, what would be the best for their investment, etc.
It doesn't have to be, but it generally is, because the decisions they reach are generally anti-environment and classist.
What do you think it does when you mandate single family homes on big plots of land? Poorer people can't afford that, ergo they can't afford to live there, ergo poorer people are kept out of living in that neighborhood. And you're saying that economic segregation is not classist, because...?
Similarly, that style of zoning is also energy inefficient and results in people cutting into nature because you need more land per person. Pretty simple. But it's not anti-environment, because...? You haven't actually explained why.
> The easy response is: it only pushes those out to metros _who feel like they have to live there.
Who cares? I'm talking about the actual impact. The impact is encouraging suburban sprawl.