111–120 of 235 posts
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Ordinary people don't have the money to, say, build sewers and roads.
They do if they pool their resources through, say, property taxes paid to their locality. Localities can build out basic infrastructure without having to have large corporations do all the development. That has the added advantage that you get actual communities that grow and evolve over time instead of sterile cookie cutter suburbs.
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is one of the incentives for those who rent housing not to keep the available housing supply low (at least to a certain point)?
If you grow carrots, you would prefer to keep the overall supply of carrots low so that your carrots will fetch the highest price. But what you are actually doing is increasing the supply of carrots. So incentives and results are two different things and we shouldn't conflate the two. I assume by "incentives", you mean that they'd manipulate the law to limit other suppliers. I'm sure that happens, but as a landlord y…
There's an error in your analogy.
Nobody is growing carrots, they're buying carrots
Incentives push the carrotlords to pass local ordinances. 'Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome'
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You don't strictly speaking need indoor plumbing, a private bedroom, windows, or paint that doesn't have lead in it. If you're rich enough to afford windows, a bedroom you don't share with another family, and to not have your kids die from heavy metal poisoning, then good for you! But indulging many of these wants is hardly economically efficient.
Are you seriously suggesting that the need for a "summer kitchen for canning fruit" and a "private bedroom" represent the same human needs? Because if you are that might be the funniest, most entitled thing I've ever read on HN.
This is pretty obvious if you don't take a deliberately uncharitable perspective on what I wrote.
I believe the smartest thing you can do if you are reading this in America is to buy a house that you can afford in an area you would like to live in for more than a few years with more than 1 bedroom and rent out the additional bedrooms. Setting aside appreciation, doing this is the closest thing to a guaranteed success imaginable. Leverage lowers your start-up costs, renting enables all your house work to be deduct…
There can be massive opportunity cost lost to dealing with the various interpersonal interaction (ie work) thats required to rent a room in a house you are personally living in. If you're making a good salary, thats probably not worth it.
Just get a handyman, or a tenant agent.
That's what landlords do and they always come out on top.
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> 5) You don’t need as much house as you’ve been lead to believe. For living arrangements, you are mostly correct. I can exist very comfortably in about 1,000ft². Heck, even 800ft² would be comfy and cosy. My problem involves my hobbies and domestic activities: I need a 200ft² cool room for the enormous amounts of fruits and vegetables I harvest every year, canning all that shit needs a 150ft² summer kitchen so I don…
You don’t “need” any of that.
Prioritising your finances over a satisfying and interesting life sounds dull, and like a great way to make yourself mentally unwell if you do it for too long.
Not everyone’s preferred life “needs” much space but when yours does, not having it can be very stifling and stressful.
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Are you seriously suggesting that the need for a "summer kitchen for canning fruit" and a "private bedroom" represent the same human needs? Because if you are that might be the funniest, most entitled thing I've ever read on HN.
Nope, I'm suggesting that wants and needs are a sliding scale with no clear dividing line except subsistence, and that it's therefore a bad idea to argue for lowering your standard of living to only what you strictly need. This is pretty obvious if you don't take a deliberately uncharitable perspective on what I wrote.
Arguing they're just two points on the same scale makes me wonder if you have some sort of agenda to argue that people don't really need bedrooms because they don't really need summer kitchens.
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Yeah, get rid of those computer books. That's what the internet + ebooks are for. Unless a book has a special meaning to me personally or is considered life changing, I rarely keep any physical books.
Interesting—I find I have a hard time reading technical books on my ebook reader. When I read fiction, it’s usually a linear process, making the reader ideal: read, swipe, repeat until done. With technical books, I often need to jump to another section, which is so much slower and more painful than with dead trees. Code formatting also tends to be abysmal on my reader—although books are not the best for this either.…
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I mean, don’t the people who live in a place have the right to decide they don’t want to invite in population until their homes are turned into a megacity? And if people don’t like the prevailing political opinions of a place that doesn’t want to change its nature to suit them, aren’t there plenty of other places to go? The market its screwed up in the Bay Area because they in way more jobs than they wanted to let in…
No, they don't. Ifbyou want control over who can move in somewhere, or what can be built somewhere, you have a simple solution, buy the land in question.
NIMBYs will argue that, in a certain sense, they did: they bought the land their houses stand on decades or centuries ago, when the area was farm land, and then promoted a city charter for a certain type of community, together with every other citizen in the area. They paid taxes for local infrastructure, schools, time and effort to organize and solve community issues, inconvenience when a new water mains or bypass was built etc. etc.
This whole communal development is what made the area desirable, it's not like they are hoarding limited farmland. It's the combination of private property + working community rules that create property value.
Some owners in the area would now opt out of those rules outside the democratic process pre-agreed to their change, by simply building a large condo building on their plot, depreciating the value of nearby single family homes and pocketing the cash. You can imagine existing owners will fight tooth and nail to maintain the agreed rules.
While i don't 100% subscribe to this point of view and there is much to be said about the exclusionary and down right racist behavior it can enable, the issue of urban development is not quite as clear cut as you make it out to be.
People are fighting the wrong fight when they attack this guy (or attack the people attacking this guy, for that matter) It isn't SF Bay Bros'/foreigners'/companies' fault that houses are too expensive. It's because of strict zoning laws and a lack of building enough housing to match supply with demand[1]. Demand keeps going up way faster than supply, nationwide, and we're all feeling the squeeze [1]: A great example…
Out of curiosity, how big is a 3 bedroom apartment in Japan?