Ask HN: How do you feel about people who say “Techies” are raising the rent?

I was talking to my girlfriend the other day about rent prices and such here in the Bay Area, and she said (Knowing that im a programmer/"techie"), that, and I quote "All these fucking techies keep moving here and are making it harder for the rest of us normal people." What's your thoughts on it, HN?

Personally, I think people need to stop blaming the techies that are moving out here for all the work that there is that needs to be done, and start blaming the shitty ass landlords and such that keep raising rent, because they know they can. We don't want to pay higher rent either, you know.

It's happening in Seattle.

A building might be 3 floors and have 12 units per floor, built 50-70 years ago. Each of these units rents for $800-900.

Now that Amazon is building 70,000 units of office space, people are predicting that another 70,000 people are going to be moving nearby for work. And so landlords are seeing a lot of people willing to pay a higher rate for these apartments. This requires evicting the ~24 people who live there, 2 of which (on average) will become homeless.

These landlords can either make the same amount of money, or they can make more money by raising the rent and forcing out the "average" people, confident that an Amazonian or other Techie will pay $1200 a month for the same apartment. And so the traditional residents of Seattle are being pushed out - to surrounding communities, to other areas, and out of the city they love.

A more drastic option is to evict all 24 people, demolish the building, and rebuild with twice the units at twice the rate.

Is this the fault of landlords for being capitalists?

It's your girlfriend telling you this, so there are a lot of ways to win that argument and harm your interests.

If it were a stock San Franciscan, you'd be well advised to open with something like "Do you think immigrants should be allowed in SF?" "Me, too! I think everyone should have the opportunity to live in SF, because SF is awesome. Sadly, not all SFians agree with us -- they'd prefer to put a maximum quota on the number of people who get to live here. The mechanism for this is our building process, which they exert de-facto control over. It's like building a wall around the city made up of the houses they won't allow to be built.

The existence of the cap on housing guarantees anyone over the SF Resident Cap gets screwed. Sometimes they're immigrants; sometimes they're tech people; sometimes they're immigrant tech people. I don't care who is getting screwed, because no one should be without a house. That's why I support building more housing."

"Normal people"? "Fucking techies" while she knows you're one? Dude she seems nice.

It is not the fault of the landlords. Almost anyone would do the same given the same situation and ability to make a large amount of money. The problem is that the City of Seattle allows for the creation of new housing without the creation of enough affordable housing.

It would also be reasonable to index the level of income for new city-mandated apartments to the minimum wage. So if we have someone working for $15/hr (minimum wage) and 30k/yr who takes home $1939.26 monthly they should only be paying maximum 40% after-tax income into rent, which is 1939.26 * 0.4 = $775.70. Someone making $85k/yr will have a take home of $4997.46/mo, and can afford $1998.

So someone making minimum wage would not be able to afford their own apartment...

This is where the city government should take control, and mandate more low to medium income housing, and more micro apartments. South Seattle along the light rail would be a great area to build up, as it allows for easy access to downtown & Seatac jobs, and would finally stop some of the problems that we have seen here. The U-district/Ravenna could also be redeveloped more, although that is already happening.