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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

There is also no great tragedy in two parties coming to terms on a transaction when both of them agree - by definition, they're both better off because of the transaction. $70K for a the weeded lot next door it not a bad deal.

The real tragedy here is land-use restrictions that most municipalities instituted in the '70s and '80s, which prevent the supply of housing to meet demand (http://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-t...).

Many "gentrifiers" in many Atlanta neighborhoods would probably prefer to live in NYC, LA, SF, or Seattle, but those municipalities have strict rules that prevent the building of sufficient housing to meet demand. So people move elsewhere. Matt Yglesias discusses this in more detail in The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/TheRent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp...).

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It looks like you switched to using an affiliate tag to promote that book. Can you share with us what the earnings are from a typical link on HN?

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

Wow!

The one time I posted an amzn affiliate link in a comment I got something like $3.

I'm not sure if we should feel betrayed by this sort of behavior, if you're going to post a link to a book anyway.

Interesting. Thanks!

The real tragedy here is land-use restrictions

Should community residents not have the freedom to enforce restrictions on their own communities? Would these communities be as desirable if they allowed new residents to crowd out the old residents?

>Should community residents not have the freedom to enforce restrictions on their own communities?

Definitely not. Land is a common asset of all of society: taking away building sites while basically all urban areas (ie: with jobs) suffer housing shortages is exploiting the commons.

Would you also permit hazardous chemical refineries to be built alongside or within residential communities? Are there any freedoms of self-government that you would like to see preserved?

>Would you also permit hazardous chemical refineries to be built alongside or within residential communities?

Probably not, but I'd have their site planned at the regional/state/province level rather than allowing each individual municipality to say "NIMBY!" to everything. Because most NIMBY measures aren't about chemical refineries, they're about the working class, about sites of housing and employment for ordinary people.

So you're okay with reducing home values by placing high-density housing anywhere (and the corresponding violent crime risks), but not with reducing home values by placing industrial facilities anywhere (along with their corresponding health risks).

Well yes, of course. High-density housing provides a lot more good with a lot less bad than chemical refineries. Besides which, it's both factually wrong and in severely bad taste to imply that working-class people are a form of chemical pollution. Also, violent crime is at an all-time low, in dense cities as much as in rural suburbs right now.

The whole view that dense housing somehow equals violent crime is decades out of date and largely only ever applied to deliberately-created black ghettoes in the first place.

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