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Comment by ebikelaw | Hacker News Reader

Western cities have only themselves to blame for turning housing into an appreciating asset. Housing is not supposed to appreciate and if it does not then nobody would speculate in it. In cities where they just build housing, like Vienna (typical rent ~1000 Euros/mo), they don’t have a need of these kinds of laws.

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Ding ding ding, we have a winnner!

Housing can't both be affordable and an 'investment' that always appreciates in value.

Focusing on 'the foreigners' is not addressing the root cause of the problem.

And what would address the root of the problem?

In the long-term, building more housing. In the short-term, cracking on speculators seems sensible.

Wouldn't a credible commitment to rapidly building more housing itself crack down on speculators?

The problem is that in many places it is quite unlawful to build housing. The legal regimes exist to protect incumbent land owners. That’s an open invitation to speculators.

In one sense that's not a problem - in most cases the same body passing these laws could make new construction entirely lawful. But it does point at a root problem - that there's a meaningful chunk of the population that more-or-less wants things overpriced.

Well the solution would be to reject the idea that housing is an investment, and do whatever we can to crash the housing market. For example, by building a whole lot of houses.

I don't think it's fair to blame cities for what is a nationwide problem. The entire economy is shifting from farming and production to a service economy. The former provided incentives for people to be widely distributed across a number of small cities and town. The latter does not, so there is a mass migration to cities. It's happening faster than the infrastructure, zoning, and physical layout of the cities can adapt to accommodate.

This is a hard problem, and isn't made easier by moralizing, which seems to happen heavily on both sides.

Personally, in the US, I think we'd be better off trying to make our mid-sized cities more desirable than turning our handful of large cities into giant skyscraper-filled concrete grids. We have plenty of space for everyone in the US. The problem is people all want to live in an increasingly small fraction of it. Increasing the density of that tiny fraction while the rest of the country empties out doesn't seem great to me.

American big cities are not that dense. 80% of San Francisco is detached single-family housing.

San Francisco is not an American big city. It's American, and it's a city (and county!). But it's not particularly big.

It is the most-dense city save for NYC, which is ten times larger. Which is my point: people think of it as dense but in reality most of it is suburban in character. There’s no need for skyscrapers to change this. A handful of 5-story buildings on major intersections would do the job.

Look beyond arbitrary administrative divisions at what actually exists on the ground. Of course, many cities are spirals rather than circles so it can be difficult decide where to draw the line. Oakland and Silicon Valley, and even San Jose are also part of "Greater San Francisco", which is a very spread out city because of the geographical imposition of the bay.

I mean, what's wrong with SOME cities being giant skyscraper filled grids?

Personally I would love to live in that kind of city. And apparently this is also true for a lot of other people.

The low density people have 99% of the world to live in. Why can't us high density people get the 1% that WE want?

Let's just let everyone live how they want. There is more than space for both skyscrapers and suburbs.

Do you have kids yet? I lived in such cities from when I left home at 17 until 36, but the arrival of kids... well, I want them to have a yard to play in, in a chilled neighbourhood, close to the beach and hikes, etc.

As well as more room so they can all have their own bedroom, we can have a family area, etc.

When they leave the house, I’d probably move back to the city to an apartment.

In essence, I’m agreeing with you but I think it also depends which life stage you are in as to what you prefer.

If you took half a dozen normal-sized detached American houses and their yards, put all the houses right next to each other and all the land in a contiguous polygon, you'd have a way better place for all the children to play, just as much interior space, and a dramatically better place to be. Detached single-family homes fragment the open space and alienate people, which are not good things for growing children.

> I mean, what's wrong with SOME cities being giant skyscraper filled grids?

Nothing at all, and I get that some people dig that.

> Why can't us high density people get the 1% that WE want?

You can. What I disagree with is the moralizing tone that people take when others don't want their existing city turned into that.

> There is more than space for both skyscrapers and suburbs.

I agree, but this discussion usually takes place when people argue that the existing single-family homes should be torn down and replaced with greater density.

I'm probably overly sensitive because I live in Seattle in a single-family home. But it gets really tiring always being made to feel like a bad person for liking the way I currently live.

> people argue that the existing single-family homes should be torn down and replaced with greater density.

Literally nobody argues this. Pure strawman. What people argue is that property owners should be _permitted_ to build _slightly_ larger buildings on _their_ property. The law today for most land in most American cities says that property owners are forbidden from building anything but detached single-family dwellings. To remove this prohibition and to allow property owners to develop their own land, if they want that, is not the same as bulldozing the existing neighborhood.

You can keep your single family home.

What I want is for every major city to have a singular 1 square mile area, with zero building height limits, so that people who want to build tall building on their own property, are allowed to do so.

There is more than enough room in Seattle that is already allocated to single family homes. Now let's pick an area, and get rid of all zoning limits in that singular area.

> I don't think it's fair to blame cities for what is a nationwide problem

In the US, zoning and land use regulations are mostly enacted at a city level, so they're pretty much to blame. Of course, they could be preempted at a state or even national level if the political will were there, but the current mess can be laid at the feet of our cities' regulations.

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