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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly.

I worked in the Bay Area for a few years. As some one from Bangalore, the difference was night and day. Overall quality of people, scale of challenges, money and in general career awesomeness are just unmatched.

Eventually Bay Area will give way to high rise apartment complexes, it's just natural that it will happen. Economics is above everything, and eventually people will just make it work.

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> I worked in the Bay Area for a few years. As some one from Bangalore, the difference was night and day. Overall quality of people, scale of challenges, money and in general career awesomeness are just unmatched.

You pay for that "awesomeness" in premium housing prices.

> Economics is above everything, and eventually people will just make it work.

The economics are working. Home owners are sitting on increasingly valuable assets.

The economics are being strongly skewed by an overly-enforced artificial scarcity. It's the government's job to regulate housing. But, the government is letting itself be pushed around by the land-owning minority to inflate that minority's assets at the expense of everyone else.

It's the government's job to serve its _current_ constituents. And those constituents want things a certain way. I don't know what the demographics are like today given the big influx of transplants over the last 10-15 years, but at some point the "land-owning minority" was not a minority, but the primary constituency the local government served. Given their investment in the community (by virtue of putting savings into houses), I would argue they do have a greater right to implement laws that protect their interests in how they want the city to look/feel/operate.

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