Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

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>The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism.

when people don't want to give away (for free or below market price) their share of GOOG nobody calls that NIMBYism. When people don't want to give away their share in a city (drastically increasing density/population does in many ways take away from existing residents without any just compensation) - that is suddenly becomes NIMBYism.

The issue can practically be solved simply - city is to be like a corporation with stock, and any new resident/development has to buy the stock on the secondary market. Density/population increase (i.e. zoning changes) is by issueing new stock to be distributed proportionally like dividends to existing shareholders(residents). That way NIMBYism would just disappear the same way like it doesn't exist when it comes to GOOG. That also would make gentrification into a buyout where people who create a city desirable to live in would materially benefit from it instead of being just kicked out being as poor as when they moved in.

That is because in the case of a goog share you arent telling someone else what they can do with their share.

No one is telling a SFH owner that they have to do anything. Instead, SFH are being allowed to have more options for what to do with their property.

In fact giving more options for property actually increases the value of that property.

Actually, this does tell a SFH owner that they have to do something: Live in a place substantially different than when they bought there.

This may be worth it broadly, but it absolutely enforces our preferences onto the SFH owner.

The SFH has domain over their property - and that's where it should reasonably end. Giving them domain over what gets built on everyone else's property is where we get into trouble.

Except that they don't exercise the preference over what happens over everyone else's property in isolation. The SFH owners collectively vote for their town councils and governments and what not. And those governments in turn make the zoning rules.

If we choose to overturn those collective preferences, we need to have principled discussions as to why our preferences should rule over the other groups'.

You have to ask what’s special about geographical clustering. Homeowners have all the power because they are arranged in big, continuous, municipal-government-sized blobs. Renters have none because they are dispersed across little pockets of each jurisdiction. If all the renters moved to one suburb they could easily get zoning power there, but they can’t, because that suburb would never allow 51% rental housing. The next best thing is to push zoning power up to a more aggregated level, where the scattered renters can form a more significant bloc.

Geometry is an arbitrary basis for power, not a principled one. There’s no deep reason why the block is too small to decide and the state is too big to decide and the City of Sunnyvale is just right.

>That is because in the case of a goog share you arent telling someone else what they can do with their share.

The same way with the proposed city stock shares - nobody is going to tell you what you can do with it.

>Instead, SFH are being allowed to have more options for what to do with their property.

no. It is a rich&powerful well-connected developer who is getting zoning changes and only to his properties (similar to the situation when only the major shareholder would get additional stock/dividend issued for free) at the cost to all the other residents and property owners. Privatization of profits with socialization of costs - the main reason for the NIMBY.

>In fact giving more options for property actually increases the value of that property.

Nobody is giving more options. Uniform re-zoning never practically happens. It is always a targeted action for the benefit of specific powerful developer who has already at least got an option on those targeted properties. At least the common stock schema i propose would allow to spread some of those gains toward all the others who also bear the costs, ie. the whole city.

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