Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

A city has 100 homes. Local homeowners vote against any new construction to preserve taxpayer-funded parking welfare (aka neighborhood character)

This means that house prices are a race to the top so to speak. You're always competing with your neighbors.

The first thing you do is have both of them work (this happened ~4 decades ago). Even if you don't want to, you have to, because your neighbors are doing it and they're your competition in the home hunt.

The second thing you do is live together with other unrelated adults to save money on rent (hey, housing is scarce for some dumb reason, after all).

The third thing you do is decide not to have kids, because after all, the 2+ bed flats are full of adult professionals sharing them. You can't possibly outbid them!

Meanwhile, the few extremely well-paid people are able to pay for the nice homes that were built before the housing cartels took over. Everyone else is screwed. They can move to the country, but jobs are scarce and crappy <massive generalization of course>.

Not sure what comes after step 3. Maybe we could trying building a flat or two?

>Not sure what comes after step 3

The steps 1...3 you described are literally "the demand for housing will gradually fall". What follows is, naturally, gradual lowering of the prices, with subsequent stabilization and rebirth.

Curiously enough we observe the same patterns in nature: a species out-grows its prime ecological niche; the population starts falling down (usually without outright crashing), and then stabilizes at the optimum point. The cycle repeats.

The only possible source of instability in the whole housing/population cycle would be the government trying to prop up the house prices once the price correction starts. Some people have this misbegotten idea that real estate has to be a magical kind of investment that always appreciates in value.

I don't follow, can you elaborate? People making more efficient use of a scarce resource doesn't suggest falling demand. How are steps 1-3 akin to that?

The price signal called "rent in SF" suggests that there is a scarcity, given that people who would like to have a 2 bed apartment to themselves can't get one. That's not weird. What's weird is that we've let the owners of homes vote on whether it should be illegal to build more homes. It makes sense - it increases the value of their asset. It's just not helpful to non-home-owners.

You wrote "The only possible source of instability in the whole housing/population cycle would be the government trying to prop up the house prices once the price correction start" - but the government, at the behest of local homeowners, IS propping up the price of houses by making it nearly impossible to build new ones (this has abated somewhat in the extremely recent past).

Do we give GM a vote on how many cars Ford is allowed to build?

Note that I write "home", not "house" intentionally - providing homes for many people in a small area usually means apartments, condos, etc. for the most part. Houses still exist, albeit as a luxury. It also means you don't price land used for sleeping cars cheaper than land used for sleeping people.

The cycle doesn't always repeat. The cycle only repeats if fertility rates stay where they always have been... the elk continue to attempt procreation at the rates they always have.

Then,once the foraging/pasture regrows, that rate being the same, the elk rebound.

Calhoun proved this. The mice would, despite having everything they needed, despite the population crash giving them the space they apparently required, just not procreate. Lots of bizarre behaviors, but no procreation.

No little girl who has grown up an only child, most of the adults in her life either having just one child or even none at all, will say "I want to have 2.1 children when I grow up!". And it would have to be every little girl that did that for replacement fertility. If only a few do it, then the number has to be higher than 2.1 for it to average out.

The implication is that fertility rates can only ever fall, and never rise. We're more like Calhoun's mice than we are like some cervines that have outgrown their food supply.

You described effect observed in population that grew up in, and descended exclusively from generations living in singular over-crowded space with full living necessities supplies.

Humans out in the real world aren't like that. Some live in the crowded city, some live in the open regions. Some hunt for best deals in the mall, others hunt for the game for lunch. There's a constant trickle of cultural & genetic mixing, and there's a lot of small towns etc. that are somewhere in-between on the scale of self-reliance.

If the city populations were to crash, we the humans wouldn't really suffer all that much. Perhaps less new entertainment content would be produced, but the necessities would be taken care of as per the usual, knowledge would be preserved, and communication & trade would go on. In due time, cities would be re-populated.

To be fair, my wife and I were both "definitely no children MAYBE 1" for a long time, but now that we live in an area with lots of 4+ children families (middle of Ireland) it doesn't seem so outlandish to have 3. We won't, because 1) we're old and 2) We should really view 2 as a hard max if we're going to try not to destroy Earth (though since it looks like we will anyway you might as well just have as many as you want I guess. More soldiers on your side for the food wars).

I don't doubt that increasing their own home values is part of it, but here in the North East where I live when I hear co-workers making the case for restricting housing development they're concerned about one of two things. Either that if their town was more affordable the wrong sort of person would move in, they'd go to school with their kids, and either harm their kids or teach them bad habits. Or that more people would mean more cars and more congested streets.

We're also concerned that there may be too many kids for the existing school, especially higher density residential construction, and then existing homeowners will be asked to pay for the expansion / new school.

Adding facilities can be a condition of planning permission for new homes. A growing population of kids means more schools, so whether they're in infill or in suburbia can be addressed through similar mechanisms.

How do you think that existing school got built? It wasn’t dropped from the sky.

Do you then remind them that they might need to check their biases?

After all, kids learn all sorts of dubious things from "innocent" Places and well-off kids use things like drugs at a similar rate. They are simply less likely to get caught because they have unsupervised large back yards and things like that.

That opens a fun argument. "Don't worry about your white child mixing with other races, because if he ends up dealing drugs to them, it will be OK because prosecutors will blame the black kids".

More seriously, preferring rich neighbors isn't rooted in racism, it's a cause of racism. Why don't you want poor people moving into your neighborhood? For the exact reason poor people want to move into your neighborhood! Because proximity to wealthy is valuable, and proximity to poverty is less valuable.

To me I’d be more worried if my kids went to school only with rich white kids because they’re the ones with the money to buy coke ;-)

kind of on the right track. the reality is the ratio of minorities is directly correlated to how hard the incumbents try to keep them out. people are desperately trying to keep them from taking over the cities. at the same time making them take all the tax and social burdens. these minorities could spread out but probably the best thing for them is to target the smaller cities. take them over and finally change their antiminority policies.

Anecdata, but when I went to community planning boards it was very much:

"this will hurt home values"

"I like being able to park on the [public, taxpayer-funded] street instead of paying for land to store my car on"

"This will bring more cars"

but it was telling that nobody at the meetings had school-age kids. They also fought like hell against bike lanes, which would help with the whole "people === cars" relation. I'm sure what you describe is a concern for people too.

Ironically the neighborhood was a huge draw for people from _other_ neighborhoods because it was so nice (South Park San Diego). Known for its small bungalow-style housing and pleasant, narrow streets - both illegal to build now. More housing would allow more folks to live walking distance from the nice bars, restaurants, etc. (and the well-regarded German-language school I would've wanted to send my kid to if I had one), instead of driving in and consuming available parking.

Building apartments in your backyard

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