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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

> Telling real estate developers to build low-income housing in areas where they could easily build high-income housing is, well, let's just say cities promise this all the time and developers never do it.

Where I currently live developers are required by law to build. Certain percentage of square meters of social housing for every square meter of higher class housing they build. When my house got build they had to build social housing right next to it.

If I understood it correctly, the city ties this to the building permits. So if you wanna build new stuff you need to show that your plans include these social and affordable flats as well.

A city should in my opinion regulate to maximize the happieness of it’s inhabitants and not it’s developers (to some degree these two overlap anyways).

Certainly you could also try to change things via the market, but unless your city has a lack of developers why should you?

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I have heard that, in the long run, these kinds of legislation tend to really kick the housing affordability problem into turbo mode.

What ends up happening is that developers need to raise the rents on the non-subsidized units, because they're the ones that subsidize the subsidized ones. Which creates a constant upward pressure on housing prices that ends up squeezing everybody.

I'm not sure what the solution is, and I'm no economist, but it seems plausible. Looking at it from a 3,000 meter perspective, I would assume that, however well-intentioned San Francisco's housing policies were, we should probably expect that emulating them will yield the same outcomes that San Francisco is currently experiencing.

That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either. I would also suspect that emulating Detroit would also tend to lead to the sorts of outcomes that Detroit is currently experiencing.

> That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either.

This isn't something we do, it's something that falls out of a free real estate market. Money either finds itself and accumulates, making prices soar, or it flees the whole area throwing prices through the floor.

There is no magical world where the forces of supply and demand just happen to create income-diverse neighborhoods. We have to force that to happen if we want it.

Ultimately this, like every other problem resulting from income inequality, must be resolved by fixing the inequality, not by forcing people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.

That is something we do. Almost all cities, even very progressive ones, have a long history of redlining, which is still being dismantled today. The biases are racial and on income, which are strongly commingled from even heavier handed discrimination in the past.

The current separation of rich white and poor black/brown absolutely did not and does not fall out of a free market without consistent, long term, and deliberate racial action. Frankly, this is completely ignored by most neoliberal treatments of the housing issue.

The way San Francisco and Seattle run affordable housing is just tossing scrapes to the poor so businesses can retain cheap labor. They do nothing to maintain communities, just token diversity.

Sustainable affordability is achieved at the balance of supply and demand.

Supply can only be increased by building upward and outward: increase density near jobs, and invest in effective regional public transportation to mitigate "Manhattanization" (extreme density) or "Los Angeleization" (car commuting hell).

Demand grows from increased economic prospects, so can be managed with progressive taxes (ideally reinvested in transit/education/job training that equalize economic opportunities).

Subsidized housing makes sense as an interim solution, a buffer as the market adapts, but those subsidies are ultimately unsustainable (requiring prescient central planning).

How can they maintain communities exactly? I have seen many different definitions of that community to the point where I can't see a meangingful goal let alone an achieveable one. A bit like "ruining society" as a charge.

Minimizing emigration due to rapidly rising cost of living.

That is a fair enough goal - especially if done at a whole city level. A complicated balancing act but well so are a lot of things.

Build more housing. When an area gets overbuilt, units start going vacant, developers start going bankrupt, and vulture capitalists can swoop in, buy the properties for cheap, and rent them for cheap. Or if they don't, squatters move in and just start living in the abandoned buildings for free.

Ironically, this is the one outcome that is bad for both the city and the developer. The developer goes bankrupt, so obviously they and the bank don't like it. The city usually has a problem collecting tax revenue from bankrupt developers, and during the transition period between when the developer goes bankrupt and when another landlord buys the property, they face problems with crime and blight. It's good for enterprising bottom-feeders and for the city's poor, but neither one of them get a seat at the table. So here's a case where the incentives are directly aligned to let the people who make the decisions profit at the expense of the people who don't make the decisions.

That's only if you do it wrong. If you offer offsets in return for inclusionary zoning, it can work quite well. If you offer no offsets whatsoever like San Francisco, though, then the cost is borne by the community, not the developers: https://www.sightline.org/2016/11/29/inclusionary-zoning-the...

I don’t really know it exactly, but AFAIK there is a cost benefit involved for the developers. So it isn’t only additional work, but helps them tax wise.

Was a few years a go since I head to deal with this. However I want to emphasize the positive effects this kind of mixed living has on the social climate. The most mixed up city I ever lived in was Vienna (also due to their munipicial flats called “Gemeindebauwohnung”) and it really creates a better climate. People seem to be less afraid of each other and more in contact across culture and class barriers, it is harder to be in a bubble.

A negative example in Europe would be Paris — there you have strong segregation between different parts of the society. I have met Parisienne art students who never have been out of the city center and have no idea how it is there (except for what they heard about it).

> A city should in my opinion regulate to maximize the happieness of it’s inhabitants

Putting rich and poor people together maximize happiness?

Putting all poor people together certainly doesn’t.

Yes, it does. At least in my experience. The cities I lived in which had more mixup were certainly the ones with a better social climate, people talking with each other, helping each other, taking note of each other’s sorrows and doing sth. about it. On the other hand in a segregated city you have districts who get estranged of each other, or outright hate each other. The rich ones never leave their part of town because they are afraid and heard all kind of stories about these districts. And the poor ones go to work in a distric were people don’t even know they exists.

I wouldn't say it maximises happiness but it does serve to mitigate ghettoisation. In the UK they've done a good job of this, you'll often see council housing mixed into upmarket areas. Also all newly built developments are required by law to have 20% allocated as "affordable" and social housing.

Those low income housing requirements are counterproductive in many ways. You end up with low and high income housing, but those policies are terrible for those in the middle. Too "rich" to qualify for low income housing, but unable to afford market rate.

That's not due to inclusionary zoning [1], that's due to the "missing middle" of housing: https://www.sightline.org/2019/02/13/who-would-live-in-missi...

[1]: https://www.sightline.org/2016/11/29/inclusionary-zoning-the...

When I said high income I meant “above a certain threshold” and that threshold is certainly also affordable for the middle class, at least over here.

In my book these requirements work quite well, the developer I talked to also didn’t complain because there are some tax benefits so he has no incentive to make the flats more expensive.

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