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Comment by Wohlf | Hacker News Reader

I don't mind this as 7% per year seems like a reasonable safety measure to me. The issue is they need to make it much easier, cheaper, and faster to build more housing along with it. Portland is probably particularly bad about this, as I see plenty of new apartments and rowhouses going up in Hillsboro and Beaverton. Still, these units aren't what I'd consider affordable.

I think we need to seriously reconsider the effect some building requirements and property taxes have on housing prices. It may not be ideal but very small apartments with shared commons and no parking for a few hundred dollars a month would be better than living in an RV or on the streets. This is a pretty common setup in Japan, not to mention college and military dorms. This isn't even that different from having roommates.

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For the most part, our high housing prices are purely a matter of supply and demand. If you own a piece of land, and you want to build housing, you're not allowed to build as much as you want. NEARLY EVERY building proposed builds to the maximum currently allowed on that land.

The market wants to supply more housing. We don't let it, based on laws that originally were created to keep black people out of neighborhoods. Those laws continue to be very effective at that goal.

> The market wants to supply more housing. We don't let it, based on laws that originally were created to keep black people out of neighborhoods. Those laws continue to be very effective at that goal.

Why does this continue to be such a problem in deep blue areas?

Go on, mate. I think we both know why that's the case. Poor people and rich people make poor neighbours for each other. Maybe you can afford the house, but you can't afford the car, the motorcycle, the road bike that costs more than your annual daycare.

That is a pleasant breeding ground for justification for crime.

So there's the anti-poor angle that rich deep-blue neighbourhoods take and that ends up being racially discriminatory because of the underlying demographics.

> So there's the anti-poor angle that rich deep-blue neighbourhoods take and that ends up being racially discriminatory because of the underlying demographics.

That makes sense, but that just raises the question of why racial demographics are so regressive in those areas.

I genuinely asked because I don't know much about the inner workings of progressive coastal areas. It seems like if nearly all of the politicians and most of the population are committed to very progressive racial policies, you would expect to see... I don't know what exactly, but not this. I'd like to understand why things went so wrong.

Are there any US cities that are good examples wrt to racial demographics? Something that we could learn from?

They are committed to these policies in the abstract but any time there are winners and losers for a policy, the losers will fight harder than anything.

Second and third order effects are also hard to control through publicly popular policy.

And I am not aware of any significantly sized US areas that don't have race-discrepancies in educational attainment. American society has very strong positive feedback loops and I think the strong economies of the coastal paradises amplify that. Take any uneven distribution of wealth and it will get worse in that environment.

It's a problem everywhere in the US; all cities have these policies, but the coastal cities have much higher demand.

The reason you don't see prices spike in inland cities is that they can expand outwards, and they don't have much economic opportunity. Cities on the coasts can only expand in one direction - and because of international trade, they have more economic opportunity, so more demand.

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