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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

If the market could build its way out of this, it already would have. There's not enough money in building and leasing units to rent to burger-flippers and dog-walkers, when there are millionaires lining up to make all-cash purchases.

You either have to pay people enough to afford a mortgage in the area, or you watch all your manual laborers move to the big cities.

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> If the market could build its way out of this, it already would have

I believe the author mentions that there was a proposed large apartment building (250 ish units) that could, presumably, have alleviated some of the demand but that it was voted down by nimby types to avoid CB “becoming aurora”

I’d think then that it’s less so the market preventing building than it is voters and activist home owners

The free market is precisely what gave this particular makeup of voters and activist home owners the keys to the kingdom. If you can't afford to pay to play in that municipality, you don't get to vote.

The "free market" didn't give those activists the right to veto development, the political processes and rules of their communities did. It's silly to treat that veto as a natural result, it's just as contingent as any other political rule.

How did they get to be able to vote? As TFA describes, they could afford property within the incorporated propery of CB, unlike those forced to find places to live outside it. Their wealth gave them access to the vote, and they are using their votes to further their own interests.

Being able to buy whatever you want for whatever price works for you and the seller sounds quite a bit like a "free market" to me.

Tying voting to property ownership is not some law of nature.

Neither is voting a law of nature, and nor is property ownership. So what's your point? That we don't have to do it this way? Well, sure. But what's the actual alternative?

Where I live planning rules are set on a national level. The whole notion of incorporated and unincorporated land seems like a weird US-ism.

It's not really weird at all. It's a big enough country with enough different conditions that it does make some amount of sense that there is a heirarchy of levels of control. That looks something like:

                               |+-- incorporated municipality
   Federal -> state -> county -+
                               |+-- unincorporated land

In the case of an incorporated municipality, the people who live there have a political process to make decisions about planning/zoning/construction, but these (in general) cannot override the rules from the county, state and federal levels.

In the case of unincorporated land, the county makes the rules, and so these are controlled by a political process involving the entire population of the county, rather than just those who live on a particular piece of land (because "there is no there, there"). Again, the county generally cannot override rules from the state and federal level.

In general, the state doesn't really set planning rules that affect specific placement of things. There may be environmental and health regulations that would prevent X being built in a particular location, but the state doesn't normally control whether single family only zoning (as an example) should be used in a given neighborhood - that's up to the incorporated municipality to decide.

The federal level really doesn't set any planning rules other than high level environmental and health regulations.

Most YIMBYs are not at all "markets solve all our problems" kinds of people. But this is anything but a free market.

* If the market could build its way out of this, it already would have.*

Residential development isn’t a free market. The locals control who gets to build what. And very few locals want their single family home in the shadow of a new mid-arose condo.

> If the market could build its way out of this, it already would have.

Indeed, if it was legal to build it would have been done already.

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