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Comment by notthemessiah | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure shoplifting is to blame, and not the price of rent and lack of new construction.

They're both problems that can be attacked independently. You can crack down hard on shoplifters and reselling rings but also build lots of new housing.

Price of rent is a function of housing supply and demand. Rent control just pushes the costs to less visible things like security deposit, maintenance, etc.

They're more interconnected than at first glace. When ambitious people can't be stakeholders in the economy due to NIMBY gatekeepers, they resort to less socially-acceptable means of getting ahead and making it big.

I don't think "reselling rings" are that easy to crack down on, they probably are not rings at all rely on apps and services and operate on a more individual basis. The very framing of such is just used to justify greater police budgets, but this is something far harder than even the drug war to win. The only way to win it is to make sure entrepreneurial sorts find it more profitable to do things legitimately than it is to plunder goods, and ensure jobs and job training are more accessible than a life of crime.

I suppose you're not suggesting that people whose ambition to become business leaders is hindered by high rent turn to running criminal rings?

If you grow up in a neighborhood where the only example of financial success around you is a drug dealer, and every honest person is losing, what would you want to be when you grow up?

> When ambitious people can't be stakeholders in the economy due to NIMBY gatekeepers, they resort to less socially-acceptable means of getting ahead and making it big

I don't ever remember thinking of drug dealers at any school I went to as "ambitious". Some drug _users_, yes, but they never stole stuff to fund their drug habit. It was more like recreational, responsible alcohol for them. And now that we all have careers it's pretty clear who was actually ambitious and who wasted their parents' money.

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