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Comment by mrjangles | Hacker News Reader

The reason no one is building expensive apartments in these areas with socialist like governments is because of things like rent control and laws that disadvantage landlords, and which make the prospect of leasing to poor people completely undesirable. This is why a huge number of the apartments in California are sitting empty, because it is still better to have an empty apartment than having a poor person living there and paying you money. Any laws that force people to build low quality homes will just mean no one builds at all.

People always want to control everything, and when there is a problem they think they can fix it by forcing everyone to do what they want. No one ever wants to consider that it is them that is causing the problem in the first place.

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> This is why a huge number of the apartments in California are sitting empty,

California has one of the lowest rates of unoccupied housing in the country: https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud...

Not only is your explanation of the effect a fantasy born of ideology rather than fact, but even the effect you purport to explain is such a fantasy.

Huh, you are absolutely right. The internet is full of articles saying the exact opposite, but none of them compare California to other states. Turns out this is part of a push, by certain political groups, to introduce even more laws to disadvantage landlords into the California property market, and I fell for it. Thanks for setting me straight on that.

We have a thing in Melbourne where empty places can be fined. They can track by utilities use. There's a process for appeal etc etc but it amounts to: "you have a liveable place, let someone live there"

I have no problem with this. If investors argue it is a shit deal, that is fine, get out of the market and let someone who wants to live there buy it.

I firmly believe that housing cannot be both an investment market AND affordable for everyone.

By some definition of 'expensive', probably there are more expensive apartments in NY, LA, and SF than anywhere else in the country. Those are probably the top three cities.

The reason rents and sale prices are high is that people love living in those areas.

> socialist like governments

How do you define that? Loaded terms are important to define; otherwise they become, 'whatever I think', which means different things to the writer and reader.

"The reason no one is building expensive apartments in these areas with socialist like governments"

That sentence is absurd, and shows either someone with an ax to grind, or who has never traveled anywhere unfamiliar to what he prefers.

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