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Comment by merrywhether | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t there tension between what I’m assuming is land-value tax to push developers to create more housing and keeping people in the home they’ve lived in for 20 years? That home has probably become inefficient from a public value standpoint and would better contribute if it was a multi-unit dwelling. I’m with you that people should be able to continue to afford to live in the same neighborhood even (with a shift in the type of building most likely), but attempting to protect their exact house just creates the equivalent of a public subsidy to exempt them from keeping pace with local land efficiency demands.

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There is huge tension. We've forced ourselves into a situation where it is difficult to fix things because housing is such a huge portion of many people's wealth. Policies that improve things for the poor and lower middle class in meaningful ways will crush the upper middle class, who have a lot of local political influence because they've got enough money to have free time but there are still a lot of them. Somebody with a mortgage 4x their gross annual income is going to fight hard to prevent their house from tanking in price, even if that means promoting anti-social policies.

It is a mess.

More generally, there’s tension between people who prefer nothing to change and those who want to allow change.

If you like your house and your neighborhood, you probably don’t want demolitions and construction, even if it’s not your house. It’s noisy, it brings uncertainty, and maybe when your neighborhood won’t be the same after buildings get replaced. Maybe the new buildings are too ugly or the residents undesirable or the infrastructure unable to keep up. Or maybe none of those are true but you personally are anxious from the thought of change so you don’t want to risk it.

In any case, the no-change crowd holds all the power except when those pursuing change have a lot of money. This further reinforces negative impressions of what it means to allow change in your neighborhood.

Yes! And thank you for approaching this with a thoughtful question.

One solution to this would be to guarantee a unit in any multi family or apartment building to the current resident, and pay for their relocation while the new unit is being built.

Alternatively, buy units from people who are leaving or who have passed away.

We do need to knock down some houses to build more housing, but we can do it in a way that is minimally disruptive.

>One solution to this would be to guarantee a unit in any multi family or apartment building to the current resident, and pay for their relocation while the new unit is being built.

You are just increasing the cost of the building's rent with this stuff. You'll have a few birthright units and everything else will be luxury to cover costs. This is the same problem we currently have with affordable units, huge missing middle.

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