Comment by superchroma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by superchroma | Hacker News Reader

Whilst it's true that there are a lot more rules, there are areas that have been largely without them (crypto comes to mind), and outcomes are still often not so good. With as many people as there are on this Earth, packed as densely as they are, there are increasing amounts of commons, and also increasing numbers of tragedies occurring in these myriad commons as well.

I'm not sure getting things done for the sake of it is desirable if it means we have an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong, or unprofitable bullet trains running empty like China, or asbestos products or other things. The notion that we must “move fast and break hearts" on failed ideas is kind of fanciful, because in practice in society we don't often have a clear figure elected to do that; we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all. Councils and groups of talkers coming together are presumably trying to perform this actual function, and I think we don't necessarily give them credit for that.

Fundamentally, some of that articulate class is trying to preserve some kind of life style that they perceive is rapidly evaporating in the face of cheaply built things built purely for profit.

> we don't live in a dictatorship where a flick of a finger can end a project after all.

Sure we do: they're called planning, zoning, or environmental review boards. And process by which they operate has been engineered to make it increasingly easier to stop projects. In some states like California, any random person (they don't even need to live in the community!) has the power to stop projects for months, if not years, all but guaranteeing either failure or massive budget expenditures.

Your argument is basically a Slippery Slope argument. The flaws in Slippery Slope are well known, but the mentality is so very attractive to the way humans think. See, e.g., Prospect Theory. As a community becomes wealthier, more people have more to lose, and they will predictably become ever more cautious about change--any kind of change, even change that on its face is positive and enriching. In the back of their minds they're thinking, "But what if this, or what if that, later on down the road, causes the loss of what I already have." Everything begins to look like a zero-sum game.

Perhaps the only thing worse than this state of affairs is the complete opposite state of affairs, where most people are desperately poor. They have nothing to lose so they're happy to leap from radical project to radical project chasing a parade of cheap promises made by snake oil men. See, e.g., most any poor country.

Potentially, but I think we have actually slipped down a lot of these slopes at one point or another. These negative possibilities are not just hypotheticals, they are informed by actual failures. I'm not going to argue that there aren't people defending their interests selfishly in such arrangements, - there definitely is, as well. Maybe such councils should be filled with non-affiliated neutral parties that are randomly elected?

  "an ocean of copy-pasted apartment buildings like Hong Kong"

That's an incredible way to frame place for people to live. You may find that aesthetically disgusting, that's your right, but I find the legally mandated suburbs of an expensive city to be morally disgusting given the impacts on the environment and poor people.

This isn't a discussion about housing availability. You should make a new submission about that if you want to go into that topic in depth. There are facets to this discussion that your post is glossing over; it's not a binary choice between HK style apartments or suburban sprawl.

I don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing. It's always used as a political weapon against housing. Someone's ability to have shelter always beats out the other person's subjective aesthetic tastes that they have no right to impose on anyone.

I would suggest this speaks to the weight of your experiences coloring your view. It doesn't have to be this way, though, yours are just one set of lived experiences, and the systems you live in are not necessarily objectively the best ones.

The issue you're discussing is that aesthetic objections are being used as a hard roadblock to progress. This suggests that aesthetic input needs to be received without them being an opportunity to derail a project if the projects is passing all other measures it has been evaluated on. It could be said that such input should have achievable criteria for success/passability without being significantly at odds with the premise of the exercise.

Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it as this is a pressing and heated american issue, and it's clear that you feel strongly on the matter.

> I would suggest this speaks to the weight of your experiences coloring your view.

> Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it

This is extremely condescending and unnecessary. There is no reason for the other poster to “create a new submission” for their points.

If you disagree with them that is ok, feel free to respond to the points. If you’re having difficulty responding to their points, don’t respond. However, as far as I can tell their points are on topic for the example you provided and shouldn’t be dismissed in the way you keep trying multiple times.

There's no point going into the weeds in a discussion ten posts deep when we deviate from the broader topic. It discourages community engagement from the discussion we're having and the main thread and derails the thread as people have to scroll past it to see other comments. This is not why people are here, even if we feel passionate about the topic.

> There's no point going into the weeds in a discussion ten posts deep when we deviate from the broader topic.

That is up to the other person and what the downvote button is for.

> It discourages community engagement from the discussion

Then the community can vote via the down button. Meanwhile, you do not need to be condescending or singly try to shepherd a group conversation.

> This is not why people are here, even if we feel passionate about the topic.

I’ve been using HN for 10 years, other than trying to shut down the other commenter, the back and forth and deviation/tangentiality in this thread isn’t different than I normally have seen on HN.

The only way that community input into aesthetics won't be used against housing is if land is decommoditized. Until then the financial incentives are such that this will be used as a weapon, as we've seen happen repeatedly. The hypothetical universe where aesthetics can be regulated and that government power isn't abused by the landowner lobby doesn't really exist pre-decommodification.

Hi. Longtime Hong Kong resident here. Public housing and private housing in HK could both be described, in terms of appearance, as copy-pasted. Quality of construction is exceedingly poor (to get the flavor, you could watch this new-build home inspection video from local TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShJtbmkjKG8) and backwards (e.g. single-pane windows are the norm, walls have zero insulation, etc.).

The wait list for public housing is many years long. Depending on whose numbers you believe, between 100k and 200k people are living in subdivided apartments (which, in some cases, translates to a bed inside a literal metal cage -- hence the term "cage apartments"). Private housing costs have gone down very slightly thanks to political developments and purported pandemic control policies, but prices for badly-built, tiny, puzzle-piece-shaped apartments in huge copy-pasted high-rises are eye-wateringly high.

Saying it's copy-pasted is a criticism of the aesthetic, not the build quality. Copy-pasting designs is just economies of scale and should lead to cheaper construction and design costs, all else held equal.

I have no problem with regulations of apartment quality. Those are usually too lax.

This is a point made elsewhere in the thread. We need more good regulations and less bad regulations. More regulations of build quality (e.g noise transmission, double pane windows). Less zoning and aesthetic regulations.

There's technically no reason that copy-pasted skyscraper apartment buildings can't be built to a high standard, quality-wise, and it certainly may yield savings to the entity commissioning the project.

But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard (and this subthread is about Hong Kong, where that is certainly the case) and there's nothing preventing cheaply-built, shabby, cookie cutter housing from being sold at exorbitant prices (ditto).

Your statement, in taking issue with someone else's completely accurate description of HK buildings as copy-paste jobs, that you "don't really accept any discussion of reducing subjective eyesores when it comes to housing" in tandem with an invocation of "ability to have shelter" signaled a deep lack of understanding about HK's housing situation.

I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.

Do you think the wait list for public housing would be longer or shorter if the government enforced your esthetic preferences on apartment construction?

Or to say it another way, your posting claims that HK housing is both too expensive and too low quality. If the government solved the low quality problem by banning it, it would probably make the expensive problem worse.

I’m not saying that housing quality should never be regulated. I’m saying that regulation can have side effects policy makers need to consider.

The aesthetics of public housing in HK is not a factor in the pace of public housing construction or the amount of public housing made available. Appearance and supply are completely unrelated. Supply is maintained at an always-woefully-inadequate level and many are allowed to live in squalor.

This, purely by happenstance, ensures a market for new and used low-quality, cramped private dwellings. In turn, everyone's dream is to manage to get a second apartment to lease out and/or emigrate so that they can retire in, for example, Canada, the UK, or the United States on the proceeds of the sale of their small, poorly-built apartment in a copy-paste high-rise.

Coincidentally, in HK, the government owns literally all of the land except for one or two tiny freeholds (e.g. a very old church is one that comes to mind) and derives a great deal of revenue from land sales (selling long-term leases, really, rather than the land) to property developers. The money from land sales is earmarked for infrastructure projects.

To reiterate: the notion that slapping together near-identical residential skyscrapers in HK helps make housing more accessible is incorrect. Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.

> Appearance and availability are completely uncoupled here.

Your evidence for this is that prices are extremely high. But you have no evidence that prices wouldn't be even higher if purely aesthetic constraints were imposed on development that had nothing to do with utility or quality.

Moreover, that's not even relevant to the main problem with the focus on aesthetics. You're right I don't know much about the HK situation, but where I'm from, aesthetics is one of the top two excuses that landowners use to lobby the government to block new housing.

What he is saying is, there is no point in turning San Francisco into Hongkong. If you don't find affordable housing in SF, move somewhere else. It's not the only city in the world.

> There's technically no reason that copy-pasted skyscraper apartment buildings can't be built to a high standard.

> But there's no reason they can't be built to a low standard.

That's my point. Apartments being copy-pasted implies nothing about the build quality, so it's therefore a criticism of the aesthetic, which is what I took issue with.

> I'm telling you that HKers aren't seeing any of the "ability to have shelter" benefit you seem to be imputing to ugly, identical tower blocks. The wait list for copy-paste public housing is years long and it's a byzantine process to get into an apartment even then. Private copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg for cubby-hole sized micro-apartments, so much so that 100-200 thousand people at any given moment are living in desperate conditions under spalling concrete, with rats and bedbugs, and shared toilets and "kitchens" that I suspect would give you the dry heaves if you were to take a tour of such places.

If you want to add more good regulations that enforce build quality, I'll be right there with you. I haven't seen a country or locale where the building code regulations have been good enough.

> being sold at exorbitant prices

> copy-paste housing costs an arm and a leg

Okay, so decommodify land, build more good public housing, and allow more private housing by reducing zoning restrictions. But "ugly" and "cookie cutter" and "identical" should not feature into the criticism.

>This isn't a discussion about housing availability

Down-talking dense, quickly built housing because you don't like how it looks IS making it about housing availability. Those buildings were built to quickly get people housing in a reliable way. Every month they waited was a worse housing situation.

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