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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

If you can’t lead a comfy life (because house prices are in the millions), and you see everyone here 10-20 years before you leading a comfy life (and capitalizing on housing price growth), you’re going to feel the game is rigged and you’re being played the fool.

So yes, those people are more likely to gravitate towards a personal politics that offers a solution for their personal woes.

It’s not hard to fix as a society. Build enough housing and you’ll find all those busy educated relatively-high-earning folks go off to live a comfy life, like generations of relatively-high-earning folk before them.

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Building more housing, does that sound like overpopulating the SF area, with predictable effects on the ecologic footprint which they’ll accuse the rich to be the cause of, like in Europe?

I much prefer cost-of-living indicators to be an cruel indicator that the area is populated enough. Stop basing your model on everyone being able to move to the SV. Remote work is much better as a social model, if not just for the ecology.

This would only make sense if the cost-of-living indicators were actually driven by ecological impact. Instead they’re largely driven by preferences of local residents.

suburban sprawl is worse ecologically than dense cities. for a given number of people, its almost tautological that the denser the living situation, the more space there is for the natural world.

To some people, city living is akin to being locked in a zoo.

So if you build more housing in cities, there will be more wide open spaces left for the people who hate cities. Of all the anti-urbanist talking points, this one is easily the most nonsensical.

Most people who do leave cities complain about noise, crime and school quality, not density per se.

> Most people who do leave cities complain about noise, crime and school quality, not density per se.

Talk about nonsense.

I know numerous people who have moved out of NYC to long island, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and California, all to suburban or rural areas. Everyone one of them has stated that they wanted more property, privacy and less people. When they visit NYC or drive through they tell me they would NEVER live there ever again. Hell one friend born and raised Brooklyn tells me "fuck that dirty overcrowded shit hole." And I know a few more who are either thinking or planning to leave. So you are 100% wrong.

>does that sound like overpopulating the SF area

No. Asia has many denser cities than the Bay Area. The temperate climate and a dense urban setting with good public transportation make the Bay one of the most environmentally friendly places in the country for people to live. Even the usual California bugbear of water use is pretty small per resident in the Bay.

>Remote work is much better as a social model, if not just for the ecology.

All the remote workers moving to Montana and Tennessee ultimately consume more resources and damage more fragile ecosystems than if they had lived in cities.

Sure, reducing demand also works. My point is that when people have enough money to survive and have extra income, but not enough money to hope to ever afford their dream life, they tend to use that money in ways that result in confused articles about the rise of socialist engineers.

Bernie-ism is basically people who were promised a comfy white collar life in exchange for getting a college degree and are pissed to learn that this ship has sailed. The decent jobs are here and the affordable houses are there, take your pick.

The existing sparse housing is much worse for the environment than dense housing.

Build some tall multifamily buildings in SF if you want to lower the carbon intensity of the residents.

Source:

https://jalopnik.com/nyt-report-confirms-that-density-reduce...

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