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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

Unless you're interested in selling your house, that it technically rises in value really only means that you pay more in property tax. It being worth more doesn't help you.

Lots of people have purchased a home where they have with the intention of living there permanently. If the density around them increases, that decreases their enjoyment of their home and ultimately may force them to sell and move elsewhere. Which is a serious PITA and may not be feasible if it means they'd have to find a new job elsewhere.

So for many people, there is nothing but downside to this happening for them, personally.

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California property taxes are fixed to when you bought the property + 2% change per year

This is understandable and I almost wanted to include it as a caveat in my original comment. Tax burden from upzoning could really hurt some homeowners. On the flip side, zoning could be seen as subsidizing land that would otherwise be more productive if it were zoned to what the market demands.

Not in California it can't. Property taxes can rise a maximum of 2% per year for as long as you own a property. That's rarely enough to even keep up with inflation.

You completely missed "decreases their enjoyment of their home" part. It's not just about money, some people actually prefer to live in low-density environments, as evidenced by the existence of expensive low-density towns.

An unrealized capital gain being "nothing but downside" is the possibly the most charitable spin of an interpretation. If you can't support the carrying cost of your private property, you sell it, just as you would with a car, for example. And in this case, the large gain eases the pain immensely. If you wish to inefficiently use land that otherwise would have a much higher utility to your surrounding community, you need to pay for that privilege.

> If you can't support the carrying cost of your private property, you sell it, just as you would with a car, for example.

A house, being a home, is radically different than anything else precisely because you can't just sell it without incurring an enormous disruption in your life, and if you're being forced out of a location you invested in for "life", then an enormous personal toll as well.

I can sell my car without completely uprooting my life and perhaps ending up with a lower level of happiness. Very often, this is not possible with a home.

> And in this case, the large gain eases the pain immensely.

Not really. There are plenty of things that money doesn't make better.

You're looking at this through a purely economic lens. That's pretty mercenary, but fair enough. The point that I'm making is that for many, a house is something far larger and deeper than just an economic unit.

A home still needs to use socialized resources be viable. It needs the surrounding infrastructure, the schools must be funded, etc. Unless your home is in the middle of nowhere, it will definitely need to contribute to the upkeep of the region around it.

A home — where your family lives, where your children have made friends and go to school, where you have built an extended community — is not a car.

If you wish to rob other people of their homes, you ought to pay for that privilege, and only with their acquiescence.

Disagree. The refusal to build any new homes where people want to live is creating huge problems for all of society: it prevents people from starting families, it's massive wasted economic opportunity whenever people can't move to where they'd be most efficient, and it shunts tons of investment dollars into the pockets of landlords instead of providing useful value. It's an existential threat to the country.

At some point it has to be treated as a negative externality like pollution, and the people responsible for it need to pay their fair share of these externality costs.

> At some point it has to be treated as a negative externality like pollution, and the people responsible for it need to pay their fair share of these externality costs.

I disagree strongly with categorizing it as an externality. But ignoring that, what you're actually arguing is that nobody can ever own a home that they can rely on being a home for the rest of their lives. Unless you're into real estate investing, this cuts out the one real advantage to owning a home and allows something you purportedly own to be legally stolen from you.

Rising property tax forces people to move which is a good thing imho.

I mean not in cali, the property tax isn’t allowed to increase. That’s part of the problem.

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