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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to lump together home-owning yet anti-home-building wealthy boomers with the working boomers who are now becoming homeless.

Generational abstractions are unbelievably leaky.

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Given that there aren't infinite ressources, shouldn't we prioritize housing families, that prepare the future, rather than the elderly?

With housing, the problem isn't so much that we can't afford to build it easily, the problem is that we have made it illegal to provide housing.

We have a shortage not because it is expensive, but because we regulated a shortage into existence.

We do need some subsidy programs to help those with the lowest incomes or no incomes. But those will become easier to provide once we allow enough housing to be built and lessen the rentier extraction that comes from having an unnecessary shortage.

Housing is expensive, especially in the american, low density suburbian way. You need to build a large infrastructure around housing for it to be viable, and if the housed can't pay taxes, everyone will end up paying for it.

Also, I don't understand: why not move to a place without zoning? Not all homeless have to live in SF right?

There's more than adequate infrastructure in cities to support a huge increase in population. And it's super cheap to do that. Suburban sprawl is massively expensive because of that inefficient use of infrastructure, it's unbelievably wasteful and ends up getting paid for by people who live in dense areas, which are the seas that actually generate surplus tax revenue that can cover the freeloaders in the suburbs who drive everywhere.

> why not move to a place without zoning

Because I don't want to live i n isolation, I want a city, and cities and density have been banned. Nobody bans sprawl, they ban density and its efficient use of infrastructure. I want the people. I want the culture. I want the transit, and being able to experience more amenities than anywhere else without having to drive to every goddamned place. I want to be able to walk to do interesting things and meet interesting people.

What does your comment about homeless in SF have to do anything else you or I have written so far?

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