Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abalone | Hacker News Reader

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This is Q-anon level conspiracy rambling. Preston has a long career as a tenants right attorney directly opposing the interests of landlords. He is landlord enemy number one. He wrote and passed a tax on the real estate industry to the tune of $350M along with several laws protecting rent control and tenants from eviction. The idea that he's secretly a landlord and that socialists are in the pocket of the real estate industry is a desperate (though well-funded) Big Lie.

But you've made the larger point of the article: The oligarchy that funds the YIMBY movement uses it as a political tool to slander and fight anti-oligarchy activists. Just moments after pointing to seemingly neutral, technical legislation on the minutiae of zoning reform, you descended into crazed mudslinging against tenants rights advocates and socialists.

Addendum:

I looked up Red Bridge Strategies and find no evidence they have opposed affordable housing developments. What I do see them supporting:[1]

* Yes on H! Rent Control for Pasadena

* Yes on M! Empty Homes Tax

* Tax on $10M Real Estate Sales to Fund Social Housing

* Gross Receipts Tax on Large Corps to Fund Homeless Services

and so on. These are all genuinely progressive/socialist positions consistent with promoting working class affordable housing and opposing landlords.

It seems like you've just been taken by this well-funded right wing disinformation campaign. I hope you can see the larger point of the article that this is indeed a coordinated political strategy designed to radicalize people like you (and tech industry professionals generally) into fighting to defend the oligarchy and undermine the kind of populist progressive movement we see Bernie/AOC trying to start up again lately, and that folks like Preston genuinely were a part of.

[1] https://www.redbridgewins.com/work

> Yes on M! Empty Homes Tax

San Francisco's so called "Empty Homes Tax" doesn't even tax empty homes, single family homes are exempted. It's purely performative.

San Francisco has built almost no housing for years. You want to know why housing is so expensive, that's the real reason. And NIMBYs like Dean Preston perpetuate this.

It was also struck down by a court and never collected a cent. Turns out that revsoc costume play doesn't translate to practice.

Well as much as I dislike the SF city government, at least they respected the court ruling, which is more than you can say for some people.

None of the things you mention support building more housing.

A few look like they might, but don’t: Increasing taxes on expensive real estate just pushes demand down the chain, reducing supply for all.

If empty houses are actually a problem, fix the root cause. I can think of two reasons a house would go empty: Speculation (betting there will not be enough houses built), or planning departments that prevent the house from being repaired.

Making it easy to build houses solves both those problems.

If you attack landlords, who do you expect to build and maintain rental housing?

The affordable housing requirements are similar nonsense: Say you have some cash to invest. If you put it into building housing, the government will require you to sell the houses at a loss. Are you really going to build houses, and not invest it in something that can at least break even?

The yimby folks in CA are useful idiots that serve people that want housing prices to stay up. If you don’t believe this, go take an introductory micro and macroeconomics course.

It might surprise people in the U.S. to know that the Abundance agenda is not at all how many other international cities solve affordable housing. Did you know that one in four Parisians live in public housing? Or that in Singapore it’s 80%?

Or did you know the National Bureau of Economic Research just published a study concluding “Supply Constraints Do Not Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities”?[1] Directly contradicting the YIMBY narrative that all we need to do is unleash market rate supply.

Simple economics tells us that when you have a boom town with strong demand from white collar professionals migrating in, driving up incomes, they will outbid lower income folks for market rate units ten out of ten times. Per the law of supply and demand, all of that demand needs to be satisfied before market prices even have a chance of declining to affordable levels - and that’s only if the real estate industry decides it is profitable to keep building. Older units get renovated into luxury units as well.

That creates a real scalability problem for cities because you get a labor shortage. That drives up the cost of everything: education, restaurants, and you guessed it, construction itself.

That’s why social housing is such an international standard. Without affordable working class housing, the local economy becomes dysfunctional. And it echoes the debate we had about socialized medicine some years ago, the solution favored by pretty much all other developed countries, but always said to be too expensive or impractical to be done here, the richest country on the planet.

But we’re beginning to see some cracks in the narrative. And it clarifies why these right wing movements find the Abundance agenda so appealing.

[1] https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2025-06.pdf

Social housing is not one of the solutions the yimby movement in the US promotes. It also works because it doesn’t matter if the government or the private sector builds the houses.

Anyway, that paper concludes there is no difference in housing supply elasticity across the US (which is questionable, to put it politely) so demand elasticity doesn’t explain price differences. So, they conclude that, if you don’t build any houses at all, then demand will set prices.

That says nothing about what will happen if you do build houses, and also doesn’t contradict the basic economic finding that, if you have a glut of supply, prices go down. (Because no outbidding can occur — the losing bid still gets a house.)

> Social housing is not one of the solutions the yimby movement in the US promotes

This is not correct at least for the largest organization, California YIMBY. CA YIMBY has endorsed every social housing reform that has emerged at the state level, for example AB 309, AB 2053, etc.

What idealist socialist critics mean when they say "YIMBY doesn't support social housing" is actually "YIMBY refuses to outlaw market housing".

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