7 ms·

People are fighting the wrong fight when they attack this guy (or attack the people attacking this guy, for that matter) It isn't SF Bay Bros'/foreigners'/comp

by VRay 5y ago

People are fighting the wrong fight when they attack this guy (or attack the people attacking this guy, for that matter) It isn't SF Bay Bros'/foreigners'/companies' fault that houses are too expensive. It's because of strict zoning laws and a lack of building enough housing to match supply with demand[1]. Demand keeps going up way faster than supply, nationwide, and we're all feeling the squeeze [1]: A great example of this is the super low housing costs in Tokyo. My mother in-law and sister in-law are renting a 3 bedroom apartment right now, 20 minutes outside Shinjuku (one of the "Giant Bustling Megacity" parts of Tokyo) for $1300/month, which they can comfortably afford while working part time doing low end janitorial work. More info here: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...

mitchdoogle 5y ago
You're right that housing supply is an issue, but second homes and investment homes are a major issue as well. Too much housing stock sits empty and the ultimate end result is that a very small portion of individuals get richer, meanwhile millions of people are desperate to buy their first home. Both problems need to be solved, one with more housing, one with tax incentives.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
Tokyo is somewhat good example, but brushes off things that houses are much smaller and IIRC you don’t own land below it.
gonzo41 5y ago
Out of curiosity, how big is a 3 bedroom apartment in Japan?
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Bigger than a homeless guy shopping cart.
- VRay 5y ago
  It's tiny by US standards, but they use different types of furniture, so it's comfortable. They tend to use a lot of wall hooks, tons of tiny drawers, smaller convertible beds, etc. I was living there with my wife and her two family members and had no trouble at all. That place was about 700 square feet, but it felt like an 1100 square foot place would in the US with giant furniture and large open floor spaces. I had a ~150 square foot room set aside for my office and VR space, the in-laws had a bedroom with tatami mats, there was a large-ish living room/kitchen with a big TV and couch, and then a bedroom for me and the wife
colechristensen 5y ago
I mean, don’t the people who live in a place have the right to decide they don’t want to invite in population until their homes are turned into a megacity? And if people don’t like the prevailing political opinions of a place that doesn’t want to change its nature to suit them, aren’t there plenty of other places to go? The market its screwed up in the Bay Area because they in way more jobs than they wanted to let in housing, that’s a problem, but I don’t begrudge people that want to put limits on density because they want to live in a certain kind of place.
- djbebs 5y ago
  No, they don't. Ifbyou want control over who can move in somewhere, or what can be built somewhere, you have a simple solution, buy the land in question.
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    People who rent also have voting rights for electing local governments in many places in the world.
    - chaostheory 5y ago
      True, but they still don’t have as much influence on local government as much as more affluent residents. The prime example would be Palo Alto. It’s the NIMBY capital of the world. Even Stanford University has trouble with development on land that they own.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        That is mostly their fault for not voting (renters are less likely go vote and thus don't matter). Also their fault for not realizing property tax that the landlord pays comes from rent or lack of maintenance (complex because supply and demand sets rent prices, so tax is a second order effect)
        5y ago
bosie 5y ago
Increasing housing increases demand on alot of other resources (medical, kindergarten, streets, public transport, schools,...). how do you orchestrate such a rise in demand in a densely populated city like san francisco quickly (dense in the sense of non-used land, not by population)?
- walkhour 5y ago
  > kindergartens, schools and medical offices. Where exactly do you think schooling and medical practices happen or children are taken care of? >Public transport How hard is to coordinate to double the number of trains or buses? > Streets I don't know what you mean by the demand of streets increases. Most times solving the housing problem is a lack of will or coordination, and the solution is muddled/deleted/delayed indefinitely by arguments like this.
  - edmcnulty101 5y ago
    And alot of times, especially with mass transit, there are economies if scale. So it's even more efficient with higher population.
  - bosie 5y ago
    > Where exactly do you think schooling and medical practices happen or children are taken care of? in close vicinity of the housing. not sure i understand the question. > How hard is to coordinate to double the number of trains or buses? running a bus during peak hours at twice your current rate (unless the rate is completely ridicilous) does not sound easy. why do you assume it is? at that rate, for SF at least, you are talking subway. by streets i meant the higher volume during peak hours that need to be sustained (walking, cycling, driving, busses, trams, parking etc).
    - rahimnathwani 5y ago
      "running a bus during peak hours at twice your current rate (unless the rate is completely ridicilous) does not sound easy" The 14R (the fastest bus from my home to downtown SF) is scheduled to run every 10 mins (on average) during the morning peak. Running that bus every 5 mins (which presents no special difficulty) would double the capacity, and reduce average wait time by 5 mins.
nemo44x 5y ago
I think some people find it frustrating to see that the system does in fact work; that the narrative they’ve chosen to believe is just cynical and wrong. That a person on a house cleaners income can find a way to own property in SF as well as around the country. And be good about it by finding properties that need some love and investing in them. I thought it was a great story about a person that saw the vast opportunities in front of them and used a bit of grit and smarts to make happen the future they wanted.
- bradlys 5y ago
  lol - did you not look at the prices they were dealing with? They bought an apartment building with friends and their share of the mortgage was only $900/month - half of which was shared with their partner. $900/month is a joke - even for back then. They bought land with cash that was even remotely near SF as well - unfathomable now. This person bought before prices in SF were so above and beyond what anyone near that level of income could ever afford. This is just survivorship bias mixed with a bit of “I did it during a time when prices were nowhere near what they are now”. Story sucks because it’s not a story of grit and smarts. It’s a story of unrepeatability.
  - stevehawk 5y ago
    You're not wrong that they did it during a better time. But the move to get a bunch of friends to essentially move in and take over an apartment building and then buy it (in a non-forced manner) was pretty clever.
    - bradlys 5y ago
      I think my issue with that is that it’s not going to be easy to do in the current market. Back then - it was more doable. They were able to buy under market value (when that likely wasn’t very much to begin with) and manage the loan with each other. Now where each person needs to make $250k+ to afford buying the apartment - you’re getting into territory where you’re unlikely to find people who want to buy that apartment and move into one whole place with you. Maybe it’s doable but the virtue of it being so expensive and the incomes required being so high means that it’s very unlikely to be reproducible unless you only associate with very high income people and those people also like apartments. I find high income folks generally want to move away from apartments as they age and they want to do so at a much faster rate than someone in a much lower income bracket would.
bradlys 5y ago
Main thing I see people attacking this guy over is the “I did it and so can you” mentality more than anything. It’s survivorship bias at its strongest. No different than the FIRE post trending here as well. Dude literally saw his NW double in a year and income go up 50% cause of stock appreciation. Along with incredible starting salary and overall close to top tier comp the entire way - and no kids or what not. I think people just really hate these “stories” because it’s not realistically repeatable. Someone will make it happen but it’ll be based off luck and nothing else. Even the dude in the fire thing wishes he did startups for 6 years. Mindlessly ignoring he’d get paid way less but oh wait - of course his story would only be posted if he joined a company that IPO’d and he got 8 figures out of it. It’s just so annoying to see this shit on HN all the time. It’s some weird capitalism fetishism porn.
- more_corn 5y ago
  Living below your means is repeatable (and desirable). Riding a bike instead of driving a car is repeatable (and beneficial). Buying land and building a house, buying distressed property and carefully investing time and money to rehab it… all repeatable. All things that benefit society. This isn’t capitalist fetish porn.
- jfengel 5y ago
  HN is part of a Silicon Valley venture capital incubator. It exists to be capitalism fetish porn.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  >"I did it and so can you" What is the antithesis here? "You won't succeed, so don't bother trying. Become an employee, rail against capitalism and wage slavery." Dismissing it as luck can only work if the author succeeded on the first try. Did everyone succeed on the first try? Before it can be called "survivor's bias", you need to survive. If you croak at the first unforeseen and perhaps unfair hardship... What is missing from many of these stories are the concepts and ideas which were eliminated by failure or analysis. It would be unusual for the first idea that pops into someone's head to come to successful fruition. Maybe it would be illustrative if the author listed all of his failed endeavors and how he reasoned his way through them. Undoubtedly, it would make for much longer-form content and perhaps ramble off-track from his chosen subject. Persistence is an unspoken companion to what you flippantly dismiss as luck. Trial and error, iterative improvements and self-sacrifice are also key ingredients. Of course, you don't need to listen to that. It is much easier to lay blame than manifest the change you wish to see.
halpert 5y ago
I've looked into moving to Japan. My family has a house in Setagaya, which had severely distorted what I thought Tokyo living to be. It turns out, a typical one bedroom apartment is like 20 sq meters. Separate from that, I don't believe zoning has anything to do with housing shortages. Housing has "induced demand" similar to traffic. You can look at heavy traffic over a bridge and think, "if only we had another bridge, that would alleviate the traffic." But it turns out, when you do that, more people end up using both bridges and traffic becomes as bad as it was before. Housing is similar. If you build more houses, even more people want them. Look at places like NYC, which has extremely dense housing. It's still expensive.
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  Houston's housing isn't expensive though. It has few zoning laws and is not land constrained though (unlike NYC or SF).
  - mauvehaus 5y ago
    There's also an awfully short list of places in the US that sprawl more than Houston. I'm not arguing that sprawl is inherently bad, but it definitely does add the need to own a car (for most people) and spend a lot of time in it (ditto).
- Nelkins 5y ago
  This is absolutely wrong. Pretty much every single piece of evidence we have shows that zoning has a massively impactful effect on the supply of housing. Similarly, the vast majority of studies looking at the issue show that induced demand doesn't occur for housing (that is, adding housing supply does lower prices, rather than simply causing people to consume more). With regard to NYC, even though it has added around 250-300K housing units over the past fifteen years or so, it has added around three times that in jobs. If housing supply isn't increasing in line with people, you will see increases in prices. Some links: - https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-cast-induced-demand-housing https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-cast-in... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w - https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/supply-skepticism-housing-supply-and-affordability https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/supply-skepticism-ho... - https://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/SOC_2017_FOCUS_Changes_in_NYC_Housing_Stock_1JUN2018.pdf https://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/SOC_2017_FOCUS_Changes_i... (the key quote here being: "In 2016, NYC had 8.2 percent more housing units, 11 percent more adults, and 16.5 percent more jobs than it did in 2000.")
kilna 5y ago
Capitalism inherently exploits economically unequal systems, and thus incentivizes them in both the private and public sectors (especially in the US where politicians are basically owned outright[1]). So, yes, it is "companies"... or more specifically, large wealth-owned profit-takers, that are the root cause of the supply-demand curves AND the zoning AND all of the other contributing factors. The fact that there are different sets of capitalists (rent and investment exploiters versus labor exploiters) who have varying influence on politicians is secondary to the fact that the politicians are primarily if not solely doing the bidding of capitalists. Attempts at corporate externalizing of risk happen in multiple contradictory directions, thus causing inconsistent public policy. Regardless, privatized-profit motivated externalization of public risk is the core problem. GDP-centric increases in productivity mean precisely fuckall for working class quality of life until we solve for the fact that the entirety of increased productivity gains have gone to the wealthy in the past 5 decades[2]. I do think as a society we should build more affordable housing in densely populated areas, but allowing capitalists to hold the reins for that would accelerate all of the problems of late stage capitalism. Lastly, Japan has succeeded where others have failed because of a cultural difference which highly values new builds over old homes. They dispose of their homes and rebuild, as often as the US disposes of old cars and builds replacements... So political leverage by real estate investors is less of a concern there, a 30 year old home might be considered close to worthless. At the same time it creates other risk externalization problems like a colossal amount of inefficiency and waste. The only way to get a similar result of reasonable pricing in urban areas where real estate is profit-driven as opposed to use-driven, would be though affordable public housing as a counterbalance. We've seen time and again that capitalist housing development will naturally result in more capitalist-driven inequality. Investors will continue to buy making the bubble worse, then when the bubble pops the rich buy even more stock as disproportionately middle class and poor investors are forced to liquidate, as happened in the 2008 bust. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig [2]:https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16112368/piketty-saez-zucman-income-growth-inequality-stagnation-chart https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16112368/pi... (or the same chart any of dozens of places)

by VRay 5y ago

mitchdoogle 5y ago

You're right that housing supply is an issue, but second homes and investment homes are a major issue as well. Too much housing stock sits empty and the ultimate end result is that a very small portion of individuals get richer, meanwhile millions of people are desperate to buy their first home. Both problems need to be solved, one with more housing, one with tax incentives.

dzhiurgis 5y ago

Tokyo is somewhat good example, but brushes off things that houses are much smaller and IIRC you don’t own land below it.

gonzo41 5y ago

Out of curiosity, how big is a 3 bedroom apartment in Japan?

MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Bigger than a homeless guy shopping cart.
VRay 5y ago
It's tiny by US standards, but they use different types of furniture, so it's comfortable. They tend to use a lot of wall hooks, tons of tiny drawers, smaller convertible beds, etc. I was living there with my wife and her two family members and had no trouble at all. That place was about 700 square feet, but it felt like an 1100 square foot place would in the US with giant furniture and large open floor spaces. I had a ~150 square foot room set aside for my office and VR space, the in-laws had a bedroom with tatami mats, there was a large-ish living room/kitchen with a big TV and couch, and then a bedroom for me and the wife

colechristensen 5y ago

I mean, don’t the people who live in a place have the right to decide they don’t want to invite in population until their homes are turned into a megacity? And if people don’t like the prevailing political opinions of a place that doesn’t want to change its nature to suit them, aren’t there plenty of other places to go? The market its screwed up in the Bay Area because they in way more jobs than they wanted to let in housing, that’s a problem, but I don’t begrudge people that want to put limits on density because they want to live in a certain kind of place.

djbebs 5y ago
No, they don't. Ifbyou want control over who can move in somewhere, or what can be built somewhere, you have a simple solution, buy the land in question.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  People who rent also have voting rights for electing local governments in many places in the world.
  - chaostheory 5y ago
    True, but they still don’t have as much influence on local government as much as more affluent residents. The prime example would be Palo Alto. It’s the NIMBY capital of the world. Even Stanford University has trouble with development on land that they own.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      That is mostly their fault for not voting (renters are less likely go vote and thus don't matter). Also their fault for not realizing property tax that the landlord pays comes from rent or lack of maintenance (complex because supply and demand sets rent prices, so tax is a second order effect)
      - 5y ago

bosie 5y ago

Increasing housing increases demand on alot of other resources (medical, kindergarten, streets, public transport, schools,...). how do you orchestrate such a rise in demand in a densely populated city like san francisco quickly (dense in the sense of non-used land, not by population)?

walkhour 5y ago
> kindergartens, schools and medical offices. Where exactly do you think schooling and medical practices happen or children are taken care of? >Public transport How hard is to coordinate to double the number of trains or buses? > Streets I don't know what you mean by the demand of streets increases. Most times solving the housing problem is a lack of will or coordination, and the solution is muddled/deleted/delayed indefinitely by arguments like this.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  And alot of times, especially with mass transit, there are economies if scale. So it's even more efficient with higher population.
- bosie 5y ago
  > Where exactly do you think schooling and medical practices happen or children are taken care of? in close vicinity of the housing. not sure i understand the question. > How hard is to coordinate to double the number of trains or buses? running a bus during peak hours at twice your current rate (unless the rate is completely ridicilous) does not sound easy. why do you assume it is? at that rate, for SF at least, you are talking subway. by streets i meant the higher volume during peak hours that need to be sustained (walking, cycling, driving, busses, trams, parking etc).
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    "running a bus during peak hours at twice your current rate (unless the rate is completely ridicilous) does not sound easy" The 14R (the fastest bus from my home to downtown SF) is scheduled to run every 10 mins (on average) during the morning peak. Running that bus every 5 mins (which presents no special difficulty) would double the capacity, and reduce average wait time by 5 mins.

nemo44x 5y ago

I think some people find it frustrating to see that the system does in fact work; that the narrative they’ve chosen to believe is just cynical and wrong. That a person on a house cleaners income can find a way to own property in SF as well as around the country. And be good about it by finding properties that need some love and investing in them. I thought it was a great story about a person that saw the vast opportunities in front of them and used a bit of grit and smarts to make happen the future they wanted.

bradlys 5y ago
lol - did you not look at the prices they were dealing with? They bought an apartment building with friends and their share of the mortgage was only $900/month - half of which was shared with their partner. $900/month is a joke - even for back then. They bought land with cash that was even remotely near SF as well - unfathomable now. This person bought before prices in SF were so above and beyond what anyone near that level of income could ever afford. This is just survivorship bias mixed with a bit of “I did it during a time when prices were nowhere near what they are now”. Story sucks because it’s not a story of grit and smarts. It’s a story of unrepeatability.
- stevehawk 5y ago
  You're not wrong that they did it during a better time. But the move to get a bunch of friends to essentially move in and take over an apartment building and then buy it (in a non-forced manner) was pretty clever.
  - bradlys 5y ago
    I think my issue with that is that it’s not going to be easy to do in the current market. Back then - it was more doable. They were able to buy under market value (when that likely wasn’t very much to begin with) and manage the loan with each other. Now where each person needs to make $250k+ to afford buying the apartment - you’re getting into territory where you’re unlikely to find people who want to buy that apartment and move into one whole place with you. Maybe it’s doable but the virtue of it being so expensive and the incomes required being so high means that it’s very unlikely to be reproducible unless you only associate with very high income people and those people also like apartments. I find high income folks generally want to move away from apartments as they age and they want to do so at a much faster rate than someone in a much lower income bracket would.

bradlys 5y ago

Main thing I see people attacking this guy over is the “I did it and so can you” mentality more than anything. It’s survivorship bias at its strongest. No different than the FIRE post trending here as well. Dude literally saw his NW double in a year and income go up 50% cause of stock appreciation. Along with incredible starting salary and overall close to top tier comp the entire way - and no kids or what not. I think people just really hate these “stories” because it’s not realistically repeatable. Someone will make it happen but it’ll be based off luck and nothing else. Even the dude in the fire thing wishes he did startups for 6 years. Mindlessly ignoring he’d get paid way less but oh wait - of course his story would only be posted if he joined a company that IPO’d and he got 8 figures out of it. It’s just so annoying to see this shit on HN all the time. It’s some weird capitalism fetishism porn.

more_corn 5y ago
Living below your means is repeatable (and desirable). Riding a bike instead of driving a car is repeatable (and beneficial). Buying land and building a house, buying distressed property and carefully investing time and money to rehab it… all repeatable. All things that benefit society. This isn’t capitalist fetish porn.
jfengel 5y ago
HN is part of a Silicon Valley venture capital incubator. It exists to be capitalism fetish porn.
aww_dang 5y ago
>"I did it and so can you" What is the antithesis here? "You won't succeed, so don't bother trying. Become an employee, rail against capitalism and wage slavery." Dismissing it as luck can only work if the author succeeded on the first try. Did everyone succeed on the first try? Before it can be called "survivor's bias", you need to survive. If you croak at the first unforeseen and perhaps unfair hardship... What is missing from many of these stories are the concepts and ideas which were eliminated by failure or analysis. It would be unusual for the first idea that pops into someone's head to come to successful fruition. Maybe it would be illustrative if the author listed all of his failed endeavors and how he reasoned his way through them. Undoubtedly, it would make for much longer-form content and perhaps ramble off-track from his chosen subject. Persistence is an unspoken companion to what you flippantly dismiss as luck. Trial and error, iterative improvements and self-sacrifice are also key ingredients. Of course, you don't need to listen to that. It is much easier to lay blame than manifest the change you wish to see.

halpert 5y ago

I've looked into moving to Japan. My family has a house in Setagaya, which had severely distorted what I thought Tokyo living to be. It turns out, a typical one bedroom apartment is like 20 sq meters. Separate from that, I don't believe zoning has anything to do with housing shortages. Housing has "induced demand" similar to traffic. You can look at heavy traffic over a bridge and think, "if only we had another bridge, that would alleviate the traffic." But it turns out, when you do that, more people end up using both bridges and traffic becomes as bad as it was before. Housing is similar. If you build more houses, even more people want them. Look at places like NYC, which has extremely dense housing. It's still expensive.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago
Houston's housing isn't expensive though. It has few zoning laws and is not land constrained though (unlike NYC or SF).
- mauvehaus 5y ago
  There's also an awfully short list of places in the US that sprawl more than Houston. I'm not arguing that sprawl is inherently bad, but it definitely does add the need to own a car (for most people) and spend a lot of time in it (ditto).
Nelkins 5y ago
This is absolutely wrong. Pretty much every single piece of evidence we have shows that zoning has a massively impactful effect on the supply of housing. Similarly, the vast majority of studies looking at the issue show that induced demand doesn't occur for housing (that is, adding housing supply does lower prices, rather than simply causing people to consume more). With regard to NYC, even though it has added around 250-300K housing units over the past fifteen years or so, it has added around three times that in jobs. If housing supply isn't increasing in line with people, you will see increases in prices. Some links: - https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-cast-induced-demand-housing https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-cast-in... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w - https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/supply-skepticism-housing-supply-and-affordability https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/supply-skepticism-ho... - https://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/SOC_2017_FOCUS_Changes_in_NYC_Housing_Stock_1JUN2018.pdf https://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/SOC_2017_FOCUS_Changes_i... (the key quote here being: "In 2016, NYC had 8.2 percent more housing units, 11 percent more adults, and 16.5 percent more jobs than it did in 2000.")

kilna 5y ago

Capitalism inherently exploits economically unequal systems, and thus incentivizes them in both the private and public sectors (especially in the US where politicians are basically owned outright[1]). So, yes, it is "companies"... or more specifically, large wealth-owned profit-takers, that are the root cause of the supply-demand curves AND the zoning AND all of the other contributing factors. The fact that there are different sets of capitalists (rent and investment exploiters versus labor exploiters) who have varying influence on politicians is secondary to the fact that the politicians are primarily if not solely doing the bidding of capitalists. Attempts at corporate externalizing of risk happen in multiple contradictory directions, thus causing inconsistent public policy. Regardless, privatized-profit motivated externalization of public risk is the core problem. GDP-centric increases in productivity mean precisely fuckall for working class quality of life until we solve for the fact that the entirety of increased productivity gains have gone to the wealthy in the past 5 decades[2]. I do think as a society we should build more affordable housing in densely populated areas, but allowing capitalists to hold the reins for that would accelerate all of the problems of late stage capitalism. Lastly, Japan has succeeded where others have failed because of a cultural difference which highly values new builds over old homes. They dispose of their homes and rebuild, as often as the US disposes of old cars and builds replacements... So political leverage by real estate investors is less of a concern there, a 30 year old home might be considered close to worthless. At the same time it creates other risk externalization problems like a colossal amount of inefficiency and waste. The only way to get a similar result of reasonable pricing in urban areas where real estate is profit-driven as opposed to use-driven, would be though affordable public housing as a counterbalance. We've seen time and again that capitalist housing development will naturally result in more capitalist-driven inequality. Investors will continue to buy making the bubble worse, then when the bubble pops the rich buy even more stock as disproportionately middle class and poor investors are forced to liquidate, as happened in the 2008 bust. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig [2]:https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16112368/piketty-saez-zucman-income-growth-inequality-stagnation-chart https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/8/16112368/pi... (or the same chart any of dozens of places)