So, Bone, teasing apart your arguments, there seem to be 2 arguments you are making.
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Programs to make “housing affordable” artificially (like NYC’s rent control) distort markets and are frequently corrupt anyways.
I think *some* of the posters in this thread agree with you here.
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“I happen to have an early stake in a pyramid scheme and my stake has doubled in under a decade. So this is awesome for me financially and terrible for everyone but the small group of people like me.”
Basically everyone disagrees with you here.
Some of the best tech jobs in the country are in the Bay Area. From someone who doesn’t live in the Bay Area, but the tech field I am interested in is heavily concentrated there, from my perspective this housing scam is just a scam. It’s a way to steal most of the money I’d be working 60 hours a week to earn - or most of my free time. Money or time, lose-lose.
Because either I’d have 30% of my income burning away in rent (and get hit with high taxes on top of that), something like 30% of my waking free time wasted in commuting, or if I could buy,
a. Housing prices cannot inflate forever. There are limits, specifically as to the rent a property can command. It’s possible they are already near the max they will ever reach. At current prices, thousands of businesses and jobs are leaving yearly.
b. Unlike you, simply for coming later, I’d be forced to pay double the taxes. Why should you get to pay half taxes because you moved somewhere earlier? What entitles you to this unequal treatment?
And, here’s another counter-argument. Other people have mentioned dealing with the problem at a state level.
There's a *national *security and national economy angle here. In general, the well being of a country is higher if it's more efficient at producing things that other countries value. Present thinking is that Artificial Intelligence is *the* most important product a country can produce, period, and it's the most valuable thing human beings will ever make.
It seems there is an enormous network effect to having a "tech hub" with the right policies in place. You need all the top tier companies in one place, with a good climate, with labor policies that ban non-compete and poaching agreements. You need reasonable taxes, you need weed and other drugs to be legal, you need a good transit grid, etc.
Corruption in the building permit system is preventing the most valuable and productive part of the entire United States from growing as fast as it should. The way it should work is this :
It should be legal for developers to install any density of commercial or residential structure, anywhere they want, so long as the building/tenants aren't emitting air pollution or high noise levels.
Municipalities should be able to charge a density tax nonlinear to the density of a building, and should be required to upgrade the infrastructure with the money through some form of federal incentive system. They should be able to charge a higher tax for buildings that are isolated - lone skyscrapers are obviously harder to upgrade the infrastructure around than n+1 skyscrapers around the city core.
That is, efficient land utilization would look like a neat 2d bell curve, with the highest buildings in the center and the best transit links between them. (because the owners of the buildings pay for those links). And as you get farther from the core of a city the heights get smoothly lower and lower. Residences would be interspersed smoothly with offices so that in many cases it would be possible to rent an apartment within a few floors of the same building where you work.
Rents, since this is a free market, would mainly just scale up and down with density costs. The only reason it would cost more to live in the center of the city is because those 100+ story skyscrapers cost more per square foot to construct. So rents would be perhaps 50-100% higher there simply because the building you are living and working in is made of stronger and more expensive stuff.