It's always interesting to me how many people think they have a right to live in a specific location. It's a strange mental model that I haven't fully grasped.

"I have a right to live here" is to me a less bizarre claim than "I have a right to impose a height limit on the neighborhood I live in" or "I have a right to tie up housing stock and keep it empty at the cost of disrupting other people's lives."

Honestly "I have a right to impose a height limit on the neighborhood I live in" is the closest to reasonable IMO. The citizens of a place should be able to shape the place they live in.

Would you be okay if it was allowed to vote that someone you don't like can't live in the neighborhood? By imposing height restrictions, you end up doing just that.

It's more interesting to me how many people think money should, and inevitably will, trump all other interests.

Maybe if you're a 20-something programmer uprooting your entire life to live somewhere else after decades in a location because financial pressures outside your control make your home and everywhere near it impossible to afford that's not such a big deal.

But for fuck's sake, think about this for a second. Most people do have things rooting them to a particular location. Maybe it's a social circle. Maybe it's support network. Maybe it's their career, or their children's schooling, or their health and the local climate.

At the end of the day we as a populace get to decide public policy. Taking people being priced out of their homes as fait accompli because them's the market breaks is heartless enough, but then saying disdainful things about just how painful and difficult it is is worse.

Here is the thing, there is only so much room for people. You are either saying "fuck you" to the young people of the community that want to get a house in the place they have roots, or you say "fuck you" to the people that can't afford to live there. I don't see how it's particularly fair for a person to feel entitled to an area they did not purchase property in over another that just didn't happen to be there as long.

> At the end of the day we as a populace get to decide public policy.

That's how we got to the NIMBY polices we have in many major metro areas and that has contributed in a major way to the financial pressures.

It's always interesting to me how people go to municipal government meetings and continually suggest that, on the one hand, jobs should be plentiful, while on the other hand, housing should be scarce.

If you have X jobs in city B and Y housing units, where X > Y, you have a tight housing market. If X >>> Y, then people can't even just double-up with roommates anymore.

I'm perfectly willing to talk about the moral trade-off involved in asserting that the born-and-bred residents of a city have a right to residence which they can assert over newcomers, to keep transplants out, but first we have to get the economic deadweight loss of insufficient housing supply off the damn table.

Build baby, build.

The eternal NIMBY conundrum. It'd be saner to bite the bullet and accept that they don't really want the jobs either; they just want the revenue, which means the _productivity_, which could be accomplished with the (relative) wages for _existing_ jobs.

They want to be rich without having rich-people problems (like too many new people moving to your hometown). I have a friend who works in city planning, and disturbingly enough, he told me the gentrification episode of South Park ("The City Part of Town") was completely realistic.

>You have plenty of places to live,

Two hours by car away from work? And that's with me living in a dense part of the country where it's easier to make a long commute like that?

I mean, come on, bother to admit that economic trade-offs exist. If demand for labor is greater than the supply of housing, you're going to have a difficult housing market, and that's before you account for bubble shenanigans like "ghost apartments" used as investments.

Remote work?

Two hours at every time of the day? Unusual shift times could help.

The problem is firms (managers) are not great at adapting to these new problems, instead they pump a lot more money into hiring (spending a lot on headhunters, recruiters, "technical sourcers" and so on), and then put a lot of money into the employee's hands and then they with the same smooth move put it into the landlords' pockets, which then goes to fuel the asset bubble.

We're a hardware and firmware shop. Our work equipment is a physical piece of silicon on my desk.

Yes, we could switch to a remote-work model, but that would make logistics significantly harder (some of the stuff we work with is proprietary and confidential) and destroy our terrific team spirit.

Could your company not be headquartered in Des Moines, IA? Chattanooga, TN? The list goes on of affordable non-1st Tier cities.

>Could your company not be headquartered in Des Moines, IA? Chattanooga, TN?

Well, some of our largest clients are at MIT and Brandeis Universities, so no, it couldn't. Network effects regarding availability of customers, expertise, and capital are a thing.

Then you've got to raise prices to support paying your employees enough to live in high cost locations. If they're not willing to pay rates to support that, then you can't offer the service (or you need to find employees who are willing to work in less than ideal work conditions like excessive commuting on personal time).

Market forces at work.

You do know that land cannot be moved, right? Were the geographical confines of the post lost on you? Places outside OP's city are irrelevant

Land doesn't need to move, people do. Geographical confines aren't walls. If you choose to live in a highly desirable location, it is going to be expensive. If it bothers you, deal with the tradeoffs of moving. If you don't like the tradeoffs, understand you are making a choice.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people mistake market trade-offs as deliberately engineered hardships (often by a cabal, in a kind of morality play) despite over 150 years of economics as a formal discipline explaining these emergent phenomena, albeit imperfectly. It's almost akin to possessing a pre-scientific belief in the thundering skies representing a god's wrath

It never ceases to amaze me how many people mistake political will for market trade-offs. Do you think we can't build tall apartment buildings with elevators in the vast majority of the United States, or do you think we pass laws against it because we prefer, for some reason, that even our cities should be basically suburban?

"Just build up" is not a simple, problem-free solution. The physical (gas, water, waste removal, transit capacity, etc.) social infrastructure (schools, police, hospitals, etc.) and more intangible desirables of urban planning (noise levels, green space, continuity of neighborhood design) don't just magically expand to fit the density. Maintaining the quality of life that will keep property values at least relatively stable (and thereby the tax valuations to maintain everything) does not necessarily rise linearly with the number of people you add, and when you have preexisting inefficiencies to work with when the original design wasn't done with the record urban population rates we're seeing now in a modern standard. There are plenty of urban slums around the world where people have space to live, if you can call that living. Now that's an extreme, but if you want to forge ahead and sacrifice some quality of life for everybody by upzoning, don't forget that the preexisting tax base also usually has the greater resources to move.

That's not to say we should never build, or find innovations and consider incentives to make urban living more accessible, but let's not pretend that easy answers without significant costs that others will tolerate idly while legislation eats into their self-interest.

Some people are also unaware that "just build up" isn't possible in some places due to geography. The downtown area of the city I live near can only support buildings between 6 and 10 stories tall. This is because solid bedrock is several hundred feet below ground. The buildings foundations aren't built on solid bedrock (which taller buildings absolutely need).