The idea that when you buy a house, that you’re somehow paying for your neighbourhood/city to perpetually remain in a state that personally satisfies you is behind most of our housing problems. Enabled by the almost universal dysfunctionality of local democracy.

In SF's case the external pressure just was to huge and they should have given up long time ago keeping it a low built city.

Yeah, and why bother making the country a mess by letting foreigners into your country?

People moving for opportunity is a fundamental part of what America is. To deny others opportunities that you have by virtue of birthplace is nativism, and it's ugly.

Sure, it sounds relatively harmless when it's "just your town", but you can look at the bay area and see what happens when everyone behaves this way for their neighborhood or city. Massive rents, struggling families, hideously long commutes: all the result of NIMBYism.

I mean, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? And unless you’re a proponent for open borders, you advocate a similar position - just a different scale. I’m also not really a fan of the “deny others opportunities” grandstanding. I mean you do it right now. I bet someone wants the job you have. Why not give your money away so others have opportunities? It’s easy to talk the talk with that. We all, by nature of our global system, deny others opportunities. The Swiss deny me an opportunity to move to Switzerland since I don’t have a million bucks. New Zealand requires me to invest half a million. Canada has a points system for immigration.

> People moving for opportunity is a fundamental part of what America is. To deny others opportunities that you have by virtue of birthplace is nativism, and it's ugly.

Well, like towns, you shouldn’t expect the idea of America to not change. There is like 350mm people here. Personally I think that’s plenty and the Statue of Liberty mindset just reminds me of 2nd Amendment arguments. I don’t want to end up like India, China, or Bangladesh with crowds and crowds of people (whether they are here due to immigration or birth). I think the US is overpopulated as it is. My idea of America is a lot of untamed wilderness, clean air, national parks, peace and quiet. Increases on population don’t really fit my vision (but that’s mine).

> Massive rents, struggling families, hideously long commutes: all the result of NIMBYism.

And this isn’t solved by building skyscrapers and having more people. It’s solved by having fewer people and jobs less concentrated in specific areas.

PG talks about taboo topics. Population is one of those I think, for me. I feel uncomfortable saying anything about it publicly, and I feel as though people have largely been indoctrinated that growth=good and you shouldn’t challenge that. I really just don’t see the value in adding more and more people to the US (birth or immigration). If we could have fewer, better educated people and less wealth disparity this could be an even better place to live. Imagine getting rid of jobs that people don’t want to do and then paying people a lot more money to do jobs they do want to do? Pay a barista $100,000/year instead of two business analysts making $50,000. It’s not like we’re going to add enough jobs to keep up with the pace of growth, unless we add mind-numbing bullshit jobs or create another TSA.

But I think the whole raison d'être for everything here in this tiny post is that our economy is built on a growth model. It’s a huge Ponzi scheme (in function not intention), so if we don’t increase the population or increase global population and sell to them, the whole thing falls apart. But it’s also this growth mindset that’s destroying the pristine wilderness we have, causing global warming, and contributing to nonsense wars and terrorism.

I don't know about TulliusCicero, but I agree with their comment and I think open borders would probably be good. The US's historically high levels of immigration have been very positive for the country and I think we could let more people in.

> My idea of America is a lot of untamed wilderness, clean air, national parks, peace and quiet

The US is enormous, and people who want to move here are primarily interested in living in the major cities. If we allow building dense cities we can easily continue to have very large fractions of the country set aside as wilderness.

> If we could have fewer, better educated people and less wealth disparity this could be an even better place to live.

You're only considering the interests of the people who already live here. Keeping people out doesn't make fewer people, just fewer people here, just like it doesn't decrease wealth disparity only wealth disparity here. Lots of people around the world would love to come here and have the same opportunities we have. I think we should generally let them.

My take on that is that it’s a naive, anarchist position. I’m also unsure that anyone can anticipate the potential downsides as well. I see so many problems it’s hard to even get a start. And it’s not about not letting in “bad” people, but that infrastructure would be absolutely overwhelmed and it would be an unmitigated disaster. We wouldn’t have like a couple million more people moving in, it would be tens, maybe hundreds of millions. They all won’t fit in NYC and SF - they’ll move to Columbus, and Pittsburgh, and they’ll move to suburbs, and shanty towns. I just don’t see positives outweighing negatives unless we really just skyrocket prices - but on a macro level that’s no different than how things are.

To me it’s like putting your oxygen mask on before you help someone else. We can’t even solve problems in this country now. But I do imagine mega corps would love this since they’d have a much higher pool of workers, and an expanded market that is easier to get access to, which kind of gets back to my last point about growth-mindset.

> You're only considering the interests of the people who already live here. Keeping people out doesn't make fewer people, just fewer people here, just like it doesn't decrease wealth disparity only wealth disparity here. Lots of people around the world would love to come here and have the same opportunities we have. I think we should generally let them.

I appreciate your comment but I don’t think it’s a fair one. To start, I think GLOBAL population is far too high, and I’d apply the same principles to the US that I am suggesting but globally, but we were talking about the US. I also think that this is a case where it’s easy to say “oh but if they only had the opportunity” because it sounds great while also ignoring how it affects others. Generally I don’t think we should let people in to the US, because it doesn’t really solve any problems. It certainly doesn’t help the rest of the world. Am I lucky that I was born here? You bet. But that’s it. I’m also lucky to not be born with a disability, I’m also not lucky since I wasn’t born wealthy.

The last point I’ll add is that the vast majority of the world disagrees with open-borders and I think for good reason. Even the most liberal countries (broadly speaking) don’t do it.

Thanks for your discussion points here. I’d love to hear more of what you think - and I hope what I said doesn’t come off too poorly. It’s hard with text and not in-person.

Modern USA was created by migrants. But when the country was being settled, those migrants were faced with having to either provide for themselves, or die. The US has also seen a lot of growth from continuing to import immigrants. But those immigrants were all selected based upon a relatively strict criteria to evaluate whether they would be providing value to the country.

> Why bother make your town a mess in the name of growth.

Local government elections don’t have any influence over population growth. The forces that influence that are beyond the control of local government (and to a lesser extent, beyond the control of government in general). If the local population increases, the only thing local government can control (in relation to housing) is what choice it makes between preserving character or prices. The typical NIMBY response to dealing with population growth is that it should happen elsewhere, because they like where they live, and don’t want it to change.

That’s true on matters of zoning, schools, libraries, fire stations, or whatever other decisions the town faces. There’s a process for amending zoning rules; there’s usually a process for getting a variance from zoning rules that are unduly burdensome in regards to an individual parcel. What about this democratic process is dysfunctional, other than some people not liking the outcome?

Solving the political problem is much harder.

My initial quip was to point out that (as I suspect @anonymoushn was alluding) the problem isn't technological. Rather it's one of incentives, politics, and market structure.

This is a problem of policy and social engineering - technology can and will help, but it won't solve it.

https://about.google/locations/?region=asia-pacific&office=s...

Does anyone know what proportion of their workforce is not in California?

A question to Googlers and those who have worked there, is it possible to move to say Boulder within Google easily?

Pay depends enormously on the local market for your skills. NYC and Boston pay almost as much as Mountain View, while (ex) London pays much less. People moving between offices are often offered large increases/decreases. A strategy of joining in Mountain View and then transferring to a lower-paying office isn't generally going to give you much higher pay at the new office (though you'll of course have the money you put away while in Mountain View).

(Speaking only for myself)

I think it's about half.

> is it possible to move to say Boulder within Google easily?

Reasonably. You need to find a team at the other office that has openings for someone with your skills, but I know many people who have done it (Mountain View -> Cambridge, NYC -> Seattle, Cambridge -> Pittsburgh, Mountain View -> Boulder among others).

Surely the locals already have their houses in KC and would benefit more than they'd suffer, as renters, sellers, shop owners.

(See Auckland as well)

It also raises prices which means local shops and places to eat would be booming.

But if they're a local and not getting one of these high paying jobs ... they're going to have a hard time finding a place they can afford.

In the short term, sure, but there's plenty of room in KC.