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Re:Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning by Matticus_Rex on Saturday July 03, 2021 @12:26PM (#27722744)
You're confusing the incentives of all developers and people who might become developers collectively with the incentives of entrenched large players already existing in the market.

It's like in many industries; the interests of the group as a whole push towards deregulation, while the interests of the biggest, politically well-connected firms is to increase regulation that will be harder for competitors to deal with and will allow them to get or maintain a stranglehold over the market.

Re:Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning by Ericson2314 on Saturday July 03, 2021 @02:54PM (#27723869)
People in general lack the imagination to grow the pie too. Getting / keeping a big slice allows you lord it over others, and do so immediately.

A big lie spread under capitalism is that the wealthy and powerful actually like growth.

Re:Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning by lr4444lr on Saturday July 03, 2021 @06:34PM (#27725511)
Do you know why you're getting down voted? Because this "insight" flies in the face of reality: economic growth (despite arguably unfair distribution of it) has defined the last 150+ years of the most powerful nations on earth, aside from a few blips during a war period or brief speculative asset collapse.

The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.

Re:Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning by epistasis on Saturday July 03, 2021 @07:28PM (#27725877)
There are plenty of wealthy people that are more focused on maintaining relative position in the hierarchy than they are on increasing their absolute amount of wealth.

Prime example is oil wealth. With their massive coffers, fossil fuel companies could be leading the transition to renewable energy, massive increasing human wealth as they drive the cost of energy down and drive their former competitors out of business by acquiring all the new renewables startups that will become the large companies of the future.

Tech, and the HN crowd in general, pursues a strategy of generally increasing the pie size, of disrupting themselves before somebody else disrupts them. But that is not the case for the majority of the economy in developed countries. And in undeveloped countries it's painfully easy to see so many wealthy people maximizing their own position in society over maximally growing their wealth.

Re:Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning by Ericson2314 on Saturday July 03, 2021 @07:11PM (#27725775)
Sure, they like it when numbers in account books get bigger, but

Why are they NIMBYs when they could make much more money redeveloping their best-positioned neighborhoods as massive apartments they rent out?

Why did they not let wages grow, when the resulting increase in consumption will make them more profit?

If rich people as a class really were interested in max growth, they would have stayed Fordist-Keynesianist, but that did not happen. And indeed growth, while still present, hasn't been what it was in the past.