Part of which is playing out here where people of privilege are working out a story that allows them to displace an older population dependent on rent control so that they can get that housing.
But more importantly, I'm not sure what you mean by "people of privilege are working out a story that allows them to displace." As far as I can tell, what's happening is that landlords own property, and they see an opportunity to rent the property to someone who is willing to pay more. I'm not sure what "story" is being worked out by the new renter; by the time they find out about the property, it is already on the market.
The "story" built here and in other articles is the minimal believable tale that gets rid of current generally older tenants to make those units available for people with more money. To reach the front page of HN, it only needs to be believable to those who will benefit from its implementation. Not a very high hurdle and usually easily reach by hand waving some misunderstood "free market" juvenilia.
Which is convenient as they'd like to use their superior purchasing power to acquire nice SF apartments, and rent control blocks them from that goal. So it helps to have economics on your side, to a) make you feel better about yourself and b) to convince others to join your side.
Maybe in this case that's "right", but the fact that we are collectively upvoting the economics that helps us and not approvingly discussing some other economic theory about how importing low-wage software developers would boost the economy makes it political.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9246255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8884775
In either case, eliminating the malthusian constraints on housing are a solution to the problem.
See also this article on moreright illustrating how your view and mine are not strongly in opposition: http://www.moreright.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-tyran...
Wtf? How do you get to that conclusion when inequality has been growing for the last 40 years?
This is of course completely tangential to the main point, namely that they both can live in SF if we build more housing.
This conclusion doesn't follow from your premises, unless you include the hidden premise that more wealth in the world is the only criterion you're using.
Once you begin looking at things like wealth distribution or the like as measures of "better", your argument doesn't reach that conclusion.
But logic must take a backseat to ideology.
I could argue the exact opposite. The barista assists those who'd like to drink a cup of coffee and contemplate, and increasing contemplation creates a lot of value (intrinsic value) -- maybe not every barista, but this particular one does -- whereas the software developer writes programs that make soul-crushing economic activities more efficient, and so sucks away value from the world.
> The world is then better off.
Or worse off. It all depends on how you see value, which, naturally, is part of your personal value system. For example, in my opinion, a single crippled cat may create more inspiration for a great work of art than, say, Uber. I therefore see a single crippled cat (or any cat, for that matter) as making the world much better off than an inane ride-sharing smartphone app. I would venture to guess that you believe Uber is more valuable than a cat. You value efficiency, I value inefficiency (or, rather, freedom from efficiency); you value rational behavior while I value spite -- or freedom from rationality (not all the time, of course); you value freedom from the will of the masses, while I value freedom from the will of corporations.
BTW, are you a Dark Enlightenment believer? If so, I'd love to shoot you an email, if you don't mind.
You got that completely backwards. A developer can be productive during the commute. Given modern offices with their distractions, an hour commute each way can give a developer much needed time for design and analysis. The barista, on the other hand, does nothing productive while commuting.
As crowding rises the value of labor relative to land will fall, something very beneficial to the wealthy and harmful to the employed.
On a site where conjecture about immorality pills and "the singularity" abound, how is it supposed that population density can grow forever and everyone be better off for it? Mega-cities are the characteristic of the third world and they are paragons of failure. Or will SF uniquely continue to grow infinitely owing to killer apps and the innate superiority of its people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
Bangalore, Istanbul, London, Mumbai, NYC and Pune are all wonderful places and I'd be happy to live in any of them. Mumbai in particular is a place I actively plan to spend at least a year in. (I've already lived in NYC, London and Pune.) I can't say I love Delhi or Hyderabad, but you could certainly do worse.
By the standards of the west, Mumbai or Delhi certainly are "paragons of failure". That's the problem with living in a developing country. It's not a failure of density, the low density regions of India are vastly worse.
Indeed if mega-cities were a good thing then Pakistan, Nigeria and the Congo should be doing better than Japan. Excepting just 6 out of 84, your list thoroughly proves my point; over crowding correlates with societies with suppressed labor value.
And by the way, in spite of adding endless supply of housing, none of these cities have cheaper real-estate than the rest of their country.
If universal healthcare was a good thing then people in Rwanda should be more healthy than in the US. They aren't, so universal healthcare is bad.
Find the flaw in this argument and you'll find the one in yours.
84/100 mega-cites are in the third world.
I don't know how this could confuse you but feel free to google inductive reasoning.
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2013/2013-world-p...
As for the one I gave a negative opinion about, a big part of my dislike for Delhi is due to the lack of density - it's more suburb than city. Going from where I work/live (Pitampura) to the fun parts of town (South Delhi) takes 1-1.5 hours and the metro shuts off at ~11pm. (Other things I dislike are pollution, oily food, and the difficulty in finding a date.)
India almost certainly will be better off after people escape rural poverty and enter the middle class living in the cities. This process is happening rapidly and the results are good.
It's also beneficial to the unemployed who want to go to SF. Saying it's generally harmful to the workers is only true if you ignore those left out by the restrictions.
And as business expenses rise to cover the inflated cost of living (eg rent) there will be fewer and fewer jobs available (eg no unemployed teacher looks to San Francisco). And cost of living will rise with population density while wages fall. Also there are plenty of unemployed people in SF too namely the huge homeless population. As the real value of wages drop their numbers increase. Since calls here for justice and opportunities seems strangely focused on middle class people, I should ask how that new person's arrival would affect these other equally unemployed people.
If you believe in "market forces" then unemployment and low wages are not solved by adding more people. Indeed individuals would be happier and communities stronger if they were not often up rooted by market whims. Especially in old age. So the ideal solution for employment, wages and quality of life would not assume people are infinitely portable human resources.
I don't see how you justify this, and therefore the rest of the argument. What mechanism do you see that implies that increasing population density leads to higher costs of living?
I think you are falling into a third cause fallacy mistake. While there is certainly correlation between higher pollution density and higher living costs, it's not one that causes the other, but a third factor that causes both: wanting to move there.
The reason rents are higher is because people are willing to bid more to live in SF; preventing population density will do nothing to curb that desire. But it can reduce costs of living, by allowing rents to drop and therefore reduce the need to bid higher and higher.
If there is a theoretical supply and demand argument that building always drives down costs then there is a theoretical argument that excess supply of labor drives down the value of labor.
If there is an observational argument that large population densities do not lower wages then there is the observation that high density cities do not have low cost of living.
My claim is that the price of housing will rise to at least 30% of wages no mater how many or few units you have. If you really wanted to lower rent rather than shuffling around who is living where, you'd need enormously radical change to land ownership laws and incentives. The things that made the twentieth century unique in history for the relative wealth of ordinary people. Things now being reversed.
Another apparently impossible option would be to make other cites into bastions of free thinking diversity, tolerance and creativity so there would be innovation and demand to live there instead of fleeing them for the few cities that have those things and the wealth that comes with them.
But the path we're apparently going to follow, deregulation, which will do exactly nothing, could nicely degrade the character of one city after another which would reduce demand and that might slow price rise. It'd take surprisingly little to turn SF into another Huston. But don't expect the people with a choice to stick around a characterless city among a sea of less imaginative people looking just to get rich quick.
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/more-renters-find...
High prices is not beneficial to the wealthy, it's only beneficial to homeowners. A vast majority of tech workers in SF are renters, who can afford high rents but would nonetheless prefer them cheaper.
If you want to cap populations on cities, then do so explicitly and not through back-door means. Otherwise you have to let them ebb and flow as people desire.
That's sort of the problem though - "that" housing. If there were more housing, if it were not the zero-sum game that it is in SF, then it would be less of a problem.
The only question is which N-K people have a problem - this will be determined by economic and political processes.