For a lot of people on HN, "making a living" means owning property in a VHCOL area.

anigbrowl 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.

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_DeadFred_ 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth.

I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life.

I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.

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bloppe 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue NIMBY policies to restrict the housing supply to keep prices as high as possible. Most of the tech workers actually moving to the Bay Area and renting would much prefer a massive increase in the housing supply to bring prices down.

California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1]

Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else.

[1]: https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-...

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_DeadFred_ 11 hours ago | parent [-]

My example is representative of EVERY person I grew up with that didn't come from generational wealth. I guess if their parents died when they were young of a fluke you would consider them lucky, but what's the average lifespan for someone in the area? Everyone I knew would rather have had the option to live/raise a family in their home town than inherit a million dollar home in their 50s after they had to start a new life they didn't pick.

You can write paragraphs about how displacing people is fair, how kicking grannies out of their homes and auctioning them off because of tax debt (something that was happening) is the moral way. But you are still just talking around displacement of people to reach your desired end goal.

	▲	bloppe 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A functioning economy is full of these tensions between people with divergent "desired end goals". Everybody wants high home prices when they want to sell but low home prices when their kids want to buy. Everybody wants low prices for things but high wages for people, even though those things are inversely correlated. I'd bet many of the parents you're talking about voted for NIMBY policies and cheered the tech industry's rise. Of course they would. If I'd owned a house in the bay, I'd have been pretty jazzed about it too. I'm not pro-displacement. I'm pro-housing, which we need much more of in SF.

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WarcrimeActual 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Correct. This is a space occupied disproportionately by spoiled rich nepo or otherwise kept silver spooned babies.

	▲	14 hours ago \| parent [-]
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