<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>ProfessorLayton</author><text>&amp;gt; do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once?&lt;p&gt;Yes, we absolutely should. I live in a tract house&amp;#x2F;neighborhood from the 40s in the East Bay, which is a cookie cutter house that was constructed en mass, and was cheap (For the time) &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; high quality. I believe the house was initially purchased for something like ~8k (~140k in 2019 money), but it is worth &lt;i&gt;many more times than that&lt;/i&gt; solely because no more housing has been built en mass since the war.&lt;p&gt;We should of course move onto building multifamily homes, and away from the mess SFH suburbia created, but the principle remains the same: More housing availability pushes down prices for everyone.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Pfhreak</author><text>Building new buildings still displaces people, and in many cases the new buildings do not replace the existing affordable units with an equivalent number of affordable units. Even if they do keep parity, the people need to be moved out (and moved around) for years, and finding section 8 housing can be a challenge. Moving can be costly and exhausting.&lt;p&gt;Even if you do move back into the same neighborhood after construction is complete and your rent isn&amp;#x27;t impacted too much (which is not a super common outcome), it&amp;#x27;s likely the community around you has changed. Gentrification increases the costs of basic food, clothing, and other resources in your area. You&amp;#x27;re local diner might be replaced with a wagyu beef slinging $15 hamburger joint. It&amp;#x27;s doing brisk business, but you can&amp;#x27;t afford to eat there. Your old dinged and dented grocery store or market stall is now a fancy Whole Foods.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not to say it&amp;#x27;s impossible to build or improve neighborhoods, but it&amp;#x27;s also not so easy as &amp;#x27;just build more on top of existing units.&amp;#x27; The disruption and displacement of hundreds or thousands of lives for years is significant.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a healthy debate around how best to deal with this -- do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once? Do we try to preserve the residency of the people currently living there and build up opportunistically? Do we try to decommodify housing altogether to remove the incentives that lead to this situation? (If we priced housing based on how well it provided housing, rather than based on what the market would bear, we&amp;#x27;d see a different sort of situation, I&amp;#x27;d imagine.) I dunno, maybe the combination is all three.&lt;p&gt;I highly, highly recommend this youtube playlist which works through these sorts of things using Cities Skylines (which is a great city sim game): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&amp;amp;list=PLwkSQD3vqK1S1NiHIxxF2g_Uy-LbbcR84&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&amp;amp;list=PLwkSQD3vqK...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>LurkersWillLurk</author><text>Why should they? If you increase the supply of housing, it puts downward pressure on rent. Am I missing something?</text></item><item><author>Dakizhu</author><text>Even if they did vote, a lot of the politically active young renters oppose new development since they see it as gentrification or only enriching real estate  developers or only building luxury housing.</text></item><item><author>duxup</author><text>Along similar lines of thinking it would be really nice if the young people would vote as consistently as the old people.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m in between generations and watching the old vs young bickering &amp;#x2F; division is painful to see... but I&amp;#x27;ve also got a low tolerance for a lot of the &amp;quot;OMG boomers&amp;quot; stuff out there from folks who as a whole have a really poor voting record.   Get in the game people....</text></item><item><author>davidw</author><text>I guess that&amp;#x27;s to be expected when those parents are the ones going to all the planning commission and city council meetings to put a stop to the construction of housing.&lt;p&gt;The US builds more 3 car garages than 1 bedroom apartments: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.curbed.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;26&amp;#x2F;13423358&amp;#x2F;three-car-garages-us-apartments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.curbed.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;26&amp;#x2F;13423358&amp;#x2F;three-car-garages...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Report: Young adults more likely to live with parents than spouses</title><url>https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-the-american-household/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>opportune</author><text>Gentrification is a really complex issue, because on one hand it is objectively improving an area, and on the other, basically anybody without housing equity (ie a mortgage) in the gentrifying area gets screwed.&lt;p&gt;I think it needs to be solved at a macro level, in a way that is nuanced and delicate. Because on one hand, assuming the rest of the world doesn’t change, making an area nicer to live is objectively good. And upper middle class people deserve housing too, and landowners perhaps should have at least some level of control over what they do with their property (you can argue that landlording in general could be abolished, but that’s a separate discussion).&lt;p&gt;Of course on the other hand, it is a shame that poor people have to fight to keep their neighborhoods shitty so that they don’t get displaced to somewhere far away from their jobs and community.&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure if there’s a great economic solution that still involves a market housing economy. The least worst solution I can think of is to basically carve out special units for the exact people displaced. IE if I want to built a 300 unit condo tower in West Oakland taking up a whole block, I have to provide current-market-rate rents for all the people currently living in that block.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Pfhreak</author><text>Building new buildings still displaces people, and in many cases the new buildings do not replace the existing affordable units with an equivalent number of affordable units. Even if they do keep parity, the people need to be moved out (and moved around) for years, and finding section 8 housing can be a challenge. Moving can be costly and exhausting.&lt;p&gt;Even if you do move back into the same neighborhood after construction is complete and your rent isn&amp;#x27;t impacted too much (which is not a super common outcome), it&amp;#x27;s likely the community around you has changed. Gentrification increases the costs of basic food, clothing, and other resources in your area. You&amp;#x27;re local diner might be replaced with a wagyu beef slinging $15 hamburger joint. It&amp;#x27;s doing brisk business, but you can&amp;#x27;t afford to eat there. Your old dinged and dented grocery store or market stall is now a fancy Whole Foods.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not to say it&amp;#x27;s impossible to build or improve neighborhoods, but it&amp;#x27;s also not so easy as &amp;#x27;just build more on top of existing units.&amp;#x27; The disruption and displacement of hundreds or thousands of lives for years is significant.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a healthy debate around how best to deal with this -- do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once? Do we try to preserve the residency of the people currently living there and build up opportunistically? Do we try to decommodify housing altogether to remove the incentives that lead to this situation? (If we priced housing based on how well it provided housing, rather than based on what the market would bear, we&amp;#x27;d see a different sort of situation, I&amp;#x27;d imagine.) I dunno, maybe the combination is all three.&lt;p&gt;I highly, highly recommend this youtube playlist which works through these sorts of things using Cities Skylines (which is a great city sim game): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&amp;amp;list=PLwkSQD3vqK1S1NiHIxxF2g_Uy-LbbcR84&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&amp;amp;list=PLwkSQD3vqK...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>LurkersWillLurk</author><text>Why should they? If you increase the supply of housing, it puts downward pressure on rent. Am I missing something?</text></item><item><author>Dakizhu</author><text>Even if they did vote, a lot of the politically active young renters oppose new development since they see it as gentrification or only enriching real estate  developers or only building luxury housing.</text></item><item><author>duxup</author><text>Along similar lines of thinking it would be really nice if the young people would vote as consistently as the old people.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m in between generations and watching the old vs young bickering &amp;#x2F; division is painful to see... but I&amp;#x27;ve also got a low tolerance for a lot of the &amp;quot;OMG boomers&amp;quot; stuff out there from folks who as a whole have a really poor voting record.   Get in the game people....</text></item><item><author>davidw</author><text>I guess that&amp;#x27;s to be expected when those parents are the ones going to all the planning commission and city council meetings to put a stop to the construction of housing.&lt;p&gt;The US builds more 3 car garages than 1 bedroom apartments: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.curbed.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;26&amp;#x2F;13423358&amp;#x2F;three-car-garages-us-apartments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.curbed.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;26&amp;#x2F;13423358&amp;#x2F;three-car-garages...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Report: Young adults more likely to live with parents than spouses</title><url>https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-the-american-household/</url></story>