<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>arcticbull</author><text>Housing is literally exclusively a supply and demand problem. If you want rent to go down, allow more building. End of story. There&amp;#x27;s actually nothing else to it. Lower property values caused by an increase in supply will yield lower rents because rents are generally indexed to mortgage rates which are indexed to property values.&lt;p&gt;The problem is twofold.&lt;p&gt;1. Americans view property as an investment while also wanting it to be affordable. These are mutually exclusive. If you want something to be a good investment you want it to become less affordable over time.&lt;p&gt;2. Renters tend to be younger, transient, non-voters with weaker ties to the community. Landowners tend to be older, established voters with strong ties to the community. This means the city council panders to landowners, and they pass policies which prevent development.&lt;p&gt;SF is the worst for this, the city is basically unchanged since the 1970s to the absolute and sole benefit of landowners.&lt;p&gt;There are wonderful examples of cities which pretty much default-allow building housing, like Tokyo. Tokyo is &lt;i&gt;incredibly affordable&lt;/i&gt;, downtown starter-home&amp;#x2F;condos cost $200K USD, and people in Japan do not view property as an investment but rather as somewhere to live. More like a car.&lt;p&gt;Yes, prop 13 sucks, yes a land value tax is pointing in the right direction, yes rent control isn&amp;#x27;t helping, but none of these things are a substitute for the simple unit economics of supply and demand. Anything other than permitting tons of new building is at best a band-aid over a hole in the dam.</text><parent_chain><item><author>rcpt</author><text>Luckily a San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago so we don&amp;#x27;t have to wonder about this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more — constantly forcing down wages.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Advancing civilization tends to increase the power of human labor to satisfy human desires. We should be able to eliminate poverty. But workers cannot reap these benefits because they are intercepted. Land is necessary to labor. When it has been reduced to private ownership, the increased productivity of labor only increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of progress go to those who own land. Wages do not increase — wages cannot increase. The more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity to make anything at all.&lt;p&gt;A land value tax fixes our problems but Californians went and voted in Prop 13 which is about as far from that as you can get. &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.henrygeorge.org&amp;#x2F;pchp23.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.henrygeorge.org&amp;#x2F;pchp23.htm&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>GhostVII</author><text>San Francisco&amp;#x27;s solution to everything seems to be to just keep raising taxes, and throwing money at things which don&amp;#x27;t work. At some point you have to realize that more money isn&amp;#x27;t always the solution, you actually have to fix your beurocracy. It&amp;#x27;s insane to me that the city with so many rich people and incredibly valuable companies is such a mess, your telling me that a small city with an incredibly wealthy population can&amp;#x27;t figure out how to keep the tenderloin from being full of tents and open drug use? Or get some form of functioning public transit? Pretty pathetic.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-05/san-francisco-voters-approve-taxes-on-ceos-big-businesses</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>bhupy</author><text>A pet crusade of mine: California can pass a 100% (or close to that) land &lt;i&gt;appreciation&lt;/i&gt; tax (capital gains tax on land), and that wouldn&amp;#x27;t violate Prop 13. High land appreciation taxes are essentially indistinguishable from Georgist LVT. China taxes land appreciation between 30-60%.</text><parent_chain><item><author>rcpt</author><text>Luckily a San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago so we don&amp;#x27;t have to wonder about this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more — constantly forcing down wages.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Advancing civilization tends to increase the power of human labor to satisfy human desires. We should be able to eliminate poverty. But workers cannot reap these benefits because they are intercepted. Land is necessary to labor. When it has been reduced to private ownership, the increased productivity of labor only increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of progress go to those who own land. Wages do not increase — wages cannot increase. The more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity to make anything at all.&lt;p&gt;A land value tax fixes our problems but Californians went and voted in Prop 13 which is about as far from that as you can get. &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.henrygeorge.org&amp;#x2F;pchp23.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.henrygeorge.org&amp;#x2F;pchp23.htm&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>GhostVII</author><text>San Francisco&amp;#x27;s solution to everything seems to be to just keep raising taxes, and throwing money at things which don&amp;#x27;t work. At some point you have to realize that more money isn&amp;#x27;t always the solution, you actually have to fix your beurocracy. It&amp;#x27;s insane to me that the city with so many rich people and incredibly valuable companies is such a mess, your telling me that a small city with an incredibly wealthy population can&amp;#x27;t figure out how to keep the tenderloin from being full of tents and open drug use? Or get some form of functioning public transit? Pretty pathetic.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-05/san-francisco-voters-approve-taxes-on-ceos-big-businesses</url></story>