I think the telling quote of the article is the last sentance which sums up his feelings on the current US situation
- "The situation that many in-demand U.S. cities find themselves in is an example of extreme “market failure,” which is what bureaucrats call regulatory failure; and is also extremely unnatural"
Basically he is saying that "bureaucrats" ineffectively regulated the market to the point of failure, or where the market could no longer compensate for the demand which causes a lack of affordable housing.
So I think he isn't calling for more / less regulation, but better slash more effective regulation that allows the market to operate.
I think it's more complicated than the author suspects.
This is not a US only issue. And it's not a developing nations-like issue (say rural to urban migration pattern).
We're seeing this in developed countries (with a few exceptions, Japan, but they also have the confounding declining pop factor). So, The UK, Germany, Sweden, China, many others are seeing similar issues to the US (SF is a special case exacerbated by politics, but I digress).
I think policymakers (and markets) have been caught off guard by this shift to the city, ironically, oftentimes, precipitated by a boom in technology and or technology rich companies, who, despite Marissa's observation, can afford and can work with a remote workforce.
This is a transformation that was not predicted. And, unless in s top-down government system (ala China, or Singapore) this kind of change in infrastructural usage change, takes multiple decades to adjust to.
You could make the case (not made in the article) that social policy is increasingly being shaped to favour _ownership_ over _contribution_. Interest rates are kept low, residential investment property is taxed favourably, agricultural land is heavily subsidised, planning/zoning is unreasonably tough, and so on.
The market doesn't can't correct because the working classes are losing their ability to afford property whilst ever-richer property owners are heavily incentivised to continually expand their portfolios.
I suppose, but also we have a lot more international wealth buying up real estate which often times goes under used.
With globalized, unrestricted open markets we get the new international wealthy buying real estate across borders which competes against local buyers.
So, in SF and Vancouver you're not only competing against transplants from the Midwest but with wealthy investors from China, India, and other countries where people for different reasons want to get their money out of their countries.
It's perfectly natural side effect of deliberately imposing extremely low costs on owning land. If something is valuable and untaxed (c.f. repeal of prop 13) then hoarding is inevitable, which will drive down supply.
Property developers don't want that of course, but they do want fewer regulations.
The article seems to make the case that when lots of people want to move to the same area, prices and density go up. I am unsure why this insight is worthy of the front page of Hacker News. Maybe I am missing something?
Not that it would be a bad thing just figuring out what is the take-away