Seattle Socialists Strangle Golden Goose

[Kath]

So I read (somewhere in this thread,) that Seattle is not allowing new building permits, which is keeping the housing prices artificially high. The reason cited is that those with the higher paying jobs keep lobbying/bribing Seattle to keep new building from happening.

Is there any truth to this?

Proper zoning balance is one of the key functions a city government performs, IMO.

[Speaker to Animals]

It seems to me that as lower-earning workers are priced out of the city proper, they simply have to endure a commute. Most are willing to endure the commute, so there's no problem.

Now, suppose we reach a point where no one is willing to commute into Seattle for a minimum wage job? What happens at this (not yet reached) point? I suspect the following:

1. The market forces employers in Seattle to raise worker wages until they are willing to endure the commute required to get to downtown Seattle. This is the best option, letting the market forces play out to the benefit of worker wages.

2. The minimum wage jobs become automated - possible for some but not all jobs. Middle of the road results. Losing jobs is bad, but in the short termthere's the buying of automation equipment and a few jobs recouped from maintenance on automated systems.

3. The local government starts playing god with housing and decides to divy it up according to who they think should have it. This is the worst, and most economical wasteful approach. Human councils picking winners and losers has never performed nearly as efficiently as price driven markets. Not suprisingly, this approach is a favorite among liberals and progressives.

Those strike me as the three most likely avenues of response to high-paying jobs displacing lower-wage earners.

(1) You start hitting shut down conditions for most small businesses.

(2) We are not anywhere near automating all of the service industry. We will automate half of software engineers and IT workers before we finally automate the entire service industry. I was writing code generation AI more than ten years ago. For AI, what humans consider high-level work is actually easy. That's just knowledge engineering for expert systems, code generation, machine learning, etc. The hard stuff is all the little things we take for granted. Imagine all that goes into a little kid catching a ball in the outfield. That's actually harder than automating medical diagnoses.

[Speaker to Animals]

So I read (somewhere in this thread,) that Seattle is not allowing new building permits, which is keeping the housing prices artificially high. The reason cited is that those with the higher paying jobs keep lobbying/bribing Seattle to keep new building from happening.

Is there any truth to this?

Proper zoning balance is one of the key functions a city government performs, IMO.

This is true. But they are zoning and cutting deal with corporations in an effort to drive up their city revenue with disastrous longterm consequences. How do you convince democrat politicians at the city level they should forgo the short-term gains they get in revenue from cutting a deal for a new high-tech campus that will allow them to create more gibs programs for the have-nots and entitlements for their union workers? This is a democracy problem at the core.

[DBTrek]

You make a solid point for small businesses going under, StA - but I’d point out the rising property values, plus rising property taxes, plus a plethora of city taxes levied specifically against businesses, is every bit as detrimental to their survival as having to raise wages to attract displaced workers.

Seems like a wash.
Lose-lose

[PartyOf5]

That’s not a problem to be fixed, that’s how markets work.

Sadly the markets are a problem that needs to be fixed in the eyes of progressives.

[PartyOf5]

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/16/pf/buyi ... index.html

The city also has strict regulations when it comes to building apartment and condos, and 70% of the land mass in the city is zoned for single family homes, according to Matthew Gardner, chief economist at Windermere Real Estate.

"We aren't very dense at all," he said.

Well, some of you are dense.

[DBTrek]

As I’ve been alluding, and Fife has been plainly stating, the vast majority of this crisis is government inflicted. For years we’ve watched so-called government solutions merely exacerbate the issue at tremendous cost to the taxpayer.

... and what are progressives offering today? MORE government “fixes”.

How many years must an approach fail before its proponents accept that their approach is failure? In Seattle the answer is “obviously more than ten years”.

[Ph64]

As I’ve been alluding, and Fife has been plainly stating, the vast majority of this crisis is government inflicted. For years we’ve watched so-called government solutions merely exacerbate the issue at tremendous cost to the taxpayer.

... and what are progressives offering today? MORE government “fixes”.

How many years must an approach fail before its proponents accept that their approach is failure? In Seattle the answer is “obviously more than ten years”.

Standard progressive logic.

"We saw a problem and threw money and beaurocracy at it, it got worse... we need more money and beaurocracy to 'fix' it."

[JohnDonne]

In regards to your "solution" of letting the homeless rot, it seems like such a good idea that it'd probably work in a lot of other areas. Hospitals could boast of having healthier patients if they admitted only the physically well, and left the sick ones to die. Public schools could boast of only smart students if they didn't enroll stupid kids. There's a lot of potential in this way of dealing with problems.

Ahhhhh yes, that red-hot leftist rage when they confront the truth - their "policies" are a billion dollar fraud that fail to improve on doing nothing.

Ouch, right?

Like . . . even preschoolers could probably improve something with a billion dollars. Not progressives though. You give them a billion dollars to improve homelessness and they'll give you MORE homeless.

By the way, I didn't say let the homeless rot. Doing "nothing" would have still left emergency services and all the other pre-existing homeless services we had in place while simultaneously keeping the homeless numbers lowers and saving the city a billion bucks. How bad is a political ideology when it can't even improve on "nothing" with $1,000,000,000?

Pretty bad.

DBTrek plays this shell game a lot.

When he's wrong about affordable housing, when it turns out the affordable housing fund is accounted for and is actually getting homeless people off the street, he forgets the 20 million dollar tax, and switches to the billion dollars that "didn't improve things."

Then he says he would have "done nothing" yet left all the other "pre-existing services we had in place" that "kept the homeless numbers low."

Never mind that the affordable housing fund, ER care, and pre-existing services are all a part of that billion dollars he claims did nothing.

So which is it Trek? Was all the billion wasted or was some of it a success? Which services?

If affordable housing is the only part of the budget that actually gets the homeless off the street, why are you against that and for the pre-existing homeless services that no doubt attract more homeless people?

Are you aware that homelessness in Seattle was already increasing 30 percent every five years, whether they built affordable housing or not?

[DBTrek]

Lots of innuendo, baseless assertions, misdirections, etc. no results. Thanks for playing JD, we’ve already debunked your multiple attempts at justifying government waste countless times.

Come back when you have new talking points.
Zzzzzz