Adversity Creates Community

Hostile govt policy can build stronger communities!

Most of the US economy is hell-bent on making people as free and independent as possible. The market wants to give people anything they are willing to pay money for with as little friction as possible. This makes the earning and accumulation of wealth among the most important things you can do to maximize your ability to steer your life.

One of the biggest exceptions is housing in highly-regulated areas. Let me tell you the harrowing story of Berkeley housing, and the heart-warming story of community solidarity in the face of adversity.

Berkeley doesn’t want new housing. It both hard-limits what can be built, and state and local governments place dramatic extra costs on building which acts as a tariff on new housing.

To “fix” this problem, the government implements tax-discounts and subsidies to existing owners, and rent-control to existing renters. This doesn’t address the problem of not enough housing, but it does hide the problem among people already living here. This creates two major problems:

1. It’s very hard to find housing. The scarcity in supply means people can search for months for a place to live, sometimes over a year. There just isn’t much available, and finding what’s there takes a lot of work and some luck and often a lot of compromise. And tons of money. Just so much money.

2. Government price-controls mean the longer a property is held by one person, the more its price becomes unmoored from the wider market. It becomes a house-out-of-time, and extremely desirable. A house that’s been under a lease for ten years is drastically cheaper than that exact same place if it was to be rented out new today. No one wants to sell/buy either, because changing ownership would increase taxes dramatically and lose insurance-protections. (It’s financially preferable to rent a place held by someone else for a long time!)

A person on their own can only deal with this situation in one of two possible ways: accept a lower quality of life, or pay huge amounts of money to outbid everyone else.

But a significantly large-but-tight-knit community has another way to solve this: informally transfer ownership within the community without triggering formal change-of-ownership rules.

In the SF-Bay area, among a certain group of socially-aligned folks, it is known that if you are moving out of a house you do not simply end your lease. Instead you let everyone in the community know that soon this place will become available. This is mostly done by word of mouth. There are enough social events and group chats that if someone announces several months in advance, word will spread that a space is coming available. If a member of the community wish to move here (or change addresses within the Bay Area) they will only have to work things out with others in the community rather than competing against every human alive who wants to move to/in the area.

Likewise, if someone wishes to move they start asking around. “Hey, I’m looking for X bedrooms around Y location. Have you heard about anything coming open?” is a very common question. People are always looking out to help others in the community find housing when they can.

Holding housing for others in the community is an incredibly pro-social thing to do. Generally the search for housing takes hundreds of hours across many months. Being the beneficiary of someone else having already done that search and securing the lease is an INCREDIBLE boon. It creates social gratitude in the beneficiary. It provides some measure of social standing to the person who passed on the lease.

Access to this network increases the value of being a member in good standing in the community, and thus encourages pro-social behavior overall. It’s pretty good for landlords for the same reason, they don’t need to take a risk on an unknown quantity and can instead transfer a lease to someone who is already vetted by their community.

The greatest housing assets of all are long-term leases of large houses under a single name. I’m aware of at least two houses that have been held for over a decade and are currently under a single person, who lives in the house and subleases many rooms. They are able to lease rooms at extremely favorable rates due to government rent control. Their stewardship of a house is extremely valuable to the community in general and the housemates they select in particular. If the community was to lose one of these houses to the general market it would be a significant blow. It seems almost immoral to let these leases end. Yes, rent-control is a far greater evil. But we can’t change rent-control laws. We can work within them to keep some spaces for people who are important to us, and who we know are good.

It occurred to me when I first became familiar with the Bay Area housing environment that this is a modern recreation of ancient patterns. Humans banded together to support each other and survive in hostile environments. The more hostile an environment was, in ways that could be overcome via strong cooperation, the thicker and more intertwined a community became. We are a social species because independent life was impossible.

As the wonders of technology and capitalism made us less and less dependent on a community, we fragmented. No one needed anyone and we all became alienated. Then government reintroduced hostility into the environment, and once again humans did significantly better when they banded together to overcome that adversity.

Yes, Californian governance makes life materially worse for everyone in California. But it makes it spiritually better for those who are able to respond to this by becoming a beautiful, interconnected organism that cares for its members. It seems crazy to say this but…… it just might be worth it.