The only areas in California where housing is cheap are the Republican strongholds in the Central Valley...but lest you think that this implies it is because those Republican counties and districts are better at managing housing, I would remind you that almost no one wants to move to the hot, dry, San Joaquin Valley, they live there because they a) were born there, b) can afford to live there, c) etc. I say this as a native of those counties. This lack of demand, and the wide open spaces, keeps land and housing prices low without much effort.
edit: This is why I am really hopeful about remote work. So that people don't HAVE to live in high density housing.
The poor in dense, urban areas typically are Democrats. Out in the countryside, people have less exposure to information and less contact with a diverse community, making it easier for Republicans to instill false consciousness by whipping up fear of the other.
I could say the same thing about blacks in the cities, not very educated, no contact with white or hispanics or anything except from blacks and yet they vote democrats. Let's admit it, these days there is no correlation between rich vs poor and voting, the rich people in silicon valley mostly vote for democrats.
Erm, these areas have internet and go to school like anyone else. They're plenty exposed.
What does "instill false consciousness" mean to you? When I try to parse this sentence I get "make people incorrectly believe" maybe? I'm not clear on your meaning.
All in all, if I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that people are being tricked by a political party, yes? That being the case, it's definitely possible that you're right. I would suggest, however, that it appears much more likely that both major parties are playing that game.
I mean, I watched the last American president endure four years of accusations from his political rivals that he would start wars, persue extremist agendas, and be the destruction of his country. We were told that if he wasn't stopped, everything would go to hell in a handbasket. So he was stopped. Afterward, their candidate for presidency appears to be ushering his country to hell in a handbasket.
Seems like everyone is playing fast and loose with the truth anymore. I believe that's a pretty typical politician game.
Could it be that the people in dense urban areas have more exposure to propaganda and more contact with political commissars, making it easier for Democrats to instill false consciousness by whipping up fear of the other.
Or should we maybe try to avoid this kind of toxic rhetoric all together.
Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN, or take HN threads further into flamewar generally. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what is for.
If anyone has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is, and if you know a better way for HN to relate to political topics while fulfilling its mandate, I'd definitely like to know what it is. Just please familiarize yourself with the past explanations first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.
The proposal has been done before: add a "show/hide politics" option to the preferences, similar to the "show dead" option. Allow users to mark posts for being political, set this flag on a post once a threshold has been passed. Hide posts with the "politics" flag by default but do not shadowban users for political reasons - this ends up showing personal political bias and only worsens the problem. Users who do not mind political banter enable "show politics" in their preferences which makes these posts visible to them.
It is impossible to keep all politics out of the subject matter discussed on this site since there is a conscious effort to politicise everything, this is especially clear in "progressive" circles. Since it (for now) is also there where most tech development happens politics often come directly from the source.
Add the flag, allow users to mark posts and the problem is mostly solved - or at least it is out of sight for those who don't like these discussions and for those who visit the site without logging in. Trying to ban them altogether is futile since it nigh impossible to do without showing personal political bias.
There's no consensus about what is "political". The question "is X political or not" is just as hotly debated as the political conflicts themselves. Arguing about whether "X is political" becomes a proxy for arguing about X. Most users won't bother with a "mark story as political' button, but you know who will? All the politically passionate users. In other words a "mark as political" button would simply become a new weapon for warring sides.
Worse, once a story got marked 'political' and removed from some feed, the side that lost—i.e. that didn't want it removed—would come back to HN to complain about that, repost the story, and generally try to fight the battle on other fronts. We don't need any of this.
Even the users who wanted politics removed from their feed would be unhappy because they would eventually find out that lots of stories which they actually wanted to see, had been removed for being 'political'. Maybe they still want to read about topics like technical interviewing, or end-to-end encryption? Well, a lot of people believe strongly that those are political topics—and they have a point, since at minimum there's some political overlap there. It's not at all obvious how/where to draw this line. All you'd get by adding up a bunch of different opinions about where to draw it would be a line that satisfied no one. It would feel crazy and arbitrary, too, like an image of a face made from bits of lots of different faces.
The idea is tempting because it comes from a false assumption. It's easy to imagine that the question "is X political" would be answered in a way that approximately corresponds to your own feelings about what counts as political. In reality, it wouldn't; how people answer that question is intensely personal and, as I've explained, already intensely political. It is an egg out of which the entire political arena would eventually re-hatch. It's not a way to solve or avoid the conflicts we already experience—we'd just end up with the same fires, but burning in more places.
Ultimately, I'd say this is a variant of the principle that you can't solve human issues with technical mechanisms. It's tempting to try, because technical mechanisms are easy to add and human issue are hard to solve. But after a while the same human issues will re-express themselves, like how water erodes and works around obstacles. There's no substitute for the hard human work of relating to each other.
There's another aspect that I think is relevant here. It's part of HN's DNA that it's a non-siloed site. That is, people don't choose what/who to follow. Unlike Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.—which all have mechanisms by which users self-segregate into subgroups—on HN everybody sees the same feed. Whether we like it or not, we're all in one big room together. This leads to a lot of uncomfortable experiences because, much of the time, we don't like being in the same room with people we strongly disagree with. Nonetheless I think it would be a mistake to sacrifice this quality and subdivide HN into siloes. Every online community needs to deeply understand what it is and not try to be something else—trying to rewrite the DNA would likely turn HN into a poor version of some other kind of site, rather than being the best form of this that we can be.
I've written elsewhere about how important I think the non-siloed aspect of HN is, if anyone wants more:
It takes a record book worthy amount of tone deafness to suggest that the poorer parts of the republican base have been hoodwinked into spending generations voting for a party that promises to solve their problems but does nothing of the sort but the same part of the democratic base hasn't. The republicans have served poor rural voters no better or worse than the democrats have served poor inner city voters.
For about the last 35 years (since Bush 41) I saw no discernible difference between the parties in terms of governance (lots of difference in rhetoric though). However, once the pandemic hit there tended to be a much greater amount of authoritarianism regarding pandemic policies coming from elected democrats. Interestingly it was across the board as well. Even down to the local community levels, it seemed to me that the democrats were interested in way more heavy handed approaches.
This seems to have now expanded beyond pandemic management to other things as well. That is a concern for me.
Interesting. I live in a very rural community in a neighborhood that is incredibly diverse, not only racially, but by age and religion too. We get along just fine.
Perhaps this area tends towards republicans because folks around here aren’t overly hung up about their differences and seem more to focus on their similarities. They also seem to be more capable of self-sufficiency and less day to day reliance on the government…even those with modest incomes. That tends to be the GOP messaging (at least around here) and people are drawn to it. Their life perspective tends to run counter to the dem messaging of division and government reliance.
We also have two different fiber optic ISPs willing to provide internet to our homes. I assure you there is definitely no lack of information around here.
It's the rural-metropolitan divide. Often the poor in rural areas are also Democrats. But all those farmers (huge land wealth), car dealership owners, plumbing empire magnates, or trucking magnates, are incredibly Republican.
But rural areas have far less opportunity than urban areas, and the wealthy often pass their empires down to their children, further hoarding opportunity. So even though there is a ton of wealth for a few at the top, there's extremely little opportunity. Urban metropolitans often offer much more opportunity, as well as greater amenities in the form of culture etc.
Democrats have become a coalition party of the cultural and economic elites as well as the subsidized poor. Republicans tend to be the party of the working class.
And even then, home prices in the peripheral areas of the Central Valley that are within a 2-3 hour drive of the Bay Area have skyrocketed in price during the pandemic. For example, when the pandemic started I remember seeing large signs off Highway 152 through Los Baños for brand new single-family houses in the high $200,000s. Fast forward to today, and new development in Los Baños now starts in the mid-$400,000s, a dramatic leap in price. Tracy and Mountain House have also risen in price substantially, and I've seen places go from the mid-$400K range to the mid-$500K range in Lathrop and Manteca.
There's also been considerable price increases in the Fresno area, too (though it's still possible to purchase brand new homes there under $400K), which is outside the normal Bay Area commute orbit, though now with WFH, an occasional trip from Fresno to Silicon Valley or San Jose isn't that bad. The only places I haven't seen dramatic appreciation in house prices are smaller, more isolated metro areas that haven't attracted those leaving the Bay Area or Los Angeles, such as Hanford and Visalia.
Coming from a guy who grew up in Sacramento, yes the Central Valley is hot, but the best part about the Central Valley is its relative affordability and its proximity to many interesting places. Portions are close enough to the Bay Area to commute (though I wouldn't do it every day), and while it's farther away from the beach than the Bay Area, it's closer to the Sierra Nevada mountains, and SoCal is still within weekend-trip range. Living in the Central Valley allows people to take advantage of California amenities without having to get on a plane or take a very long road trip (though, admittedly, Reno and Las Vegas are also close enough to many of these same California amenities, sometimes even closer depending on your destination).
EDIT: There are some other cheap parts of California. Many of the desert areas of the state are affordable. Lake County, north of Napa, is quite cheap.
Off topic, but I couldn't help but ask after checking out your site: do you have any advice for someone wanting to learn more about explainable graph artificial intelligence?
I'd like to mention that most people in the San Joaquin valley don't really consider Sacramento to be in the valley, and certainly the weather is different. More rain in sac, and no matter how hot it is in Sacramento, you can look forward to the evening's Delta Breeze.
and yeah, I was specifically talking about Visalia, Hanford, Fresno,
Most YIMBYs are actually NIMBYs who concern-troll every development project into oblivion. Even Robert Reich [0]. What the video (very good IMO) lacks is an examination that this is a liberal bastion. I think NIMBYism is bipartisan, and I doubt affluent right-wing Texans are exactly open to high-density development in their neighborhoods too.
This is an excellent point, but I would add that it's not just liberals. There are some older leftists, ans even some younger leftists, that have embraced housing austerity as a way to spite developers. Which unfortunately enriches landlords and homeowners far more than it's hurts developers. And whose money is doing the enriching? A lot of it comes from those who are barely scraping by, and those who can't scrape by are displaced from the state.
There is no human right to live in Palo Alto, but something is amiss when housing in a metro area is so expensive that people making middle class salaries (we're talking around $60K-$100K) find themselves "driving until they qualify" 60+ miles away to places like Tracy, Manteca, and Los Baños to find an affordable place to life. For various reasons, Bay Area governments have decided not to densify to the degree necessary to accommodate all the people who work there, which means that development has sprawled out to the closest far-flung places that are willing to build homes. Sprawl is politically expedient compared to density, even if this sprawl means more traffic on our roads, more money needed to be spent on serving an ever-sprawling metro area, and more money individuals have to spend on transportation. (Admittedly, with more people working from home, the downsides of this sprawl could be mitigated, but not everybody can work from home.)
I reiterate that there's no human right to live in Palo Alto, but companies based in Palo Alto and other Silicon Valley locations who demand that their workers work on-site may increasingly find it difficult to hire people if their housing options are limited to situations that require multiple roommates to bring the cost down to affordable levels, or commuting from far-away areas. If enough people refuse to work in Silicon Valley, then this decreases Silicon Valley's desirability as a place to work, which in turn may decrease the property values there since there will be less demand to live there. The Bay Area has to be very careful not to kill the goose that has been providing it golden eggs.
> but something is amiss when housing in a metro area is so expensive that people making middle class salaries (we're talking around $60K-$100K) find themselves "driving until they qualify" 60+ miles away to places like Tracy, Manteca, and Los Baños to find an affordable place to life.
Why is it Ok to live in Palo Alto, but it’s wrong to live in Manteca ?
People are making a choice that best fits their needs, and they choose affordable housing over commute distance
California is expensive because everyone wants to live there - you can’t make that affordable.
How many condos do you have to build in the bay area to make it cheaper than Tracy ?
California's coastal metro areas are expensive due to high demand caused by its job market combined with artificial restrictions on supply. There is plenty of room for the Bay Area (and Los Angeles for that matter) to densify. The reason why these areas aren't densifying are largely political. It is politically easier to offload housing construction to Central Valley and thus promote urban sprawl than it is to densify the Bay Area.
Tokyo and its suburbs are a great example of how densification could work. Roughly a quarter of Japan's residents live in the Kanto region of Japan where Tokyo and its suburbs are located. While the inner core of Tokyo is quite expensive, there are many affordably-priced neighborhoods just 30 minutes away from Tokyo via normal commuter trains. Even with Japan's falling population, Tokyo's population has been growing before the pandemic due to population drain from Japan's rural areas. It seems that Tokyo is better able to accommodate its demand than the Bay Area; there are very few people commuting 60 miles into Tokyo.
> How many condos do you have to build in the bay area to make it cheaper than Tracy ?
It doesn't necessarily need to be cheaper, but comparable when including transportation costs. And I think the answer for that would be, not very many, as a percentage of the land area.
By definition, if we took 1/10th of the already residential area of San Jose, and increased the density 10x, we'd be able to almost double the housing capacity (1.9x). That's not hard to do if we build 6-7 stories high and the entire surface area covered is housing without lawns and so on.
If our goal is a more modest 5x increase in density, which is easy with typical 4+1 story apartment builds, we could re-zone 10% of the residential area for that and capacity would be 1.4x what it is now. For a city like San Jose with a population of over 1,000,000, that means it could support a further 400,000 people.
We could also add some residential mini-skyscrapers in downtown Mountain View, Palo Alto, and other smaller cities, possibly with reduced parking, for people who want to live, work, and shop downtown.
According to Wikipedia, the 9-county "SF Bay Area" has a population of 7.76 million. If we remove San Francisco and Oakland from this, plus round that up to removing 2 million let's say for the areas that we can consider "sufficiently dense", that still means about 6 million people live in areas that are suburban-like and could be densified. By increasing density 5x in 10% of already residential areas of these cities by building upward, more than another 1,000,000 people could live in the Bay Area. And obviously we could apply this to 20-30-40% rather than just 10% to support much larger populations, and build slightly higher as well.
> By increasing density 5x in 10% of already residential areas of these cities by building upward, more than another 1,000,000 people could live in the Bay Area.
Do you want that ? Are there a million people out there without better alternatives?
Oh it’s okay to live everywhere. I agree with the freedom view. Which is why I think it’s not okay to tell someone who owns a home that they shouldn’t put four homes there, as much as I would rather live in a SFH than a 4-plex.
This is mostly an artifact of the two party system (or the left/right divide, which changed throughout history), in fact there are 3 independent ideologies: Conservative (concerned with values of authority and cultural preservation), liberal (concerned with values of individual freedom) and progressive/socialist (concerned with values of equality/inclusion and democracy).
These ideologies are not opposites, they have different concerns, but they might contradict in practice. Sometimes they are also compatible, they accept same tools for different reasons. (For example, property ownership is a policy tool acccepted by liberals for reason of personal freedom, and by conservatives for reason of preserving value. Or basic income is accepted by progressives as means of including everybody in the society, and by liberals as way to promote personal freedom.)
There's lot more to this but that's the gist of political philosophy, I think.
Came here from another comment where this video was linked. Hilarious how it's been [flagged], it's as if the subjects of the video (California NIMBY liberals) feel personally attacked, and need to shut this down to preserve the narrative.
42 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadWhat does "instill false consciousness" mean to you? When I try to parse this sentence I get "make people incorrectly believe" maybe? I'm not clear on your meaning.
All in all, if I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that people are being tricked by a political party, yes? That being the case, it's definitely possible that you're right. I would suggest, however, that it appears much more likely that both major parties are playing that game.
I mean, I watched the last American president endure four years of accusations from his political rivals that he would start wars, persue extremist agendas, and be the destruction of his country. We were told that if he wasn't stopped, everything would go to hell in a handbasket. So he was stopped. Afterward, their candidate for presidency appears to be ushering his country to hell in a handbasket.
Seems like everyone is playing fast and loose with the truth anymore. I believe that's a pretty typical politician game.
https://www.sjgov.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=33619
Perhaps you should look at demographics and voting patterns for your chosen sections of the valley.
Or should we maybe try to avoid this kind of toxic rhetoric all together.
Wasn't there a ban on politics on HN? I have been shadowbanned several times for reacting to posts like this while the posts themselves stay up.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/4194332
[2] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-false-consciousness/
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As for politics- there's no ban. The question of what's on topic vs. off topic is complex. I've posted many long explanations of this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Some links to start with, if you want to read more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
If anyone has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is, and if you know a better way for HN to relate to political topics while fulfilling its mandate, I'd definitely like to know what it is. Just please familiarize yourself with the past explanations first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.
It is impossible to keep all politics out of the subject matter discussed on this site since there is a conscious effort to politicise everything, this is especially clear in "progressive" circles. Since it (for now) is also there where most tech development happens politics often come directly from the source.
Add the flag, allow users to mark posts and the problem is mostly solved - or at least it is out of sight for those who don't like these discussions and for those who visit the site without logging in. Trying to ban them altogether is futile since it nigh impossible to do without showing personal political bias.
Worse, once a story got marked 'political' and removed from some feed, the side that lost—i.e. that didn't want it removed—would come back to HN to complain about that, repost the story, and generally try to fight the battle on other fronts. We don't need any of this.
Even the users who wanted politics removed from their feed would be unhappy because they would eventually find out that lots of stories which they actually wanted to see, had been removed for being 'political'. Maybe they still want to read about topics like technical interviewing, or end-to-end encryption? Well, a lot of people believe strongly that those are political topics—and they have a point, since at minimum there's some political overlap there. It's not at all obvious how/where to draw this line. All you'd get by adding up a bunch of different opinions about where to draw it would be a line that satisfied no one. It would feel crazy and arbitrary, too, like an image of a face made from bits of lots of different faces.
The idea is tempting because it comes from a false assumption. It's easy to imagine that the question "is X political" would be answered in a way that approximately corresponds to your own feelings about what counts as political. In reality, it wouldn't; how people answer that question is intensely personal and, as I've explained, already intensely political. It is an egg out of which the entire political arena would eventually re-hatch. It's not a way to solve or avoid the conflicts we already experience—we'd just end up with the same fires, but burning in more places.
Ultimately, I'd say this is a variant of the principle that you can't solve human issues with technical mechanisms. It's tempting to try, because technical mechanisms are easy to add and human issue are hard to solve. But after a while the same human issues will re-express themselves, like how water erodes and works around obstacles. There's no substitute for the hard human work of relating to each other.
There's another aspect that I think is relevant here. It's part of HN's DNA that it's a non-siloed site. That is, people don't choose what/who to follow. Unlike Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.—which all have mechanisms by which users self-segregate into subgroups—on HN everybody sees the same feed. Whether we like it or not, we're all in one big room together. This leads to a lot of uncomfortable experiences because, much of the time, we don't like being in the same room with people we strongly disagree with. Nonetheless I think it would be a mistake to sacrifice this quality and subdivide HN into siloes. Every online community needs to deeply understand what it is and not try to be something else—trying to rewrite the DNA would likely turn HN into a poor version of some other kind of site, rather than being the best form of this that we can be.
I've written elsewhere about how important I think the non-siloed aspect of HN is, if anyone wants more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all...
This seems to have now expanded beyond pandemic management to other things as well. That is a concern for me.
Perhaps this area tends towards republicans because folks around here aren’t overly hung up about their differences and seem more to focus on their similarities. They also seem to be more capable of self-sufficiency and less day to day reliance on the government…even those with modest incomes. That tends to be the GOP messaging (at least around here) and people are drawn to it. Their life perspective tends to run counter to the dem messaging of division and government reliance.
We also have two different fiber optic ISPs willing to provide internet to our homes. I assure you there is definitely no lack of information around here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But rural areas have far less opportunity than urban areas, and the wealthy often pass their empires down to their children, further hoarding opportunity. So even though there is a ton of wealth for a few at the top, there's extremely little opportunity. Urban metropolitans often offer much more opportunity, as well as greater amenities in the form of culture etc.
There's also been considerable price increases in the Fresno area, too (though it's still possible to purchase brand new homes there under $400K), which is outside the normal Bay Area commute orbit, though now with WFH, an occasional trip from Fresno to Silicon Valley or San Jose isn't that bad. The only places I haven't seen dramatic appreciation in house prices are smaller, more isolated metro areas that haven't attracted those leaving the Bay Area or Los Angeles, such as Hanford and Visalia.
Coming from a guy who grew up in Sacramento, yes the Central Valley is hot, but the best part about the Central Valley is its relative affordability and its proximity to many interesting places. Portions are close enough to the Bay Area to commute (though I wouldn't do it every day), and while it's farther away from the beach than the Bay Area, it's closer to the Sierra Nevada mountains, and SoCal is still within weekend-trip range. Living in the Central Valley allows people to take advantage of California amenities without having to get on a plane or take a very long road trip (though, admittedly, Reno and Las Vegas are also close enough to many of these same California amenities, sometimes even closer depending on your destination).
EDIT: There are some other cheap parts of California. Many of the desert areas of the state are affordable. Lake County, north of Napa, is quite cheap.
and yeah, I was specifically talking about Visalia, Hanford, Fresno,
Doing neither of these things would result in a more equitable and satisfactory outcome for all.
[0] https://freebeacon.com/satire/robert-reich-nimby/
I dislike living in SF so I didn’t get a job there
I can’t afford SFH in Palo Alto so I don’t live there - don’t know what is wrong with that either
is it a human right to live in Palo Alto ?
People have choices and if something is too expensive or inconvenient they can pick a better option
I reiterate that there's no human right to live in Palo Alto, but companies based in Palo Alto and other Silicon Valley locations who demand that their workers work on-site may increasingly find it difficult to hire people if their housing options are limited to situations that require multiple roommates to bring the cost down to affordable levels, or commuting from far-away areas. If enough people refuse to work in Silicon Valley, then this decreases Silicon Valley's desirability as a place to work, which in turn may decrease the property values there since there will be less demand to live there. The Bay Area has to be very careful not to kill the goose that has been providing it golden eggs.
Why is it Ok to live in Palo Alto, but it’s wrong to live in Manteca ?
People are making a choice that best fits their needs, and they choose affordable housing over commute distance
California is expensive because everyone wants to live there - you can’t make that affordable.
How many condos do you have to build in the bay area to make it cheaper than Tracy ?
Tokyo and its suburbs are a great example of how densification could work. Roughly a quarter of Japan's residents live in the Kanto region of Japan where Tokyo and its suburbs are located. While the inner core of Tokyo is quite expensive, there are many affordably-priced neighborhoods just 30 minutes away from Tokyo via normal commuter trains. Even with Japan's falling population, Tokyo's population has been growing before the pandemic due to population drain from Japan's rural areas. It seems that Tokyo is better able to accommodate its demand than the Bay Area; there are very few people commuting 60 miles into Tokyo.
It doesn't necessarily need to be cheaper, but comparable when including transportation costs. And I think the answer for that would be, not very many, as a percentage of the land area.
By definition, if we took 1/10th of the already residential area of San Jose, and increased the density 10x, we'd be able to almost double the housing capacity (1.9x). That's not hard to do if we build 6-7 stories high and the entire surface area covered is housing without lawns and so on.
If our goal is a more modest 5x increase in density, which is easy with typical 4+1 story apartment builds, we could re-zone 10% of the residential area for that and capacity would be 1.4x what it is now. For a city like San Jose with a population of over 1,000,000, that means it could support a further 400,000 people.
We could also add some residential mini-skyscrapers in downtown Mountain View, Palo Alto, and other smaller cities, possibly with reduced parking, for people who want to live, work, and shop downtown.
According to Wikipedia, the 9-county "SF Bay Area" has a population of 7.76 million. If we remove San Francisco and Oakland from this, plus round that up to removing 2 million let's say for the areas that we can consider "sufficiently dense", that still means about 6 million people live in areas that are suburban-like and could be densified. By increasing density 5x in 10% of already residential areas of these cities by building upward, more than another 1,000,000 people could live in the Bay Area. And obviously we could apply this to 20-30-40% rather than just 10% to support much larger populations, and build slightly higher as well.
Do you want that ? Are there a million people out there without better alternatives?
I think I’ll stay in my SFH in the middle of Podunk, USA and happily make less money, less fancy restaurants, yet have more wealth.
Plus the only excrement I have to endure is the manure the farmer down the road uses on his tomato rows.
Pretty soon ambulance drivers won't afford to live within driving distance of you.
These ideologies are not opposites, they have different concerns, but they might contradict in practice. Sometimes they are also compatible, they accept same tools for different reasons. (For example, property ownership is a policy tool acccepted by liberals for reason of personal freedom, and by conservatives for reason of preserving value. Or basic income is accepted by progressives as means of including everybody in the society, and by liberals as way to promote personal freedom.)
There's lot more to this but that's the gist of political philosophy, I think.