Because that would decrease housing prices. What will happen is homeowners will talk about the need to keep Oakland's character, which is codeword for stopping development of housing to increase home values.
And the renters (like me) will complain that the city (well, the permitting process they approve) is only promoting units for the financially relatively better off and is not subsidizing enough low rent units. So they scuttle low income housing to spite middle income housing.
Why should a city subsidize housing? That seems like something the market should drive primarily. For that same reason, I'm skeptical about whether zoning and permiting are a good thing in general.
Zoning and permitting are a good thing. It means a city can have long term planning and allocate resources and budget things accordingly. Mishmosh cities have existed and do currently exist in emerging economies, they tend to be chaotic and crime ridden messes.
That said, I think zoning needs to be updated to reflect more modern economies. Mixed use, company housing (it's had a stained past, but still it can work, if governed properly), and the permitting should be less political and very much so more pragmatic. I rather detest the politization that has overtaken infrastructure building when it involves private investment.
With regard to subsidized housing, I think we need it to allow the poor to afford a place to live. Now, I don't think anyone has a "right" to live in a particular place, but you also should want to facilitate people of all sorts of income levels to live in a given municipality.
I'm not claiming diversity of vibrancy or any other pseudo reason people like to list, as they are based on feel good emotions. In addition, there are plenty of places that are very monocultural and are very vibrant (Tokyo) but at the same time we should try to include a diversity of strata and allow for people to move into the mainstream stratum, as most seek to achieve, in the fist place.
Well, if cities control the zoning, they then have to ensure for the welfare of the housing market. If you, for example, block developers from adding more housing (cough San Francisco), you are supporting raising housing costs and pushing lower income citizens out of your city.
If the market should drive the equation and the municipality meddle with either side of it, it's not a market in the way one normally infers.
Also, you can argue that Google has been punished for daring to stand up to the US government (for example wanting to warn wikileaks about surveillance of its employees). Perhaps it's coincidence, but the Obama administration recently sided with Oracle in its litigation against Google. That is the sort of thing you can expect when going against the US government. Also, you give up help when it comes to things like antitrust lawsuits.
You think you care, but you have no idea who gives you privacy. Maybe you trust Apple, but have you seen their code? What if snarfing your data leads to better data for siri? Then let's not talk about the millions of small sites snarfing your data as you browse through the web, none of them beholden to sarbanes-oxley, your cell phone conversations which are snarfed by your carrier and aggregated with geo data and sold to the highest bidder, providing billboard locations that maximize demographics. You say you care about privacy, but you have no idea that you have no privacy. You may hate google / think you're maintaining your privacy by warning people about google, but it's just the beaten horse that you beat to make you feel better. It's the bright colorful logo in your face that you see, but that's the tip of the ice berg. In short you are ignorant and lashing out and making no difference whatsoever. Google's just easy to attack because it's more up front regarding how it uses your data, you can login to your dashboard and see everything. Your cell phone carrier and friends, Apple, not so much. Don't remember seeing their dashboards with the data they collect on you. So, continue on pretending like you are making a difference.
This reminds me of the EU imposing browser choice on Microsoft's European customers. The result was a larger market share for google in the EU. In the USA, where no choice was mandated, Microsoft push forth bing and as a result, it has ~9% market share and growing. Given the choice, everyone chooses Google. I think Google would be fine with giving users a choice of default maps when searching a location, default reviews, etc. But the EU would not like the outcome and they would come back for more regulation when their intent, to harm google aka knock em down a peg aka "bring diversity" is not met.
The fallacy with the EU's position is the notion of 'diversity'. Code word for "let our companies compete better". If the free market doesn't want that, any 'remedy' will in fact harm users. What the EU must do is simply focus on the question, "are consumers harmed". Anything else is begging for problems. EU bureaucrats are not smarter than the market. If EU companies are able to attract the capital and users to them, wonderful. But the fundamental problem is 'attracting capital' to a rigid (and apparently protectionist) market.
Microsoft was caught with their pants down returning google search results to microsoft via internet explorer. They call it "a signal" for bing. The difference between google and microsoft is microsoft isn't as forthcoming regarding what information they retrieve. No dashboard to browse everything microsoft tracks... You just have to trust microsoft. Good luck with that.
This coincides with my theory explaining why bing is bigger in the US and not Europe. European regulators forced microsoft to make it easy to switch search engines/browsers, and users when given the choice tend to choose google. That means bing is successful due to being a microsoft product forced upon its users.
Yes, this speech is more marketing than anything. At the end of the day, just like with google, apple is sending your data to the cloud. Location data, they even have their own street view now...
