It does depreciate, usually. It's the land underneath that appreciates in value.
Occasionally if you get unusual spikes in building materials and labour costs then the house itself can appreciate in value because it costs more to replace it, but that's rare enough.
> Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Their free cashflow is high; they're choosing not to report a profit. I don't think it's useful/accurate to say they don't make money.
Don't get me wrong, they may be doing a layoff to boost margins or enter GAAP profitability but the company revenue exceeds its operating cost by quite a bit.
> First quarter revenue totaled $639.8 million, representing an increase of 34% year-over-year
So they're growing 34% annually.
> Free cash flow was $84.1 million, or 13% of revenue, compared to $52.9 million, or 11% of revenue, in the first quarter of 2025.
Cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale securities were $4,163.9 million as of March 31, 2026.
...and they have $84 million free cash flow in one quarter, and it's consistently pretty good cashflow.
And they have $4b of cash or cash equivalents stockpiled. It seems pretty healthy to me.
It's significantly more efficient to provide services to compact towns than sprawled towns, so I'm not sure this registers to me as a downside.
It's pretty common for small sprawled towns to struggle to keep up with maintenance of roads/water/power, which is less of an issue with compact towns.
Hence the comment you replied to saying "they print cash". You'll find a lot of big companies work this way: high free cashflow, because they earn a lot more than they spend, but then the spare cash is either reinvested or paid out via share buybacks. Declaring a profit isn't advantageous compared to the other options available.
This is a pretty surface level analysis; Atlassian also has stock buybacks of billions of dollars each year. It's an intentional choice to not declare a profit and pay a dividend, and instead to reinvest in acquisitions and pay shareholders via stock buybacks.
You'll find it much more interesting to look at metrics like free cashflow, which is a better indicator as to whether the company is generating more cash during operations than it spends. This is a lot closer to the layman's idea of profit, and in a small business like a restaurant or single store it's often analogous to profit. In publicly traded companies, net profit and loss are borderline meaningless.
> Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them.
Upzoning actually increases land values, because it gives you the option to develop your land into a higher-productivity use (and hence higher potential rents).
NIMBYs in my observation tend to be anti-change; they bought with the neighbourhood a particular way and want it to stay that way. Upzoning brings in a change in the vibe and demographic that they don't want.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with what I said. There will be many HN users who are earning as much or more as Apple engineers, even if many are earning much less, so assuming that someone here would definitely jump at an Apple offer is not particularly reasonable.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of software engineers employed at companies that are of similar prestige and pay as Apple, and many of them will be on HN. If you're getting paid $500k at Netflix/Google/Meta, why work for $400k at Apple?
Occasionally if you get unusual spikes in building materials and labour costs then the house itself can appreciate in value because it costs more to replace it, but that's rare enough.