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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

And what exactly is wrong with NIMBY-ism? Not everyone likes living in dense cities. I don't see anything wrong with groups of people who prefer to live in less dense development working together to create less dense places to live.

The problem is that there are (as I said) more people who prefer to live in less dense development than there is space to accommodate them all. At that point, the market takes over and decides who gets to have a back yard and who has to settle for the fifth floor walkup. Given the problem statement, isn't that the best possible outcome?

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As long as enough high-rise apartments actually get built somewhere, this is fine. The problem is, the NIMBYs are broadly distributed, and tend to fight such construction everywhere.

NIMBYism is fine, as long as it is applied to businesses as well as housing. Way too many towns and cities want to maintain their low density small town & suburban characters while attracting employers.

Was talking about East Hollywood, at the center of a 10 million plus megalopolis. If nimbys want to live in the sticks, by all means.

That's kind of funny. East Hollywood is already pretty dense (not height-wise though) compared to surrounding areas. I can see from a parking standing point what the complaint would be but...I don't know, any new building in E Hollywood is an improvement.

Indeed, some folks prefer to live in a third world shit hole with skyrocketing rents.

Yup.

Then again, my assumption is this some old lady that has been in the neighborhood for a while. Her kids won't give a shit about the growth when they can live in or sell her house for a shit ton of money.

Soviet-style central planning is not "the market." Euclidean zoning is Soviet-style central planning.

That's ridiculous. Soviet-style central planning is not what is happening in the Bay area. The zoning there is being done by democratically elected governments and the land being developed is privately owned and can be freely bought and sold. The resulting high prices are absolutely the result of market forces.

Why are democratically elected governments and Soviet-style planning mutually exclusive? Democratically elected governments do all sorts of horrible and unjust things. For modern examples see Erdogan and Duterte.

The land itself is privately owned, sure, but undeveloped land is not very useful.

> undeveloped land is not very useful

I love hiking in redwood forests. I love peace and quiet. I love not having to deal with traffic. So I think undeveloped land is very useful.

You are free to buy the redwood forests, pay a yearly land value tax on them (which goes up as demand increases, unlike Prop 13) and then restrict access as you wish.

But redwood forests are a distraction. The main problem is SFH which can and would be replaced with duplexes and fourplexes if the market were allowed to work.

> You are free to buy the redwood forests

Much of the forest land on the peninsula is privately owned, not by individuals, but by conservation organizations.

> The main problem is SFH

Except that people like their yards and pools.

All else being equal, denser housing is better. But all else is rarely equal. Almost invariably, increased density comes with increased population. The SFH it replaces doesn't get turned back into open space, it remains SFH. Or it turns into more MFH, so now you have N times as many people living in the same space. That is the problem.

I don't have a moral objection to SFH. If people like they can keep paying for their SFH via increased property taxes. But Prop 13 breaks that feedback loop.

Immigration is not a problem. It is an opportunity.

N people live in a place. K people want to move there. You can either find ways to accommodate N+K people, or you can choose not to and have the richest people drive out the poorest (or the middle class if you start building affordable housing). Only one of those two options is classist and xenophobic. Take your pick.

Nobody has recommended this straw man of a proposal. This is an example of an argument made in bad faith.

The topic is development of single-story housing into apartments. The Bay Area is rife with short houses around transit terminals.

You would have less traffic in the Valley if there were more apartments, so employees could bike and walk to work. They now commute from neighboring cities.

> You would have less traffic in the Valley if there were more apartments, so employees could bike and walk to work.

This assumes that all of the houses vacated by currently commuting employees moving into apartments near transit (and thus becoming non-commuters) would be replaced by people who don't commute. But that's extremely unlikely to be the case.

Furthermore, all of the people living near transit would still drive on occasion, so traffic would almost certainly get worse.

Traffic on the weekend? Sure, but that is distributed aside from the typical choke points on 101 and 880.

Most would use the transit option, especially since the proximity to transit would be included in the price.

Other potential nudges would be to waive parking requirements for such development, thus denying parking places for the residents.

NIMBY is such a tired criticism. I live in an exurban/rural town on the East Coast. My town pretty consistently votes against major developments. We like the apple orchards and forest land like it is. We don’t want suburban style developments that increase traffic and taxes or industrial development outside of the light industry on the north side of town near the highway. If you want to call it NIMBY go ahead. As far as I’m concerned it’s just voting for how the local community should be.

I feel like if you want to control what gets built on a certain parcel of land, you should own it. If you want to keep those apple orchards around, make a better offer when a developer tries to buy them out.

As a practical matter that means no one except the very richest could live anywhere and have any control over arbitrary construction happening next door or their neighborhood as a whole. There’s plenty of precedent throughout history of groups taking collective actions based on the will of the majority.

Why should a person have any control over arbitrary construction happening in their neighborhood?

If you want to keep wild lands, the best way to do so is to increase density where people already live.

And the best way to do that is probably via a market-based, incremental approach: not everyone is going to sell out and turn their SFH into flats right away - it'd be gradual.

Seems like a forced dichotomy. Hong Kong is 70% green space. That's vastly higher than San Francisco at ~13% and has a more reasonable commute.

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