Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to improve affordable housing.
It has nothing to do with the inhabitants.
It's about the ugliness of these kind of buildings and everything that goes with increased density (traffic, street parking etc.)
You don't like the 'look' of 'ugly' building? I guess you better save up for the neighboring lots.
You don't like it when some of those houses are replaced by an apartment complex.
What is there not to understand?
He didn't tell anyone what to do. What are you so upset about?
No, they don't. All homeowners don't have the same utility function. Not living near people of different socio-economic strata is a very important factor in some people's utility function.
> When the only people who can afford to live within 40 miles are senior software engineers, surgeons, hedge fund quants, corporate executives, and large landowners, the whole community becomes a fake and lifeless place.
The features you see as “fake and lifeless” are what many people actively desire and seek out. Aesthetics are highly subjective.
No, it frequently does have to do with the inhabitants. That's why you saw Forest Hill homeowners kill an affordable housing development because "the new development would house 'severely mentally ill' and 'severely drug addicted' people" [1].
[1]: http://www.sfexaminer.com/city-pulls-funding-150-unit-forest...
That's reasonable.
But what is not reasonable is if you try to enforce that preference on next door. Your house is your house. Your neighbours house isn't.
Speak for yourself. Not all homeowners want less density. I wouldn't have become a homeowner if the only houses available had yards with picket fences.
But I can have the desire for the conditions to stay the same.
See Zuckerberg's purchases in Palo Alto for example.
You can think of it as an interesting experiment in collective land ownership.
I'm using "own" meaning "control" here.
That's definitely an original kind of argument.
At least that's what I'd be referring to if I were to make the parent's argument.
Increasing housing supply by 50% will increase homelessness because you have 50% more people willing to financially support it.
Neighborhoods in Tokyo have no local control over zoning, and houses are widely understood to be a depreciating asset, not an investment. So Tokyo builds enough housing and homeowners can't pull up the ladder behind them.
The homelessness rate in Tokyo is astonishingly low and decreasing: just 1600 people in a metropolis of 13.6 million. Almost everybody can afford to live somewhere, because there is enough housing for everybody to live somewhere.
You may think I'm saying that your neighborhood has to look like the Ginza area, and I'm not saying that at all. Tokyo contains some calm, beautiful, residential-focused cities such as Setagaya. (If this is confusing: a metropolis can contain a city.)
Homelessness however is more a multi-headed beast, and Japanese culture likely plays as much into a lack of people on the street as does housing availability.
That doesn't have very much to do with whether there are enough places to live. If the places where the careers are have fewer available places to live than they have people, it doesn't matter how dedicated you are, you can still fall out the bottom of the market.
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...
But I suppose that's par for the course for the US, where individual expression and selfishness is valued over collective good.
And if we recognized "physically being present before others" as a natural right, I imagine the Native Americans would have a much better situation than they do. Thinking that's a right for some but not for others is the height of hypocrisy, but that seems to be what a lot of incumbent property owners here seem to believe.
That being said, I'm hard pressed to call desired housing density a natural right.