Ah yes, "innovation" in skirting regulations as AirBnb does. Harming local communities and extracting wealth in the name of "tech disruption".
You need a TON of permits to open a restaurant and you can not open in your house, it has to be in a commercial space.
Furthermore, you are free to open your own hotel. You just need to do it in a commercial zoned area since you are doing commercial things.
You’re taking the same position people took against the printing press, automobiles, and computers when they were all in their infancy.
Restaurants in people’s homes were incredibly common until health regulators showed up.
I wonder if RCO8786 would eat at a small family owned restaurant with a low health score.
How do you suggest that it works? How do you propose that we regulate innovation before the innovation occurs? Bit difficult, no?
There's a reason it's not in their backyard. It's their backyard.
'Exerting voting rights' = zone newcomers, poor people, and apartment dwellers out of existence so they can't vote in our local elections.
This isn’t meant to sound combative, these are just facts.
Those companies themselves create the conditions that force tech workers everywhere to look for jobs in a few select cities.
That is the height of hypocrisy. The moment Google and Facebook stake out massive cultural monopolies is the moment the community they reside in has to give up a little bit for the well being of the larger national and global community.
Allowing buildings to be 2x the height means, lower home prices in general but also the oldest owners have the worst views/property prices in the neighborhood. So optimizing locally, people should not want more homes built.
Meanwhile, 2x taller buildings mean, 2x the people can sleep at night and work in the morning boosting the economy without the inefficiency of a long commute, traffic, CO2, etc. I.e. long term improvements for a larger set of humans.
In the name of progress/innovation shouldn’t the calculation be based on ROI for humanity/environment/etc and not based on a locally popular vote?
Electrification of mobility and transport makes the environmental argument a moot point.
Disclaimer: I live in suburbia.
I disagree. Electric cars are more efficient than IC, but they still use electricity which mostly comes from fossil fuels. Add in all the massively increased infrastructure spending and emissions per capita that are needed for suburbs, and urbanization is a no-brainer from an environmental perspective.
Urbanization is like nuclear power, financially and politically untenable. It is not a reasonable path to success.
Are you able to convince large populations of people they should pay much higher real estate costs for lower local taxes when they're still going to pay more (total monthly housing or lump sum payment) than in the suburbs? I do not believe that argument will fly.
If houses were banned on all but a few blocks, they’d be expensive too.
Urbanization is the arc of human civlization for thousands of years. The automobile era is a weird little blip.
These people are a) a market opportunity, and b) a set that might grow dramatically given the right technology catalyst. I personally think e-bikes will play a large role in getting people out of the cars-competing-for-space mindset at the root of so much NIMBYism, while preserving much of the convenience of personal transport over buses.
It's elitist gatekeeping and deep selfishness masked as "wanting to retain neighborhood character".
Zoning should be made on the state or county level, and for every development that's planned to be built, if it follows the zoning, approve it. Enough of this nonsense "yeah it follows zoning but I don't like it".
Most of those you label "NIMBY" are just looking to maintain an existing community and civic service level.
The people you should be directing your ire towards is not your strawman "NIMBY" but the city planners and commercial developers who overzone and overbuild office space and under-zone housing.
Housing, on the other hand, is blocked by them because that "gargantuan 4 story apt building" is going to lower their precious home value. I agree that infrastructure needs to keep up with development, but that's not impossible to do.
If NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc can do it, why does SF seem to have such a hard time doing so? Because SF local government is a shitshow that does nothing but serve the interests of existing homeowners, who somehow want to benefit from the prosperity of growing cities without the construction/density those cities require.