NIMBYism is just Conservatism bereft of any kind of principles or values.
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/3707723/margaret-atwood-condo-con...
* I don't care, just not here
* One of the housing developments in other towns, which I don't oppose
* Working from home is the future, why do people need to move here anyway?
* Further out, served by improved public transport infrastructure.
* Homelessness is really more of a mental health services problem. So the real solution here is healthcare reform.
* The problem is billion-dollar corporations all centralising in one place for no good reason. We should spread the jobs out.
* Who says the population has to grow at all? Capitalism is the problem, the endless growth it demands isn't possible.
* The solution is a bay-area-wide master plan to deliver an integrated response, addressing our current and future needs for jobs, homes, schools, equality, desegregation, mass transit, homeless and mental health services, and a response to the climate crisis.
Needless to say, these are well beyond the power of someone building a few condos. But the NIMBY's alternative is only to assuage their conscience, so realism isn't important.
> these are well beyond the power of someone building a few condos.
They are probably within the power, but they really don't care. It's cheaper and faster to build a few apartment blocks in a limited space (usually putting a strain on existing infrastructure — from water and sewage to roads to kindergartens and schools) than to invest in building out.
Unfortunately, as I see it in trends around the world, this is what's happening in almost every country. Why create a "master plan to deliver an integrated response" when you can plop down a few apartment buildings and be don with it.
The reason we have gotten to this point is building out instead of up, sprawl instead of vertical expansion. Surely the solution is not more sprawl.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
That's how you end up with public transport overwhelmed, electric grid strained, local schools and kindergartens overflown. Because instead of "attaching infrastructure construction to the housing construction" you just build housing. Lots of it.
By then it will already be too late, and you would have to tear down half or more of what has been built just to fix the issues.
I'm pretty sure an "8-storey 16-unit building" means "a single building, with 16 apartments spread over 8 floors" - not 16 buildings.
1. The area that contains your rental unit is rezoned, allowing higher density
2. The current owner of the building you rent in is now able to sell the property to a developer interested in demolishing the building in favor of a taller, denser one
3. You get kicked out, and have to find an apartment at market rate (Your building being demolished is one of the few ways you can kick a tenant out in San Francisco IIRC)
People will come up with any number of reasons to oppose it as you suggest, but the core reason I think is simply people don't want their homes and neighbourhoods to change dramatically, they find comfort from them remaining roughly the same over time.
The difference between living next to farmers and having a giant subdivision, 5,000 kid summer camp, or an airport next door are huge. We rarely see direct compensation for the negative impacts of such change so people have little reason to support change that negatively impacts themselves.
People will shout and scream and boycott to make sure you can use whatever bathroom you choose. Or make sure that everyone respects your choice of pronouns.
But ask those same people to build more housing and provide ample public transit? Ask those same people to close all private schools and force people to use public school lottery systems that mingle rich, middle-class, and poor?
Absolutely never. They isolate into their communities and tell the folks trying to get in that their town is now full.