Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

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The NIMBY problem suggests that it's not so much your fault at all - the locals would have passed zoning laws preventing housing for you from being built, as they did in SF ("protect our views" and such) - but actually the fault of the locals for resisting density upgrades.

Imagine, in SimCity terms, if your Low-Density High-Wealth Residential citizens passed a ballot measure preventing you from building Medium-Density Residential zones, and you have the essential problem of SF and other regions in a nutshell.

People don't like density upgrades, and they fight against them tooth and nail. It's what we get for allowing density to be zoned locally, and it's something that other countries just don't even allow when it's bad enough that homelessness is a problem. "Your city block is being upgraded to a megatower, here's due payment for your home and you get first right of refusal on a free home in the megatower."

Be warned, though; once you become an established local, you are extremely vulnerable to falling prey to this exact behavior. I know several awesome people who finally made their wealth and bought a house in SF, and promptly turned into anti-density NIMBY folks - because they were afraid that they might not make a profit on their home, or because they liked their neighborhood, or whatever.

Now I want NIMBYs in city builder games randomly preventing the player from creating and/or upgrading zones. Chances are they will be treated like the nobles in Dwarf Fortress, that's forced to leave or killed off in spectacularly creative ways.

It's all fun and games until someone's home value is depressed by a zoning decision, and then your city goes bankrupt because they mob against you on SimCitter :)

"Due to your citizens refusing to approve tax levies for sewage system upgrades, your city has died of dysentery."

I think it is understandable if people don't want the surroundings of their property cluttered with buildings.

So, they are opposed to urbanization, but don't leave because they want to reap the benefits of urbanization?

It is understandable that people are selfish but why society as a whole should pay for that? It is a relatively recent development, no more than a century, that people actually have such a power to derail urbanization while at the same time profiteer off of it. Society just pays [1] those people basically because they were born at the right time.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/nimbyism-...

I'm pro density but the densification process really trips core parts of people's psyche. We're human beings.

It affects your _home_. You've lived in a place for 10 years and suddenly you have no privacy because a big block of units gets stood up looking right over you. Or they block your sunlight, build right up to the boundary, or your quiet leafy neighbourhood just isn't quiet anymore and that's after you lived next to a construction site for 6 months. These things can have impacts on people's relationships as well.

Of course the world changes, such is the price of progress, and _usually_ those affected can afford to wipe their tears with big stacks of cash.

But I don't think it's fair to characterise all NIMBYs as just greedy, a lot of people just want to live in the neighbourhood they thought they were buying into.

I agree, it's not a pure calculated greed but some sort of a "mental denial of change" coupled with the historically unusual legal powers. Immediate property appreciation is more like blinders, it is very hard to swim against "number go up". End result for society is still the same though.

Weighing the Justice :

'I like they way my lawn is and i don't like construction noises'

vs

'I can't get a job because it's too expensive to rent or buy where the jobs are, so i live in poverty' (or i can't start family because i can only afford a room-share, or any number of other effects from NIMBYism)

So if people make babies, they are entitled to take your stuff away? I think that is too simplistic.

> It is understandable that people are selfish

Existing residents resisting change really aren't any more selfish than new residents demanding change. Both are championing changes that are in their self interest at the expense of the self interest to others.

Sure, and every oppressed person demands changes in their self interest at the expense of the oppressor. Now, I'm not trying to call people who want to live in HCOL city but don't have money oppressed but want to point out that this line of thinking is unhelpful. What matters is the outcome for the majority of people now and in the future, and based on that I don't see how rights of the existing residents to tell their neighbors what to do with their property in the world class cities make the world a better place. And research supports that conclusion.

"research supports that conclusion" - from some marxist think tank perhaps. Definitely bullshit. People are not better off without property rights.

And with your attitude, I guess you celebrate colonialism. After all, those were people looking for new places to live.

> People are not better off without property rights.

Sure, but the problem at hand is they have more than property rights, they have rights to a neighbor's property, conversely my neighbors have rights to my property, and how's that fair under capitalism. Besides, there are other capitalist countries where zoning is not a local level affair and they don't seem to be marxist hell-holes as you imply.

> I guess you celebrate colonialism

I don't celebrate anything but people are born in increasing numbers, the whole economy and governments rely on this trend so I think it is only fair to the new generations if we at least return to the respect of the private property which is long gone.

Of course people have more than property rights. Like access to clean drinking water, infrastructure, and so on. It's wrong to assume their rights should stop at the border of their property. Like if they have a water pipe to their house, other people shouldn't be allowed to cut off that pipe. (As a simple example).

You are talking about a kind of societal contract of society having to provide housing for people. Likewise, there are other societal contracts.

"I don't celebrate anything but people are born in increasing numbers, the whole economy and governments rely on this trend so I think it is only fair to the new generations if we at least return to the respect of the private property which is long gone."

The argument "the economy depends on more people being born" doesn't really fly in a discussion of how more people cause problems (like needing a place to stay). I don't think most people are asking other people to have lots of children.

Even if you assume everybody should be provided with such a place, why in my backyard (or anybody else's)? Since you seem to have given up on the notion that people might deserve a nice place to stay in, why not just build ugly skyscrapers somewhere else (other than my backyard), and house people there? How about starting in your backyard?

It's understandable that people want control over property they don't own. Doesn't make it right though. And it doesn't make sense for the law to give them that control.

I think it makes sense to give people some rights. For example if you build a highway right in front of their house, it devalues their investment, and they could deserve compensation. Or make it a garbage dump. Are you really of the opinion the the government should be allowed to simply create a garbage dump in front of your house? What about a garbage dump in a poor black neighborhood, would you consider that OK?

It's possible there was a promise of "quiet surroundings and lovely views" when they bought the land from the government. So the government should stick to those promises.

You're debating a strawman. The argument is that NIMBYs oppose more housing in a place already zoned for housing. No one's talking about building a nuclear power plant next to a kindergarten.

If the places are already zoned for housing, NIMBYs are unlikely to be able to prevent it.

Somewhat reminiscent of the GME short squeeze phenomenon. New entrants buy expensive homes, they go up in value because of nimbyism, more people buy homes at the higher prices because they saw the others return, and have to become nimbyist themselves in order to further constrain supply to see return. It just accelerates at each iteration as the next wave has to constrain supply more and more to break even.

It would help a lot if the dense housing being built wasn’t so hideous.

Underappreciated.

No, it really doesn't. SF tried that with neighborhood commissions. It turns out that higher density housing is hideous to existing residents, regardless of the shell it's in.

And where is this attractive new construction you speak of?

It doesn't need to be. Vienna has quite a few of higher-density council housing buildings that are architecturally pleasing, one example is Alt-Erlaa [0].

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wohnpark_Alterlaa

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