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Comment by mediaman | Hacker News Reader

Part of the idea is that this is self-sorting.

NIMBYs are likely not going to move a city built on the foundation of density and easy permitting. Just like people who hate hot climates don't move to Phoenix.

Build certain zoning policies into the city's charter that is hard to change. If NIMBYs move in, then - no, they don't get to change the charter with a simple majority.

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Sure but that's just the first few years. Again there is a fundamental human mechanism at work, mission drift. Just like a startup's workforce is very self-selected, so is a startup city. But cities last generations and hundreds of years, and even your startup will not be run by the same people in 20 years as it was at year 0. It's why companies go from dynamic, YIMBY startups to becoming Oracle.

So this question needs a serious answer. You can write something in the charter, but what's stopping enough people from changing the charter 30 years down the line? All NIMBY American cities started out as startups, the country's not that old. Little more than a century ago the West was associated with the frontier life.

No one has knocked down your argument, so they downvote your argument. The NIMBYification of a city happens slowly as more people in the city have wealth, and want to store it in their homes. If a city has a charter, people will simply enact NIMBY laws in a suburb, and due to the wealth accumulated there, it will become the new center of the region. Look at how SF went from hippies and artists on the edge of silicon valley, to being the center of silicon valley.

This. The reality is that finding a home you like is hard. You'll research neighborhoods, city policies, construction projects in the area, what the neighbors are like, what internet is available, taxes, etc. Then you find a place that matches your needs and you move it. That's time consuming, difficult and stressful, especially if you're buying the home. It's also time consuming and difficult to get out, especially across long distances.

So once people are in, ANY change is problematic. Increased density and construction is the common case these days because that's what we need, but the same would happen in reverse. If NYC's mayor said they were going to eminent domain the whole place to make it a low density suburb, even the people who get to keep their homes would lose their shit. You don't live in Manhattan because you want a big yard for your 6 dogs and 3 chickens.

When it comes to housing, any kind of change is hard. So if you start from scratch, there's not much problems.

I didn't do this when I bought my place 20 years ago. I looked for houses I liked and could afford near where I worked. Being single, school districts were not as much of a concern, though that would probably be the biggest factor for families and a big driver for house price.

I was admittedly heavily biased by where I lived before, because I am used to that area, which seems to be true of my friends, independent of where they actually work.

Maybe this is just the Bay area. For me at the time Palo Alto and Menlo Park were too expensive, so I was looking in Mountain View, Sunnyvale or Redwood City. Fortunately for me Mountain View has gotten a bit nicer in that time.

That's why suburbia is so pervasive. It's almost never practical to create Manhattan on a cornfield. Cities occur incrementally as economic growth drives the need for more buildings. When you arrest that process in its infancy you will never get a city.

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