Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

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Some people aren't solely motivated by the rise in their property. Evidence already suggests doing nothing increases it plenty.

On the other hand, some folks just don't like living in higher density neighborhoods. I can empathize with someone that bought a single family home decades ago, probably can't afford to buy a new one today even after selling it, and doesn't want to see their quiet neighborhood turn into a bustling urban environment.

As an example, my parents live in the suburbs of a midwestern city. It's almost entirely residential single family housing, with a downtown business district that sprung up along a rail line 100 years ago. The city has major highway access, but not close to the rail station.

There are plans to build a 400 unit apartment complex adjacent to the downtown area. Even with light rail to/from the major city, you still need a car to get around. Current residents are naturally livid that their quaint downtown they enjoy is going to change, and the streets around it that weren't designed to handle the daily commutes of hundreds of people are going to have far more traffic and road maintenance.

It has nothing to do with home prices, and everything to do with maintaining the community experiences that they bought into, sometimes decades ago.

Exactly. I'm an evil SFH owner. I don't give a single shit about how much it is worth, because I'm not a house flipper and I plan to live in this home for decades. I deliberately moved to this home, away from higher-density housing, primarily to get away from high population density and for the other various benefits of living in a SFH neighborhood. Some people like living in higher-density neighborhoods, and they should have a place to live that they like, too. There is not One True Correct style of home for everyone.

To clarify, do you live in a city?

Respectfully: you bought your house — not the neighborhood around your house, and everything in it. It's true that it's OK to have mixed densities of housing, but I think it's an unrealistic and ungrounded expectation to buy a single family house in a city and expect your neighborhood around it to never change.

There are areas of the country where you can cheaply move to, outside of cities, that will likely never upzone (or land is so cheap you can buy everything around your house to ensure it never changes).

Nope. The far out suburbs. If it wasn’t for my job being near a city, I’d have moved even farther to the rural boonies. Now that remote work is getting normalized it’s tempting. To me, the idea of a SFH in the city is nonsensical. The whole point is getting away from having people everywhere and having your own place you don’t have to share walls, sounds, and drama with strangers.

One of the major considerations for me when I bought was “how likely is it urban development will reach this far out in my lifetime?”

I mean, if you are able to prevent apartment complex on someone else's property that is not even next you your house, then you have too much control.

Do you also apply this to a new Walmart, Amazon warehouse, fertilizer plant, Casino, steel mill, et. or is residential use the only inalienable use of property?

I don't think exercising your right to vote in local elections and ballot initiatives and speak your mind about local issues is "too much control." It's part of living in a democracy that has some measure of municipal autonomy.

In this particular case, most of the local opposition is because city government is fast-tracking the project while neglecting their own regulatory processes and distrust of the developer (for good reasons, frankly).. Not only do local residents want the community to keep certain qualities in that neighborhood, it's encoded into the law. That wasn't done by one person with too much control, it was done by an elected body with the consent of the governed.

But I don't want to get into the specifics, the gist is I can empathize with someone that wants to preserve the community they live in.

This is pretty much it imo. There was some discussion on new housing and higher density in the town where my parents live a few years back, and apparently the standard "against" argument that got it shot down was "there's not enough parking and already too much traffic, we don't want more of either".

I think a lot of this comes down to generational dynamics. Boomers were until recently the largest generation and have only been passed by millennials two years ago. They have the wealth and will to be politically heard and aren't particularly concerned with the difficulties of younger generations unless they see it second-hand through their children.

Is it “not solely home prices” or “has nothing to do with home prices”? The latter is not a defensible argument, on its face.

For the community I was talking about, absolutely. Many of the residents in that neighborhood are in their last home, not first.

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