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Comment by Eextra953 | Hacker News Reader

I can't access the article.

There is a lot of opposition to high density that is racist and selfish. However, in my experience, a lot of people who are not ignorant or racist are opposed to high density housing because it is built in places that lack infrastructure to support high density housing. I think there would be a lot less opposition if cities were more proactive in improving infrastructure (more parks, mass transit, wider roads, etc.) before high density housing was developed.

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> are opposed to high density housing because it is built in places that lack infrastructure to support high density housing.

I've seen this objection a few times now but never actually seen it sourced. Do you have a source?

I feel like there's some kind of conflict between that being true and the fact that suburbs can't afford to maintain the infrastructure that they _do_ have.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/8/weve-built-citi...

I am active in my community and I engage with NIMBY groups to try and better understand their motivation. The top reasons they give are more traffic, less parking, more noise, less park and trail space.

To add, my experience is limited to living on the edge of a mid sized city that is currently seeing lots of growth in sections that were rural (think 2 lane roads and wide open meadows and creeks). I have no idea why people oppose HD housing in big cities or rural areas.

In my experience, the same people who oppose new housing due to the lack of infrastructure often also oppose building that infrastructure. They don't really oppose the housing itself but changes in their neighborhood.

That's an impossible conundrum. Who's going to pay for increased mass transit if there's nobody to ride it? Who's going to pay for more parks if there aren't enough people to use them? (Wider roads are counter-intuitive: dense development needs fewer, narrower roads, not wider).

One thing or the other has to happen, and there is demand for more development now. Let the development happen and the demand for infrastructure will follow.

The infrastructure is not the problem. Cities can build this easily with increased tax base. Most roads are way overbuilt anyways.

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