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Comment by brucelidl | Hacker News Reader

10 year Davis resident here, with generally quite Yimby tendencies. I would support something like this, as we do absolutely need more (and if possible) cheaper housing in town for students. The university is the whole reason the town exists and it's just not healthy to make it prohibitive for students to live here, while at the same time force university staff to live in cheaper surrounding towns and then commute in and out, in my opinion.

But I do have to be realistic, the Nimby feelings in this town are VERY strong. Everybody who buys a house here seems to feel the town should stay exactly the way it was on the day after they arrived, without any recognition of how blinkered that is. The legal fight against something like this would be intense, to say the least. It would require a developer with great lawyers, very deep pockets and the thickest of skins.

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I don't live in Davis anymore, but I did live there for 10+ years and used to own a home there. I love Davis. As Sheldon Copper from Big Bang theory puts it, it's my "zero-zero-zero-zero".

While I don't consider myself a NIMBY, because I wouldn't go out of my way to stop a development project, I do appreciate how it has kept Davis a really nice place to live.

I now live in Elk Grove, there are 3 Walmart within 5 minutes of me. Urban sprawl here is ridiculous and can be measured by how many dead skunks, and homeless coyotes you find on the road because farm land and wild spaces are turning into giant air conditioned homes (which I am totally guilty of owning). Folsom, Rancho Cordova, Roseville are the same. If you want to see what happens when Davis grow into a giant city, move to one of these places.

I am not sure what my point is. I guess I am just saying that what Davis is, is not bad, it can be worse.

But for the sake of conversation, if we are going to raze small towns like Davis in the quest of more housing friendly cities, I recommend we model it after Bellevue, WA. They have skyscrapers, and it's beautiful. But then again, that just speaks to the wealth disparity more than anything else... Which is also what keeps Davis so nice.

I’m surprised there are so many Walmarts as well given the number of NIMBY in EG. my wife went to the med school there and the folks in Stonelake voted against the new hospital.

It is always fascinating what does and does not raise NIMBY ire. It doesn’t really seem very consistent.

My first guess is hospital = noise (sirens from ambulances coming and going), whereas Walmarts probably only results in increased traffic and at worst more lower income people out and about.

People really dislike noise. There’s a small airport near me that acts as a regional shipping hub amongst other things and a certain demographic (retirees, not working, own home) is very keen on halting and further business development despite the economic benefits it creates for the city because they don’t like the noise of the airplanes overhead. Personally the occasional airplane is significantly less of a nuisance to me than people revving their loud ass motorcycles at night.

My ears are tuned to the distinct sound of B-17 engines, and I love it when they come trundling by, usually at low altitude. Last summer an Eagle cruised by, at an altitude of about 6 feet. I could have reached out and brushed its wing as it went by, but I was frozen in awe. I'm under the landing pattern for Seatac, and enjoy the heavies floating by overhead.

I like living in Seattle with all the aircraft around!

Having lived 4 blocks from a hospital, it's not the ambulances, it's the helicopters. The house had no air conditioning so it was a choice between sweltering plus barely being able to hear a conversation every 20 minutes vs. not being able to hear a conversation at all or even the TV at max volume.

Scientifically that shit is really bad for you, even when you can tune it out. There is a huge correlation with noise (especially during sleep) and cortisol levels among many other things -- it's a massive unmeasured externality (with cars being the primary cause).

Same goes for airports (but even more true of motorcycle dickheads, coal rollers and ricers which are almost always violating vehicle codes but never see enforcement).

That said, NIMBYism isn't the solution. Far better for something along the lines of noise level based zoning, and require whatever project(s) are responsible for noise pollution to pay into a fund that provides building code enforced sound insulation and climate control upgrades as well as compensation for loss of amenity to anyone that gets rezoned (or can prove ambient noise exceeds their zone).

Hospitals also don't actually need to be foot accessible (assuming you've got like a bus to it). If you wanted to do hospitals right you'd buy up a ring of blocks around the construction and turn the whole area into a park - but good luck getting a private corporation (aka the thing that builds hospitals in the US) to pay for that without a whole lot of municipal pressure.

I've always assumed that NIMBYism primarily gets its hackles raised as soon as you can't drive to exactly the place you want to go without encountering traffic. As someone who uses public transit and their legs to get around I've found that sort of NIMBYism to breed the most hopelessly useless urban planning.

Yes, it varies somewhat depending on region. Fear of the poors is pretty consistent though, and most NIMBY's are pretty strongly pro-car and anti-not-car.

People around here are not NIMBYS... We are the best consumers American consumer culture has produced. We will shop the shit out of Costco, Walmart, and the hundreds of fast food restaurants you find around here... Shake Shack, Chick-fil-A, BJ's Restaurant... Hell yes, give us more! You'll never see a more /r/hailcorporate post than the NextDoor thread of a new chain restaurant arriving in town.

I think the only reason that hospital failed was because they wanted to build multiple stories... People around here have a strong aversion to tall buildings. That was like their biggest complaint. They were worried the hospital would be able to look over their fence and into their pools. Urban sprawl can't happen if we build up. LOL.

I guess that’s the idea behind trying to add infill housing, is to prevent ugly sprawl.

Davis has one of the highest bicycle mode shares of any city in the state. It’s an ideal place to add denser housing without the additional traffic or parking lots that blight a lot of bigger (and less dense) cities.

People tend to vote with their feet and their dollars. It's unclear to me how Elk Grove is "worse" than Davis from your description, besides that there are multiple places for lower income to shop closer to metropolitan areas, in this case Sacramento. Skunks aren't unique to Elk Grove, they're n very urban environments too. "Homeless coyotes" might be a unique phenomenon, most are wild.

It's either going to go vertical or horizontal.

If people afraid of sprawl say no to vertical, then horizontal is going to happen just outside of wherever they care about.

Many people's politics are wildly irrationally disconnected from their sentiments.

I used to live in Davis. If I was King, I'd steamroll everything between A&B and 1st and Russell and replace it with ~30-40 story apartment buildings with multilevel bike parking like in Amsterdam (ex: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1e/c4/d7/1ec4d7a99c2151699afe...), and rooftop bars and cafes.

The walls would be a mix of vertical gardening (ex: https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...) and photovoltaic windows. The bottom floors would have retail and dedicated community space.

The buildings would further have multi-level skywalks connecting them with small nook like terraces (ex: https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/59f1/27ba/b22e/38e2/a...)

There would intentionally, by design, be zero parking spaces except to accommodate the handicapped.

That's as Davis as you're going to get while actually solving the problem

Davis has the best non tesla charger between Sacramento and the bay area. Leave some parking spaces for that.

Lol, ain't that the truth. When the Whole Foods was still there, the chargers around there were the best. It was close to the green belt, coffee, food, and minutes walk from downtown. You could have a real nice "small town" adventure while charging. Ahh... I miss Davis.

Alas, all good things must come to an end.

I'm a big fan of parking on the periphery and no cars at the core.

Essentially ban private vehicles on certain blocks except for service transport and smaller golf-cart sized "NEV"s

There's many older European cities with buildings too close to each other for cars where this is done. You'll also find it on islands where the infrastructure to support a car is lacking such as roads with high speed limits and gas stations

The difference here is to claim that's not just a necessity of circumstances but instead, actually a good idea.

As a complete outsider, what I don't understand is why there's so much NIMBYism in CA and such strong (and laudable) support for easy immigration. If not for immigration the US population growth would have slowed to a crawl and there would be much less pressure.

I guess housing prices wouldn't rise as quickly, but I doubt that's a big part of the motivation.

They're not for "easy" immigration, they're just against racism.

It's not cool to be racist, so you have to pretend you're just "hard" on immigration, and that people who aren't racist are soft on it.

It makes it confusing to have a conversation about it, when one side can't admit what they actually want.

Have you heard the term “xenophilic restrictionist?”

Nope, but the fact the people who are actually "hard on immigration" had to come up with a new name to distance themselves from the people who are just racist supports my point.

Though, since this is not my first rodeo, I'd suggest at least some portion of those claiming to be “xenophilic restrictionists" will reveal that they are xenophobic, and don't care about restricting the "right kind" of immigration.

As I said, it's not cool to be racist, which confuses matters.

Yes, that makes sense at all. One of the problems in the US is the real estate prices.

As far as I can tell, almost every city in the US is afflicted with NIMBYs.

I'll give a relatively mundane example in Boston, not even about development. A couple years ago, a taco shop under Emerson College wanted to stay open until 2AM. An organized group of busybodies showed up to the meeting to stop it, claiming it would bother the college students (yes, their claim was that a taco shop open until 2AM would bother college students). The city listened and told the shop it has to close by midnight.[0]

Now, it's pretty obvious to me that the majority of people closest to the taco shop would be fine with it being open. I live a 5-10 minute walk from that location and would love it to be open later as well, but I didn't hear about this meeting until the results were already in. These meetings aren't listed anywhere in bulk online, the people in charge seem to be inclined to listen to whoever wants to stop stuff, and the people who want to stop stuff seem to have organized and made it a full-time hobby to attend these meetings.

So a lot of NIMBY sentiment is simply organization rather than a true majority sentiment.

0. https://www.universalhub.com/2020/city-always-sleeps-think-c...

What is "zero-zero-zero-zero"? I tried looking it up and can't see anything relevant in this context.

https://the-big-bang-theory.com/quotes/quote/4391/

"That is my spot. In an ever-changing world, it is a single point of consistency. If my life were expressed as a function on a four-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, that spot at the moment I first sat on it would be zero-zero-zero-zero."

I don't get it, why does zero-zero-zero-zero mean a single point of consistency?

if the function doesn't change, every point should be consistent, right?

Big bang theory is a stupid show that happens to be about smart people. I wouldn't dig into the details.

Linear transformations can be more easily visualized as scaling coordinate systems - this is actually a pretty easy way to grok what's actually going on with the math. Big bang theory is pointlessly obscure (and uses four dimensions in its zero-zero-zero-zero because apparently four dimensions is enough to be "ooh mysterious" without making anyone feel like a dolt - just use two dimensions guys - everyone has worked with graph paper) but here's an interesting video[1] that sort of touches on the fact that linear transformations (by definition) keep the origin consistent.

1. Just as an aside - 3Blue 1Brown is an amazing resource https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYB8IZa5AuE

It's 4 dimensions for 3D space plus time, as he makes explicit with "at the moment I first sat on it".

That assumes that the world is naturally described in four dimensions (the three primary spacial ones and time) - but that's just a habit of humans. It's perfectly valid to describe space-time in one dimension or, if you're a bosonic string theorist, 26. The habit of identifying three dimensions (and leaving out obvious things like spin) is just one that's indoctrinated into us by our common mode of education. 3+1D is certainly very sensible - but it isn't the only right answer by a long shot. And, again, 2D is much more socially common - going to 4D really just feels like being pointlessly obscure.

thank you for your explanation.

He said function "on" the coordinate system. I read it as "function in the coordinate system".

As someone who grew up in Elk Grove since 2001 and still visits every few months, it's an example of both NIMBY and YIMBY policies. It seems Elk Grove's city hall followed NIMBY tendencies and zoned many areas as RD-5 or worse, prohibiting multi-family dwellings. Its sprawl was partially caused by developers doing "hopscotch development" - Delta Shores was empty for over 20 years before that was infilled and the lots behind it are still empty. Same applies to the Costco and Mercy Hospital near Trader Joe's. Moving on, Elk Grove also has redeeming qualities - it is a suburb that is very racially diverse, partially thanks to the newer, relatively affordable houses in the south. I attended Cosumnes Oaks High School when it was still a lottery admissions system and saw this myself (and after it was switched to a zone admissions system that favored low-income neighborhoods, heardabout the subsequent increase in fights). However, an interesting highlight is the concept surrounding Laguna Town Hall (created when Laguna was trying to split off into its own city). There's apartments, restaurants, a large park, and an Apple campus within walking distance of each other. You can also see good ideas like new senior apartments being built right next to the Trader Joe's in Costco shopping centers for walkability. And I'd be remiss if I'd I didn't mention Elk Grove's network of bike trails, which my father says are enjoyable to ride.

So I'd say Elk Grove's sprawl was driven by NIMBY-style regulation that encouraged low density housing and failed to address the effects of hopscotch development. Within those failures, Elk Grove has a few gimpses of higher density and urban planning, as well as anecdotes about the benefits of mixing different socioeconomic classes.

> While I don't consider myself a NIMBY, because I wouldn't go out of my way to stop a development project, I do appreciate how it has kept Davis a really nice place to live.

It's possible to develop in a way that doesn't involve giant strip malls and tons more cars, y'know. Most YIMBY's are urbanists, and would be much more in favor of supporting walking, biking and transit, rather than cars cars cars.

16 years resident of Davis who just bought a house in nearby Woodland. Davis homes are impossible to afford without two 100k+ salaries. I loved a lot of things about Davis, but this is not one.

edit: for those curious about Davis, visit the wiki: https://localwiki.org/davis/

There is one comment on that article, it perfectly reflects what you are saying.

Nice response! I only went to Davis, I was definitely curious what someone living there currently thinks.

I was fortunate to always live in Davis while I went there, but it definitely wasn't inexpensive!

Time for my favorite Game of Thrones quote:

> Jon Snow: What did father use to say? Everything before the word "but" is horse sh|t.

"I would support something like this [...] but fortunately it's only theoretical, because there are enough NIMBYs to make sure it has no chance of actually happening"

But I know the feeling, that was me one year ago: "I would love to get a Covid vaccine right away, but (fortunately) there are people with higher priorities who have to get it (and field test it) first". But I have to mention that I did get vaccinated eventually...

Yeah, I can see what you are saying here, but there are some of us around here who support more housing. My reaction was based primarily in just how intense and varied the no growth sentiment is in this town. It honestly takes me aback at times. City council meetings can be surreal.

Alas, people who support more housing, only support it if building it requires no tearing down existing structures, no allocating more land for building, and no conversion of existing buildings.

In other words, people support more housing, as long as it doesn't require more housing. You're free to build anywhere, as long as you leave everywhere untouched.

Well, since none of what you just wrote is true of my position, I'm not sure who precisely you are talking about.

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