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Comment by el_nahual | Hacker News Reader

The issue with NIMBYs ("Not In My Back Yard") is that they aren't really NIMBYS: They are CAVErs: Citizens Against Virtually Everything.

I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment building they'd object. But if you also proposed—to the exact same group of people—tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single family homes, they'd object.

If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too.

These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be made better: they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better, and they don't believe that ungided "forces" can make things better either.

If something has an advocate, the advocate must be taking advantage. If nobody is advocating, then something unguided must be wrong. Nothing can be an improvement.

Therefore, any change must be for the worst, and they oppose everything.

View on HN

That's one flavor of NIMBY anyways.

There's also the topically focused ones, like with a focus on crime or property values. (I have had a lot more experience with the latter)

Case in point, Naperville, IL (quite wealthy suburb of Chicago) had a cell coverage problem in the late 90's. The NIMBY's shot down any proposal of putting up "ugly" cell towers because it could mar the view and impact property values. (I would love to know the overlap between the people complaining about cell coverage and property values)

The compromise the city came up with was designing a commemorative bell tower which sneakily could house cellular equipment. This old article describes, conveniently, that the tower was designed to hold cellular networking equipment, and by total coincidence they found a cell company interested in paying to put equipment there:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-12-23-991223...

The project, initially termed "The Millenium Bell Tower" (later "The Carillon"), become known locally as "The Millenium Cell Tower".

"Property values" are a cop out objection. They're almost impossible to prove one way or another, but they are a dog whistle for people who object to change in general.

It's almost impossible to tell what buyers will think of any particular change to a neighbourhood, and buyers are the ones who determine property value not the owners. But owners hear "property values" and they see their nest egg evaporating away and so of course they join in the objection.

In my city, which for the last five years has been in the top ten in the country for year-over-year increases (as a percentage), at least 10, up to 15% property value increases, a proposal, "Missing Middle" was introduced, to help increase middle-density housing availability.

A study was requisitioned by the city, and found that "worst case, the effect on property value would be to reduce the -increase- over the next ten years to be 7-9% year-over-year".

Holy hell, you'd have thought they were executing people's grandmothers in the streets. All of a sudden what I assumed were just people's homes were their "investment in the future" with some hitherto unknown to me guaranteed access to double digit home value increases. People who lived on dead end streets that would not have been rezoned (access to transit and arterials was a consideration) screamed that there'd be "constant traffic through their neighborhood", etc.

It makes more sense when you read it as "people values".

They don't want the blue collar or lesser crowd moving in.

I originally had bit in the post about classism and racism about how people moved out to the suburbs to escape higher density housing but deleted it because I thought it would be too contentious.

Plus, that's more the "crime rates" crowd, which is often thinly veiled racism.

> Plus, that's more the "crime rates" crowd, which is often thinly veiled racism.

There's a lot of that in Naperville as well. It is that kind of place.

Property values generally go up with bike lanes?

https://www.icebike.org/property-prices/

I get that article is probably biased, maybe you can find the opposite "proof"?

I'm kind of addicted to "Not Just Bikes" (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A) and he claims studies show massive increases in property prices with more bikable / walkable areas.

There is a ton of evidence from urban planning that proximity to transport hubs (metro / subway / light rail stations), bike infrastructure, small parks, street design, neighborhood cafes / retail, etc., and overall "walkability" boosts property values significantly.

It's called "Locational Advantage" and there's a few decent studies here:

- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10527001.2021.2... - https://www.redfin.com/news/how-much-does-walkability-increa... - https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/walking_the_walk_cortright.pdf - https://www.housingwire.com/articles/better-walkability-mean... - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02642... - http://www.reconnectingamerica.org/assets/Uploads/2009Walkab... - https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Etc.

But it doesnt go up during the 5-10 years of construction time when roads are blocked and jackhammers are operating. People today want to sell/flip thier house long before any newly-started improvement will be complete.

If bike lane or cycleway takes 5-10 years of construction time then something is deeply wrong.

That's the point of the OP. For a variety of reasons, projects sometimes take exponentially longer than expected. It might only take a few days to paint some lines, to convert a car lane to a bike lake. But if the project instead means either making the sidewalk smaller, or expanding the road overall to accommodate the new lane, then timelines start growing. And, of course, a bunch of other improvements and maintenance are layered atop the project. Generally speaking, the road is brought also up to whatever safety standards have been changed. That might mean new sidewalk bits and pieces, new electronic signage or streetlights. Before you know it you are staring at traffic cones for years, mostly as the project waits for one or another subcontractor to do X or Y before Z can begin.

That's an argument for opposing metros or light rail (though I'm not sure it's true even there). But a bike lane takes weeks, not years.

Sure, but they only need to find one exception to force you to end that line of reasoning.

Their excuse at that point typically becomes "crime"

This article has a photo: https://www.positivelynaperville.com/2020/09/04/2020-carillo...

I suppose it is vaguely terrifying.

Ah, I've seen that one before! It's from Lord of the Rings, isn't it? Thought it was destroyed by the flooding those environmental activists caused...

We got that issue here to mixed in with a bit of anti-5G.

It pisses me because I can barely get LTE signal. For some reason, most carriers except version are dead where I live, which is odd because I live inbetween suburbs and a busy road. It's not like I'm in the middle of nowhere. Even with version the signal strength is crap.

Hey, welcome to Germany.

Version? I assume you got attacked by auto-correct and really meant Verizon.

Yes, sorry, that would be correct.

And it's a hideous brutalist thing that towers over the park it is in, frightening the children. It looks like something out of a futuristic Lord of the Rings reboot.

Brutalism‽ Won't somebody think of the children‽

I think we don’t have ENOUGH frightening architecture. Where are all the gargoyles? The Dark Arcos?

I’m talking about REAL character, here, the stuff children will remember the rest of their lives and tell their grandchildren.

You must not have attended Catholic school as a child.

The return of investment on bicycle infrastructure is estimated to be 8 Euros for every 1 Euro spent. This includes property values.

My preferred term is BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Here in my country you get people objecting to projects genuinely on the other side of the country. It's becoming a bit of a problem for getting approval of major project like data centres.

If it’s the case in Athenry, that individual had a competing data centre project shovel ready in Wicklow.

"BANANAs" -- I love it.

As Groucho Marx once sang: "Whatever ya got, I'm against it.'

>These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be made better: they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better, and they don't believe that unguided "forces" can make things better either.

I believe my local council do want to make things better, unfortunately what the council leadership consider better I would generally consider to be worse - they are constantly making trying to make the area become "trendy" and divert tourists and foot traffic from the richer suburbs nearby, but at the expense of the people who actually live here.

For example, they "upgraded" a local park by adding a bunch of sheltered seating and an enclosed dog walking area, which does look quite fancy... but removed the skateboarding area and mountain bike jumps that were heavily used by the local kids as they did not "fit the image", and put the new seating and dog areas scattered around inside the park so there isn't enough contiguous area for sports.

>If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too.

We usually end up with the worst of both worlds and get awful combined parking / bike lane areas that force cyclists to weave between the road proper and the bike lane to avoid parked cars, and that often contain small oil leaks leftover in the parking spaces that can slip up the cyclists.

> I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment building they'd object. But if you also proposed—to the exact same group of people—tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single family homes, they'd object.

I suspect that you're collecting all of the people that are against things that you support into one group, when they're really multiple, often opposing groups. NIMBYs just seem to be a bag that upper-middle class millennials store their resentments in. For a similar sentiment, see "haters."

These terrible people whose deep cynicism causes them to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist.

> to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist

Painting these people as cynics is not the entirely right characterization imho.

I think parent describes a certain class of people who are constantly in fear of getting done over. Everything new is an opportunity for them to take the short end of the stick. Their imaginary adversary is always a nebulous "they", generally people they suspect to be wealthier, either in money or cachet or political leverage. That pervasive fear of getting taken advantage of is hard to explain. To use the example of the parent, you can show CAVErs a popular bikelane addition in another neighborhood, and still they would block it in their own.

I think that fear and distrust that animates the CAVErs (great term by the way, hadn't heard it), is because they really lack imagination. An almost physical inability to imagine something else, that's aspirational, outside one's own experience. I'm not sure why that is, why there is such a deeply seeped in mental sclerosis and solipsism, which at times can almost feel uniquely american.

I think you’re describing a lack of Openness as understood in the Big Five personality model.

> I think parent describes a certain class of people who are constantly in fear of getting done over. Everything new is an opportunity for them to take the short end of the stick

I mean... perhaps they have been taken advantage of a lot.

I feel like the US has become a society basically built on taking advantage of people, so... it's not actually unreasonable to worry you are being lied to and misled for someone else's advantage.

It's a mess. It all becomes circular and self-reinforcing, but we're going to need some fundamental changes to society to get out of it... that are made harder by the very conditions we're talking about.

> I'm not sure why that is, why there is such a deeply seeped in mental sclerosis and solipsism, which at times can almost feel uniquely american.

Because, at least from an European POV, y'all are constantly getting the short stick in life. Rich people can do whatever the fuck they want with absolute impunity (remember Trump claiming he could shoot someone on 5th Ave [1]?), meanwhile the poorer you are the harder you can get screwed over. Even if you are in the upper classes of employment, such as a high-paid programmer, you can be fired effectively immediately in 49 states [2] for no reason at all. You can go bankrupt from hospital bills even if you have health insurance.

Obviously that leads people to the desire to have at least one thing they control - their homes and neighborhoods.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/24/donald-trump...

[2] https://www.betterteam.com/at-will-employment

Great point, thanks for the links. I can certainly see that, nimbyism as some sort of compensation for impotence.

> These terrible people whose deep cynicism causes them to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist.

Sure they do, they're on Nextdoor.

https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv

A more charitable description of NYMBY-ism would be that these people are mainly against the externalities that construction projects in their neighbourhood would cause, as opposed to being strongly for one end result over another.

How do you distinguish between externalities and end results? Aren't both are the sum total of the outcomes?

It's all about the commute and the noise, and if someone who's retired is staying home all day they have A LOT of time to dwell on the small stuff like hearing a jack hammer for a few hours one day.

I've gotten more sympathetic to this over time. A few years ago I lived in a young (and constantly under construction) neighborhood. after weeks hearing jack hammers and other construction noise, it starts to get old. especially if you work night shift and try to sleep in the morning...

If it ever stopped that would be one thing, but it never does. It just moves around a bit but never stops. The noise, the bad traffic, the unpredictability, the random power outages, etc start to get really old and for the several years we lived there, it was never "done." Maybe I'm just old now, but I really understand the appeal of an established and static neighborhood that doesn't change.

I'm not sympathetic. I've lived with a lot of construction noise over the past 5-10 years, and yes, it's annoying, but I would never object to a project on those grounds. Cities are not static, and if you want to live in one, you have to accept the fact that there will be construction noise. Invest in a good pair of comfy earplugs, or a white noise machine, or something like that.

For me, it's more painful, because I tend to stay up late and wake up late. Construction usually starts between 8 and 9 in the morning, and by then I've usually only had 5 hours of sleep or so. But that's life! I can choose to move, or to adjust my sleep schedule, or just deal with it! I don't think any of this should give me the right to torpedo useful projects that others benefit from. The people that do are just exceedingly selfish and un-neighborly.

> I would never object to a project on those grounds.

The thing is, it's not a binary. There's a lot of possible mitigation. Noise-absorbing panels can perhaps be placed around where the jackhammers work; or around the first row of residential buildings in the vicinity. Neighbor windows can be replaced with double-glazed ones, reducing noise. Of course this costs money, but it might make the difference.

Another option is offering people to move away temporarily with the rentals being part of the project costs.

Of course this all costs money; but there's a multi-parameter tradeoff, it's rarely just "do it" or "don't do it".

Don't worry, in those neighborhoods we have leaf blowers.

Electric leaf blowers kinda rock and are somewhat quieter. I feel less bad about the environment (my electricity is hydro) at least. Though I use it more in autumn than my old petrol version. So it's probably a wash.

The emissions of leaf blowers are pretty terrible because they use small two-stroke motors designed for power-to-weight above all else. Even if you had a coal-rich electricity mix you would have to use the electric version a lot more to come close.

I've got a backpack-wearable one from Ego and I love it. That said, my comment above was mostly a joke. :)

Around here it seems to be a guy chasing around no more than five leaves for several hours.

I'm not sure how likely you are to avoid this problem. Even in a static neighborhood, you need maintenance on utilities and change dealing with advances in energy and information transmission.

That said, understandably there are benefits to staying in a constant neighborhood. The problem is that nobody wants to live in the static neighborhoods as there are few jobs or attractive businesses there. You can get a static area by moving to a rural area.

That's not true at all there are tons of static neighborhoods all over major cities. But they are wildly expensive.

How quiet and convenient was the construction of that established neighborhood?

In my experience (studying Nextdoor) nobody cares about suburban noise pollution, which really is far worse than anything they do care about. What they care about is

1. a 2-story building might cast a shadow on something

2. a person under 50 years old might walk in front of their house, causing gentrification

3. there might be some traffic, somewhere

4. tech employees are too poor to live in their city and will lower property values

5. tech employees are too rich and will park their sports cars in front of their house, attracting crime

This really rings true for me in NYC. Any project get decried by Working Family partisans as being too pro developer, insufficiently full of affordable units, likely to cause gentrification(even in predominantly white neighborhoods), or doesn’t include enough “green jobs”. If they can’t stop it in review, they appeal to their council person to veto it. Failing that they call on the sainted congresswoman, PBUH, to intercede. If she leans on city council in public, the project dies. This is exactly how a locally popular rezoning of Industry City failed.

These so called progressives are so myopic that they cement the status quo, and working people are being squeezed out of NYC as a result.

This video from Reason.com does a great job in explaining what is happening in these big cities[1]. I see it as the major downside to utopian thinking, you miss the bigger picture for the small, less significant details.

They don't want an apartment project because of a litany of small, sometimes insignificant issues that get dragged out. I'm sure the activist feel righteous in thinking that they are keeping the big bad mega developer from building apartments that gentrify the community.

This line of thinking misses big picture, if you want more affordable homes, you need more supply. On the one hand you can say that this is in fact a complex multi faceted issue and the activists may not be understanding the way their actions will backfire. But on the other hand you think there is no way, there is no way someone does not see the most basic of economic principles at work: supply and demand.

[1]: https://reason.com/video/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission-ho...

It's shocking to me reading about some of the litigation involved in that case. While I can appreciate that there are interest groups that want to ensure affordable housing is built, all approvals should have come to a grinding halt until the special interest groups and the development company could come to a private contractual agreement. In the absence of an agreement, the appeals process should be one of arbitration, in which the court can enforce a compromise that makes neither party happy.

Instead it seems like everyone is just submitting documents to approvals committees independent of talking to each other. And the judicial system is forced to deal with an overwhelming number of individual cases.

This reminds me of the Oakland A's new stadium project. It seems like the team wants to stay in Oakland, build a nice newer stadium and build a bunch of apartments (including low income) and amenities. The stadium is planned to be basically all privately funded as well. However, it's been caught up in battles where people want more affordable housing and concerns about gentrification and all this stuff, and so nothing is happening on the project. Because of this, the A's are sandbagging the team, the attendance is dropping at the current stadium, and the A's are looking to move to Las Vegas. It's really sad, because the A's are a huge part of the community, but now the community is practically kicking them out.

That sounds like nothing more than a very straightforward description of conservatism.

Agreed! Except in american (and increasingly global, english-influenced) vernacular the words "conservatism" and "liberalism" have begun to stray so far from their "original" meanings that they can no longer be trusted to accurately convey meaning.

> Except in american

What? In America liberal is very much displaced from its "original meaning".

> [alas], in american vernacular, and hence also increasingly global, the words [..] have begun to stray...

Except is used more like an interjection there (agreed, except that...). They didn't mean to except the american vernacular from the rest of the sentence, just to clarify why they didn't write "conservative" in the first place.

I read the parent "except" as "the above is true, but..." not as "in all Englishes except American English"

Or NOPE ("Not On Planet Earth")

I began my career in solar system SCADA systems. My company wanted to build a solar plant in CA, it was picketed and sued by the Sierra Club. Yes, an environmental club suing to stop a solar power plant.

The Sierra club is more of an outdoorsman club than an environmental club. The interests overlap sometimes, but often they do not and you end up with situations like this. They want to preserve nature, not the environment. And no, this doesn't cause cognitive dissonance in them somehow.

Maybe 100 years ago it was as benign as you suggest, but it's since been hijacked by other interests, including a eugenicist and a leader who was kicked out of Greenpeace for being too radical.

The Sierra Club is chapter-based, so it doesn't matter who its leaders are - they don't pay attention to them anyway.

The SF Sierra Club is just a NIMBY front though: https://web.archive.org/web/20170620220237/http://thebaycity...

Beverly Hills routinely approves single family home teardowns as long as you replace with another single family home.

But replacing with an apartment? Not in MY backyard!

And even those teardowns are subject to people trying to get the balloon framed single family home designated as a historical entity and preserved for all of time

This won't be popular, but special interests play a far greater role in the chilling affect for modern urban infrastructure than the so called "NIMBYs" do...

. Want to build a new housing complex? How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing, and you've got to have solar . Building a new bridge? Better ensure at least one lane is pedestrianized so that that <1% of potential traffic can use it as well . Want to extend public transit? Maybe, but you can't raise prices as it might affect the poor . Want to build a park? Will it be fully ADA compliant so everyone can enjoy it. . Want to install a sidewalk on a roadway? Have you also allocated space for a fully protected bike lane... can't get started without that.

Everything you listed sounds like a good thing to me. Infrastructure should serve the people.

> How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing

This one is called IZ (inclusive zoning) and is an extremely popular weapon with SF and Portland "left-NIMBYs". They know if the number is set too high, it will both make them look good and cancel literally every housing project in the pipeline (as noone can afford to build it anymore), so set it too high they have, and so their project pipeline collapsed.

When it's used at low levels it can work, but only if you accept that it fundamentally makes the project more expensive, which means the more "luxury" projects are more likely to survive, and means the cost of the market-rate units goes up.

I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion. In my experience the points you made are used as justification by those responsible for delivering those things as to why they are not doing so. Essentially, house builders want to maximise profit and not build parks. Neo liberals don't want public transport to be subsidised as a public good etc etc.

When we build, to we absolutely must build the right thing because changing it later will be much harder. That does involve lots of hard work persuading people of the benefits.

Then I think you misstate my conclusion.

Simply pointing out that NIMBY/no builders aren't the sole or even dominate factor of 'Why America can't build.' Or rather, special interest groups who seek to impose their will on public infrastructure excerpt their own form of Nimbyism -- they block development until it conforms to their interests. One can certainly argue the merits or determents of any of this advocacy, but as you state... it makes the outcome harder to achieve.

In the bay area of CA, where NIMBYs are really powerful, we call the super-NIMBYs BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything

I can guarantee you that removing bike lanes to add in almost anything else will get almost zero resistance from a typical NIMBY. Until cyclists in a city reach a critical mass they have the least valued infrastructure out of any group.

There is a documentary about a guy in Michigan who had the idea to purchase all of the blighted, abandoned homes so he could tear them down and restore the area as a community farm (or something like that). The locals flipped the fuck out, apparently they didn't want anyone solving the blight and drug problems in the area. To them he was rich, and that meant he had to be stopped. Took him years to convince people that he wasn't the devil. Turns out their only real opinion was that change made them nervous.

These sound like hypothetical scenarios. Do you have some real world examples?

There's a completely bland, ugly, brutalist movie theatre in the downtown of my city [1]. Probably from the 80s? There was talk about tearing it down and replacing it with a much nicer looking (IMO) modern mid-rise [2]. A local news organization posted about it, and the comments were flooded with old people who live in the suburbs moaning. One just posted a link to a YouTube video of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" ("they paved paradise/and put up a parking lot"), absurdly.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@48.4255478,-123.3621296,3a,75y,...

[2] https://www.cheknews.ca/officer-tower-proposed-for-capitol-6...

Kind of funny using Victoria as an example. Having lived in Victoria on and off for the last 20 years I can remember the "tall-building ordinance" that finally got removed to allow for the construction of taller condos in the downtown area. Up above is also someone posting the lack of progress for bike lanes in their city but Victoria has been pretty good about that with the mayor going ahead with them even despite significant outcry about them. I think Victoria could be faster at adjusting to change but when I think about the changes over the past 2 decades, there has been significant development.

Not to mention the movie theatre is right across the street from a larger, nicer movie theatre.

Not that it matters but, while that theater may be ugly, it's certainly not brutalist.

The quintessential "bad faith NIMBY" proposal is probably the infamous "historic laundromat" saga in SF where a laundromat had to do three studies on shadows and was proposed for historic preservation in an effort to stop an apartment building: https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...

A lot of small parks in SF are also there because declaring some land a park is a good way to stop affordable housing projects/senior housing/anything that doesn't sound as cute as a park.

My college fraternity purchased a former sorority house turned retirement home, with the intent to turn it back into a fraternity house. Neighbors objected.

We had to take it all the way to the state Supreme Court to use the dwelling as it was originally intended and zoned.

Can you blame the neighbors for not wanting to live next to a frat house? That’s pretty much the embodiment of partying, booze, loud music

Sure but that’s not how laws or zoning are supposed to work. A retirement home is zoned the same as a fraternity.

It is like suing your neighbor because you’d rather they have 2 kids instead of 3. Or suing the corner business because they opened a coffee shop instead of a donut shop.

The idea that you think you have a say in your neighbors private business is the real problem.

As long as you tag your hypothetical neighbor's business as "private", saying that it's inappropriate to think you have a say in it is tautological.

The idea that you have a say in your neighbor's business is not a problem, it's a fact. The fact that you have property at all is an agreement amongst your neighbors to respect that claim. If you want a place where your neighbors don't get a say in what you do, you should shop for another planet.

Most other countries don't have this concept. Strict zoning, permitting, and your neighbors suing over everything is kind of a US specialty.

Can't do nothin like that in supposedly collectivist Japan.

I find it really interesting that in the supposedly "land of the free" US people constantly try to invade each other's private business. So many regulations telling you what you can or cannot do, especially in your private property. And of course people willingly(!!!!!) joining organisations that regulate where you can park on your own driveway or what's the regulation height of the grass in your garden.

In other countries you want to open a business out of your garage? Go ahead, why would anyone stop you. It's your private property. Your neighbour doesn't like it? They can talk to you about it. The local council isn't going to invervene because.....it's none of their business. But somehow in US that's flipped on its head - like somehow the "freedom" means "freedom to tell others how to live their life" instead of "freedom to live my life how I want".

In my town you to have all of the neighbors within view of the proposed building sign off on your project.

Hopefully you find everyone with a claim before you build and that the person you missed doesn't give a shit.

Wow, I almost never see a comment to this effect on HN. So very few people understand this, and that it also extends to all property, not just land.

I wouldn't even think you need to shop for another planet - there are plenty parts of world where it's essentially free-for-all what people build on their own land. They're variously known as favelas, slums, shantytowns etc.

And you think there is a power vacuum there? Try build there and see for how long no-one bothers you.

I suspect one of us rather missed the point here.

Haha, have an upvote. :-D

PREACH. If they wanted a say in what happens on a piece of land, they should have bought that land!

I've heard of people moving next to schools and playground/sport field and then complaining to the council about the noise. Some take it even further to enforce restrictions on the use of the public grounds.

It's always easier to say no. Happens in orgs and happens in neighborhoods.

That's the nature of large open forums. It can feel like they are hypocritical, but actually it's just different voices from the same group.

This is literally the Conservative ethos at play

Another way of looking at this is as, "institutions tending towards prudence" which is an after effect of inheriting the anglospheric intellectual tradition (Hume, Burke, Adam Smith). This is classic empirical conservatism-- there must be a very good reason to implement new policy if the system tends toward stability, solutions must be vetted, and new policy should be, "test-driven" at small scales before being implemented more generally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke

Here's my question-- without making an appeal to, "oughts" or ideals; what part of any of this is controversial or surprising given the highly capitalist nature of American civic life? People don't want their nice neighborhoods to change. I don't see this as unreasonable.

This literally sounds like American "Conservatism".

Most city democrats are actually conservatives. They just don't believe it. They'll still vote "democrat" but typically the most conservative ones.

The problem if you only have row options (liberal/democrat vs conservative/republican) is that totally unrelated things have to fit this incredibly coarse framework. If someone is against constructing anything and afraid "outsiders" will come into the neighborhood, but they are for tighter gun control are they conservative or not? It's just random labels now from a policy perspective.

Anyone who is confused by this should go to a school board or school planning meeting in a deep-blue district. You find "deep blue" citizens absolutely going nuts to ensure their school abides by little of the values we typically think are progressive values.

Well yeah, does anyone really believe people fit into neat little boxes with extremely broad labels? Blue folks can be pretty small government when it comes to police and the justice system, conservative when it concerns gentrification, individualist when it comes to welfare programs, bodily autonomy, drug use, and pornography, and free market when it's about immigration and global trade.

Thank you for this. We pretty much have two main political labels for people in the US, "republican" and "democrat". Sure, some people identify as libertarian, some as independent (which to me means nothing), green, whatever. But either you're a Dem or a member of the GOP, for the most part. And do we really expect that everyone in each of those buckets as the exact same needs, desires, and policy plans? C'mon...

People do not vote for Democrats because they share their values, but because they like free money that Democrats typically promise.

People vote for Democrats for all sorts of crazy reasons, including agreement with one of their many policy platforms. People also vote for Republicans for reasons that aren't "I'm a fascist".

I think it's less about free money and more about the following general policies: no jail for thieves, drugs for everyone, homeless++.

In general democrats seem to be doing anything they can to make society worse in exchange for more votes.

I feel like everyone should find a balance between being liberal and conservative. There is no one size fits all approach to life. Sometimes one needs to be conservative and other times progressive. Explore/exploit if you will.

Moreover, I don't blame people for NIMBY. A house is extremely expensive. It only makes sense to be conservative and protect that investment.

Not sure what the solution is, but I have found it very comfortable in smaller cities. Less commute and hassle than living in a big city, well worth the sacrifices.

Not here to disagree, and I say this all the time, but I feel it bears repeating in this context: Left vs. right or liberal vs. conservative are ridiculously reductive ways of categorizing people's political opinions. Even allowing for people "in the middle" is reductive. That people are so attached to the idea of a single-axis political spectrum in the US plays into the two party system very well and helps keep voters from having any meaningful impact. We ought to be able to place ourselves independently on many axes, i.e. data privacy, gun ownership, taxation, consumer protection, energy policy, and so on. If we didn't lean so hard into the partisan tribalism then you might see movement on more of these issues where it's not such an even split of public opinion.

My intuition is that the inutility of voting afforded by the left vs. right meme may be the end-goal for many reinforcing it, perhaps in support of those with the most money sloshing around in political spheres. If I intended to buy certain unpopular policy with political donations, I wouldn't want voters breaking out of their ideological silos and crossing party lines to oppose the candidates doing my bidding. Maybe that thinking is a bit too conspiratorial, though.

If nothing else, it's a way to lock down a large swath of the demographic you must appeal to, and lets you then pander to only those are are sensitive to an actual position, and not just being endorsed by a group (or even just professing memborship in a group).

In some respect this is useful for the average person because there's just so much going on that being fully aware of the the different candidates stances on many different topics and trying to juggle all that is hard, and doing a good job of it in some cases is next to impossible. That said, it's taken advantage of in the extreme by politicians (of all groups) now, who seem to have purposefully divided the populace so they can rely on this. To all of our detriment.

Not just the house, but the neighborhood itself. I get NIMBYism if only because i understand sticking with the devil you know

It’s not limited to the city. In the countryside you’ll find “conservationists” who don’t want to lose the small-town character and zone everything outside a tiny village as farmland or single family housing on 10 acre lot sizes with huge setbacks. They then take their giant piece of property and put it into a conservation trust - a tax shelter that keeps your land from being developed and taxed at its productive value. But they’re usually democrats so it’s conservation not being conservative.

You can do whatever you want on farmland. Skyscraper? Pyramid? Go for it.

does these labels make any sense any more? Not that they made sense to begin with. Liberalism and conservatism aren't polar opposite. The opposite of conservatism (those who don't like change) is radicalism (significant changes). In general, anyone who favors the long standing status quo is a conservative. Conservative label itself doesn't convey anything about one's political believes without knowing the contemporary social and political history surrounding the person. Every longstanding blue-state democrat by definition is a conservative. On top of all that you have the uniquely american problem of having to pigeon hole everyone into just two labels, and labels gradually losing their values to identities.

Are you describing Twitter?

they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better

The hard part is that often they're right, especially in California - as with the Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project, where TFA says that the commute times were actually increased.

You can argue that it's a somewhat self-fulfilling belief... but the regulatory state is where it is. The CAVErs today are dealing with what exists.

I've seen this term nimby float around a lot recently. You can tell it's the just the next wave of internet propaganda because the term is used as a subtle method of peer pressure to give advantage to whatever sugar daddy paid for all those blogposts and new articles that now reference the term.

First off, it's not a bad thing to live without evangelizing their mindset on other people, the emphasis of "only caring about their own back yard". They're allowing other people to live life the way they want to, that's gracious. Emphasizing your status quo in only your own back yard is the opposite of entitlement.

We live in a system of hierarchical social participation. Everyone has participation at the federal level, but each person's participation counts less there than anywhere else. As you move down the ladder to state, county, city/town the you have more control over what goes on in your locality. If you live in a neighborhood where you don't want something to change, you have every right to want that. Especially if you're rooted in the area while a demographic of transient transplants try introducing ground-changing legislation in the city they just moved to, and might leave within 10 years.

If you want people to live in your neighborhood and not be "transient" (aka not homeowners), it might help to build enough houses to let them live in them. Although I don't know what being a homeowner has to do with being transient, as you can always sell the home again.

This kind of opinion being popular suggests many Americans would love it if we had a China-style hukou system; if you could forbid other Americans from moving to your town you'd never have to see a younger person again.

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