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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision. My point is the NIMBY crowd have their point, and it’s unreasonable and unfair to assume they’re entitled asshats that hate poor people. Solutions where they exist will lie in the middle, otherwise in a democracy we have ways of resolving these things.

However it really should be a city level decision - the whole point of having lots of cities is they can vary in their character and quality. Moving these decisions to a state level doesn’t allow for the advocacy of a neighborhood to matter as much. That’s not good.

The world shouldn’t revolve around some NIMBY, but a community of NIMBYs should be respected for their desires as the community. Ceding community control to the government and developers isn’t the right way to go.

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> They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision.

I mean, no they aren't? These people are directly screwing over people like me. I'm gonna disagree with them loudly and publicly until the problem is solved.

If you are being harmed, of course you have a right to speak up against the ones committing said harm!

Explain how this is a direct screwing over please. It seems fairly indirect. Did they enter into a contract with you for an affordable home and then broke it? Did they jack up your rent and evict you? Or did they lobby their government for a policy you don’t like and could, along with other factors, cause your rent to go up? If it’s the latter, that’s pretty indirect.

Technically you are correct about his word choice. But I think you missed the point.

I don’t think I did. There are many factors other than NIMBYs that lead to the perceived harm. It’s also unclear what the harm is - that you can’t afford something in a market economy? That you have to move? When they raze all the single family homes and replace them with Soviet style block houses and everyone can afford it, the NIMBYs will move too. Did they face harm?

I think he is angry at the wrong thing. Maybe being angry that the cities are necessary to live in to get ahead? Maybe he should be hopeful that telecommuting will relieve housing pressures over time? Maybe there’s a saddle point that can be reached by not assuming the other side is malicious towards you personally?

No one has complained about the prices being too high in a market economy. In fact, NIMBYs are distorting the market with inefficient regulation. The harm, of course, is that this regulation unfairly favors current home owners.

The state of California has said enough is enough and has rendered the local regulation null and void.

And no one has said anything about soviet style apartment buildings. That is very unlikely.

The policy they've chosen to advocate directly harms me. Not in a, "oh, no, there's now a construction project nearby" sort of way. In a, "I literally cannot afford to live in this city anymore, so I have to leave" sort of way. I will deride the hell out of the extremely privileged status quo interests who put their precious aesthetic opinions above the basic needs of their children and grandchildren. If you loudly advocate your selfish and in doing so you hurt the hell out of large groups of people, they will dislike you for it.

I see, the harm done is if the city won’t change to accommodate you you might have to move to another city. The harm done to the other side is they can’t stand to live in the city that changed to accommodate you so you didn’t have to leave, and they have to leave. Their advocacy for the city accommodating them is selfish, but your advocacy for the city accommodating you is egalitarian?

I see a lot of people say this is direct harm. I don’t think people understand what that term means. “I’m upset by the outcome of your advocacy” doesn’t mean direct harm. Advocacy isn’t directed towards you, no one has come to you and harmed you. Direct harm would be them coming and removing you from your home and keeping you under housed directly. Their advocacy indirectly leads to higher housing prices, and even then there’s a lot of other confounding factors. “I’m really upset with the situation and those guys are advocating for a partial factor that gives rise” is about as indirect as you get.

Harm is done to the person owning the single family home absolutely but I would argue that is the lesser of two evils. The best way would be to give them some element of compensation, but still, if one wants a nice, lower density area they should move away from the rapidly growing city. You can't just expect to maintain that forever.

The same could be said of the person who wants a larger apartment than they could afford given the market for housing - move further away from the city.

Neither extreme makes sense, we should probably recognize both camps have valid points and a middle path is likely the right one, and no one will be fully satisfied.

From a utilitarian perspective though it's a greater harm to all the people that would live in the high-rise that now have to live miles from the city versus the handful of single family home owners.

That is true. Hence my comments above about the extreme is razing all the SFH and replacing them with society style apartment blocks to ensure everyone has the minimum required to house the maximum number of people at the lowest cost possible. The other side is they’re incumbent, have established a life, and their entire community wants the life they have lived. Respecting that is important too, otherwise you get what you see in China with the razing of old cities replaced with efficiency unit high rises and forced relocation. There’s something to be said for respecting the lives built of a community vs destroying the community built for utilitarian gain.

True and I 100% agree not everybody can live in santa monica or San Francisco. It should be expensive or inhibiting in some way.

> I see, the harm done is if the city won’t change to accommodate you you might have to move to another city. The harm done to the other side is they can’t stand to live in the city that changed to accommodate you so you didn’t have to leave, and they have to leave. Their advocacy for the city accommodating them is selfish, but your advocacy for the city accommodating you is egalitarian?

This is very well expressed, thanks.

Fundamentally you have people who live somewhere and like it how it is, and all the people who don't live there and want to radically change it to be something else. Clearly these desires are in conflict. Each side has the right to speak up for what they'd like to see, sure.

But where does it come the idea that the people who don't live there should have a greater say in how the place develops than those who actually make their life there?

I can only live in one place, all other towns of the world are places I don't live in. By that logic, I should be able to influence all the N-1 places on earth I don't live it, but have no say in how development occurs in the 1 place I do live in. Does that make sense?

I don't live in Boston. Should I have greater vote on how Boston needs to change than people who actually live there? (To pick a random city I don't live in.)

But isn't your position premised on an entitlement to live in a particular place? I don't recall ever creating or affirming that entitlement. And it doesn't exactly strike me as reasonable. There are expensive neighborhoods that I cannot afford to live in. I don't see anything wrong with that.

>Moving these decisions to a state level doesn’t allow for the advocacy of a neighborhood to matter as much. That’s not good.

I firmly believe that it is good. Neighborhoods shouldn't have the right to work together to exclude other people from moving to that neighborhood.

> They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision.

The voters of California have clearly decided that they aren't.

Yeah and I think they’ll regret it. If you think the voters of California are good stewards you’ve not paid attention to California.

Depends on the level of information available to voters. At the local level, decisions are usually terrible, as getting info about local elections is usually contained within patronage networks.

At the state level, elections are much better, and state level elections are usually far more informed. There have been moments of pure greed by the electorate, like with Prop 13, that have severely harmed the state, but that's a common trap with all electorates.

Overall I think California voters are newer on par with places like Minnesota thag have generally very good governance.

> There have been moments of pure greed by the electorate, like with Prop 13

That is a very uncharitable description. Prop13 was driven by people sick of getting thrown out of their long-time homes by huge tax increases. There is no "greed" in the desire to keep living in the home you bought.

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