The Dangerous Rise of Front Yard Polticics | Hacker News Reader

The Dangerous Rise of Front Yard Polticics

theatlantic.com

25 pointsPigalowda42 comments

This is just more NIMBYism. Front yard signs that everyone is welcome but then flip out when immigrants arrive. People proclaiming they care for the poor, the homeless, yet become enraged if you dare to put a shelter within half a mile of their property. It's the same disingenuousness that American politics is rife with.

Americans seem very enthusiastic about telling everyone else what they should do about an issue, but as soon as it effects them in any way, it becomes Not In My Backyard or just "not my problem."

The article does touch on this. It's a more general issue of which NIMBY is only a part. In most usage, NIMBY is about building a tangible thing in a particular place. What the author is talking about applies even when there's no tangible thing and no particular place - e.g. taxes or regulations that affect what we do or how we do them. I think of it as people saying they want some change X while precluding all ways of doing X. Consider the example of helping the poor.

NIMBY: ...but I don't want to see or interact with them.

Almost NIMBY: ...but not by providing them with housing or transportation other things that cost money.

Not NIMBY (but still awful): ...but not by dealing with payday lenders and bank fees and punitive policing.

Do you want to use "NIMBY" as convenient shorthand for all of these? That's fine with me, and consistent with your name here, but it is a shift from how the term is currently used. The difference is worth thinking about, instead of "just"-ing it away.

Couldn't all those people with signs welcoming illegal immigrants house them on a couch or spare bedroom or a tent in their back yard?

This is not even more literally NIMBY than most (which are "not in my neighborhood or I usually spend my time")

This is half devils-advocate, half serious, and half I'm curious to see where the discussion will go.

What if instead of using credit scores to decide who may live where, what if we instead used social credit scores to decide? Perhaps it is lazy of me not to elaborate on what exactly would go into that score but part of it is me not knowing either.

Check out the Black Mirror episode called ‘Nosedive’.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

A social credit system, such as the one used by the CCP? Are you sure you don't want to elaborate?

I can maybe try. What are the qualities we would want and not want in a neighbor?

A top priority I would think is we don't want someone who makes us feel unsafe, so there should be a penalty for such things as getting into fights and crime, perhaps petty crime especially.

On the other hand we do want someone that is friendly and helps take care of the commons, someone that helps clean up the street from litter and someone that arranges block parties to help people get to know each other.

There are also factors where people have strong preferences and compatibility is important, stuff like loud late night parties (it's reasonable to have neighborhoods both with and without) and communities where you have to have a perfectly manicured lawn (compare HOA).

The problem is that the people with power set up what data gets used in a credit score - and the people with power are the white homeowners who want HOAs to control their neighbors. When you ask "what are the qualities we would want..." you miss that the definition of "we" is why discrimination exists.

> and the people with power are the white homeowners who want HOAs to control their neighbors

While I'm sure this is fairly common, I was careful not to restrict my sibling reply to the GP to a single race. There are predominately black or hispanic communities out there (for example) with very similar preferences.

> What are the qualities we would want and not want in a neighbor?

Ah, but that's exactly the problem. There are a ton of places in this country where people would answer that as "people of the same race, with the same values as me".

How is wanting to live near people “with the same values as me” a problem? My kids will pick up values from the neighborhood kids. Why wouldn’t I want to live in a neighborhood where people share my values?

Heck, in my experience as a brown guy traveling in some pretty conservative parts of the country, even most of the “race” stuff boils down to “values and culture.”

True, Rosa parks had to sit at the back because of values and culture. Also George Floyd /s

> There are a ton of places in this country where people would answer that as "people of the same race, with the same values as me".

I agree about the "same values" part, but I think the "same race" part is more dubious.

I've witnessed first-hand conservative non-Hispanic white Americans getting along very well with conservative Hispanic Americans, and conservative Asian Americans – and while that is just anecdote, I'm not aware of any hard data to contradict it – most of the time, the shared outlook on political/religious/moral/etc issues ends up being much more significant than the racial/ethnic/linguistic differences. I don't have the same anecdotal experience to draw on when it comes to conservative African Americans, but I'd be surprised if it was greatly different in that case.

My impression is that in a lot of these discussions, when people say “race”, they really mean “class”: most middle class people don’t want to live right next door to the lower-lower class, and an ethnoracial majority lower-lower class person is really no more attractive a neighbour than a minority one; meanwhile, most of them (even most conservatives) would be perfectly happy to have an ethnoracial minority neighbour who is of a similar wealth, education and views/outlook/attitudes/politics/ideology/etc

> What if instead of using credit scores to decide who may live where, what if we instead used social credit scores to decide? Perhaps it is lazy of me not to elaborate on what exactly would go into that score but part of it is me not knowing either.

I mean, what would go into it is race, and after that, adherence to cultural norms (Christianity, conservatism, cisgender heterosexuality, immigrant status) and then gerrymandering. Even if that isn't what happens on paper, that's what would happen.

>I mean, what would go into it is race, and after that, adherence to cultural norms (Christianity, conservatism, cisgender heterosexuality, immigrant status) and then gerrymandering. Even if that isn't what happens on paper, that's what would happen.

Your average immigrant would peg the needle on that scale if not for the inclusion of race and immigrant status.

We've done that, and current anti-discrimination in housing law is a direct response to and rejection of it, and also a good place to find a list of exactly what would go into it.

Scary populism is really really scary

The article is not about populism at all.

This article reads like meta-virtue signaling. The author criticizes his neighbours' yard signs, but he too lives in what is presumably a rich, homogeneous and exclusive neighbourhood - I've only ever seen those types of signs in those areas, rarely in a working-class neighbourhood. The author projects an image of a virtuous champion by calling out others for not doing enough, but as a beneficiary of exclusionary policies, how would he feel if his quality of life declined as a result of the values he champions in this article?

I agree with the general sentiment about "front-yard politics" (aka virtue signaling), but instead of facing the reasons why people tend to shy away from substantial action, the author advocates for doubling down on counter-productive (and discriminatory) programs that disfavour working-class people. I question the author's honesty. All those words don't strike me as much more convincing than a sign in one's front yard.

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