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Comment by elteto | Hacker News Reader

In summary: “screw you, I got mine. Go some where else”.

It’s not about “getting mine”. If I and neighbors have a community, governing it ourselves to maintain our quality of life makes sense. We have put in time and work and money to make our communities what they are. Now others look at these communities and want it for themselves but with the job they want to be in, with the price they can pay, etc. That’s just not reasonable and especially because it requires current residents to subsidize them with a loss of their own quality of life. For example if there is more traffic or less parking or more crowds at parks, it takes away quality of life from the rest of us.

Decisions on density and zoning should remain local, because of how local these decisions and impacts can be, and how directly it impacts current local residents.

By the way I would be happy to even pay taxes to encourage economic or housing development in other cities to strike a balance between affordability and protecting quality of life. I see an often repeated false attack against anti density people that they just care about their house’s value. That’s not on my mind at all. I just don’t want to have my neighborhood crumble into every other decrepit high density city I’ve lived in previously, after building a life that fits me well over years, just because a sudden influx of newcomers want to change everything. Is that really any more “selfish” than those seeking to move in and take away local zoning and permitting process?

This is the same logic folks used to keep black people out of their neighborhood.

People using a line of logic to justify racism doesn't make the logic itself faulty. That would be onerous. If you disagree with the parent, do so, rather than calling them racist. Please save that for other parts of the internet (or for overtly racist people).

I don't see that comment as calling out the previous commenter as a racist, just highlighting how brittle the logic actually is.

I think the lesson is that humans are in fact fungible, and doling out preferential treatment of them in terms of ancestry or color or economics or merely owning land isn't in the spirit of an egalitarian democracy. We certainly don't live in one of those today, but I think we like to at least pretend we do and we should strive for it.

what generally happens to a neighborhood after that particular demographic shift happens?

I really hope you aren't implying that black people cause crime, because that's what this comment reads like.

If you look back to the early 1900's you find that excluding minorities was a big reason for zoning regulations and minimum lot sizes. Minorities tended to live in apartments so banning apartments was a good way to keep them out. Immigrants and minorities tend to live in multi-generational households. Ban that as well.

On the other side of the coin its never you and all your neighbors. Its you and a handful of a noisy minority of neighbors with the free time to show up and complain at development meetings. No census on the issue was ever done. A lot of people don't care at all about apartments or not. Case in point: all the people living in and near apartments across the earth. And on top of all of this most people aren't even qualified to opine on sweeping land use decisions when you consider the economic knowledge required to put all of this in its correct context.

I assume you live in a city. If everyone else before you in your city had thought the same way and blocked development it's very likely you'd have never lived where you are right now, and the culture you are trying to keep would have never even formed.

If your city is attractive enough it will eventually be developed further, instead of fighting completely against an inevitable change it'd be good to help shape how such developments can happen in a way that won't completely erode what you like about what you and your neighbours fostered. It's a much more creative endeavour than attempting to stop the winds of change, those won't stop blowing, work with it.

OP whines about the entitled but sounds like he’s pretty entitled as well.

The fact that replies of this quality level are so common on this topic even on HN, where internet-style sarcasm/bitterness is otherwise relatively rare, makes me desperately sad. It just makes me feel like nobody cares about anybody. I understand you probably have good intentions, but please don't fan the flames of hatred on yet another topic we simply can't seem to be rational about as a culture. There is no unambiguous moral high-ground on virtually any topic, particularly this one.

I think many are just exhausted by all the people who constantly miss the forest for the trees on this issue. Supply and demand isn't really something that is taught in our school system unless you go on to take classes that go over this and other basic economic theories.

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