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Comment by wronglebowski | Hacker News Reader

Housing doesn’t benefit the local community(from most NIMBY perspectives). It makes housing more affordable lowering their property values, creates the need for more infrastructure and creates change in their environment.

The motto seems to be, “Neighborhoods full, I like things the way they are. No more change please.” Doesn’t matter if it’s a data center, housing, or any type of development.

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It benefits local business by having more customers and benefits local government by having a wider tax base.

Maybe it doesn’t benefit some individuals, but the community improves.

Many times it’s just unplanned uncontrolled growth. It causes issues that aren’t mitigated and generally makes life worse for existing residents. NIMBY is strong because residents know that their politicians are corrupted and incompetent. Politicians will get kick backs and infrastructure will never get extended sufficiently to support. Theoretically we all benefit from increased density due to reduced infrastructure costs and shared resources, in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings. Similar to how larger companies cost savings from size is offset by internal inefficiency and friction.

I think the history of the 20th century shows that "planned growth" is in many ways far inferior to unplanned growth.

All of our favorite locations were created far before the era of modern planning, when growth was largely uncontrolled.

> in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings.

Do you have any examples of this? I've never heard of it before and never seen data that could support it. Unless the "government inefficiency" is highly restrictive zoning, which would be an unusual framing but one that I would highly endorse if that's what you mean!

Look at how any large American city is managed. Especially west coast ones that have recently grown. The city government is complete dysfunctional and dispite having significantly more revenue than neighboring smaller cities they piss it all away and produce much worse results than neighboring smaller cities. Seattle and Portland are good examples.

At the same time, the most densely populated large cities are also among the most expensive.

That's because the community benefits so much from density. People want to live there because the density has created fantastic amenities and jobs, ergo prices go up.

Depends what you count as an expense and where collected taxes flow. Rural living is artificially cheap by being subsidized by its more “expensive” dense living counterpart.

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