NIMBYs aren't just shutting down housing
inpractice.yimbyaction.org
inpractice.yimbyaction.org
It’s just like… why?! I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s no downside to being able to top off on milk and eggs by taking a leisurely stroll on a sunny Saturday morning. That sounds downright idyllic.
People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away.
Additionally I spend so much less on transport and no longer waste time driving. When I'm riding public transport I can read stuff. I don't see any negatives.
had a similar experience in RDU in NC. Or Anacortes, WA.
plenty of cities can and do run these locations. it's not just an NYC thing.
I miss it so much.
I was living in Bath, ME wherein I could walk to multiple bars and restaurants, a farmer's market, gym, two different grocery stores, as well as the town riverwalk. I currently live back in New Hampshire, and, while it's certainly rural, its more than just a "two bars and a gas station" town but its also a 20 minute drive to the closest grocery store, 15 minutes to the nearest gas station, 30 minutes to a hospital, etc.
Traffic? Parking?
Yesterday I went to a neighborhood corner coffee shop that I'd never been to before. They had a little parking lot across the street that was full (and a disaster, I had to back out onto the street), so I had to park around the block in front of someone's house. All the street parking near the shop was full.
I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away
There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away." I can literally drive all the way across my metro area in about 45 minutes, passing dozens and dozens of grocery stores, coffee shops, and restaurants during the journey. A 45 min drive is a huge distance.
The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.
You did it again. There nowhere in the US where you need to "[cart] a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee." Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").
That kind of black-and-white thinking does no one any good. And it's probably a big part of the reason why, like you said above, you "can’t wrap [your] head around it". You're not going to understand things without empathizing (or at least reasonably hypothesizing) about the other group's feelings and experiences.
> Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.
So? No American city is going to be bulldozed to build a clone that works like Tokyo, even assuming the Americans want to make the same tradeoffs the people of Tokyo make. If you want to any progress towards walkability, you're going to have to make serious compromises away from that ideal.
I say this living in a suburb and driving a crossover myself. The charms of this lifestyle are not lost on me, but I would kill to have consistent coverage of proper sidewalks, bike paths, and corner shops. I'd love to not need the car at all.
And no bulldozing is necessary. Just tweak zoning to allow small businesses and people will organically start live-in corner shops.
If thats not your thing, Walmarts, or Stop and Shops, you know for people who don’t want to spend their whole pay check on a single meal worth of food (we exist)
You should be smarter than that because...
> New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.
...situations like are a nuisance and engender resistance. Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.
So I think "get rid of parking minimums" is actually a pretty bad idea. You need parking minimums (but maybe not as large as is typical nowadays), plus zealous parking enforcement, to control the negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood.
This doesn't feel like a realistic scenario at all. A "suddenly very popular coffee shop" or "several shops opening close to each other" over here wouldn't significantly affect parking/traffic for several reasons. 1. a coffee shop's capacity (as in: seating, queue times) is already much smaller than parking space nearby; 2. of people in the queue, most will be locals already; 3. "it's hard to park nearby" by itself acts as a filter that naturally pulls people either to shops closer to their location, or to public transport.
There's just no such thing as "people from outside my neighborhood going out of their way to drive to the local XYZ". And places that _do_ want wider audience like fancier restaurants or wholesale won't pick a middle of the neighborhood to set up even if they were allowed to.
Also, we may be having different definitions of a quiet street. If anything, traffic in a mostly-residential area should decrease since locals could do things like small groceries without using a car?
I know this isn't your main point but I was sadly laughing at that sentence. Pretty much anywhere I go in the U.S. there are giant SUVs. Plus crossovers and even sedans are just getting bigger, with smaller cars like subcompacts being phased out and compact cars growing in size.
dunno what america you're in. unless your point is they're big pickup trucks now?
A 1990s Ford Explorer weighs around 4000 lbs. That was considered big at the time. A current one is a couple hundred pounds heavier, a Ford Edge around the same, Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V a little less but still almost 4000 lbs. By contrast a 1990s sedan was generally under 3000 lbs with ~2400 lbs being pretty common.
The main difference isn't that SUVs got smaller, it's that sedans got bigger. A 1989 Honda Accord was ~2500 lbs, the 1990s ones were ~2800 lbs, the current ones are well over 3000 lbs.
Also median commute times in car dominant cities are usually less than 30 mins. The narrative of people driving far distances to work represents a few (loud) supercommuters in most american cities. What people forget about with suburban sprawl is that jobs have sprawled as much as housing; oftentimes the old downtown is not even the major job center any longer for the region, a vestigial center whether the city realizes it or not (many a cases of new build american hub and spoke rail networks to long faded downtowns only because that’s how it used to be done not because that is reflective of most people’s travel patterns today. hence poor ridership capture of many of these newer networks).
Commute times in large transit oriented cities are often longer with metros averaging less than 20mph, an hour or more is not unheard of in places like nyc. It is really hard to beat the convenience offered by a car and a say flyover american city barely 25 miles wide with 60mph point to point travel pretty much everywhere at any time. That is why people drive almost exclusively in those places.
But the bigger point is that even for a similar amount of time, driving is far less convenient than public transportation. Cars demand your full attention. Public transportation does not. I can sleep on the bus or train. I can read. I can work. In the car my options are limited to music/podcasts/audiobooks. Cars are extremely expensive. They are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and expensive to insure. Cars are deadly. Driving is the single riskiest thing people do with regularity, by a large margin. Cars are less efficient and have more externalities. They require more space for roads and parking, they produce more pollution, in terms of both greenhouse gasses and noise. They are also possibly the single biggest factor in the obesity crisis. Part of the reason America is among the fattest countries in the world is because a trip to anywhere requires driving there, where in many other countries people walk or ride their bike to many places the need to go to.
It’s very hard to live in a place with proper, functional urban design and public transportation, and walk away preferring car-centric culture.
> but then they might not be economically viable
I want a source for this. I've never been to Tokyo or Amsterdam, but everyone I know who's been there describe the zoning working exactly this way and it seems economically viable.
The premise of these places is that it's on your way. That's not any more traffic, it's just the people already passing by stopping there momentarily.
> Parking?
That's this:
> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
You would also get things like part-time shops. You have someone with a work-from-home job and they put out a sign in front of their house saying you can get coffee and food there. They mainly get a few customers during the morning rush and a few more at lunchtime and do the work-from-home job the rest of the day.
Those would be everywhere if it was allowed, and they wouldn't even need parking lots because they wouldn't have enough simultaneous customers to fill one and there would generally be one within walking distance of any given place anyway.
> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
> This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
No, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. What I'm saying is a busy coffee shop has negative externalites on its surrounding neighborhood (traffic, people parking in front of your house all the time). That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.
So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
>> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
> Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
Like have you lived in a suburb? Shops aren't usually walkable, but they're not "concentrated downtown" either. The middle is totally an option, and that's probably the usual situation. I don't know why people are gravitating to this false dichotomy (walkable OR 45min away, NO in-between). Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.
Your premise is that the median one couldn't survive unless it was inundated, but that's contrary to all the currently operating ones in locations where that isn't happening.
> So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
What really happens is that people look at the traffic at one when there is a severe constraint on where they can be built and expect that to happen everywhere without that constraint, when the constraint is the reason for the traffic being concentrated in that one place to begin with.
> Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
The problem is the example was "45 minutes" which is actually pretty excessive, whereas the overall issue is "have to sit in traffic or circle to find parking to get there".
And then isn't your contention here contrary to your previous premise? If there is no traffic with that number of shops, what result when there are more, smaller shops so that each one has less traffic than that?
That's not actually guaranteed - it is possible for all or most of them to go out of business because of over-expansion - the key is that there are other sources of coffee that they're also competing against.
Suppose there are currently 5 coffee shops because the area zoned to allow them is already saturated, and then you rezone to allow them in other areas.
If the maximum number that can be sustained is still 5 because the zoning wasn't actually the constraint to begin with then either no one will build another one or someone will, there will be 6+ until some of them go out of business, and then there will be 5 again which is back to being sustainable. You still don't end up with 0.
If the zoning was the thing preventing there from sustainably being more than 5 then rezoning allows there to be e.g. 10. Then if there are 11+, some go out of business until there are 10.
About the closest approximation you could get to that is if you could sustain 5 but had 6+ and then several of them went out of business simultaneously, before the first one's exit could save the second or third one. But that's just a temporary condition where you have e.g. 3 in an area that can support 5 or more until people notice that the area is underserved and sustainably open more.
And that has little to do with zoning except that changing the zoning could allow the sustainable number to increase. If the number was 5 with the existing zoning and you don't change it, someone could still open a 6th downtown where that isn't sustainable and then have the temporary condition when there are less than the sustainable number if more than one of the 6 fail simultaneously.
Not in Cambridge, Massachusetts traffic!
Somehow all our neighborhood corner stores, cafes, village centers, and such seem to get by without a huge amount of parking. Likely because there's bus service and lots of housing within walking distance and actual bike lanes and such to get around.
Not my preference but also not out of bounds as a democratic outcome.
If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
The definition of democracy is that we hold regular elections for political office. It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level. 51% of my neighbors cannot decide that they'd like expropriate my house or checking account. The point of YIMBYism is that these kinds of decisions have negative externalities and a larger group of voters- at the state or national level- are removing that decision-making power from a smaller group at the local level. This is a democratically legitimate outcome!
Come on, you know that's not analogous.
> It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level.
It also doesn't mean "any policy the voters want, as long as long as it's the one I want."
Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
Not who you responded to, but I thought it was completely fair. We were a nation filled with Sundown Towns[0,1] very recently. Some probably still exist but are more discrete about it to avoid unwanted attention from those of us who would (loudly) call bullshit on the practice.
> Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
I think you're trying to shutdown someone who has a different opinion from yours by delegitimizing their position. It's not reading the way you thought it would.
I'm trying to delegimimize the delegitimization that was being directed at me.
And yet you did it again.
Maybe not analogous, but closely related: Many of those suburbs were built for people who wanted to segregate themselves from minorities, and took steps to keep them out.
> when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
You seem to be shutting down the conversation. IME that is what happens overhwhelmingly when attempting to discuss issues of racism - far more than the few times people address the issue seriously. It's as if they think racism doesn't exist.
This kind of voting still happens today. Don't bury your head in the sand.
If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
>> The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?
>> If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences. It's not supposed to "push these processes...towards more globally optimal outcome," which when decoded means "what you or what some distant technocrat prefers."
If the people disagree with you, then you're not talking about democracy, you're talking about "benevolent" authoritarianism ("we know what's good for you, and that's what you're going to get, like it or not").
Just be clear what you're really advocating for.
Sometimes this agenda is altruistic, like reducing crime. Sometimes it is populist, or social, or even fascist. Even then, elected officials are supposed to have limited power, not unlimited power. In some (many, depending on where you live) cases, they’re not even accountable to the people — the people can’t recall them, to remove them is a political act by other parts of government.
What we need is a representative democracy, where our representatives genuinely care about getting the best outcomes, so they enlist experts who actually know what they're talking about, and make policy based on that.
Yes, sometimes that will disagree with what the masses want—and in most of those cases, that means that our representatives need to enlist some communication experts to explain why it's actually best.
Democracy isn't an end in itself. It's supposed to be the means to an end of better governance for all. We don't have to accept things that are actively worse for us just because 50%+1 of the relevant voters think they're better right this second.
In a representative, constitutional democracy, we're supposed to elect people who can more fully understand issues and possible outcomes, and work from there to create a system of laws and policies that is predictable and fair to all the parties.
This means that not every policy will be fully understood or agreed with by the populace. If we wanted to just implement what the public wants, we could just directly vote on every issue.
Orthogonally, there's a whole lot of the fabric of our daily lives that is just a certain way because that's how it's been so far. It works, but is neither popular nor unpopular-- it just is. That doesn't mean it couldn't be better.
Who gets to decide on expanding an interstate or zoning has a huge impact when the votes are counted, so drawing lines on a map is suddenly where the power lies not with the people.
And with representative democracy, it's impossible to give a care about more than one or two things.
Representative democracy tends to large numbers of parties with proportional representation give far more power to the voters than a two party first past the post voting system. On the other hand having zero input on who specifically ends up being a representative is problematic in a different way.
It’s interesting just how many different reasonable systems you can come up with and how few of them have ever actually been tried.
The flaw in this argument here is that the opposition is trying to prevent these folks from even having a voice, which is fundamentally undemocratic. So this isn't a relevant statement here because this isn't a complaint about a democratic outcome. It's a complaint about people trying to eliminate voices who want to solve a problem. It's an attempt to silence discussion, which has the effect of preventing action.
Effectively, we are all living in a shrinking prison of all decisions made before us. A "democratic" dystopia.
Respecting an outcome doesn't mean you have to (1) give up on differing views, or (2) stop working respectfully for another outcome.
Most people agree that more homes need to be built, but no home owner wants it in their backyard. So you end up with a deadlock where nothing is done.
I'd love more 24/7 options around, even if it's just a 7/11
Many small towns have a 24hr gas station that doubles as a convenience store/minor grocery and they're often quite nice, clean, and quiet.
The thing to note is that NIMBYs are loud and obnoxious, but they do not have broad democratic support. What the average person has is a deep aversion to change they were not consulted with. What gives NIMBYs power is the fact that the average zoning agency is not very good at explaining the rationale of their changes or collecting and incorporating public feedback. It's very easy for a NIMBY to take a few things out of context, bring out a parade of horribles, and scare the average guy into opposing something they otherwise might have liked.
Since NIMBYs are inherently minoritarian, the real base of their power isn't even democratic outrage. Their favored tool to stop projects they don't like is paper terrorism: i.e. finding as many legal complaints as possible that they can sue over to block the project. Even if they're bullshit, it'll take a year or two to get the lawsuit thrown out. Which means that, congratulations, you just increased the cost of the project by about 10% or so, and you're probably gonna have to explain to the feds why the grants you applied for aren't enough and your project is late.
[0] And, in the process, piss off a bunch of locals as they bumble their way through the city using their translator app
[1] In fact, a lot of the hype surrounding self-driving cars is just to make it possible to completely shut off one's brain while driving. I would argue that trains and buses already do that, but...
Lots of places in the US have walkable neighborhods. You just have to live in a place that was developed before WW2 and car ownership wasn't assumed.
I myself live in a fairly high COL city (Denver), and even here things aren't as dire as what you are describing. I think your area (Seattle I'm guessing?) is rather an outlier.
My neighborhood was built in the late 90s. Single family home small town suburbia. I can walk to just about anything I need in daily life. Within 10 minutes walk there are 2 supermarkets, movies, many restaurants, variety of services, library, parks, theaters, doctors, and more.
If we count cycling, I can bike to 99% of what I could need in life. (Problem in practice is lack of safe bike parking but that's not a distance problem.)
Most places I've lived in the US in my adult life have been similar. The exception was once when I lived in a very rural area and had to drive 10 minutes to the nearest supermarket.
I don't understand these threads that talk about suburbs where you have to drive an hour to the nearest convenience store. I'm skeptical that such places exist. Where are they?
https://maps.app.goo.gl/KmSjG465pkAGJia19
https://maps.app.goo.gl/DvCv5oMbhfXRDVAR6
https://maps.app.goo.gl/14duytarnCn8UPR37
They're kind of all over the place. It seems to me non-walkable suburbs are the default from the places I've lived and visited. Unless you're either living near the town square of a small town or adjacent to the downtown area of a big city it's probably not really walkable.
An hour to a store is probably hyperbole for most places, but I definitely have friends where it's like 5+ minutes to drive from the middle to the edge of the neighborhood of only single family houses, and then you're just on a street in nearly the middle of nowhere with no shops right outside just other neighborhoods full of houses.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/GB7SPqHZoDeRE7eX6
I clicked on each of those links and asked for directions to food shops and in every case google maps gave me a route less than 10 minutes drive.
So I remain unconvinced that suburbs with "essentials being a 30-45m drive away" are somehow a common thing. You need to go pretty far off into the boonies for that to be the case but then it is no longer a suburb.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/fc2DS3dMQrDJK3na9
https://maps.app.goo.gl/AnygKw17WmFxHkc58
https://maps.app.goo.gl/kppAZYyDJuJZBGtD6
But a 10 minute walk to most of those amenities is also pretty uncommon. You look up walking directions for most of those places? I'll be amazed if there's a real grocery store within a 10 minute walk.
(Because everyone needs food and other essentials, so if you have "an endless desert of houses" somewhere, that's a lot of people, so inevitably very soon there will be stores nearby.)
The other point is whether you can walk to them in 10min (or 15min as lotsoweiners above said). I don't claim you can always walk to shops in 10min from suburban houses, it is easy to find cases where it's further away (but far far far closer than "30-45m drive away").
But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them. The idea (which often comes up in these topics on HN) that it is impossible to walk to stores/restaurants in the US outside of Manhattan & SF, is nonsense. If you like to walk (I do) just pick a suitable spot.
A few examples where I've lived: next to Pruneyard in Campbell, a bit further south in San Jose around Cambrian, and in Cupertino not far from DeAnza College. In all of these it was easy to walk to a supermarket in 10min. All of these are in Silicon Valley, where the story goes you can't walk anywhere but I was easily walking to stores.
> But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them
I agree, you can find some housing stock like that in most housing markets. It's less rare than finding a unicorn, I agree. But they're also often not a large chunk of the overall housing market.
It sounds like all those experiences are in Southern California. That's pretty dense compared to a lot of the places I've lived, even though I wouldn't call it extremely dense. It's also a place that while still having a lot of notable NIMBY stuff going on it tends to be way more amenable to pedestrian and bike infrastructure and city design. Weather also leads to more and more people willing to be outside. You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.
Look around the rest of North Texas for a good example. You can find pockets where it's decently walkable. Plano and Richardson and some parts of Dallas can be pretty bikeable. But Frisco? Little Elm? Arlington (outside the college campus)? Aledo? You can live at the edge of a large neighborhood and still have it be walkable/bikeable. But then there's still the rest of the neighborhood where it's going to take a while to walk to the edge.
Look at Kansas City, KS [0]. You'll find tons of neighborhoods like this. Not exactly walkable, like much of the metro area. Once again, sure, pick a house at the edge of this neighborhood and it's okay, but that's not the majority of the housing stock. Once again, sure, you'll find some neighborhood around that is relatively bikeable, but percentage of hosing stock it's pretty rare. Not unicorn rare, but still pretty limiting on the housing market. Can you find houses that are walkable? Sure. Is it in your budget? Does it meet your other needs? Is it close to your work? Are the schools still pretty OK?
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/L7vRMc4v4ouS9uuh9
Go to St Louis [1]. See it's pretty much the same story? Most of this suburban housing stock isn't walkable and is not very bikeable.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/CLZDVKjdVkwj92sq6
Can you find some place walkable and bikeable in practically any decently sized metro area in the US? Sure. It's it even a quarter of the overall suburban housing stock in that metro? Probably not!
(Silicon Valley is NorCal but still)
I've also lived in Pittsburgh, did not own a car or a bike just walked everywhere. And northern New Jersey, was also walking distance to shops and restaurants.
The one and only place I've lived in the US where walking to shops was not practical was out in the countryside in northwestern NJ. That's a pretty rural area so needed the car, closest supermarket was a 5 minute drive.
Also have family in Phoenix, have lived there for decades and never had a drivers license. Supermarket is 1.5 blocks away. The heat can be rough, but in distance it is very near.
Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
Pittsburgh (especially the actual city proper) is well above average in walkabiliy compared to the rest of the country. Also a good bit of New England, especially the older towns.
> Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
I mean yeah, that goes along with what I'm saying. If you just ignore 85+% of the housing stock in a lot of metros it's all walkable! Just limit yourself to just the most walkable places in the country and you'll only find it walkable. Look up the walk scores of the areas I'm talking about.
You even acknowledged a lot of the areas I shared earlier would be a 10 minute drive to get to a grocery store. How fast do you walk? 40+mph?
It shouldn't be so hard to find affordable homes without massive tradeoffs that are walkable/bikeable. And by find I don't mean see it on Google Maps, I mean actually afford it and have it be available when you're ready to move and not have other massive tradeoffs.
If you actually want walkable, big metro areas are overrated. Look for small towns, that's where walkability rules. The town is small, so everything is near.
Where I live now, most of the town is in a 1 mile radius. And the bulk of it is in a 0.3 mile radius. When everything is small and near, everything is walkable.
As I mentioned, in a 10 minute walk I can reach two supermarkets, one big box store, countless restaurants, several pharmacies, a few bars, stores of all kinds (hardware, clothing, etc), post office, library, theater, movie theater, soccer, tennis and basketball courts and plenty more.
I say if you live in a place where you can't walk anywhere, that's by choice. Tons of walkable places exist all over the US.
Everyone where I live wants a corner store or corner bar 2 or 3 blocks away from them. Close enough to walk to conveniently but far enough they never have to know it exists unless they are personally interacting with the establishment in the moment.
No one wants such a thing a few houses down. So the local neighbors get their friends who live close by to join the local neighborhood meetings and rail against the noise/traffic/crime/etc. And of course the ever-present “property values” boogeyman. Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away. There also might be traffic!
Sitting through local neighborhood association meetings is exhausting. Anyone who actually desires to get things done burns out pretty quick.
This could be true but I would want to see some data. I have paid extra for an apartment before because it it had a grocery store on the first floor, so it's not obvious to me that being adjacent and having to walk past the shop every day would drive a home price down. I know apartments and detached homes are different, but still.
I just think the common explanation for NIMBYism, that everyone wants to protect their property value, doesn't actually make sense when it seems like the densest American cities are also the most expensive to live in. I have the same confusion about public transit. It's common for suburbs to fight very hard to keep public transit out of their town, but it's incredibly expensive to live within walking distance of a train station, so property values don't work as an explanation for this either. You also hear people say it's because the NIMBYs are afraid of the city folk invading their suburban paradise, but if you go to NYC or DC nobody is taking the train from the city to the suburbs to have fun, there's nothing to do there. These stops are almost exclusively used by upper middle class office workers going into the city for work. You don't have to worry about poor city people because as soon as the stop is built, they won't be able to afford a house anywhere near it.
It has made me wonder what proportion of that sentiment is held by my neighbors in spite of the obvious city problems we face.
Allowing business also does the opposite to property values, it creates demand to sell because fewer people want to live adjacent to heavily trafficked areas.
There has to be a careful mix to have business and residential in the US and it not devolve into Vape Shops, lottery stores and other highly profitable but exploitative businesses.
It really only works if there's some other sort of barrier like general unaffordability.
Not saying these people are right or wrong. Just that it isn’t so black and white an issue. It is one thing when a place is already “lively” and tacitly accepting of all that comes with that vs going into that especially when it is unknown and easy to just say ‘no’ before seeing it how it may play out.
Allowing cafes into neighborhoods doesn't mean mandating you turn your living room into one.
At the end of the day, it is going to cause friction something happening somewhere there wasn’t something going on previously. Not saying these people are right or wrong, just that they have grievances that are based on real issues, however big they may be in the grand scheme of things, that they may value more than the prospects of an $8 latte a few minutes sooner than the one already down the road at the strip mall in a sort of containment zone.
God forbid.
What if my neighbor has a BBQ?
I personally find it quite pleasant - and if not I can just shut my damn window - but many others apparently get super annoyed at even the tiniest of potential inconveniences.
Any more than the problem of loud neighbors, is a problem of having neighbors.
Well, you should probably respond to the person who could not figure any downsides of a mom and pop store in a residential neighborhood because I am well aware of the downsides.
It's not just that it's not a fundamental characteristic of stores, but it's also not a fundamental characteristic of homeless people, it's just a characteristic of these homeless people and this store. Depending on the type of store, I'd grant you that other issues could have arisen, such as rodents, smells, etc.. but also any other neighbor could be hosting parties, smoking near your window, leaving debris around. In some cases, you either need to accept it, adapt, or find somewhere else to live.
I had a neighbor in the burbs growing up that didn't like the way we behaved on our property, or how it looked, and stuck her nose in and intruded frequently, often threatening to call the police for all sorts of absurd reasons.
Seems like the issue is the store owner (i.e. the neighbor), not the fact that it is a store.
When I lived in Houston I used to jog past a house where the front yard was absolutely covered in garbage. Super nice neighborhood and all the houses in the neighborhood looked great, but just this one guy clearly had issues. It smelled horrendous.
Anyway, seems unrelated to it being a store.
People keep writing this, obviously, without thinking even for a minute. A neighbor who allowed homeless camp in front of their house would:
1) have to live behind a homeless camp himself
2) be tanking his own house value
3) be open to sanctions from the code as there are way more restrictions on residential property use than there are on commercial.
>When I lived in Houston
Your experience in Houston, where there is no zoning, is not very irrelevant in discussion of zoning, don't you think? Unless you are actually making an example why zoning is important, of course.
1) the business owner has to operate a business behind the camp
2) the business owner tanks the value of their own property
3) what code? The building code? If we can apply a “code” to a home, then we can apply it to a business. So if there really is such a disparity where you live, the issue is that disparity in application of building codes, not zoning laws.
Re: Houston, what does zoning have to do with anything? My story could have happened i”anywhere. Zoning doesn’t control whether you are allowed to cover your property with trash. My point is that even in an area with nothing but houses, you can have horrendous neighbors.
Not at all. There are tons of businesses next to homeless camps in every American city, and the value of a business is not in the building but in the location and zoning, the code is the city code attached to zoning, the thing you don't have in Huston. The zoning for a residential and commercial is different thus you cannot apply residential zoning to commercial and vice versa.
Fix the irresponsible behavior directly.
Most residential codes define minimum living standards, and as a result people camping/crashing on a property whose structure they don't live in, is prohibited.
Apparently your zone code needs to be corrected. Small businesses in residential areas need to be held to relevant/responsible residential zone code.
(You are proposing a zoning code fix too, but for reasons I don't understand, seem fixated on eliminating non-offending businesses, instead of directly addressing the problem.)
I can see now why you would pretty much make any change if a side-effect was a solution.
Probably should have disclosed when you first stated your opinion, that it was dependent on local dysfunctional, so others could have understood.
Definitely not the norm.
There is no place in the world that is zoned for homeless encampments. Zoning is stuff like residential, commercial, industrial, mixed use, and so on. If you are talking about homeless encampments, it’s not a zoning discussion.
I don’t support homeless encampments. Out here where I live in California they tend to be on public land like parks. But wherever they are, there should be laws, enforcement mechanisms, and social support to deal with them. But none of those things have anything to do with zoning.
Seems like your code officer is obviously crooked. Not sure what that has to do with zoning though.
I am against your views because it increases the price of living for everyone, for your own specific benefit.
If you want to be selfish feel free to be openly selfish, but don't be surprised when people like me respond in kind.
I am down for property taxes 10xing to fund building homes because of people like you.
>My own specific benefit as sleeping at night...
invest in ear plugs
I already said you were a nimby, no need to reiterate my position
Although in this instance I think NIMBYism is less useful than having functioning local government, police, and homeless services.
Said unofficial husband was dealing drugs out of the backyard, and, as time passed, the backyard, followed by the vacant lot behind - for some unknown reason referred to as “the sand lot” became home to numerous homeless junkies. It became a rodent infested, trash filled, needle strewn nightmare, abhorred by the neighborhood.
The landlord, bless his heart, was, once upon a time, a sweet, naive, hippy, and very talented artisan. Until “someone” introduced him to meth, and it all went downhill from there. He remained a kind soul - and unable to say no to anyone, even when he could no longer stand the situation himself, and knew he was close to losing his remaining house.
Well, actually, he’d started trying to by the end, with our help; we were happy to play the role of “the bad guys” so he didn’t have to. But it was too late, someone gave him a hotshot (meth and heroin) and that was the end of all that.
(Who were/are we? My partner and I rented the other half of his house in March 2020. It was rundown, but cheap, and we were still getting back on our feet after my partner spent several months in the hospital with bacterial pneumonia and we ended up quasi-homeless. We knew the landlord and his unofficial husband from many many years earlier, long before all the nonsense began, and were in a hurry to find a new place so we did not do our due diligence. Didn’t take long to figure out the hell we’d landed in, but thanks to that little pandemic that started around the same time, it became impossible to move.)
So, yes, people have done that with their house.
I'm not sure however that there's anything to indicate that mom and pop stores are especially susceptible to these kinds of outcomes. It sounds more like you got a case of shitty neighbour which is possible whether or not the neighbour is a commercial lot or a small home.
If your negative experience had been with a neighbour living in a private home instead of a neighbour who owned a small business would that change your view around the matter of zoning for small businesses in residential neighbourhoods?
I don't see why this is to be expected, but a business shouldn't expect to pay a fine
>not to mention he would be living in a homeless camp, which is not something most homeowners are eager to do.
Again, most business owners are not eager to do this either. You've told an anecdote that doesn't support your argument because it's not common (an understatement) for businesses to be a homeless camp, so to use that as an argument for why someone wouldn't want to live next to a business is ridiculous.
Understandable, you don't seem to know what zoning does so it might not be evident to you that commercial zoning is different from residential and available property uses are also different. Residential zoning restricts the occupancy and structures you can have on your property more so than commercial. That's why if you run a store in your house you will be fined unless you keep your customers and vendors under a very low limit and running a store from a commercial lot does not get you fined, for example.
Having lived in a dense walkable place with plentiful stores mingled with residential housing, I can say I’ve never seen that particular problem before.
Only half-joking.
The problem is the fact that those people were homeless to begin with.
So many people like you seem to just accept the idea that there will always be homeless people—you just don't want to have to see them. Ideally, they should just go die, and decrease the surplus population, right? At least that way they won't be bothering you.
If a few of them are breaking noise ordinances or stealing stuff and the police won't do anything, then complain to the city about that, not about the fact that the shop owner has the compassion to allow them a place to exist.
And if you actually want there to be fewer homeless people overall......then maybe, just maybe, you might have to accept fewer zoning regulations that raise the price of housing.
Are you willing to see the city pay to house them?
Because otherwise, you're basically saying "I don't think the fact that they're homeless is a problem; I think the fact that I have to see them be homeless is a problem."
It's been a while since I had to break out the I Don't Know How To Tell You You Should Care About Other People; most people at least pretend that they're not absolute moral voids.
Too many, crossing an intersection with a traffic light makes that commute unwalkable. In my suburbia, going from one shop to another 5 doors down requires driving.
Because I can get about 2 miles by car in that time, if I'm really honest about stop lights and such.
I live far enough out of DC where there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me. On the way to my parent’s house, there’s a bison farm. But I’m also a 5 minute drive to the closest strip mall (which has a CVS and several restaurants, both sit down and fast food). The ALDI is 10 minutes, and almost everything else, including the Apple Store, is within 15.
There are some suburbs where it’s 30 minutes to get to essentials, but most aren’t like that. Heck, the average one-way commute to work in Dallas Texas is under 30 minutes.
A 15 minute walk is about a mile, so that's a 3.14159 sq mile circle - that's a small town or a neighborhood or two.
And since learning I shifted firmly into car dependent camp and regret that we bought a house with 60 walkscore and not say 20.
First of all convenience is overblown for everything except drinking and children (paradoxically - people go to the burbs for kids but it must be pretty bad for those who can't drive). Shopping for groceries on foot every other day is a waste of time. Local stores for hardware, clothes etc. are typically more expensive with worse quality and selection. Anything remotely specialized like a climbing gym or a bar that is a good place for dancing is unlikely to be walking distance unless you optimize for it, so you need a car or transit - slow and inconvenient. Restaurants in the US are expensive.. sure if I had a Tokyo style joint nearby maybe, otherwise going out is not a daily thing and if prefer variety, so the walking options quickly lose appeal. The only thing it's unquestionably better for is going to a local bar to drink a beer or eight. I lived blocks from Granville st in Vancouver when I was 25, that was great. Maybe a local park would be nice too, but suburbs do have those. Driving everywhere, as I found out, is just better for everything else.
The second, in the US it filters out the wrong kind of people to a large degree. Given non-existent law enforcement for property crime and disorder in many cities, this is why I suspect people protect their low density. Places where people have to drive, and places without services, will have many fewer people of the kind that cause crime and disorder. The economic lower middle gets caught in the crossfire - I have lived next to affordable housing and I believe 95% of the people there are probably great, but they didn't enforce the law on the other 5%, so if they tried to build anything affordable next to me i would fight it tooth and nail.
I live in a walkable neighborhood in Seattle and had to pay for it. Also lived in Lausanne and Beijing so I still know what I’m missing.
Please tell me where in the US, aside from very remote desert areas, can you possibly be 45m (min or mile? either way) away from essentials.
Or, you could live in a somewhat smaller residence where you actually have access to the things that make life good. But god forbid there's a train nearby that increases the sound by 10dB every 10 minutes and brings in all those dodgy (i.e. working class) people! Grrr functional society makes me angry!!
This is a strange opinion to me and I guess it's just "the divide". The things that make life good to me, of the things that change with home location, are peace/quiet, privacy, safety, meditative aspects, nature, space to host and play and have kids run around. Hearing that a city block contains "the things that make life good" is kind of baffling. Driving time is suboptimal but it's nowhere near an hour and it's worthwhile.
Also, there is such thing as medium density, in between "city block" and "endless houses". No one seems to want to acknowledge this exists and may be a good option. I'm fortunate to live in a medium density area and I think it's very pleasant. It is absolutely not a city block but there's a train station 1 minute away and a local shopping/community precinct 10 minutes away (by walking). A decent amount of green space, and it seems to be popular with couples and small families. But suburbs like this seem to be rare and that's my point.
Could it be possible that what makes life good is subjective and people have different enjoyments and hobbies?
Having space for a woodworking shop or a large garden or a backyard pool or any other such things bring joy to some people. Not everyone wants to live in an apartment in Manhattan.
In Seattle I lived on the 20th floor above a bar and it still awoke me some nights.
my soulless suburb has lots of parks, trails, and friends and neighbors houses for me to walk to, why do i need a commercial development in the middle of this?
This is how it is in the sleepy residential parts of Tokyo. An interesting knock-on effect is smaller, simpler, cheaper refrigerators since you don’t need to store a ton of refrigerated goods for long periods when groceries are within arm’s reach.
japan is always used as the example here, but america is not japan. i’ve spent a lot of time in japan. due to “cultural differences” the systems that work in japan don’t work in the united states
also, the car dependent areas of japan are still way nicer than tokyo anyway
California gave birth to anti-SLAPP torts for a reason I guess.[1] Then you can have a mini-litigation about litigation, which would prove the NIMBY wrong for their “complaint” or the state bar wrong for failing to screen frivolous or malicious use of their processes.
For some reason this article brought home to me that these NIMBYs are expressing hostility to neighbors, community and to the idea that people should have a place to live. I wonder if they realize or even consider the implications of their positions.
[1] https://www.sfbar.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/anti-slapp....
Do lawyers still really believe they can just throw some legal jargon at laypeople and we will just get confused and back down? Like not only do we have every single law and legal precedent on a device in our pocket, we also have AI's that can instantly answer questions. I am sure shit like that might have worked before 2010 when you would have to scramble to figure out if what they were saying was true or not, but it just seems antiquated to attempt it nowadays.
In many places it’s illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you match certain criteria, such as being a licensed engineer or working for a company in the industry that can oversee your work in a specified capacity.
There was a famous case where someone tried to get some attention about a traffic problem at an intersection in their city. They included a drawing of the intersection. The politicians involved didn’t like person so they tried to retaliate by going after the person for doing civil engineering work (aka making a drawing of a road) without an engineering license.
The worst part is that they actually might have had a case under the licensing laws. The licensing laws are outdated and mostly unenforced, but they’re out there. If you call yourself a software engineer you might be breaking a law in your location.
that is the case in most countries. the US is an outlier in the First World in that sense.
only country where you could be called a Sandwich Engineer with a straight face and not get sued.
Is the implication that being sued for calling yourself a "sandwich engineer" is a desirable state of society?
I totally get it. People don't like change - I certainly don't. Especially when it changes the neighborhood you're living in.
if there was any centralized advocacy, they'd have to confront the fact that they all want development to happen in each other's backyards and it would expose the lie.
I think it's definitely a good thing to build up more high density housing. I've got no complaints there.
However, a major problem we are having locally is that while that local housing is being built like gangbusters, the infrastructure to support that housing, such as the roads and public transport, hasn't been upgraded in tandem. 10 years ago, I could drive to work in 20 minutes. Today during rush hour it's a 40 to 60 minute affair. It's start/stop traffic through the neighborhood because there's no buses, interstate, etc to service the area where all the growth is happening.
It also doesn't help that promised projects, like new parks, have been stuck in limbo for the last 15 years with more than a few proposals to try and turn that land into new housing developments.
What I'm saying is housing is important and nice, but we actually need public utilities to be upgraded and to grow with the housing increase. It's untenable to add 10,000 housing units into an area originally designed to service 1000.
It may be surprising, but Idaho actually had pretty decent infrastructure throughout my youth. This "defund everything" attitude is relatively new to idaho politics. Idaho's drift into libertarianism started around the tea party era and just slowly has gotten worse since then.
I realize libertarians by nature have unique viewpoints but that feels like a bit of a mischaracterization. In general libertarians support a smaller government that increases focu on areas where societal collaboration is strictly necessary like roads, police, and firefighters while by default opposing government involvement in other areas beyond baseline rule of law (like NIMBY zoning).
There are a lot of libertarians that would argue against all 3 of these things. They'd solve roads with tolls, police with private militia, and firefighters with private companies.
I agree that libertarian ideology is all over the board and that a broad generalization is impossible. That said the majority, and especially the load majority, are against basically all public spending and taxation. To the point where you'll find prominent libertarians arguing for things like private judicial systems.
The problem is that by being reasonable, you eventually arrive at a government that isn't considered libertarian by most libertarians. That's why I call libertarianism dumb. There are basic requirements and regulations needed. We've had governments without them, particularly in the US.
For example, libertarians have no solution to what the USDA solves. Go read up about the quality of milk in early america before the foundation of the USDA. That was a libertarian government. The best solution I've heard from libertarians is reviews and 3rd party verification that you pay for but, as we can see on amazon, those are very easy to manipulate. The force of law is the only thing that really solves problems like people selling unpasteurized and diseased milk. With raw milk we are already seeing the rollback of the enforcement of those laws and the impact of that rollback [1]
[1] https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/health/2026-02-05/r-ba...
I generally consider myself a YIMBY but I think you make a good point and I found it very uncharitable for the parent comment to characterize it as whining. Who wants to spend 10 hours a week in traffic?
I'm from south central Idaho and it's really astonishing to see how much growth has happened in both poky and Burley. But basically all the cities I'm familiar with are also operating with roughly the same infrastructure they had when I was a kid, and that's the problem. Idaho isn't upgrading that infrastructure. Instead they keep finding inventive ways to keep cutting taxes and ignoring infrastructure.
right, it'd be great if that stuff could be built to support the housing before the housing gets built. but you can't do that either without people having a fit about wasting money building a road to nowhere, or buses just being for homeless people. the NIMBYism doesn't just apply to housing, it applies to building literally anything. often because people think they can block new housing development by opposing the infrastructure that might support it.
nothing about YIMBY is about opposing infrastructure development. we need to build all the things that humans need to exist - housing, infrastructure, recreation, businesses. build it all.
"we shouldn't build any housing until there's a highway" is just another variant of "i support housing, just not here". opposing housing because there's no bus route is still opposing housing. those are fixable problems.
They are fixable problems that very clearly are not being fixed here.
I might have a different attitude if new bus routes or highways were being built in response to the new housing that's gone in, but like I've said, we've failed to build infrastructure for the massive expansion we've seen in the last 10 years.
Why should I think it's a good thing to build another 1000 units of housing when none of the infrastructure is able to handle the current population? It's not a case of "busses to nowhere" it's a case of "we are filled to the gill and they want to add even more people".
My kid's school, for example, has started paving over the playground and installing trailers in order to accommodate the kids coming in. Instead of building a new school for all the new housing, we have exactly the same schools and school buildings that we had when I first moved here.
And I should say, we have even more housing planned and in construction right now all around me. That's all been approved yet I've not heard or seen a peep about adding another school, bus, etc.
That's why I have a hard time seeing it as NIMBY.
None of this should be unexpected. All construction requires permits so you know ahead of time what's being built and almost certainly can just extrapolate out how many new kids will be in the school system based on the current rates.
It's like how a bunch of cities approve new commercial construction but then don't also don't fast-track some residential construction; you're just going to generate traffic because nobody can live close to work.
The public cannot directly vote to reject the electric company's price increases, or more expensive groceries, or car dealers charging MSRP. Requiring voters to directly approve school taxes or public services is great for cost control. But you get what you pay for with austerity: long waits for service, crowding, short hours, lower quality employees. Voters only approve the school levy when the pain of service cuts exceeds the pain of forking over another $$$/yr in tax. While residents choose politicians, over long periods of time politicians choose what mix of residents can move into the area! Think of downtown areas that are purely zoned for office buildings and parking garages.
https://www.google.com/search?q=+robhit%27s+municipal+bonds
What exactly am I search for?
But when the "developers" are people replacing single-family homes with duplexes, etc, it gets harder to manage.
The correct response is not to shutdown building more housing. It's for you to get involved and petition your local government to build the infrastructure that you desire.
IMO, people need affordable housing more than you need a short commute. If you don't like that, do something to improve conditions.
There's nothing wrong with nimby.
Or made a home for wayward youths who live yelling slurs?
Unless you own a shitty property in a very bad area, you're clearly lying.
Basically the law should be the newly added properties be more valuable than the existing ones.
It makes people unable to do anything themselves because they don't have space.
It gives investor groups exclusive power over housing and locks even people who own into rent-like housing association fees.
It removes people even further from nature.
It drives up costs.
What's to stop them from saying that it should now be zoned for industrial, and a chemical treatment plant can open up next door to a school? It's the same line of thinking.
Why do people who don't own the land think they're entitled to tell the actual owners what they can build?
> It's the same line of thinking.
It is not. This is a made up slippery slope.
While I would place state laws passed by popular vote above local laws passed by popular vote, I would say that laws passed by representatives, without much awareness of voters that this was their intention, should not necessarily be put above local laws passed by voters themselves.
And in this case "local laws passed by voters themselves" are one of the causes of the state's housing crisis. I think the state has a legitimate interest in overriding local laws here.
Like if you don't want high density in your neighborhood, buy all the houses. Form a neighborhood association and buy every house that's put up for sale. When selling properties, include covenants restricting resale to a developer, or giving the association first right of refusal. Spend your own money. Don't use state violence to achieve private ends.
But we all know that's not the case. Prospective purchasers are well aware of zoning laws. Same reason you can't build a fuel refinery on your tidy plot of R1 land. It would put existing owners, who have a reliance interest in existing zoning laws being respected, in an awfully unfair position.
I've met a few people who really loved condo living but almost every one would have taken the single family home next to the condo building if it had been even remotely similar in price.
That's not what's happening.
People who are living like that are being invaded by high density people who want to live in high density in their communities. They want to take over and force people out.
And generally they just want to flip. Find somewhere cheap and make it expensive to make money by lowering everybody's quality of life and calling it progress.
How do you "force" people out? The existing owners have to sell land, and once they do the new owners have as much right to decide as the other residents. Are there thugs going door to door forcing sellers to sign papers?
Allowing higher density construction doesn't mean higher density must get built there. That's still up to the property owner to decide. True freedom.
And the occasional eminent domain.
That's an important price signal that the land is under-utilized. If we actually allowed denser residential then those people could sell their land to a condominium or townhouse developer in exchange for a new unit and some cash. They get to stay in the same place, their property taxes stay roughly the same, and they get to enjoy the cash. While everyone else also benefits from more housing. Win-win-win.
In any case, it shouldn’t be illegal to build either dense or sparse housing.
How?
Upkeep is arguably more expensive for a detached house, and suburbs make cars almost mandatory.
Also, Hawaii is expensive for reasons way beyond the reach of NIMBYs, and highly influenced by travel corporations.
Look up property taxes, cost of living expenses, and overheads like parking, schools, etc.
Is NYC the cheapest place to live in the country?
Is there a cost of living chart: density vs. cost?
I currently live in an arguably not very dense city, in the suburbs. I pay thousands of dollars in property taxes. I must own two cars to serve the whole family, for things as basic as going grocery shopping. My HOA is almost a thousand dollars a year. A couple years ago I had to replace the roof, at a cost of several thousands of dollars.
I had none of these problems when I was living in a more dense city, and on top of that, I could actually walk to the nearest coffee shop.
> Is NYC the cheapest place to live in the country?
NYC is dense because it appeals to more people, and the more people that move to the city, the more expensive it gets, precisely because there are not enough homes.
Are you assuming that less dense cities are more desirable to live in? Is Anchorage a more appealing city to live in than NYC?
I would make money, since more high rises means higher price per square foot of land, but I wouldn't like having to move. If someone moves into an area that is zoned for particular types of properties, then new zoning is imposed by outside fiat (not a vote of the people who live there) is not appropriate.
The character of the neighbourhood is only invoked for perceived negative externalities. No one complains when the cracked sidewalks get repaved, or fiber internet lines replace slow copper, when increasing affluence mean that houses are better maintained, when a new sewer line allows people to remove septic tanks. That all changes the character of a neighbourhood, but never gets fought.
Go ahead and commit to the bit, lock in on the character in ALL ways: make sure you fight any alteration to any building, any change in the shade of paint should be fought! Your neighbour replacing their front door? Denied! Replacing a concrete driveway with pavers? unacceptable? Replacing incandescent bulbs with LED? Uncharacteristic! Increasing home values changing who can afford to live there? Not acceptable, gotta sell your home for what you paid to maintain the character!
> If someone moves into an area that is zoned for particular types of properties, then new zoning is imposed by outside fiat (not a vote of the people who live there) is not appropriate.
How small are we going to allow the "area" to be defined? Is it one vote per property owner, or one vote per resident? Can we call a block an area? Who decides the arbitrary boundaries? Do people living on the boundary line get to vote for projects in adjacent properties in adjacent jurisdictions?
Just call NIMBYism what it is, selfish justification for control of other people's property. Your position is - explicitly - that other people and property owners should be made less well off for your comfort. "The Character of the Neighbourhood" is a red herring.
You are now describing an HOA, which overlaps with NIMBYs.
Reductio ad absurdium is a logically valid ment technique to expose a fallacious argument. Since you aren't attacking my premises - is it safe to say that you accept the fallacy in your argument?
/s
I get what you're saying about my comment. But I stand by NIMBYism being essentially a selfish restriction on other's property rights, and 'character' arguments being window dressing for that.
You think people don't care about what their neighborhood is like? Given the extraordinarily high costs of moving (thousands in moving costs, tens/hundreds of thousands in realtor fees, weeks of time and disruption, tens of thousands annually in property taxes if basis is reset), it is very understandable that people would care about their neighborhood not being drastically transformed (suburb to high-rises).
When I read the HN thread [1] about how upset people get by people in neighboring apts playing the TV too loud or smoking, it reinforced how much I don't want my neighbor's property to be transformed into an apt complex.
I'm not saying that at all. I haven't said anything like that. I'm saying that people care so deeply that they come up with horseshit to justify personal wants as community needs instead of just saying it.
I'm saying - repeatedly - that 'character' is a term that is so nebulous as to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. In my sibling comment that you also responded to I pointed out that I can use the "character" of a neighborhood to justify infill, densification, and transit lanes as easily as I can use it to argue against the exact same things. It can, and is, weaponized for really petty gripes.
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't argue for or against changes that affect you. I'm arguing that "character" is a virtuous shield that people use to hide behind the argument of "I personally don't want this, but can't come up with a reason that sounds better than personal preference". The problem with "character of the neighborhood" is that you can't really argue against something that is so loosely defined.
Your complaint about apartments can just be straightforward, you can say that you are concerned with the possible nuisances that can come with dense housing, and you don't trust the current enforcement or rules to allow you to enjoy your property peacefully. That is a perfectly valid reason to oppose something.
Great, that's one of the things I wouldn't want. But I also don't want to live in a city, which is why I didn't move to one. The other aspects of city life (noise all the time higher crime rates, etc.) are what many suburbanites are referring to when they talk about the character of their suburban neighborhoods. It's not hard to grasp, and there's significant overlap in what individual people mean. That's why "character" is used as a shorthand.
One example that springs to mind for me is Pasadena, CA and their trees. They are (or were) very NIMBY about things which would impact their trees. And I can't blame them. It's one of the few areas in the valley with significant shade thanks to their investment and protection of trees. Their roads were planned around mature existing trees instead of cutting them down as is so common. There's no doubt that Pasadena could have more dense housing if they cut down more trees to make room. It also doesn't seem at all disingenuous to feel like that would be a loss for the "character" of the city and a negative for the collective residents due to rising temperatures and loss of shade.
A huge reason for this is arguably NIMBYism. The reason that sort of thing exists is because suburbs very intentionally separate commercial from residential, and will not reconsider as things change. As a result, you end up with putting all the stores on busy roads, and they need parking lots since the people live so far away. All of the homes go in rigidly controlled neighborhoods that are both politically and physically difficult to change. Neighborhoods used to have stores interspersed, old ones, and ones in other countries still do. They don't anymore because we cluster buildings by use in North America, and especially in suburbs.
I'm highlighting the picking and choosing aspect.
Wanna keep everything the same? Sure, argue for that, but that isn't what "character" arguments are about. It is about claiming the things that you like as inside an arbitrary sacred protection line, and the things you don't as outside. Claiming maintaining character if you don't fight every single change is a way of painting over selfish interests in the name of the community. There's nothing wrong with selfish interest, but don't try to hide behind a claim that you are doing it for the greater good, or to preserve something indefinable.
E.g. I could just as easily argue that the "character" of a neighborhood is derived from the affordability and diverse socio-economic backgrounds of residents. Therefore densification, infill, reducing parking for transit lanes and other YIMBY efforts in advancement of those characteristics of the neighborhood are about preserving 'character'.
I'll also point out that your example seems to concern public preservation of nature, not restrictions on private property. There's a stronger argument there since it is a public good. Raising a stink about your neighbor wanting to build an inlaw suite, or - god forbid - a few townhomes, or multifamily housing on their lot is a whole other thing.
If you argue that the character of a neighborhood is based on all of those things, then keeping them the same would maintain the character. What you seem to advocate is for changing them, which is then changing the character.
> Raising a stink about your neighbor wanting to build an inlaw suite, or - god forbid - a few townhomes, or multifamily housing on their lot is a whole other thing.
If someone builds an apartment complex on land near mine, the builder it is not my "neighbor". The builder is an LLC that owns the land. They do not live there and do not care if traffic gets awful, crime goes up, or quality of life of the pre-existing neighbors gets worse. That's because they aren't our neighbor. They're an LLC.
You totally missed what they're saying, which is that "character" is a nebulous term and can mean anything one wants it to be. For example, it could be argued that you're the one changing the neighborhood by refusing any change, and causing people to be priced out, thus changing the neighborhood's "character".
>If someone builds an apartment complex on land near mine, the builder it is not my "neighbor". The builder is an LLC that owns the land. They do not live there and do not care if traffic gets awful, crime goes up, or quality of life of the pre-existing neighbors gets worse. That's because they aren't our neighbor. They're an LLC.
Why would a builder ever be a neighbor? Your neighbors are the people that live in the complex, and they would indeed care if traffic gets awful. Not wanting to suffer through traffic is a major reason one would pick an apartment complex near one's job.
Ultimately NIMBY's want to control property they do not own to the detriment of others. If you don't want an apartment complex next to your house, then consider buying that land and not building an apartment complex.
None of these are arguments from me against new development or pushing past NIMBYs where they become intractable. But if development in Pasadena can maintain as much existing green space as possible and commit to building out more, it would be a lot palatable to the "natives". And I think it would lead to better results for future residents as well. I think it's okay that people want to live in a neighborhood full of quaint small family businesses and resist the Subway and the McDonald's and the Dollar General. But that's "NIMBY" too so where do you draw the line? We live in a capitalist society after all, and the only thing preventing these large mega-corporations from being absolutely everywhere are the few NIMBY willing to say no to it with the little power they have over their slice of the world.
I'm not saying the feelings are disingenuous or that you can't object on personal grounds.
I'm saying that using 'character' as a catchall for things you personally don't like is disingenuous. It's hard to argue against since it can't be defined.
Don't like multi-story infill? fine. Argue against that specifically and provide reasons that don't rely on something indefinable. Personal feelings about specific issues are a fine reason for arguing since those can be dealt with. I can argue that parking is or isn't an issue and can be mitigated. I can't really argue that the neighborhood isn't losing its character.
I can do the same thing by invoking "problematic" which carries social connotation in the same way that "character of a neighborhood" carries social meaning. If I say an argument is "problematic" you can't really rebut in any meaningful way because you don't even know what I mean. If I say an argument is using false premises or invalid logic, there is a discussion to be had.
The word problematic differs because it can be applied to any type of thing (not just neighborhoods/zoning) and has no hints as to what it might mean. Everyone understands that people who move somewhere generally want it to stay that type of place. This is why people complain about gentrification, urbanization, and all other types of neighborhood change. They chose to live in that place because that was the kind of place they wanted to live.
It has been invoked in plenty of examples in the name of preventing other cultures and skin colors from a neighborhood, among other less defensible reasons. My parents weren’t sold a house because the seller thought “a good Christian family” would be better suited to the character of the neighborhood. That’s not a rare story. Ask some of your visible minority friends. So if you want others to assume what “character” means, you don’t get to be upset when people assume that your motives are rooted in something ugly. If that isn’t you, don’t be surprised when you find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder with a person like that.
That’s why I prefer if people elaborate what exactly they are objecting to. It keeps you from providing cover for assholes (or exposes you for one), and allows a conversation about what changes might actually be welcome.
The notion that a word is poisonous because it is used by people who use it in a different way is silly. According to this logic, democrats should not advocate for "progressive" policies because some of the people who call for progressive policies are actually calling for the confiscation of private property.
It's like saying that vegetarianism is poisonous because Hitler was rumored to have been vegetarian. It's like ad hominem, but dumber.
Not sure about the other two, but I've seen groups defending repairs of things that had been broken so long they had become "local institutions".
> Go ahead and commit to the bit, lock in on the character in ALL ways: make sure you fight any alteration to any building, any change in the shade of paint should be fought! Your neighbour replacing their front door? Denied! Replacing a concrete driveway with pavers? unacceptable? Replacing incandescent bulbs with LED? Uncharacteristic! Increasing home values changing who can afford to live there? Not acceptable, gotta sell your home for what you paid to maintain the character!
Buy a historical property in some jurisdictions at everything you listed would happen exactly as described, except maybe the sale price.
the other issue with urbanism debates is that everyone's version of Yimbyism is different and you end up not trusting any of them because some people really DO think that you should shut up and allow high rises. They have a moral reason for that too---because housing really is at a shortage and costs too much and some people getting their fancy neighborhoods while others have access to nothing is sorta unfair. But that position is basically untenable, if you try to enforce it you just make an enemy of everyone. But it seems to me that the happy medium, the "build good stuff and not bad (carefully)", is an everyone-wins situation (except for a few crotchety people I suppose). That goal is to break the equilibrium of "some (established) people get to govern what happens to almost-everybody" and replace it with something more generally democratic, but without letting in all the repugnance of how the free market will build things if you don't govern it at all.
(this is all very idealistic of course. The problem is that a random anti-development suburban neighborhood that likes being that way has no incentive to let anyone change at all, and is probably basically right that the urbanism program doesn't benefit them at all. I imagine that only really systematic way around that is to end up in a higher-trust version of society where towns are mostly nice, instead of mostly not, so that people actually crave this sort of development instead of reacting negatively to it.)
The bigger issue I have is that people seem to think that suburban areas can be required to be urbanized, but urban areas could never be suburbanized (from a zoning/setbacks/etc. perspective). That is, they don't seem to think that areas can be forced to change, in general. They seem to think that forcing urbanization is fine, but it's a one-way ratchet.
(Which results in amusing things like a cluster of chains just outside the city limits but ah, well, Americans gonna America.)
It's just the public input process is a filter that selects for extremely high activation, interest, and agency. So if a democratic vote ruled these decisions, YIMBYism would rule the day, but if you go to the meetings it's NIMBYs who are prevalent.
There are definitely centralized NIMBY groups, like Livable California:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-26/how-to-br...
And there are tons of smaller groups that organize locally, far more than YIMBY groups. In my city there are 2-3 people that typically organize a group, give it a new name, make a web page, and act like they have the backing of everybody in the city when they talk even though most people disagree with them. They've been doing it for decades, and have found many tactics to amplify their voice to be much larger than the sum of the individual group members. YIMBYs are far behind on doing this, though they are getting better at it.
When I first joined NextDoor about a decade ago I dared speak up in favor of a plan to allow apartments to be built on a commercial thoroughfare, and the onslaught of a single person in their replies and direct messages was completely overwhelming (If people here think I'm loquacious, well, I have been far bested in that....). That was my first entrance into city politics, and I quickly learned that this person was in charge of a large "group" that mostly consisted of that single person. They had also been doing it for years, with creative group names, the best of which was probably "Don't Morph the Wharf" which even launched lawsuits to prevent changes to the wharf, delaying necessary maintenance and repairs which a few years ago resulted in the front falling off of the wharf. Individuals can have very undemocratic impacts on local politics.
I am pretty much in favor of people being able to do what they want with their properties, as long as they are responsible for any externalities the changes create, and I still largely find these groups insufferable (in case you couldn't tell from the paragraph above).
NIMBYs are mostly people who have other things to do with their day than agitate to make their neighborhood worse (where worse is a change from the status quo, which they presumably are at least okay with given they live in the neighborhood), so you don't hear much from them most of the time.
In short, there is no need for advocacy for the status quo unless someone is attempting to modify it, as it just continues on by default.
terminally online young adults who are bitter that they can't afford to live precisely where they like
More accurately: they would like to live in a particular location, the owner of that location would like to sell or rent it to them, but a third party wants to forcibly prevent that transaction.
Change is bad as far as existing residents are concerned, which is why external YIMBYs are particularly annoying. I live in a pretty nice area so gentrification isn't really possible, and the people who want to live there but can't afford to are the ones agitating for change.
> More accurately: they would like to live in a particular location, the owner of that location would like to sell or rent it to them, but a third party wants to forcibly prevent that transaction.
No, the accurate description in CA (and YIMBYs are trying to replicate this elsewhere) is that a group of people collectively decided how land can be used in their area, and people who disagree are going over their head to change the rules.
It's just a current argument that flies well in the existing political climate; if that climate were to change they'd have another one.
There's also a lot of them because many people live in cities.
Also many online communities driven by user moderation are controlled by folks with a lot of time to participate and skewed against certain segments of society. Online views often skew wildly from real life.
I've basically given up trying to find community online. Talking with real people is so much more rewarding and less frustrating.
If instead of trying to solve loneliness through urban development they dedicated their efforts to "touching grass/concrete" and got to know their community - suddenly they'd discover they have the power to urbanize - but do they still have the desire?
In that sense, it makes little sense to approve large amounts of office space without considering the housing capacity needed to support it. If the jobs-to-housing ratio grows too high, the costs are pushed onto workers and surrounding areas rather than being addressed directly.
This problem is compounded by limited public transit and inadequate road infrastructure. Framing the issue solely as NIMBY opposition misses the structural imbalance at the core of the problem.
Instead of treating symptoms or assigning blame, governments should focus on correcting the underlying mismatch between employment growth and housing supply.
The filled office space full of white collar jobs paying $200K is what triggers the eye of the residential developers of high density housing as it provides a basis for the profit margin spreadsheet model.
My best bet now may be to move to orbit like S.R. Hadden. But it'll have to be high orbit, away from the satellite constellations.
I can't really think of a way to measure it that would come out how you said.
That is correct, for the reason you yourself gave. Since it bothers you so much personally, I'm very sorry about your bad luck. But it was objectively the right decision.
Most landscaping teams have 2-3 dedicated guys who do nothing but leaf blow the entire time they are at a house. Towns have been largely unsuccessful in curbing this, mostly because demand for landscaping services is so high.
It's great to want to be around few people, that's a choice that should be respected. Just as there should be a choice to allow people to associate at higher densities. But in practice, the law only works against one of these choices.
I really hope such technology comes to fruition and becomes the standard sooner than later.
Don't worry, there are sooo many free speech absolutists that will come out of the woodwork to protect this dastardly attempt to stifle speech through abuse of legal procedures.
No? Where did all those absolutists go?
I also oppose mandatory licensing. (In this case, to practice law)
The latter is the accusation, it seems impossible it’s not thrown out.
Even the one reply to me from a self-proclaimed absolutist didn't bother to defend the political speech and petition of government, just said that they were present!
Elsewhere people have reacted to a situation by saying "I believe this is okay, because free speech."
But those people didn't include this specific incident, so they apparently don't believe in this one.
The first one is using a statement on an adjacent issue to demand attention on one’s own pet issue. The latter is calling out alleged hypocrisy.
The bad faith free speech argument that somehow applies to only some people, to only one side of the political divide, but never to the other was prevalent mainstream argument for years now. Some peoples free speech was sacred and if you criticized or opposed them, the criticism and opposition themselves did not counted as free speech - even if it in fact consisted of speech only.
So like, kicking at those people is entirely fair. Because they actively damaged "free speech". Not that they care or ever cared.
> Everyone wanna get down with a gang in America these days. "I'm liberal!" "I'm conservative!" Be a fucking person, ok? No good, decent person is all one thing. I got some shit I'm liberal about, and I got some shit I'm conservative about.
I think he's absolutely right, and that labeling things as "left" or "right" is a thought-terminating cliche that one should strive to avoid. What matters is the idea, not which faction people might stereotype it with.
The regions that give the strongest support to the Democrats, like Marin County in California, don't want anything built, are actively kicking out ranchers that have lived there for generations, are adamantly against anyone calling anyone else something offensive, and are in general against what was classically liberal.
Meanwhile, rural Texas counties that give the strongest support to the Republicans are for worker protections, generally against government-prohibitions on insulting someone, are increasing in their support for populism, and so on.
The Democrats used to support free-speech absolutists, who are no longer welcome there, but the Republicans are just opening up to the ideal, and don't fully support it yet.
Basically, the extreme wings of both parties are seizing power and preparing for battle, while the moderate wings are tuning out. (Or to put it another way, more of the center is becoming politically independent.)
Traditional ideological lines break down under these conditions, because the important thing is damaging your enemies, not maintaining ideological consistency.
> Can you name one such individual and give examples of each phenomenon?
But it seems that you conflate "Republicans" who are actually members of government with people who simply support the party; and anyway the concept of "free speech absolutism" is inherently not partisan. The existence of 1A defenders on either side of the aisle (or representing any niche interest) doesn't say anything about the existence of principled, consistent 1A defenders.
This seems entirely reasonable to me, and I'm grateful that a group like this exists.
But I'm a YIMBY, so of course. If lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar on the basis of laws that I disagreed with, I can imagine feeling frustrated, conspiratorial, or disenfranchised.
Maintaining a consistent commitment to liberal democracy, the legal system and due process is one of life's great challenges!
If your local building code requires an elevator that can accommodate a hospital stretcher, which is almost certainly does, that was jotted down in the building code by literally one guy from Glendale, Arizona, on the basis of a whim.
We were warned by nay-sayers the county would burn down but that never came to fruition and meanwhile I've seen so many code-Nazi places in California burn down from wildfires.
It's hilarious watching the systematic destruction of the counter points when people tell me about the horrors
(1) "You wouldn't want to live in such a house, it would burn down." I already do, and have been.
(2) Your neighborhood would catch fire. I live in such a neighborhood, it didn't.
(3) Just wait long enough! It will happen eventually. Eventually you'll have bad luck! This has been going on for 20+ years.
Most cities adopt a mishmash, but they take them from large private organizations that publish big books of code, and how that whole process happens is far more opaque than most standards bodies because it's so obscure. Is there evidence backing the changes? Is it vibes? Is there financial benefit for the code writers for certain choices?
This mishmash of choices by local cities also greatly reduces building efficiency, because even if I learn the fine details of my city, that doesn't guarantee I can apply my hard won code knowledge a few miles away.
Building code is important and I wouldn't go as far as saying "if you own the house you don't have to follow anything" but our current situation is also not providing much safety in the US. Code mostly exists to justify checks, not improve safety. A simpler, more uniform code, with clearer motivations and evidence would go a long way to reducing unnecessary costs.
I couldn't give a shit if I have to sell it for land value (which has massively appreciated by my own development, since I did all the prospecting for water, electric, and septic -- the land was basically worthless when I bought it), on the off chance someone doesn't want a mega cheap house in cash for break even. I didn't build it as an investment, I built it to live in.
It's by escaping your mentality, which is what has poisoned the real estate problem writ large, is how I escaped the inflated property price conundrum.
Hah, they most certainly are! To such an extreme extent that I figure you'd probably reword this to something like "If I was aware of all the ways that lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar". They are most certainly constantly and relentlessly influencing your municipality on every issue that is relevant to them.
To those downvoting, if you tell me your municipality I will provide you with evidence of corporate lobbying influencing decisions of governance at the municipal level.
https://www.govtech.com/archive/uber-encourages-voting-gets-...
In this case though, it's not someone going to a non-local city council or school board meeting and arguing for or against some policy that is up to that local board, but it is someone pointing out a policy that has been set at the state level. Any arguments for or against that policy need to take place at the state level, because that is the only place where it can be changed.
It is reasonably likely that people who lived there chose the location because they wanted to have horses, otherwise why buy there?
When dense apartments get built next door, soon enough the city prohibits horses because the thinking goes that horses don't belong in a dense population area.
I'm not familiar with the area OP mentions, but exact same thing happened around here. Some 30 years ago most houses had horses, then a lot of smaller building came around and they prohibited horses.
Doesn't impact me personally but I'm sad for the long time residents who specifically moved here to have horses. Not fair to them. Some have moved of course, but moving isn't always easy if you have job and kids in school in town.
Let the free market decide whether it wants the homes or not.
30 minutes drive in no traffic, crossing half a dozen cities and the 405. There's reasons to inveigh against the YIMBYs (why are they celebrating densifying a coastal area that's actively falling into the pacific[1], nevermind it's inherent beauty) but let's not deny geography.
Also RPV doesn't have 1-5 acre lots, it just costs ~$4m for an house on a normal lot, rising to ~$20m as you get to the coast. You might be thin thinking of Rolling Hills, to the extent you're thinking of anything on the peninsula at all?
NIMBYs thinking they have some social right to land, a shared resource. Land value belongs to society silly.
(I am biased as someone who thinks public parks should allow nonresidents to visit and is pissed at how Portuguese Bend has been managed
If he tries to incorprate as "Yimby Law" he may hit a roadblock in some areas. Secretaries of State regulate business entity names and often bar or scrutinize words that imply a regulated profession (e.g., “bank,” “trust,” sometimes “law”) if you are not licensed or not forming the appropriate kind of professional corporation.
However he's free to send a letter, just not incorporate a business called "Yimby Law". He should change it to "Yimby Citizens Group" or "Yimby Institute" or something.
Lawyers don't own law. The law belongs to the public. So says this active attorney member of the State Bar of California, and I'll stand on any law firm's conference table in my boots and say that.
This sounds suspiciously similar to what happened to Chuck Marohn from StrongTowns.
Also, I just dislike activism in general, which seems like it generally is trying to force people to do things they don't want to do through passing laws. I get that there is sometimes a need raise attention. But generally it seems like activists are very one-sided, agenda/ideologically driven. It also feels like they are trying to find meaning in activism (yeah, we forced other people to do what we think is Right), instead of healthier, more traditional forms of meaning.
Is going into cities that are violating civil rights laws basically being a tattletale?
>they don't want to do through passing laws.
Yes, that is how the rule of law works.
there's no such right, never been. Just because one has a right to speak, doesn't make it an obligation for others to listen
Why? Should be outed
Especially for a purported lawyer should be able to stand by their demands in public.
If society wants to put dumpster so badly, compensate to those who (practically) lose their house. Let everyone pay, that's fair. Picking "haha this will be the loser this time" is not.
It's easy to be YIMBY when you don't own anything.
It seems there’s some strange bias in play where NIMBYs are somehow fearful of density.
FWIW SFH economics isn’t sustainable in highly desirable areas. You have to redistribute wealth from workers to land owners (the CA model), or raise taxes commensurate to resource consumption. I suspect there’s a limit to how much feudalism the working class will allow, and if land owners had to pay for the resources they consume they’d have to densify anyway.
Really the whole thing survives on handouts from workers to landowners
I didn't make such assumption, I don't understand it either.
In any sane world, being open and welcoming is a pretty rad posture to have. But in a capitalist world? Naive and stupid.
The situation is more complex. The forces about housing right now are incredibly destructive. Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes. In this case NIMBY is the correct solution. In other cases Rich People want to prevent affordable housing. In this case YIMBY is the correct solution. But blindly applying these terms provides a cover for a complicated situation. We have cults of personality, and now we have cults of Jargonism. Neither helps us.
Being outraged because lawyers don't want you to speak is great. The issues legal and housing issues are far more complex and important.
Rich people want to make more money by blocking homes from being built, thereby driving up their property values and making all housing in the area more expensive.
You present a very simplistic view that does not begin to capture the complexity of what's actually happening in practice:
> Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes. In this case NIMBY is the correct solution.
Why would NIMBYism ever be the answer here? What values does it represent? Allowing rich people to build housing for rich people means that the rich in need of housing don't take away more affordable housing. And when rich people are forced to pay for more affordable hosuing, what used to be affordable becomes unaffordable.
Ensuring that rich people's money goes to new building that doesn't hurt less rich people is the correct solution, if one values keeping housing affordable. One should only block that rich housing if one wants the existing housing to become more expensive.
I don't think my views are absolutist at all, but please do point out wha you think is absolutist if you believe that is a fair criticism instead of a passing swipe.
> generalizing "rich people" as a group without considering strata of wealth at all
I did nothing of the sort, but I did point out that if the basis of opposing something is because rich people benefit, well, that is an argument to support more housing. If somebody is saying that only certain slices or classes should not benefit but that other rich people should benefit, then let that person make that argument, rather than the overly simplistic "rich person" argument. And let them add enough complexity to concretely state the profits: a homeowner is making 5% a year on their home due to scarcity by locking others out of opportunity, while the developer makes their investors 10%-15% over 2-3 years by adding productively to society and benefiting lots of new people with access to economic opportunity and housing.
Yes, different people are profiting, but one strata is doing it by making others wealthy at the same time, and their profits are to a REIT, and one times. Whereas the landlord and homeowner getting compounded annual returns at a high rate by increasing economic inequality and segregation, through rentierism and exclusion. When developers build an apartment building, investors profit but so does labor and the new residents and city coffers through new taxation.
The comment I was replying to did not present a single shred of complexity, and their petite bourgeois naïveté presents themselves as the only people in the world deserving of profit or consideration or agency or influence. They did not refute my world view at all, and my entire worldview on housing has come about from their same overly simplistic starting point and then learning that there's a vast world out there beyond it.
The nationalization of every policy on earth needs to stop.
Nobody is gonna go through the "everything else" approval process that strip clubs and heavy industry have to go through just to expand their business parking or do $10k of environmental impact assessment to drop off a $1k garden shed. (literal examples from my town).
These evil people can't make things illegal outright so they make the process so expensive almost nobody can do it and it takes decades for someone to come along with a lucrative enough development that's worth expensively challenging it inn court over.
They just want everyone to build what they want in their own backyard.
NIMBYs might more accurately be called NIYBYs.
Rancho Palos Verdes should not be required to comply with the request of some random activist who probably has never even stepped foot in the town.
If a city was allowing racial discrimination and no one within the city sued, would that make it ok?
Rancho Palos Verdes should comply with the law, or face the consequences of not being able continue that control of their land management.
A great value of democracy is that a "random activist" can petition the government to enforce the law, that's how we keep the whole thing in check. The idea that random activists could not be a check on illegal behavior of the government is a very, well, authoritarian idea that is not compatible with any of the values embodied in the US or California constitutions, our legal system, or the very character and culture of the US.
Yes, and my point is that continued trend of state and national laws overriding local jurisdiction over things like land use is not a positive one for residents of desirable areas (and arguably any land owner) and not something I agree with philosophically, not the litany of things you decided to rail about that have nothing to do with my comment.
Can you see why there might be laws against that?
It is pretty well established that zoning was invented and is justified merely to enforce economic segregation. That economic segregation is perhaps the interest of landowners in these "desirable areas"?
I think by surfacing the true motivations of what's going on, it will become very clear why municipalities must be subjected to laws to enforce better behavior.
I think individuals should reap the rewards or suffer the losses from their individual decisions. If a community generates value, they are entitled to the rewards. If they run things into the ground (see Detroit as a notorious example), they're left holding the bag.
> Can you see why there might be laws against that?
Can I see why people would want to force themselves into a desirable situation that they had no part in creating? Sure. That doesn't make it right.
> It is pretty well established that zoning was invented and is justified merely to enforce economic segregation. That economic segregation is perhaps the interest of landowners in these "desirable areas"?
Citation needed on the first claim, but yes economic segregation is desirable to most people. That's not news.
> I think by surfacing the true motivations of what's going on, it will become very clear why municipalities must be subjected to laws to enforce better behavior.
The true motivations aren't hidden. Have nots are trying to get a piece of something desirable, and the people who already have it want to keep it.
Lol
You can accuse them of being hypocrites if they don't also support more housing in region Y but that's a pretty big if you have to prove there.
But you can't say their interests are invalid.
And my point is that there are limits on the impact region X has on region Y based on their proximity. Should someone in downtown LA be able to compel someone in Palo Alto to upzone based on this "impact"? What about someone in Kansas or Florida?
Putting that aside, no one is forcing region Y to upzone or not upzone in this scenario. They can make the choice they prefer, just like region X.
2. I take it you're done discussing the theoretical merits of this law?
As an extreme example, I can say that hurricane victims have an interest in butterfly wing flaps across the world because there is some indirect causation.
Housing expansion advocates consistently describe the simplest of supply-demand mechanisms, whereas housing demand is heavily driven by local and national economic conditions as well. Gary IN doesn't have a housing shortage.
Or higher prices in Y, because X will be both more crowded and with on average poorer people than before the supply increase, and people who prefer a less crowded area and less poor people (either directly because they are poor, or because of other demographic traits that correlate with wealth in the broader society, like race in the USA) around them will have an even higher relative preference for living in Y than before.
> The interests of people from region Y are valid.
They exist, validity is...at best, not a case you have made. Existence of a material interest does not imply validitym
Let’s remember, CA is in a housing CRISIS. I feel an immediate urgency to build as many houses as possible in this state so that my young children can feasibly afford to live here without being an AI engineer when they are adults
Your young children have no right to live in any specific location, and your usage of CRISIS to describe a lack of access to highly desirable housing is not compelling.
Strawman. I have a right to influence housing policy with my vote, which I’ve done and I’m pleased with the outcome.
Now, you nor any commenter nor any city official have the right to resist implementing this law, and the arguments against are not compelling.
Edit to be more explicit: are the people that sent/asked to send the 2 letters to the City Council residents of Rancho Palos Verdes?
NIMBYism has always been about nosy people obstructing progress.
The key problem of US housing is that a house is seen as an investment vehicle, which should appreciate, or at least appreciate no slower than inflation. Keeping prices high and rising can't but go hand in hand with keeping supply scarce.
If it was purely a money question you could just get some billionaire to go around buying out entire neighborhoods, redeveloping them, and turning around and selling them off for a profit (because they'd be worth more, right?) - the fact that this is not being done either means there's a great new startup or there are other issues.
Is this regularly true? IME, in Northern VA, land values have always increased with infill development. Thinking specifically of Arlington in the Courthouse/Ballston/Clarendon strip in the 90s and 00s. And now Reston.
Traffic and noise concerns might be legitimate, but I'm not buying the loss of value argument.
Literal NIMBY-ism, where the backyard is one's own property, is just straightforward property rights. They want to control other people's property and tell them what they can and can't do with it. That's basically communism.
How does that work exactly?
The state wants your community to turn it into apartments, but obviously the community is icey about it.
Then activists from another city dozens of miles away, who have never cared for your town or really been to it, show up at Town Hall meetings and are scheduling meetings with town councilors to push for building the apartments.
Those out of town people jumping into your community to dictate change are the YIYBY people.
If the apartments are built, they'll put another feather in their cap while walking around the forest near their home.
Who owns the forest and why do you think you get to say if people build on it or not?
* But muh republic -- spare me, the zoning fiasco shows the current constitutional limits on democracy doesn't stop it.
If someone already owns the forest, then they should get to build on their land.
They are "forcing" in the same way billionaires "force" politicians to lower taxes on them.
I think the term you meant to use is "lobbying", which is in fact what these YIYBY groups would be doing. They are lobbying a random town that they are no part of to cut down their forest and build apartments.
Lobbying can’t force the town to sell the forest.
People who live in the community don't want unaffiliated outsiders lobbying their town leaders. Those people doing the lobbying would be "Yes In Your Backyard" people. They would be this because it is not their backyard they are lobbying for, but yours.
I cannot be more straightforward in explaining the term YIYBY than that, heh
If the voters did their job and elected good representatives, who respect the interest of the voters, then they have nothing to worry about: the forest will not be sold.
Voters could also try to establish a referendum system where public lands cannot be sold without a local vote, assuming this is not in conflict with state law.
Edit: The point I am trying to make:
- You said that the town owns the forest in your example. I presented points to explain why this is not an issue, as lobbyists cannot force the sale of public land.
- I wanted to clarify that YIMBYs cannot force property owners to build against their will, except in limited circumstances (eminent domain) that usually requires assent from local government.
- To be clear, I think that individual property rights should be respected. I can build on my land, I can’t force you to build (or not build) on your land unless you are voluntarily bound by some covenant.
For some reason you are trying to argue with me about the merits of YIYBY, when I never took a stance on it, just explained what it is and why people don't like it.
>> Who owns the forest and why do you think you get to say if people build on it or not?
You:
> The town, a democratic institution for which you are a tax paying constituent, owns the forest.
That’s what I was arguing about, primarily. The other points emerged after you deviated from that point further down.
I never said anything about outsiders forcing anything. They simply lobby and people get mad about it, those lobbyists are "YIYBY". Its the origin of a term.
You built a strawman about forcing a town to do something, and are really intent on attacking that strawman. But you built it, I never said anything to that effect. Of course they cannot force the town to do anything and of course the lobbyiest have first amendment rights. Never said anything to the contrary.
EDIT: Our convo is now rate limited, but I'm glad you live in a place where politicians work for voters and ignore lobbyists. Treasure it, most are not that lucky.
You are the one who said the town owns the land. If they own the land, it looks like the voters are safe—nothing should happen.
You are the one who built the strawman by inventing a public forest under threat from lobbyists. I was just showing that this strawman was an illusion.
I believe that NIMBYs often try to do a motte and bailey argument where they make it seem like someone is literally going to force property owners to build something, when in reality they are trying to prevent property owners from using their property as they want. That really gets my goat, because it’s dishonest.
It's more common for forests to be cut down because dense housing is illegal, so cities have to keep expanding outwards.
I've never thought of the B in NIMBY as literally meaning backyard - it figuratively means "near enough to effect me" but people still want it within reach - so the ultimate NIMBY dream would likely be to live in an island of placid suburbia surround by a ring of vital services that are just far away enough that you don't need to see them every day.
(There's also, I think, a separate environmental NIMBYism but that's a really strange concept and usually more of a deliberate misinterpretation by people with an agenda to push - I'm more concerned with city service NIMBYism around public transit, food availability, hospitals, etc...)
Which costs? Driving 30 miles in heavy traffic because density is not allowed close to you? Paying excessive taxes because of huge oceans of SFHs? Having to own a car because public transportation doesn't work in low density?
There is no free lunch, only which costs you're going to pay.
NIMBY seeks to prevent the development of nearby properties to preserve some sort of “neighborhood character,” so the “back yard” is actually the whole neighborhood (and I think part of the negative connotation of that phrase is that they are treating shared spaces like their own personal yard). Then, YIMBY seeks to allow their neighborhoods to be developed.
If we’re going to extend it to “YIYBY” and “NIYBY,” we should apply the same logic, right?
Rather, I think YIYBY mostly doesn’t make sense because YIMBY people are trying to convince people that they should allow development in their neighborhood. Zoning rules… I mean, they have difference policies for changing them, but YIMBY activists aren’t usually manually and unilaterally changing them for other people.
Ultimately the decision making process is probably (depending on local regulation of course) “yes or no in our back yards,” when you get down to the details.