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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

It’s just hyper-local nimby vs regular nimby.

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.

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> Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away

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.

You have to look at it through a "conservative" lens - not the political one, but literally "I don't want things to change!"

Through some interesting turns of events I've made more and more acquaintances with some people well outside the city I live in. One thing that caught me off guard was just how true this is. People there would rather-- by a large margin-- see stagnancy than improvement. Literally arguing against adding a grocery store due to there being nothing there to support it, no roads, nowhere to even buy food. They are fiercely opposed to anyone doing anything.

It has made me wonder what proportion of that sentiment is held by my neighbors in spite of the obvious city problems we face.

Have you never lived in a suburban house? I would never want a store to be next to any of the houses I lived in. It would completely ruin that environment. Conservative viewpoint or not, house prices or whatever, it is very aesthetically displeasing to me.

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