Why ugly buildings create NIMBYism
worksinprogress.news
worksinprogress.news
People don’t care if the building is gorgeous; they will still oppose it simply because they hate new homes in their neighborhood. If making the building beautiful significantly helped getting through zoning reviews, developers would have figured this out long ago.
Aside: the reasons new buildings are bland is because no two people agree on what is ‘beautiful’; second, delays due to zoning and endless regulations already make it difficult for a project to pencil even before spending much money on the facade.
This statement is accurate, too.
> People don’t care if the building is gorgeous; they will still oppose it simply because they hate new homes in their neighborhood.
I read enough of the article to know what you claimed they claimed was not what they claimed. The 2nd paragraph said Ugliness is probably not a major driver of opposition to development by local people. But there is strong circumstantial evidence that ugliness is sometimes a major driver of opposition among people who live nowhere near the development in question.
Many buildings are not ugly and not gorgeous.
> Aside: the reasons new buildings are bland is because no two people agree on what is ‘beautiful’; second, delays due to zoning and endless regulations already make it difficult for a project to pencil even before spending much money on the facade.
New buildings are bland or ugly because this costs less. Everyone's lists of beautiful buildings would differ by 1 at least could be true but is not relevant. It is impossible to design a building most people would not say is ugly would be relevant but is not true.
Change happens one way or another. If a place has 10 homes and 100 people want to live there, you can either 1) build more homes or 2) see the 10 wealthiest of those 100 people eventually get the housing in that place. Both are pretty significant change, just one is more visible because you can see the homes that got built, rather than the less wealthy people priced out.
Cities change and adapt over time.
Boulder, CO is an example of #2 - they put a bunch of restrictions on growth years ago , so what 'change' looked like there is wealthy people moving in, and the working class being pushed out to 'leapfrog development' like Longmont, where they then commute in the serve the landed gentry.
You can easily see the first kind, but you have to look at statistics to see the second - income averages, price of housing, vacancy rates, what kinds of jobs your kids' friends' parents have and so on.
There are different things that could create demand to live somewhere - jobs, and amenities are common ones though.
People vote with their feet and their wallets.
Oh, you want to buy a car? Too bad -- it's my right to preserve my driving experience, therefore, no car for you.
There have been protests against removing rusting oil storage tanks. Our "industrial heritage" apparently.
People just grow to accept the eyesores and start to think of them as part of the local identity. You can find complaints about how ugly the Eiffel tower was when it was built. Symbol of the city now.
Of course all that's undermined by the choice to use NIMBY in the headline, which is perplexing.
If it's worth preserving, then it's worth paying for out of your own pocket. Leaving it to the government just lets biased people decide what's worth preserving instead of letting the market work. Claiming market failure requires strong evidence beyond "a thing I don't like".
It's not "word games" because they're two different movements, with two different sets of causes and therefore two different sets of needs to be addressed.
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/you-probably-own...
And it is common for developers to present at the city council some beautiful drawings of dwellings surrounded by trees, with couples walking together holding hands and children playing. But when the actual thing is built it ends up looking like industrial warehouses.
And the people who complain about enshitification of diverse services are the same ones complaining that residents oppose anything in their neighborhood (Nimbyism) or anywhere (Bananaism) - they fail to apply the same criteria: no one likes enshitification, even less so in their neighborhoods.
Actual brutalism is actually pretty. But what is today called modern architecture, is not brutalism, but a consequence of construction cost cuts.
I would like to see some brutalist examples of what you find pretty (excepting eco-brutalism, since the plants hide a bit of the ugliness).
Let's be clear right off the bat. I'm NOT a NIMBY. I live in a rapidly growing neighborhood adjacent to downtown Dallas. It's been continually under construction virtually everywhere for as long as I've lived here, which has now been about 13 years. I support it 100%. We need the housing. There's an enormous homelessness problem. Anything that can contribute to a solution is worth doing. But it isn't costless and I understand the other side. Off the top of my head, all the things I've seen over the years:
Single-family homes condemned for bullshit reasons to force the previous occupants out even when they didn't want to sell.
Lots all turned into condos that no one wanted to live, which invariably become short-term rentals, which mostly end up being party houses.
Renters who come in and ignore neighborhood rules, doing things like letting their dogs shit all over the place and not cleaning it up, throwing parties at 3 in the morning in units with shared walls, starting fights with strippers, getting the cops called our all hours of the night.
A Halloween party that went until 6 in the morning 20 feet from the downstairs bedroom my wife sleeps in, while she was in the middle of IVF hormone therapy and already couldn't sleep, with the people doing it completely ignoring us telling them to quiet down, in a neighbood where the legal noise ordinance is to quit that shit at 1130 PM on weekdays, 130 AM on weekends. They don't give a shit because it's a short-term rental.
Construction nails spilled all over the street, leading to every single one of my wife's tires going flat in the span of three weeks.
The gas company digging up bedrock and leaving it piled 8 feet high, never removing it, which eventually washed out after rain into the entire block. We now have thin yellow films over our houses and everything else kept outdoors, which reconstitutes itself within 10 minutes of cleaning something, because of this dirt getting blown into the air by Texas winds.
Sidewalks constantly dug into, unusable, closed for years at a time, even when projects halt or finish.
Everyone and their mother believing they could become a builder during the ZIRP era, invariably going out of business and leaving empty lots and half-finished buildings sitting for years waiting for a new builder to buy them out.
Above-ground power lines constantly being knocked down onto the roads by constuctions crews.
All of my power tools being stolen by a construction crew across the street, because our dumbass builder gave a unit two doors down the same radio channel for the garage door opener as me, so I couldn't keep my garage shut until I realized and disconnected the opener.
Construction crews cutting the locks to our gates.
Cable Internet contractors cutting corners and putting new residents on shared lines instead of running a new line to new units, leaking signal and getting our Internet perpetually cut to solve complaints down the block.
Completely unmaintained lots owned by builders who weren't actually building becoming overgrown by six foot tall weeds and constantly getting cited by the city.
Construction truck rock haulers dropping rocks all over the road, breaking windshields, shaking the whole neighborhood at 5 in the morning.
A crane dropping onto a building and killing five people 9 years ago.
Hacker News constantly wants to act like the only possible reason anyone might oppose construction is "but ma property value." Believe me, it isn't just that. In spite of all that, our property values have still more than doubled in the past decade. Believe it or not, having your neighborhood torn down and rebuilt while you're still living there can actually be incredibly disruptive and unpleasant. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose it or at least want to regulate it, other than "I hate black people" and "I'm concerned by property value will go down." Until you can meet those objections and honest grounds, or even just acknowledge that there are other reasons to object, we're never going to make headway on coming to agreement about this.
Also, I understand bad luck happens but that is not a normal list, a dozen things went wrong and not a single word about how they tried to improve their situation. All of them are not the fault of “construction” of new homes, which can be, and often is accomplished with less disruption.
If this were the typical reality we’d have to shut down home-building for good as too disruptive.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't push for things like single stair reform that could lead to more fine-grained, incremental urbanism.
I've been to a number of housing hearings and listened to what people actually say on the public record, and "I'd support this if it were more broken up" is not a thing I've heard. On the other hand "this is a NICE neighborhood and we do not want apartments here" is pretty common.
American racism, same as it ever was.
The big difference is that you are defined by your ancestry so there is little to no mobility.
This seems to be confirmed by the way Americans seem to regard someone's race as a fundamental and immutable characteristic, even while intellectually accepting race is just defined by social convention.
Edit: I might be conflating race with ethnicity.
British people use definitions that are different from those of South Asians, and westerners in general are entirely unaware of caste which is a whole racial hierarchy that affects a lot of the world. Sri Lankans define race as whatever your father was, but Jewishness is inherited from your mother.
It might not be fuzzy within a particular culture at a particular point is time, but it is not consistent between cultures or over time.
Edit: initially omitted because I keep sharing it and might look spammy, but decided to add a link to my blog post on the topic: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
> In the US it is very common for someone to identify as half black and half white, or one quarter Irish and three quarters Mexican, and so on.
That is one of the things I find hardest to understand about American definitions. I would just think of someone like that as American (unless they are significantly culturally not American in some way). I just describe myself as mixed, or as from one of the two countries I am a citizen of (I have lived in both for significant chunks of my life and am influenced by both cultures but have little ancestry from either).
That's classism. Indirectly associated with racism in this country, sure. But naming the thing accurately communicates the full breadth of it's effect.
Imagine it's a thousand years ago and some cardinal is hearing a dispute between some guild representative and some local lord or something.
The parties will invariably appeal to religion because that's that the listener cares about. But they don't "really" care. They care about their dispute. And they care about religion insofar as it lets them convince, often actively misleading along the way, the audience into agreeing with their framing.
That's essentially what 1) is. People are screeching about traffic because the municipality invariable has rules that make they the municipality have to care about that.
People can, and do, do the same thing with other pretexts like safety and the environment, whatever the audience cares about.
I do see 'concern trolling' as well. For instance I live in a place that doesn't see a lot of rain, so people will come out and "what about the WATER for those apartments?!" thinking they've found a gotcha, even while they themselves have a big green lawn and even if municipal use of water is a tiny fraction of the area's water
https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug...
I do not think this is all NIMBYism, as I think some reasons are valid. it is also true that you cannot add a lot of population to some places without changing its character, and I do personally like living somewhere where I get recognised in local shops and third spaces and people say hello and/or smile at you on the streets quite often.
As to change, that happens when demand to live somewhere changes, one way or another. See my other comment where I discuss an increase in the demand:
With regard to the environmental impact, I was not thinking about climate change but things such as endangering habitats of rare species.
Now condos, sure. Much better way to increase density without distorting the nature of a neighborhood.