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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical. People seem to complain most of all because 1) they view the function of a city as moving and storing automobiles and anything that might hypothetically get in the way of that is bad ("we should only build these homes if they come with a massive amount of parking and generate no traffic!") or 2) just plain aversion to change, which is more understandable.

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.

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Well, yeah. Transient residents (and that's AirBnBs, too) raises the likelihood of more criminal behavior and lowers property values. Most places are not NYC where renting is the common model and only the rich own.

Now condos, sure. Much better way to increase density without distorting the nature of a neighborhood.

> 1) they view the function of a city as moving and storing automobiles and anything that might hypothetically get in the way of that is bad ("we should only build these homes if they come with a massive amount of parking and generate no traffic!")

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 think their concerns about automobiles are actually genuine if overblown. People freak out about car stuff.

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...

NIMBYism happens in all sorts of places. Not just car oriented cities, or even just cities.

My experience is mostly with the car-oriented city I live in; I can't speak as much to what it might look like elsewhere.

Fair enough, just adding development of new housing in places I know is strongly opposed with the reasons given are things such as strains on existing local services, environmental impacts (e.g. on endangered or protected species), and lots of other things.

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.

If you are building outwards, 'sprawl', the environmental concerns have some validity, I think. But most of the NIMBYism I see is people opposing, say, an apartment building right in the middle of town. That's actual a big win for the environment ( https://www.sightline.org/apartments-are-the-climate-solutio... ) - they can be more walkable/less car dependant, require less resources, don't pave over farms or forests, and so on.

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126990

I was thinking of sprawl with regard to the instances when these are valid objections.

With regard to the environmental impact, I was not thinking about climate change but things such as endangering habitats of rare species.

Most NIMBYism isn't about sprawl - at least in the US. It's about stopping the types of housing that use land more efficiently from being built within cities, and therefore actually reduce the demand to grow outwards.

They want to keep out the poors (read: blacks.)

American racism, same as it ever was.

You have it everywhere in the world where people living somewhere has a say (of course no one in North Korea would ever NIMBY)

YIMBYs specialize in pretending to be black and in gentrifying black people out of their homes.

I think NIMBYism around the world is often "to keep out the poors", they don't have to be black. Slots in my theory that a lot of racism is just classism.

Meanwhile, someone elsewhere in this thread is talking explicitly about 'white flight'. For the record I think it's both racism and classism.

My understanding of racism in the US is that it is more like caste in India than like class in Britain, for example.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame... is an excellent reference.

Well yeah, thats kind of what race is. It’s something you’re born with, and it’s not fuzzy. It can be nuanced, thats different. How it’s regarded is a separate issue, and that has generally improved over time.

Edit: I might be conflating race with ethnicity.

Depends what you mean by fuzzy. it is culturally defined and people in different cultures use different definitions. Americans have whole categories not used in, for example, the UK (a very similar culture otherwise) such as "hispanic" which seems to include people I would call "white"? The same with people who are classified as "black" who look white. Americans now seem to use "caucasian" as a synonym for "white" which contradicts definitions used historically.

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

When I wrote that I had in mind the idea of “mixed race” people. 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. So, nuanced but not fuzzy, in that sense at least. But that is closer to ethnicity than race on second thought.

How do you define ethnicity and race? Apart from the ambiguous areas I do not think we all use the same definitions.

> 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).

> They want to keep out the poors

That's classism. Indirectly associated with racism in this country, sure. But naming the thing accurately communicates the full breadth of it's effect.

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