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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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