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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

You bought a property, not the entire neighborhood or city. Those do not belong to you.

Cities change and adapt over time.

I purposely bought my house in a federal and state historic neighborhood so that I wouldn't have to wake up one morning and discover I was back in a dense neighborhood. I lived in downtown urban environments from age of 18 to 52. That was enough. There are plenty of high density housing options being built all over my city downtown including office building conversions. I'm all for it. That's just not how I want to live and I should have that choice.

And then the current residents leave before their investments (their homes) lose value and the neighborhood as a whole loses value (or turns into a slum).

People vote with their feet and their wallets.

This is not actually a thing that happens because 'someone built an apartment building'.

Never heard of white flight, huh?

Might want to look into why white flight even happened in the first place. It wasn't because apartments were built.

It was directly tied to the disruption of neighborhoods culture. That's the root of my supposition.

It was because the new people were not white. They were black. The culture was not a factor, no matter how respectability politcs exactly as white they acted, they were black and thus a threat.

That's what 'FuriouslyAdrift' is saying. Those are the people he/she does not want in the neighborhood.

There are plenty of blacks (and latino, indian, phillipino) in my neigborhood as it's a firmly middle class neighborhood. What we don't want is CRIME and transient residents that don't care about the area along with the landlords that are out of state.

I love all of those examples of cities where the housing prices dropped because people moved out due to building more housing.

Once again, you use the passive. Change is active. Someone is doing the changing, and then they are trying to insult the people that refuse to let them have their way.

I explained two kinds of change, one that is more visible, where housing is built to accommodate people moving in, and a second kind where supply does not meet demand so the people change.

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.

"I want a free Lamborgini in your garage. You're just a NIMBY denying my need"

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