Hacker News Reader

Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it, NIMBYism is "don't ever build anything anywhere in the neighborhood/town", not "don't build in this one spot we all really like". As I said, there are tons of other buildings going up over town.

View on HN

Exactly. The "my" in "my backyard" can apply to everyone therefore nothing gets built. The alternative is everything gets built. There has to be a middle ground, which is what zoning laws are meant to accomplish. We have buildings and multi-family housing going up in our town too, but we also have historically-protected buildings on the main street that require some more work if you want to do stuff with them. This is a good balance.

Zoning laws accomplished what they were intended to do, which was to enforce economic and racial segregation by preventing new affordable housing from being built near areas of opportunity. I don't think anybody working on housing affordability thinks this is a good balance, and the trend is sharply towards rolling these rules back. Apropos this particular thread I think it's notable that the most popular way of accomplishing that is to remove home rule authority for municipalities on zoning minimums and re-vesting that power exclusively in the state, which can't be mugged by local special interest groups spawn camping public comment opportunities.

Well, and also preventing things like slaughterhouses being built in residential areas, as they were often in the 19th century. I rather suspect that the real power behind wanting to repeal zoning laws aren't altruistic people wanting to provide people with affordable housing but people who just want to make as much money as possible, regardless of the effects on people in the neighborhood.

In the campaign I'm a part of to end exclusionary zoning ("Yes Oak Park"), housing reform opponents claimed to residents that we were advocating for the construction of rock quarries next to people's houses. It's like there's a playbook of bad arguments NIMBYs are drawing from. Thanks for sharing this! It was a useful cite in a local politics discussion.

Heck, put the slaughterhouse in my back yard. I'll never have to worry about someone throwing up luxury condos full of Karenns, ever.

An odious commercial use is the next best thing to no change whatsoever.

If you have your own private back yard you're not allowed to refer to condominiums as "luxury".

>If you have your own private back yard you're not allowed to refer to condominiums as "luxury".

I live on .1ac in a post-industrial shithole that remains a post-industrial shithole largely because the politics of snooty people mostly a hundred miles away.

The last thing I, or anyone else here, needs is "those people" in our midst telling us how to live. Our lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible.

It's literally "don't build on this one spot I really like". It's in the name!

I didn't know that the acronym was NITOSIRL. Sure seems like a weird way to spell NIMBY, but who am I to judge?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com