Comment by sarchertech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sarchertech | Hacker News Reader

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> The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.

That’s the exact opposite of the experience I’ve had in my town.

It seems that money is the primary driver of turnout at town council meetings. I live at the top of a mountain with 1 real road and 2 smaller frequently closed roads down to the city below. Developers really want to build up here, but there’s no way to widen the road, and no realistic way to build more. There’s not enough flat land to build enough jobs, shopping, dining etc… up here, so increasing density just means more cars making the trip 30 minutes into the city.

Every single time there’s an issue about development, you get dozens of real estate agents, developers, and people who work in construction showing up because their bank account depends on it. Every local election, you have candidates bankrolled by out of town developers.

“No” is much less well organized and will only occasionally turn out in larger numbers than “Yes” despite dominating in elections.

People say the same things here, where I know them not to be true, but I don’t know anything about your municipality. I know what the social science says about this, and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in, but does occur to people who want to stop it. Your mileage obviously varies.

I'm betting the developers are for single-family homes not apartments. The only NIMBY I'm for is anti-SFH.

High density is more profitable for developers, they have no interest in supporting SFH zoning.

I know that not to be true in my area as well.

In CZ it is the developers who push for more density. Land prices are terrible in our big cities.

cost per unit actually goes up as buildings get larger, so it really depends on the market. i don’t really know any developers who actively oppose upzoning in my region, but the SFH builders I think have an easier and more lucrative job than the ones doing urban infill.

> cost per unit actually goes up as buildings get larger

Construction cost per unit goes up a little, but land cost per unit goes down a lot, because you buy the same plot of land and put N times more units on it.

Landlords are often against upzoning (and the increased competition!), but developers benefit from less red tape.

> and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in

That ignores all the people who have other incentives to build.

Depending on the area you probably have about 10% of the people who have jobs that directly benefit from new construction (construction workers, plumbers, electricians etc…) or who are married to people who do. Then you have all the people who work or own businesses in sectors that indirectly benefit from new construction or directly benefit from increased density.

In my town of 8k people, I’ve seen 30 people from those groups show up in support of a new sub division vs half a dozen against.

Are there any public meetings with the developer stepping up and saying “I need to make money, please approve!”. That seems… counter productive

It’s usually them saying something more like “this will bring jobs”, “growth is inevitable” etc…

And by jobs what they mean is that they will import labor to build housing you can't afford in your neighbourhood.

A new house makes every other lower quality house cheaper by providing an alternative. What matters is the total supply of the houses as good or better as the one you want.

Assuming a perfectly efficient market sure. But in reality an expensive house next door raise the price of the cheap house next door because home prices are heavily influenced by the amount banks will loan, and appraisals are heavily influenced by nearby property values.

Plus other reasons like people want to live in good school districts and higher income areas tend to have better schools.

This is well studied, and I don't believe that's true: a luxury development _reduces_ rents in the immediate surrounding area.

Then studies aren’t conclusive.

Many studies find a small net drop in rent (1-5%). But other studies show no aggregate drop in rent. And importantly show an increase in rent for lower quality apartments.

Also for single family homes, nearby property values generally rise.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07352166.2026.2...

Both can be true. The luxury development can increase value for neighbors while making surrounding areas cheaper

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