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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

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

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.

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