> It's just a matter of degree Indeed. Communities can collaborate to keep things the way they'd like them by leveraging local networks. One particular and exc

> It's just a matter of degree Indeed. Communities can collaborate to keep things the way they'd like them by leveraging local networks. One particular and exciting example of this sort of policy is Redlining[1]. Agreements such as height limits aren't as bad (and are less explicitly racist), but it's a similar sort of idea. I understand the reasons why someone would want this for their neighborhood (and in most neighborhoods throughout the USA it's not a big deal), I just think in these examples where there's extreme tension between external demand and the desires of current residents, something has to give. > There are historical neighborhoods for example. People pay a lot of money to live in these neighborhoods. You can't just waltz in and tear down an expensive house and turn it into a property with a couple of trailers on it. I'm not against historic neighborhoods in general. I live in NYC and am aware of multiple, but I feel that some, such as parts of the West Village, have been harmful to the city as a whole. The point of a historic neighborhood should be to preserve exceptional period architecture: for example, the Upper East Side historic district in the low/mid 60s preserves a particular style of late 1800s row houses[2]. Many parts of the West Village that are historic are preserving a bunch of shitty 1 or 2 story buildings constructed when the area was a slum in the teens and 20s, after half the neighborhood was torn down to build the IRT 7th Ave Line (i.e. the 1/2/3 train) that would be covered as 7th Ave South[3]. To use a historic neighborhood as a chance to "preserve community" is, I think, an extreme distortion of intent (although the ultimate result for many well-positioned historic areas is preserving a particular sort of extremely wealthy community). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining 2: https://ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/east61ststreethouses.jpg https://ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/east61s... 3: https://i0.wp.com/www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/7av_w4.jpg https://i0.wp.com/www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/201... (note the 1 story structures and general architectural hodgepodge)