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You mention the high prices you face as being problematic. If you can’t afford it why don’t you move elsewhere instead of requiring everyone else around you to

You mention the high prices you face as being problematic. If you can’t afford it why don’t you move elsewhere instead of requiring everyone else around you to take a hit to their lifestyle to accommodate you? You want taller or more buildings, but that would change parameters like traffic, noise, crime, character, and so on that others don’t want to deal with. Many long term residents have lived in- and contributed to- their neighborhood and city, through good and bad times, to turn them into the desirable and attractive areas they are now, and it seems reasonable to want to retain that. Why are their desires invalid while yours are so valid? The attitude of feeling like you are owed great housing in a great location at a great price feels like entitlement to me. And I get it - we all have our own things that we feel entitled to, myself included. But there’s an entire country’s worth of desirable places to live in. You may not have the exact job or conditions you want in all of those locations, but I am betting you can make life work in many other places. Being mad that people who have built a particular community and lifestyle want to preserve some key parts of it doesn’t make sense to me, because I understand why they want to protect those things. You’re asking them to lose something they value so you can gain something you value, and I don’t see why you feel you hold a moral high ground.

deleted 5y ago
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lkrubner 5y ago
You contradict yourself. You raise the question of why those who are there need to suffer a change of lifestyle, then you tell someone who lives there that they should simply leave and move somewhere else.
c1ccccc1 5y ago
The basic problem here is that there is a limited resource: land that is close to the downtown area where most of the workplaces and other attractions are. Some people (such as yourself) want that land to be filled with a certain kind of housing, and others ("YIMBYs") want that land to be filled with a different, much more dense kind of housing. They both have their advantages and drawbacks. The sparse areas have advantages like less traffic, less noise, and lower crime rate per capita (I haven't actually read any studies on that last one, but I'll take your word for it). The dense areas have the advantage that they can house a heck of a lot more people. Also the prices are cheaper in the dense areas, so you're more likely to be able to live next to your friends and family, even if they make less money than you. Different types of people will tend to like different types of housing. A wealthy and noise sensitive person might prefer the sparse housing, while a poorer extrovert might prefer the high density kind. In a command economy, deciding which of the two types to build would be a very contentious issue. In a market economy, it's no problem. Just let people buy land and build what they want on it. Some regions of sparse housing will be built to cater to the folks who like that, and some regions of dense housing will be built to cater to everyone else. The low density folks tend to pay a premium for the fact that they're occupying an area of land that could house 40 times more people, but in general, everyone is happy. The problem comes when one group or the other tries to bring a bit of the command economy back into it. They institute bans on building high density housing, or require a quota of parking spots to be built with new construction. This artificially decreases the supply of housing, which jacks up prices. This makes landlords happy, but pretty much everyone else is hurting on rent. Fewer people are able to be housed, and it's costing them more. Similarly, if laws were passed requiring all new housing to be high density, we'd end up with loads of dirt cheap apartment buildings, but the low density preferring folks wouldn't be happy, even though they're willing to pay a premium.
samatman 5y ago
You seem confused. You bought a plot of land, presumably with a house on it. You didn't buy a lifestyle. You don't have a deed to a lifestyle, you have a deed to land and a house. You very much did not buy your neighbor's land. So if your neighbor wants to build some dense housing, what on Earth makes you think you have the right to stop her? Now you may have the power to say "yep, not in my back yard! I'm going to file a bunch of stop orders and vote for politicians who are hostile to upzoning (and who happen to own some property whose sticker price they're afraid of disturbing)!" The reason I consider this desire invalid is because it isn't your land. What you're doing is abusing zoning, which is supposed to keep factories away from human habitation, to prevent other property owners from building the kind of housing they want on their own property. I've decided that I'm glad you consider NIMBY an insult, you NIMBY. Your kind deserve to be insulted, and those of us who think it's disgusting to tell a productive citizen of our cities "move away if you can't afford an apartment" plan to defeat you and get back to building. > The attitude of feeling like you are owed great housing in a great location at a great price feels like entitlement to me. Have a look in the mirror, NIMBY.

deleted 5y ago

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lkrubner 5y ago

You contradict yourself. You raise the question of why those who are there need to suffer a change of lifestyle, then you tell someone who lives there that they should simply leave and move somewhere else.

c1ccccc1 5y ago

The basic problem here is that there is a limited resource: land that is close to the downtown area where most of the workplaces and other attractions are. Some people (such as yourself) want that land to be filled with a certain kind of housing, and others ("YIMBYs") want that land to be filled with a different, much more dense kind of housing. They both have their advantages and drawbacks. The sparse areas have advantages like less traffic, less noise, and lower crime rate per capita (I haven't actually read any studies on that last one, but I'll take your word for it). The dense areas have the advantage that they can house a heck of a lot more people. Also the prices are cheaper in the dense areas, so you're more likely to be able to live next to your friends and family, even if they make less money than you. Different types of people will tend to like different types of housing. A wealthy and noise sensitive person might prefer the sparse housing, while a poorer extrovert might prefer the high density kind. In a command economy, deciding which of the two types to build would be a very contentious issue. In a market economy, it's no problem. Just let people buy land and build what they want on it. Some regions of sparse housing will be built to cater to the folks who like that, and some regions of dense housing will be built to cater to everyone else. The low density folks tend to pay a premium for the fact that they're occupying an area of land that could house 40 times more people, but in general, everyone is happy. The problem comes when one group or the other tries to bring a bit of the command economy back into it. They institute bans on building high density housing, or require a quota of parking spots to be built with new construction. This artificially decreases the supply of housing, which jacks up prices. This makes landlords happy, but pretty much everyone else is hurting on rent. Fewer people are able to be housed, and it's costing them more. Similarly, if laws were passed requiring all new housing to be high density, we'd end up with loads of dirt cheap apartment buildings, but the low density preferring folks wouldn't be happy, even though they're willing to pay a premium.

samatman 5y ago

You seem confused. You bought a plot of land, presumably with a house on it. You didn't buy a lifestyle. You don't have a deed to a lifestyle, you have a deed to land and a house. You very much did not buy your neighbor's land. So if your neighbor wants to build some dense housing, what on Earth makes you think you have the right to stop her? Now you may have the power to say "yep, not in my back yard! I'm going to file a bunch of stop orders and vote for politicians who are hostile to upzoning (and who happen to own some property whose sticker price they're afraid of disturbing)!" The reason I consider this desire invalid is because it isn't your land. What you're doing is abusing zoning, which is supposed to keep factories away from human habitation, to prevent other property owners from building the kind of housing they want on their own property. I've decided that I'm glad you consider NIMBY an insult, you NIMBY. Your kind deserve to be insulted, and those of us who think it's disgusting to tell a productive citizen of our cities "move away if you can't afford an apartment" plan to defeat you and get back to building. > The attitude of feeling like you are owed great housing in a great location at a great price feels like entitlement to me. Have a look in the mirror, NIMBY.