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Because your preference requires onerous restrictions on your neighbor's right to the use of their own private property. Say your neighbor wants to build a dup

Because your preference requires onerous restrictions on your neighbor's right to the use of their own private property. Say your neighbor wants to build a duplex. You might not like it, but that's as far as your harm goes. To enforce your preference, though, you have to restrict your neighbor's behavior. The metaphorical "lines" here are pretty easy to draw, because they're literally property lines with direct physical representations.

everdrive 5y ago
I agree with that, but their actions do impinge on my preferences. My preferences disappear the moment theirs are exercised. Here's an example. I absolutely do not believe that this is actually a fair comparison. I do believe it follows the same logic as your example. Let me explain what I mean. Let's say that I lived in an apartment, and developed a habit of listening to extremely loud music with bass starting at 10pm, and ending at 5am. My neighbors have a "preference" to be able to not hear that loud music at all, and certainly not when they're trying to sleep. They may not _like_ the loud music, but that's as far as the harm goes. To enforce _their_ preference, they would have to restrict my behavior. Now all reasonable people would agree that playing deafening bass in the middle of the night is inappropriate, and that it would be perfectly fine to restrict my behavior. In other words, we restrict others' behavior pretty frequently. And, this restriction is based on "common sense" judgements. When the preferences of somebody falls outside of the norm under this regime, they may not have much recourse. Now to be clear, this is far from a perfect comparison: there are laws against noise pollution, and property lines are not really the same issue as "being obnoxious on purpose." In other words, I agree and admit that these two scenarios are not interchangeable in effect. (I do believe that they follow the same logic, however.) It's also not the case that in the "duplex" scenario that the greatest ill is not simply that I must "see" the duplex. Really, population density in an area has a number of effects: - More people means more noise pollution. (and in some cities, kids will play loud bass in their cars no matter what time of night it is) - More crime. (if not per-capita, then in absolute terms) - More trash, debris, and pollution in my general vicinity. - Longer travel times. - More crowds. - Etc. And again, I'm not suggesting that I should have a legal right to prevent density from occurring. However it seems that when density occurs I have no recourse but move. I don't have any way to preserve something which is singularly important to me.
- warning26 5y ago
  > However it seems that when density occurs I have no recourse but move. Sure, and what's wrong with that? If your goal is to live in a rural area without many people, then many countries today have plenty of depopulated areas on the outskirts of rural towns. Why not live there? It's like the parent commenter said; expecting desirable land near a city not to densify is like expecting a puppy to never grow into a dog.
  - teakettle42 5y ago
    > If your goal is to live in a rural area without many people, then many countries today have plenty of depopulated areas on the outskirts of rural towns. Why not live there? If your goal is to live in a dense area packed with people, then many countries today have plenty of densely populated areas in the center of urban cities. Why not live there?
    - novok 5y ago
      The entire point for many americans, is there is really no choice for the most part. It's either rural areas, suburbs or hyper expensive urban areas because building an urban city is effectively illegal in most of the USA, so the few legacy cities that still exist have extremely high demand. In countries where there is a choice, this debate hardly happens. People who want their village life surrounded by farmland can go live in a small village with a train line stop and commute into the huge downtown city for work within 45 - 60 minutes. Look at berlin for example: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dabendorf,+15806+Zossen,+Germany/Bahnhof+Berlin+Friedrichstraße/@52.3915289,13.3798942,10.34z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x47a86a5297705675:0xd7efd5d6ac572508!2m2!1d13.4375771!2d52.2376804!1m5!1m1!1s0x47a851c303492d73:0x6c4ed0dc30b6dc04!2m2!1d13.3869776!2d52.5202894!3e3!5m1!1e2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dabendorf,+15806+Zossen,+Ger... "Move to another country" is a complete non-starter for most Americans too. What Americans have done to their country is a fence sitting exercise that creates the worse of both worlds. Cities in Europe are smaller, more dense and the drop off into nature is significantly faster. When americans attempt to make something city like, they're noisy, dirty, traffic clogged and crime ridden because it's against the culture to make walkable, transit orientated cities that are significantly quieter, than an american car dependent 'city'. They still give themselves long commutes, but you get huge suburban sprawl that never really ends until your hours out, so you still don't get your log cabin lifestyle anyway. By allowing cities to properly happen, you ironically create the conditions that make what you want more frequent and would still let you work close enough to a city core to actually make good money. A key issue with rural living is a bad income, because your too far away from other humans to make large productive groups than can make money.

everdrive 5y ago

I agree with that, but their actions do impinge on my preferences. My preferences disappear the moment theirs are exercised. Here's an example. I absolutely do not believe that this is actually a fair comparison. I do believe it follows the same logic as your example. Let me explain what I mean. Let's say that I lived in an apartment, and developed a habit of listening to extremely loud music with bass starting at 10pm, and ending at 5am. My neighbors have a "preference" to be able to not hear that loud music at all, and certainly not when they're trying to sleep. They may not _like_ the loud music, but that's as far as the harm goes. To enforce _their_ preference, they would have to restrict my behavior. Now all reasonable people would agree that playing deafening bass in the middle of the night is inappropriate, and that it would be perfectly fine to restrict my behavior. In other words, we restrict others' behavior pretty frequently. And, this restriction is based on "common sense" judgements. When the preferences of somebody falls outside of the norm under this regime, they may not have much recourse. Now to be clear, this is far from a perfect comparison: there are laws against noise pollution, and property lines are not really the same issue as "being obnoxious on purpose." In other words, I agree and admit that these two scenarios are not interchangeable in effect. (I do believe that they follow the same logic, however.) It's also not the case that in the "duplex" scenario that the greatest ill is not simply that I must "see" the duplex. Really, population density in an area has a number of effects: - More people means more noise pollution. (and in some cities, kids will play loud bass in their cars no matter what time of night it is) - More crime. (if not per-capita, then in absolute terms) - More trash, debris, and pollution in my general vicinity. - Longer travel times. - More crowds. - Etc. And again, I'm not suggesting that I should have a legal right to prevent density from occurring. However it seems that when density occurs I have no recourse but move. I don't have any way to preserve something which is singularly important to me.

warning26 5y ago
> However it seems that when density occurs I have no recourse but move. Sure, and what's wrong with that? If your goal is to live in a rural area without many people, then many countries today have plenty of depopulated areas on the outskirts of rural towns. Why not live there? It's like the parent commenter said; expecting desirable land near a city not to densify is like expecting a puppy to never grow into a dog.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  > If your goal is to live in a rural area without many people, then many countries today have plenty of depopulated areas on the outskirts of rural towns. Why not live there? If your goal is to live in a dense area packed with people, then many countries today have plenty of densely populated areas in the center of urban cities. Why not live there?
  - novok 5y ago
    The entire point for many americans, is there is really no choice for the most part. It's either rural areas, suburbs or hyper expensive urban areas because building an urban city is effectively illegal in most of the USA, so the few legacy cities that still exist have extremely high demand. In countries where there is a choice, this debate hardly happens. People who want their village life surrounded by farmland can go live in a small village with a train line stop and commute into the huge downtown city for work within 45 - 60 minutes. Look at berlin for example: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dabendorf,+15806+Zossen,+Germany/Bahnhof+Berlin+Friedrichstraße/@52.3915289,13.3798942,10.34z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x47a86a5297705675:0xd7efd5d6ac572508!2m2!1d13.4375771!2d52.2376804!1m5!1m1!1s0x47a851c303492d73:0x6c4ed0dc30b6dc04!2m2!1d13.3869776!2d52.5202894!3e3!5m1!1e2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dabendorf,+15806+Zossen,+Ger... "Move to another country" is a complete non-starter for most Americans too. What Americans have done to their country is a fence sitting exercise that creates the worse of both worlds. Cities in Europe are smaller, more dense and the drop off into nature is significantly faster. When americans attempt to make something city like, they're noisy, dirty, traffic clogged and crime ridden because it's against the culture to make walkable, transit orientated cities that are significantly quieter, than an american car dependent 'city'. They still give themselves long commutes, but you get huge suburban sprawl that never really ends until your hours out, so you still don't get your log cabin lifestyle anyway. By allowing cities to properly happen, you ironically create the conditions that make what you want more frequent and would still let you work close enough to a city core to actually make good money. A key issue with rural living is a bad income, because your too far away from other humans to make large productive groups than can make money.