> If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, toug

> If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes! Unfortunately, much of the history of that era was exploiting racial minorities in order to build. I'm currently sitting in a neighborhood (PNW USA) that at the turn of the century was established mostly by german immigrants. They built their houses here because the more anglo population in the city proper, slightly to the south, and mostly across the river, redlined them away from those areas. Fast forward to just after WW2, and a substantial black population moved here to work building ships for the war effort. These folks were largely setting in a racially integrated town just a bit further north from me. In the post war years, this flooded, creating a local refugee crisis. The powers that were in the city at the time did not want black families in their areas, so they decided to redline them into the germanic neighborhood and make it their problem. Fast forward a couple decades, and my neighborhood has become the cultural and economic center for the black community in my city. City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly racists, so they go along with a scheme to use a free way expansion and building a hospital campus to snap up the land for a fraction of what it was worth under eminent domain. Culturally the neighborhood has not recovered from this. Several multi block scale plots of land remain unbuilt but owned by the hospital. That's just my neighborhood. Robert Moses and his peers played out this story nation wide. So, there's obviously a lot going on with the US's current failure to build civic infrastructure in a sensible and affordable way. But before we lionize what was going on in the past, we should remember a lot of what got built was at the cost of someone who's rights and economic interests were legit thwarted. It doesn't excuse modern NIMBYism from a position of privilege, but I do worry about reforms that give planning boards sharper knives.