4 ms·

A tortured analogy. The concept of `NIMBY === house as investment` is a very common strawman. Believe it or not, most people care about their homes and communit

A tortured analogy. The concept of `NIMBY === house as investment` is a very common strawman. Believe it or not, most people care about their homes and communities for their intrinsic value, which is where most NIMBYism comes from.

GaryBluto 1mo ago
I've got to agree there. The whole article had the smell of somebody arguing with themself.
thewebguyd 1mo ago
The problem is when every neighborhood is NIMBY, something has to give or the problem will never be solved. At the end of the day, valuing aesthetics, parking, or quiet is a preference. Having shelter near jobs, schools and public transit is human necessity which is what should be prioritized. Freezing the SFH neighborhood also doesn't protect the community long term, as NIMBYs believe. When supply gets restricted, prices go up. It prices out the local teachers, service workers, aging family, and even the NIMBY's own children get priced out, until now it's just a neighborhood of million dollar+ SFHs with no young families, no local workforce. It's economic segregation. Continuing to allow local vetoes and restrictive zoning just pushes us out further and further into unsustainable suburban sprawl, without the transit to match, and boosting emissions. Not popular in individualistic America, but when we have the housing crisis we do, the needs of the many are going to have to take priority over the needs of the few NIMBYs.
- kurthr 1mo ago
  But why does the high density housing have to be where the SFH are? Why does it need to share the parking, facilities, retail, roads, schools, etc. of something that was built and has been maintained and evolved for 50-100 years? Why not build the high density with it's own transit, roads, malls, parks, schools etc? This is how it's done in the rest of the world, certainly Korea, Japan, and China. I see this in England and France as well. They develop a high density area with new facilities that can grow and evolve for how people want to live there, rather than mowing down houses (in communities of color) or plopping 5-7 story apartments without parking or parks right next to single story SFH, as developers like to do in the US. I assume it's because it's more profitable for the developers. They don't have to build anything, but the part they can immediately sell, and they ride on the value of the neighborhood created by the people who already live there. I think some infill near commercial districts or malls also faces much less "NIMBY" criticism. To give a more personal example: I like the location and view of where you live. I like the plants you water, and you keep the house looking clean. I want to just build another large room on top of your house, where me and a bunch of friends will live. We'll just share the stairs, hallways, and front door, and of course our share of the water and electric bill. We probably won't be too loud most nights, and usually when friends come over they won't use your bathroom or take anything from your rooms, or at least we'll ask them not to. Sorry about the construction noise while we do it, and just think you'll get to meet so many new people! Sorry that the part of your house you still own will be worth less than your neighbors when we're done, but that's the price you need to pay for living in a nice place and keeping it up. The argument that SFH infrastructure repair is subsidized by new building is a much better one. Of course that was true of the tax increases and subsidy of the original town, when the SFH were built as well.
  - hylaride 1mo ago
    > But why does the high density housing have to be where the SFH are? It depends on where said SFHs are. Cities need to eventually grow upwards! If we never allowed land-reuse Manhattan would still be 2 stories on the whole borough. I live in Toronto and the harshest NIMBYs are adjacent to downtown and/or subway stops. They fight tooth and nail against even 6 story condominiums on the major high streets (Margret Atwood, who lives in a large SFH close to downtown was among them recently-ish). The ultimate result is that we have a handful of extremely dense clusters of condominiums centred around a few subway stops that then super-concentrate people and cause extreme crowding on transit, amenities, etc. It would be better if you had mid-rise multi-unit dwellings more spread out. It's actually become an acute problem in so many ways. The people who own the SFHs tend be over 50 and childless. The result is that many schools in these neighbourhoods are at barely 20% capacity, while the condominiums (where most younger families can afford to live) are causing the schools near them to be overflowing with kids. > This is how it's done in the rest of the world, certainly Korea, Japan, and China. I see this in England and France as well. The countries broadly speaking default to higher density than North America for historical and economic reasons. They have their own issues, but the majority of Koreans live in high rises and Japan rebuilds their buildings constantly: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
    - kurthr 1mo ago
      All of Tokyo was basically rebuilt after the war, because it was bombed. Much of it was not originally built to earthquake standards. Rebuilding high density in bombed US SFH neighborhoods, would certainly make sense. I completely disagree with broader point of "cultural reasons" why Asia built high density, because it is all so recent. Mostly in the 1970s-2010s. They built entirely NEW infrastructure, with transit (e.g. subway, highspeed rail), malls, streets, commercial and residential buildings. Look anywhere in Korea, look at the rise of Shin-Yokohama (outside Tokyo), look at the highrise Urbs outside of Paris (out all the way to Rennes). Why is the center of Paris still only few stories high after the Hausmann era when it was laregely built over 150 years ago. Why don't they put 50 story skyscrapers in Paris... because they don't want to, and they push the "density" to the edges where new facilities can support them. But the housing prices in Paris are astronomical (just as they are in London). If you want to talk about closing schools, because there aren't children for them... then great! Build new high density where the school used to be. Build a school into the building, put a subway under the school with a connecting mall. Then at least the surrounding neighborhood that has been paying 70 years of taxes doesn't have to deal with the extra traffic/parking of the new construction. Maybe they'll even enjoy the new mall, and foot traffic will help support existing commercial infrastructure.
- bpt3 1mo ago
  If all the things you describe came to fruition, the current residents will have to live with the consequences of their decisions and suffer a lower quality of life (which they don't want to do), and the problem would resolve itself. Or in reality, desirable locations remain desirable, and the current residents who had a hand in making it desirable have a right to prevent a reduction of their quality of life for the benefit of people who would prefer to live there but are unable to successfully compete with others in the housing market.
  - MackCele71 1mo ago
    Excessive land use restrictions and downzoning inherently reduce the "compete" of the housing market, on purpose, for winners of prior cycles (frequently the deceased relatives of current owners).
- happytoexplain 1mo ago
  Absolutely, but this is just the opposite logical extension, corollary to "if we allow infinite development, there will only be a dystopia of super-high-density living everywhere". Both things are bad, and we must "prioritize" a balance, not one or the other. It's perfectly possible to build inward/upward in some places, and outward in other places. It's perfectly possible to build affordable/high-density housing without ruining existing areas. It's perfectly possible to accept that some places are highly desirable because an infinite number of people can not live there - that certain amounts (high amounts) of development defeat the entire point by removing the desirability of those locations. We can strike a reasonable balance between allowing developers to do whatever they want without regard for infrastructure or community, vs, on the other end, not allowing any new construction in already-populated areas. We can expand existing desirable areas reasonably, while also building new desirable areas, but that's difficult because it requires time and investment, and in the meantime it's not as "desirable" as people would like. The simple fact is that people are reproducing within and migrating into desirable areas at a rate that is not compatible with keeping those areas desirable, and developers are leveraging this conflict to pretend they can't build anywhere else, hence the crisis. More shortly: You're understating the importance of quality of life (the concept of "home" is one of the most important things in the history of humanity), and implying a false conflict that we can't both have both quality of life and more development.
seanclayton 1mo ago
> most people Citation needed*
- happytoexplain 1mo ago
  No need to be obnoxious. Just say that your opinion/experience is different. It seems natural to me that the majority of emotions regarding one's home and community are in regards to the idea of home and community, rather than their monetary value, since that's the obvious human perspective. And of course you can care about both things at once, which maybe you assumed I was omitting? I only said the the majority of people care about their home/community, and implied that I believe it's the stronger emotion, not that the majority of people do not also care about the investment (which does materially affect their actual life, as opposed to the more common image of a wealthy "investor"). I could be wrong. It's a sentiment, so it's not something easily measured (unless you fall for the trap of over-interpreting statistics, which is common in an engineering-minded folks).
- majormajor 1mo ago
  Development raises land value. That's the entire reason it's done, after all. Look at the cost of land in Manhattan vs suburban Atlanta. In the supply-choked cities in the US, development isn't gonna tank the wealth of land-owners, quite the opposite. There are exceptions, but they're "this is the largest available plot in Beverly Hills"-style outliers. What people want, even in those denser supply-choked cities, is basically just stability. "I don't want to be forced out because a bunch of rich people move in next door, and I don't want it it turn into something dramatically different experience-wise than what I bought." If everyone in those areas just wanted to maximize the financial side they'd be looking to flip their single family home for a fourplex and put the profit into another, etc etc. "We don't want this to turn into Manhattan" is NOT what anyone owning land in a maybe-could-turn-into-Manhattan place if they were just interested in the money. (That's less viable in the middle-of-the-country suburbs because the "increased land value" of the old empty pasture next door could still result in lower land value for your on-the-suburban-fringe neighborhood, if there's high amounts of empty land and more new identical suburbs popping up. But that's not where the problem is most acute, anyway!)
smallmancontrov 1mo ago
Mmmhmm, and the fact that it results in loads of money in NIMBY pockets at outsiders' expense is purely coincidental? I don't believe you.
- happytoexplain 1mo ago
  You're confusing amount of money with amount of people. Financial investor mindset is a real and dramatic example, but a minority in the set of reasons that individual people care about the community they worked so hard to live in.
  - smallmancontrov 1mo ago
    You are undertaking motivated reasoning to dodge culpability. The transfer of money from house-seekers -- many of whom do more to establish the community you are touting than yourself -- to your own pockets is not incidental, it's the point of the exercise, and your claims otherwise are transparently dishonest and self-serving.
    - bpt3 1mo ago
      > many of whom do more to establish the community you are touting than yourself Citation needed
    - happytoexplain 1mo ago
      You're projecting the image of some kind of specific asshole onto me, personally, for no reason that I can discern. This genre of comment is hideous, and should not be on HN. My family and I participate extensively in our community, both socially and civically. We all know and love each other, and regularly welcome newcomers. We are not wealthy - we're barely middle-class. We would like to die here. Our home's value has not changed (adjusted for inflation) in the decade since we purchased it. We couldn't care less if its value goes down if it means keeping our home and community. Try not to spit in a person's face and tell them who they are based on essentially nothing.
dividefuel 1mo ago
I agree with this. People buy a place to live usually because they like the qualities of that place. Changes to those qualities affect their day to day experience, whereas changes to their primary residence value usually only materialize when they need to access that value. To me the issue is that densification (in the US; can't speak to other countries) usually comes with more downsides than upsides. Mainly this is because of the US's focus on cars: the biggest downside is usually increased traffic. Unfortunately it feels towns in the US do the bare minimum to address it, like adding some traffic lights and maybe a lane or two. Instead I wish the US had more good examples of densification for existing residents, where along with the increased housing larger steps were made to improve the community. E.g. significantly expanded mass transit, bicycling infrastructure, community third places, etc. And I get it, these things are really expensive and hard to do. But turning densification into something that more clearly benefits the day-to-day experience of existing residents would do a LOT to combat NIMBYism.

GaryBluto 1mo ago

I've got to agree there. The whole article had the smell of somebody arguing with themself.

thewebguyd 1mo ago

The problem is when every neighborhood is NIMBY, something has to give or the problem will never be solved. At the end of the day, valuing aesthetics, parking, or quiet is a preference. Having shelter near jobs, schools and public transit is human necessity which is what should be prioritized. Freezing the SFH neighborhood also doesn't protect the community long term, as NIMBYs believe. When supply gets restricted, prices go up. It prices out the local teachers, service workers, aging family, and even the NIMBY's own children get priced out, until now it's just a neighborhood of million dollar+ SFHs with no young families, no local workforce. It's economic segregation. Continuing to allow local vetoes and restrictive zoning just pushes us out further and further into unsustainable suburban sprawl, without the transit to match, and boosting emissions. Not popular in individualistic America, but when we have the housing crisis we do, the needs of the many are going to have to take priority over the needs of the few NIMBYs.

kurthr 1mo ago
But why does the high density housing have to be where the SFH are? Why does it need to share the parking, facilities, retail, roads, schools, etc. of something that was built and has been maintained and evolved for 50-100 years? Why not build the high density with it's own transit, roads, malls, parks, schools etc? This is how it's done in the rest of the world, certainly Korea, Japan, and China. I see this in England and France as well. They develop a high density area with new facilities that can grow and evolve for how people want to live there, rather than mowing down houses (in communities of color) or plopping 5-7 story apartments without parking or parks right next to single story SFH, as developers like to do in the US. I assume it's because it's more profitable for the developers. They don't have to build anything, but the part they can immediately sell, and they ride on the value of the neighborhood created by the people who already live there. I think some infill near commercial districts or malls also faces much less "NIMBY" criticism. To give a more personal example: I like the location and view of where you live. I like the plants you water, and you keep the house looking clean. I want to just build another large room on top of your house, where me and a bunch of friends will live. We'll just share the stairs, hallways, and front door, and of course our share of the water and electric bill. We probably won't be too loud most nights, and usually when friends come over they won't use your bathroom or take anything from your rooms, or at least we'll ask them not to. Sorry about the construction noise while we do it, and just think you'll get to meet so many new people! Sorry that the part of your house you still own will be worth less than your neighbors when we're done, but that's the price you need to pay for living in a nice place and keeping it up. The argument that SFH infrastructure repair is subsidized by new building is a much better one. Of course that was true of the tax increases and subsidy of the original town, when the SFH were built as well.
- hylaride 1mo ago
  > But why does the high density housing have to be where the SFH are? It depends on where said SFHs are. Cities need to eventually grow upwards! If we never allowed land-reuse Manhattan would still be 2 stories on the whole borough. I live in Toronto and the harshest NIMBYs are adjacent to downtown and/or subway stops. They fight tooth and nail against even 6 story condominiums on the major high streets (Margret Atwood, who lives in a large SFH close to downtown was among them recently-ish). The ultimate result is that we have a handful of extremely dense clusters of condominiums centred around a few subway stops that then super-concentrate people and cause extreme crowding on transit, amenities, etc. It would be better if you had mid-rise multi-unit dwellings more spread out. It's actually become an acute problem in so many ways. The people who own the SFHs tend be over 50 and childless. The result is that many schools in these neighbourhoods are at barely 20% capacity, while the condominiums (where most younger families can afford to live) are causing the schools near them to be overflowing with kids. > This is how it's done in the rest of the world, certainly Korea, Japan, and China. I see this in England and France as well. The countries broadly speaking default to higher density than North America for historical and economic reasons. They have their own issues, but the majority of Koreans live in high rises and Japan rebuilds their buildings constantly: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
  - kurthr 1mo ago
    All of Tokyo was basically rebuilt after the war, because it was bombed. Much of it was not originally built to earthquake standards. Rebuilding high density in bombed US SFH neighborhoods, would certainly make sense. I completely disagree with broader point of "cultural reasons" why Asia built high density, because it is all so recent. Mostly in the 1970s-2010s. They built entirely NEW infrastructure, with transit (e.g. subway, highspeed rail), malls, streets, commercial and residential buildings. Look anywhere in Korea, look at the rise of Shin-Yokohama (outside Tokyo), look at the highrise Urbs outside of Paris (out all the way to Rennes). Why is the center of Paris still only few stories high after the Hausmann era when it was laregely built over 150 years ago. Why don't they put 50 story skyscrapers in Paris... because they don't want to, and they push the "density" to the edges where new facilities can support them. But the housing prices in Paris are astronomical (just as they are in London). If you want to talk about closing schools, because there aren't children for them... then great! Build new high density where the school used to be. Build a school into the building, put a subway under the school with a connecting mall. Then at least the surrounding neighborhood that has been paying 70 years of taxes doesn't have to deal with the extra traffic/parking of the new construction. Maybe they'll even enjoy the new mall, and foot traffic will help support existing commercial infrastructure.
bpt3 1mo ago
If all the things you describe came to fruition, the current residents will have to live with the consequences of their decisions and suffer a lower quality of life (which they don't want to do), and the problem would resolve itself. Or in reality, desirable locations remain desirable, and the current residents who had a hand in making it desirable have a right to prevent a reduction of their quality of life for the benefit of people who would prefer to live there but are unable to successfully compete with others in the housing market.
- MackCele71 1mo ago
  Excessive land use restrictions and downzoning inherently reduce the "compete" of the housing market, on purpose, for winners of prior cycles (frequently the deceased relatives of current owners).
happytoexplain 1mo ago
Absolutely, but this is just the opposite logical extension, corollary to "if we allow infinite development, there will only be a dystopia of super-high-density living everywhere". Both things are bad, and we must "prioritize" a balance, not one or the other. It's perfectly possible to build inward/upward in some places, and outward in other places. It's perfectly possible to build affordable/high-density housing without ruining existing areas. It's perfectly possible to accept that some places are highly desirable because an infinite number of people can not live there - that certain amounts (high amounts) of development defeat the entire point by removing the desirability of those locations. We can strike a reasonable balance between allowing developers to do whatever they want without regard for infrastructure or community, vs, on the other end, not allowing any new construction in already-populated areas. We can expand existing desirable areas reasonably, while also building new desirable areas, but that's difficult because it requires time and investment, and in the meantime it's not as "desirable" as people would like. The simple fact is that people are reproducing within and migrating into desirable areas at a rate that is not compatible with keeping those areas desirable, and developers are leveraging this conflict to pretend they can't build anywhere else, hence the crisis. More shortly: You're understating the importance of quality of life (the concept of "home" is one of the most important things in the history of humanity), and implying a false conflict that we can't both have both quality of life and more development.

seanclayton 1mo ago

> most people Citation needed*

happytoexplain 1mo ago
No need to be obnoxious. Just say that your opinion/experience is different. It seems natural to me that the majority of emotions regarding one's home and community are in regards to the idea of home and community, rather than their monetary value, since that's the obvious human perspective. And of course you can care about both things at once, which maybe you assumed I was omitting? I only said the the majority of people care about their home/community, and implied that I believe it's the stronger emotion, not that the majority of people do not also care about the investment (which does materially affect their actual life, as opposed to the more common image of a wealthy "investor"). I could be wrong. It's a sentiment, so it's not something easily measured (unless you fall for the trap of over-interpreting statistics, which is common in an engineering-minded folks).
majormajor 1mo ago
Development raises land value. That's the entire reason it's done, after all. Look at the cost of land in Manhattan vs suburban Atlanta. In the supply-choked cities in the US, development isn't gonna tank the wealth of land-owners, quite the opposite. There are exceptions, but they're "this is the largest available plot in Beverly Hills"-style outliers. What people want, even in those denser supply-choked cities, is basically just stability. "I don't want to be forced out because a bunch of rich people move in next door, and I don't want it it turn into something dramatically different experience-wise than what I bought." If everyone in those areas just wanted to maximize the financial side they'd be looking to flip their single family home for a fourplex and put the profit into another, etc etc. "We don't want this to turn into Manhattan" is NOT what anyone owning land in a maybe-could-turn-into-Manhattan place if they were just interested in the money. (That's less viable in the middle-of-the-country suburbs because the "increased land value" of the old empty pasture next door could still result in lower land value for your on-the-suburban-fringe neighborhood, if there's high amounts of empty land and more new identical suburbs popping up. But that's not where the problem is most acute, anyway!)

smallmancontrov 1mo ago

Mmmhmm, and the fact that it results in loads of money in NIMBY pockets at outsiders' expense is purely coincidental? I don't believe you.

happytoexplain 1mo ago
You're confusing amount of money with amount of people. Financial investor mindset is a real and dramatic example, but a minority in the set of reasons that individual people care about the community they worked so hard to live in.
- smallmancontrov 1mo ago
  You are undertaking motivated reasoning to dodge culpability. The transfer of money from house-seekers -- many of whom do more to establish the community you are touting than yourself -- to your own pockets is not incidental, it's the point of the exercise, and your claims otherwise are transparently dishonest and self-serving.
  - bpt3 1mo ago
    > many of whom do more to establish the community you are touting than yourself Citation needed
  - happytoexplain 1mo ago
    You're projecting the image of some kind of specific asshole onto me, personally, for no reason that I can discern. This genre of comment is hideous, and should not be on HN. My family and I participate extensively in our community, both socially and civically. We all know and love each other, and regularly welcome newcomers. We are not wealthy - we're barely middle-class. We would like to die here. Our home's value has not changed (adjusted for inflation) in the decade since we purchased it. We couldn't care less if its value goes down if it means keeping our home and community. Try not to spit in a person's face and tell them who they are based on essentially nothing.

dividefuel 1mo ago

I agree with this. People buy a place to live usually because they like the qualities of that place. Changes to those qualities affect their day to day experience, whereas changes to their primary residence value usually only materialize when they need to access that value. To me the issue is that densification (in the US; can't speak to other countries) usually comes with more downsides than upsides. Mainly this is because of the US's focus on cars: the biggest downside is usually increased traffic. Unfortunately it feels towns in the US do the bare minimum to address it, like adding some traffic lights and maybe a lane or two. Instead I wish the US had more good examples of densification for existing residents, where along with the increased housing larger steps were made to improve the community. E.g. significantly expanded mass transit, bicycling infrastructure, community third places, etc. And I get it, these things are really expensive and hard to do. But turning densification into something that more clearly benefits the day-to-day experience of existing residents would do a LOT to combat NIMBYism.