But now think if you happen to live on just that one plot of land in the street, right next to the development, that will now be in the shadow of the new building.
Would you be happy about it?
I wouldn’t, and neither would you.
If having a garden is a high priority for him, he has several options. He could buy the plot of land from the developer for $1.4MM or he could move to an area more amenable to gardening.
They have regulations for this in NYC: if you want to control what can be built next to your building you can buy the airspace surrounding it. For large buildings this is usually done in a deal that involves a concession such as a public park. If you don't want to pay to preserve the open space next to your building you don't get to keep it.
I propose total, brutal honesty and transparency: more density means more housing, more people, more traffic, more shadows, and less parking.
It also solves one of the largest issues facing our cities: affordable housing.
Let's just be entirely clear that that's a more important outcome than the impacts on your free parking spot, the shadows on your garden, the number of people crowding up your favorite parks and cafes, and on and on an on -- even on the loss of existing home values.
I hear your objections. I don't think you're wrong to have them. They are perfectly rational.
They're just less important than the alternative.
This is an enormous country. There is room out there for your single-family housing. But not in our most urban areas. There are policy goals that vastly outweigh anybody's desire to live in a bucolic country ranch minutes from skyscrapers.
That's half the problem; these aren't urban areas. Now people that don't live there want to urbanize them, and the people that do live there don't.
There is room out there for your single-family housing
Somewhat of an ironic statement, given there was plenty of room for their house when it was built.
2) The Valley used to be perfect for single-family houses and peach-tree orchards or whatever. And at one point in very recent history the island of Manhattan was a dense forest.
Who cares?
Neither fact has literally anything to do with the maximally beneficial housing and zoning policies we should be pursuing in those places today.
I don't mind converting neighborhoods so much after the original inhabitants have moved on, but there are still countless people around who moved there & bought when it was all peaches and single-family homes were entirely reasonable. I'm not really OK with evicting them.
I don’t want to evict anybody. I want people to make the totally banal and normal year-over-year decision about where to live that literally every human being has made for all of human history.
We don’t “roll in” and make them leave. We roll in and make them a market offer that they can accept or decline.
And, crucially, I’m proposing the sort of development that makes rents lower, not higher. (Incumbents always win this game, anyway. Don’t feel sorry for incumbents.)
What you don’t get to do is stop progress because of nostalgia. Short of that, I have no desire to make anybody live anywhere.
Why are you pushing for only one of these groups of people? And why should other people take the same position? And how should outsiders generally side between them?
And I know from experience that what looks ridiculous and petty for an outsider is suddenly much less so when it impacts you personally.
Until it happens to impact me personally.
I’m not proud of it, but I haven’t seen anyone who doesn’t react the same way. Nobody like to give up good things that they already have (especially if they paid $1M+ for it.)
And it’s great progress if people at least realize that they are, or would be in the same situation as that Berkeley neighborhood.
NIMBYs want us to accept their selfishly dicking other people over as acceptable. It's not.