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Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

I don't doubt that increasing their own home values is part of it, but here in the North East where I live when I hear co-workers making the case for restricting housing development they're concerned about one of two things. Either that if their town was more affordable the wrong sort of person would move in, they'd go to school with their kids, and either harm their kids or teach them bad habits. Or that more people would mean more cars and more congested streets.

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Anecdata, but when I went to community planning boards it was very much:

"this will hurt home values"

"I like being able to park on the [public, taxpayer-funded] street instead of paying for land to store my car on"

"This will bring more cars"

but it was telling that nobody at the meetings had school-age kids. They also fought like hell against bike lanes, which would help with the whole "people === cars" relation. I'm sure what you describe is a concern for people too.

Ironically the neighborhood was a huge draw for people from _other_ neighborhoods because it was so nice (South Park San Diego). Known for its small bungalow-style housing and pleasant, narrow streets - both illegal to build now. More housing would allow more folks to live walking distance from the nice bars, restaurants, etc. (and the well-regarded German-language school I would've wanted to send my kid to if I had one), instead of driving in and consuming available parking.

Do you then remind them that they might need to check their biases?

After all, kids learn all sorts of dubious things from "innocent" Places and well-off kids use things like drugs at a similar rate. They are simply less likely to get caught because they have unsupervised large back yards and things like that.

That opens a fun argument. "Don't worry about your white child mixing with other races, because if he ends up dealing drugs to them, it will be OK because prosecutors will blame the black kids".

More seriously, preferring rich neighbors isn't rooted in racism, it's a cause of racism. Why don't you want poor people moving into your neighborhood? For the exact reason poor people want to move into your neighborhood! Because proximity to wealthy is valuable, and proximity to poverty is less valuable.

To me I’d be more worried if my kids went to school only with rich white kids because they’re the ones with the money to buy coke ;-)

We're also concerned that there may be too many kids for the existing school, especially higher density residential construction, and then existing homeowners will be asked to pay for the expansion / new school.

Adding facilities can be a condition of planning permission for new homes. A growing population of kids means more schools, so whether they're in infill or in suburbia can be addressed through similar mechanisms.

How do you think that existing school got built? It wasn’t dropped from the sky.

kind of on the right track. the reality is the ratio of minorities is directly correlated to how hard the incumbents try to keep them out. people are desperately trying to keep them from taking over the cities. at the same time making them take all the tax and social burdens. these minorities could spread out but probably the best thing for them is to target the smaller cities. take them over and finally change their antiminority policies.

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