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Comment by matmatmatmat | Hacker News Reader

This is happening in Seoul, SK and Toronto, CA right now. I wish it weren't coming to parts of the US, but also, I don't see why it wouldn't. Only with sustained economic decline would home prices drop. Or, maybe if supply increased substantially, but people in the suburbs love their home values and that sort of thing tends to turn people into NIMBY's.

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Funny enough, looking to Korea and China is IMHO a crystal ball to the US' future. Overpopulated, hive cities, incomprehensible levels of competition for everything from jobs to (literally) pre-schools. Increasing rates of alcoholism, depression, suicide, other illnesses.

I'm not even sure it's nimbysm. There's simply no room for new SFH neighborhoods in reasonable proximity to city centers where the jobs are. New construction is still happening, but it's big RE firms buy out small businesses and replace them with dense apartment complexes for rent. The thing is, people who are going to live in those hives will have no housing to buy, no matter how much they save.

This is what people don't seem to understand. NIMBYism is vilified as the cause of all evils, when in reality there's a limit to how many people can be housed. Imagine suggesting that the reason people in Beijing or Seoul or Delhi don't have 1 acre lots and 3-bedroom houses is because of NIMBYism. At a certain point, owning a house in certain cities is simply not a reality anymore. Whether it's through sheer population size or sheer population wealth, NYC, LA, etc will never be a small town again. Fighting NIMBYism will just turn them from dense cities into Judge Dredd-like hives, as you said. But hey, I want a nice big property with a nice big house out in the country, so I'm not complaining if everybody insists on renting little shoeboxes in the big cities.

> There's simply no room for new SFH neighborhoods in reasonable proximity to city centers where the jobs are.

The demand isn't only for SFHs though. People are willing to rent/buy condos, and existing homeowners are refusing to allow them to be built. How is that not NIMBYism?

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