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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

Should have stuck with the second paragraph.

The connection between redlining and NIMBYism is somewhere between dubious and risible. But "give up their lifestyle to accommodate new residents" and "not in my backyard"? Same thing. You can howl offense all you want; the shoe fits.

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They aren’t the same thing. One has the positive connotation of preserving something good. The other has a negative connotation of preventing something, when that isn’t where the motivation comes from. It is a subtle but significant difference that tries to paint people who like the life they’ve built with a caricature, just like other modern pejoratives such as “Karen”.

You know what?

I don't care if the NIMBYs get their feelings hurt. I'm past the point of caring.

Your username says "sea" in it which reminds me of Seattle, where I live. Where, even on the very good salary of a technology industry employee, I am just about priced out of.

How can it be that someone who makes a "modest six figure income," to quote a person running for office in Seattle right now, is continually under the threat of a $3,000-or-more monthly bill to rent a place where a car is not required?

My spouse cannot drive; I strongly prefer not to. Should be easy to find a place where someone can live and be transit-dependent, what with all of this transit expansion projects? Yet, for some inexplicable reason, we're spending billions of dollars to build a mass transit system that is either solely next to a freeway or goes through areas of the city that are next to golf courses and single-family housing.

So, yeah, I don't really care about "preserving something good" when that "good" is turning into a MEDIAN house price of just short of ONE MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS and yet neither myself nor another family member--who also works in tech and has a salary that would be monumentally great everywhere in the country except here--can feel secure about the cost of living.

It sucks.

And how ironic to use a throwaway to deny its existence.

Maybe move to a different city where people aren't clueless?

We probably will, now that my employer has made noises about allowing remote work from anywhere. My spouse is a citizen of an EU country where my employer has an office so we might just move there.

If the NIMBYs want everybody who wasn't alive the last time housing prices were "cheap" in Seattle to GTFO, I suppose that's the only thing we can do. Because there's no damn way I'm scrimping and saving to pay seven figures to someone whose sole contribution to that property was that they were born before I was and got there first to stand in the way of everyone else.

I’m not sure I understand. I recently saved and strategized and worked hard to buy a not-cheap house in Seattle. Who said I was entitled to specifically what I worked hard to get? I’m very fortunate to have what I want, and by no means is it my right to be exactly where I am in the structure that I want.

Perhaps I can help.

Some of the sticker price of your not-cheap house is the quality of the house itself, and its desirable location.

Some is a cynical campaign to prevent owners of land from building more housing on land which, again, they own, through political maneuvering.

I would assert that your right to buy what you want implies their right to build what they want on the land they have bought, within reasonable limits, that the zoning regime in big West Coast cities is nothing resembling reasonable, and that we should change it so that those cities can have more, cheaper housing.

If you disagree, that's fine, that's democracy, but I consider you a NIMBY, an authoritarian busybody who handwaves about "neighborhood character" to disguise the fact that they feel entitled to prevent a lot owner from putting up a four-story building with eight condos in it.

Of the places with great wages in this country, Seattle has probably the most clued-in people and governance. They are changing their development patterns to allow for more urban living, enabling great public transit to further cut down on emissions, and are making the most progress.

The people I know that are living there are frustrated with bad governance too, but they feel a lot better when they see what's going on in California.

I'd love for a California city to be as forward thinking and reality-based as Seattle, making policy primarily o enable the good of all instead of transferring wealth from those with less to those that own land.

Seattle and Jersey City are great. The Squamish Nation in Vancouver is also doing AMAZING governance, they should just return all Vancouver government to Squamish Nation, IMHO. That is a land-back movement that would greatly increase human happiness.

You mention the high prices you face as being problematic. If you can’t afford it why don’t you move elsewhere instead of requiring everyone else around you to take a hit to their lifestyle to accommodate you? You want taller or more buildings, but that would change parameters like traffic, noise, crime, character, and so on that others don’t want to deal with. Many long term residents have lived in- and contributed to- their neighborhood and city, through good and bad times, to turn them into the desirable and attractive areas they are now, and it seems reasonable to want to retain that. Why are their desires invalid while yours are so valid?

The attitude of feeling like you are owed great housing in a great location at a great price feels like entitlement to me. And I get it - we all have our own things that we feel entitled to, myself included. But there’s an entire country’s worth of desirable places to live in. You may not have the exact job or conditions you want in all of those locations, but I am betting you can make life work in many other places. Being mad that people who have built a particular community and lifestyle want to preserve some key parts of it doesn’t make sense to me, because I understand why they want to protect those things. You’re asking them to lose something they value so you can gain something you value, and I don’t see why you feel you hold a moral high ground.

You contradict yourself. You raise the question of why those who are there need to suffer a change of lifestyle, then you tell someone who lives there that they should simply leave and move somewhere else.

The basic problem here is that there is a limited resource: land that is close to the downtown area where most of the workplaces and other attractions are. Some people (such as yourself) want that land to be filled with a certain kind of housing, and others ("YIMBYs") want that land to be filled with a different, much more dense kind of housing. They both have their advantages and drawbacks. The sparse areas have advantages like less traffic, less noise, and lower crime rate per capita (I haven't actually read any studies on that last one, but I'll take your word for it). The dense areas have the advantage that they can house a heck of a lot more people. Also the prices are cheaper in the dense areas, so you're more likely to be able to live next to your friends and family, even if they make less money than you. Different types of people will tend to like different types of housing. A wealthy and noise sensitive person might prefer the sparse housing, while a poorer extrovert might prefer the high density kind.

In a command economy, deciding which of the two types to build would be a very contentious issue. In a market economy, it's no problem. Just let people buy land and build what they want on it. Some regions of sparse housing will be built to cater to the folks who like that, and some regions of dense housing will be built to cater to everyone else. The low density folks tend to pay a premium for the fact that they're occupying an area of land that could house 40 times more people, but in general, everyone is happy.

The problem comes when one group or the other tries to bring a bit of the command economy back into it. They institute bans on building high density housing, or require a quota of parking spots to be built with new construction. This artificially decreases the supply of housing, which jacks up prices. This makes landlords happy, but pretty much everyone else is hurting on rent. Fewer people are able to be housed, and it's costing them more. Similarly, if laws were passed requiring all new housing to be high density, we'd end up with loads of dirt cheap apartment buildings, but the low density preferring folks wouldn't be happy, even though they're willing to pay a premium.

You seem confused.

You bought a plot of land, presumably with a house on it.

You didn't buy a lifestyle. You don't have a deed to a lifestyle, you have a deed to land and a house.

You very much did not buy your neighbor's land. So if your neighbor wants to build some dense housing, what on Earth makes you think you have the right to stop her?

Now you may have the power to say "yep, not in my back yard! I'm going to file a bunch of stop orders and vote for politicians who are hostile to upzoning (and who happen to own some property whose sticker price they're afraid of disturbing)!"

The reason I consider this desire invalid is because it isn't your land. What you're doing is abusing zoning, which is supposed to keep factories away from human habitation, to prevent other property owners from building the kind of housing they want on their own property.

I've decided that I'm glad you consider NIMBY an insult, you NIMBY. Your kind deserve to be insulted, and those of us who think it's disgusting to tell a productive citizen of our cities "move away if you can't afford an apartment" plan to defeat you and get back to building.

> The attitude of feeling like you are owed great housing in a great location at a great price feels like entitlement to me.

Have a look in the mirror, NIMBY.

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