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Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

NIMBYs are just people on the business end of falling real estate values, and they can't sell or rent your place for what they paid. For many people, their property is their largest investment and they'll defend this to the extreme.

To dismiss this political reality is to "bring a knife to a gunfight."

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Motivations vary, but in my experience the most active individual NIMBYs care more about quality of life issues than real estate values. Most of them have lived in the same home for years and have no plans to sell. But they don't want the noise, traffic, parking shortages, and loss of privacy that come with developing higher density housing in their neighborhoods. That is not irrational. If politicians and housing developers want people like that to stop objecting then they need a better strategy than just labeling NIMBYs as greedy obstructionists.

This might be the case in wealthier neighborhoods among younger families. I grew up in a very poor part of the Bay (starts with "East") and the motivation for people to thwart change was generally around property values. Many of the families that could afford to own where I grew up (many couldn't and rented, as it was a rough area) both leveraged their house for lifestyle reasons and often either relied on it as a retirement nest egg or handed it to their children as a way to transmit generational wealth. Many Bay Area seniors would be bankrupt in retirement without their house.

ALL of the political spam I've been getting has prominently talked about "protecting home values"

Perhaps these NIMBYs should instead come up with their own plans for increasing housing density then, ones that address their concerns. I don't see them doing that though.

It's right there in the name. Build more high density housing, just not near us.

Which is not entirely helpful when the base premise is the higher density housing is needed near them.

Telling other people what they "should" do is seldom very productive.

You're right, which is is why more and more they're not being told what they should do, but what they must do whether they like it or not.

Perhaps "the YIMBYs should instead come up with a way to guarantee rising property values, then talk about development, social agendas, etc."

Again, to property owners this is their biggest asset and they're not playing around.

> Perhaps "the YIMBYs should instead come up with a way to guarantee rising property values, then talk about development, social agendas, etc.

Making large and single family homes more scarce will increase the market value of existing large single family homes.

Allowing more dense development increases land value.

YIMBY policies increase both the improvement and land value of existing real estate with single family homes.

Yyy! I agree with these policies, and put my money where my mouth is, but I'm in NYC... In the suburbs you have issues of traffic, parking, services, infrastructure, etc.

"All politics is local" begins and ends with property values. Everything else is fluff. Crime rate, racism/multiculturalism, etc. The root of it all is property values.

There is zero evidence that build densely decreases property value. Structure is by itself a depreciating asset. Land value will increase when the neighborhood densifies.

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