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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

I mean some people legitimately do not want to live in denser areas or want an apartment building next door to them. The value of the land isn't just the utility of it.

Like I would probably sell my house and move if my neighborhood was upzoned and my neighbors sold to a developer putting in a multi unit building. That would suck. Great for society, terrible for me.

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In some ways it’s bad for society too in my opinion. As suburbs become more dense, people with money who don’t want to deal with the hassle of increased local traffic, higher property taxes, higher crime move even further out and get an even bigger house for cheaper. Rinse and repeat. My favorite example is that I live in the Phoenix metro. Tempe, the suburban city bordering Phoenix to the east has a major street called Rural Road. It is of course in no way rural anymore and I can continue East on the US 60 for another 30 minutes and not sure I’d encounter anything truly “rural”.

The issue in CA is that everywhere is the suburbs. My grandma’s house is in a single family neighborhood 10 minutes away from a huge office building with Illumina on the outside. The fact that this company, which has revolutionized biological research is in an area without enough housing and requires its workers to drive 1-2 h through traffic is insane from a society development perspective.

Suburbs can still exist but you need to have density around transit and provide an alternative to sitting in traffic.

How would it be terrible for you?

I mean this is going to be hard to phrase without sounding like an old man shouting at the clouds, but it comes down to the fact that I don't want to live next door to dozens of people. It's one of the reasons I chose not to live in a denser area. People and their cars are loud. I don't want light pollution shining onto my property at night. I don't want a tall building next door with windows looming into my yard. I would be sad to see all the old growth trees cut down to make way for the construction or street widened for the traffic.

And you can say if I don't like those things then don't live somewhere where it's a thing. Which is exactly why I live where I do, and if that situation changed I'd leave. But it's not hard to empathize with people that want to preserve the kind of community they bought into.

> But it's not hard to empathize with people that want to preserve the kind of community they bought into

It is hard to empathize when common sense says the basic math of increasing populations means things will change, and continue changing, especially in highly desirable areas.

On the flip side the value of your lane will have massively increased so you’re getting significant compensation. Maybe you are wealthy enough not to care about the extra money you’ve been given.

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