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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses. There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings like exist all over older parts of the US and Europe (and presumably many other parts of the world).

An interesting deep dive on one component of hideous new development: https://marker.medium.com/why-everywhere-looks-the-same-2489...

It doesn't help that architecture (and most other artistic fields) is currently dominated by the belief that beauty is almost completely subjective. Under that philosophy, why not just design the thing that's going to at least win some awards for being "innovative" or "striking?" (These are almost always euphemisms for "offensive" but for people who think offense is a purely subjective experience)

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There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings

There is a real reason: lack of skilled trades. Those old, beautiful buildings are the work of skilled tradespeople such as masons (skilled in stonework), master carpenters (skilled in joinery), glaziers, plasterers, painters, sculptors, blacksmiths, ironworkers...

Modern buildings use so much metal and glass because these materials don't require skilled trades to mould and shape them on site, they are delivered whole and assembled according to plan. To build an old-style building today would cost a fortune because the few surviving practitioners of those traditional trades are considered highly specialized experts and historians of construction techniques.

This is a component for sure, but you can absolutely get CNC’d millwork to add ornamentation if you cared to. We can develop technologies to make buildings both beautiful and easy-to-construct if we cared to.

Also we need to be training up skilled tradespeople in general, even for the basic basic stuff.

Even simple brick masonry work seems like it's dying. My father was informally trained by old school Chicago bricklayers. I'll see brickwork done by him 20 years later still looking new, and lined up well, while a lot of newer stuff just looks terrible. Same thing here in Chicago, so much nicer old brickwork compared to newer construction.

Yeah. Construction is in a race to the bottom, cost-wise. In my city (university town) there are a bunch of off-campus high rise residence buildings. They put these things up so cheaply that a lot of them are falling apart not even 5 years on!

Their whole m.o. is to put up a new building, sign as many incoming students as they can to leases, then mysteriously fall behind schedule for the opening of the building. This leaves hundreds of students stranded without a place to stay at the start of school term. They then offer these students a “free” lease transfer to the old building, thereby renting out a bunch of crappy rooms no one wanted in the first place.

Back about 20 years ago, a development where I lived got new sidewalks poured. On looking the work over, I decided that in the modern market today's foreman is the apprentice of two years ago, at most.

These days they just pour out a concrete slab，press a brick pattern in to it, and then paint it red.

The other portion of this is a lot of buildings are build by contracting firms, not architects. It's taking a lot of trends and squishing them together in a way that works, but is not designed. The end product is facades with windows not lining up properly, weird perspectives, and extra rooms that don't fill a purpose.

NIMBYs are always going to NIMBY. You can concede all kinds of things, but it seems to be 'change' that bothers many of them. It's never beautiful enough and if it is then, well, it's not "affordable", or it doesn't have enough parking, or or or...

Source: I show up at things like city council meetings to support housing as a YIMBY.

People have a lot of reasons for resisting development. One of them is that it will increase traffic in the area and there's a good chance traffic is already bad enough. Secondly no one wants to have a 3+ year large scale construction project going on in their neighborhood and all the headaches that come with that. People want peace and quiet and the only one benefiting from it is the developer so why not resist that. Additionally, people bought into a certain place because of its characteristics and often those are not respected by developers who just want to maximize their profit by building the most profitable thing they can get away with. Lastly, often "new development" means rentals in an area that is dominated by single family homes. Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners.

Saying that I agree that some people will just find any excuse possible to resist. But their opinions are just as valid as the next guys and this is why we need to find compromise. I support thoughtful development and in making the dense part of town more dense.

There is no right to buy a piece of property and expect the surrounding area to stay static. If you want the town to stay small and quaint, buy the entire town.

Towns that do not grow wilt away and die. There are absolutely towns that didn't grow across America. You can recognize them by their landmarks like the closed factory, the "fod lease" signs along Main Street, and so on.

>Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners.

This and your reference to "the dense part of town" tend to point to a different meaning of "don't have the same skin" than the initial read suggests. Even if that was not your intention, it's absolutely the practical effect of reinforcing old injustices by claiming the rich white areas should remain that way while the denser, inevitably more diverse areas have to absorb all change.

And YIMBYs are gonna YIMBY. I just wish they would change their acronym to the more accurate YIYBY -- for your backyard. Which is where they want all this glitzy new stuff (with dubious benefits most of the time; and aesthetic qualities of even less merit in almost every case) to be built.

Source: I show up at the same meetings. And for the record, am agnostic on the [NY]-imby scale. I just wish the Y contingent wouldn't be so self-satisfied in their pretension that anytime someone questions the wisdom of latest pork barrel / snake oil proposal put forth by the development industry -- why, it's because they're a selfist, narcissistic you-know-what who just hates progress and loves to whine.

That new housing is "snake development projects", but my house was probably built by pure of heart Disney-esque woodland creatures singing as they worked, right?

People need a place to live. It is driving so many problems in our society that they don't. Sprawl causes massive CO2 emissions. Homelessness. People forced to move away from where they grew up. Businesses that struggle to hire.

And "my" backyard is accurate: people being told by others what to do with their own property is a big part of the problem. If it is your backyard, no one is going to force you to build anything in it.

Clearly, not all new development is perfect and awesome all the time, but one thing we used to do is to allow it: and then, crucially, allow it to change and adapt over time into something better.

That new housing is "snake development projects",

It's not snake oil because it's new. But because of the blatant lies (and occasionally more subtle distortions) in the developer's project proposal, staring everyone right in the face.

Nor is all new development bad, nor old development ipso facto good, by any stretch. We get the issues, and understand the tradeoffs.

And I, at least, don't demonize YIMBYists. I just wish they'd stop being so smug, and find a better way of supporting their position than simply responding to any expression of opposing viewpoint with facile generalizations and tired caricatures.

In a lot of cases, those caricatures write themselves:

Oregon passed HB2001 a few years back, which re-legalizes up to 4-plexes anywhere single family units are allowed. Good stuff with bipartisan support!

And this lady was out there in the paper wailing about how we were going to see tricycles in yards https://ktvz.com/news/bend/2021/09/13/some-bend-residents-op...

And you see the unsatisfiable concerns over and over and over again. It's pretty rare to see a "yes, this project looks ok, but could we add this thing to it or do this other thing a bit differently?", where the asks are within reach and not impossible.

This is exactly what I'm talking about:

Anything less than a confirmed Yes vote (perhaps with caveats, but ultimately: a Yes vote) to whatever the developer proposes is, in the YIMBYist book, equivalent to the objections of that lady in Oregon.

Not really. Here, our YIMBY group works, from time to time, with the local bicycle advocacy group to improve new projects. We've found developers to be quite receptive to polite dialogue about potentially problematic bits and pieces of their projects.

Most public comments are simply unrealistic or "no!", though.

No project is going to be perfect, ever, and we're desperately in need of more homes, so yeah, let's build more!

The tricycle lady wasn't just some random person, either, she used to be on the planning commission, and helped kill a number of badly needed apartments in the 'nice' bit of town.

Funny. When our neighbours sold their house they stopped by all the houses around to deliberately leave kids toys out front everywhere. They wanted the area to look extra kid friendly. It was a very family heavy, child friendly area, no one minded. People do look for communities that actually talk to each other.

Based entirely conversations with a few architects and interior designers, the incentives are almost always far more aligned with “cost-effective”/“inoffensive” than “innovative”/“striking”.

Today supply is so constrained that not filling out the zoning ‘box’ entirely is leaving money on the table.

If the supply of buildable zoning was more lax, people would have more latitude for fripperies.

Architecture has always been strongly bifurcated with the (much larger) low end being dominated by cost/market considerations. But these architects do take design cues from the top of their field.

Low-end Italianate and Gothic Revival yielded the gorgeous Brooklyn brownstones. Low-end Corbusier yields the hideous, cultureless 5-over-1s perfectly prepared for a Chipotle logo.

Chicago has many pleasant old courtyard buildings (mostly 3-4 stories) and our NIMBYs would protest them for not providing parking if they were being built today.

I think some (potentially even most) would, yes, but they'd have a lot less tacit support from the less militant folks around them.

> Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses.

This. Being upset that your entire neighborhood has been boxed in by ticky-tack five overs is a pretty natural response IMO.

People like to hate on NIMBY's here but for many cases (not all) I think it's reasonable to care about your neighborhood and to want to prevent outside interests from fucking it up.

Yeah, no. This is simply not true. It is simply not true that NIMBYs would opposed only especially ugly building. The complain and actual reality is that they oppose pretty much everything.

If you oppose building in general you are not a NIMBY though.

I guess the slide has been big but isn't the term mostly about, like, prisons, pubs, waste collection centres etc. that they want, but just not near them?

It applies to housing too.

"Sure, the Seattle area needs more housing, but not in our quaint little suburb, that's already gone downhill since whenever I moved in" is a standard NIMBY line.

> some NIMBYs

> not all

It's funny, brownstones originally had similar resistance for being bland and uninteresting yet we find them beautiful now. I think cost effective new housing just isn't going to be that visually interesting, but we need it anyway unless it's going to be expensive.

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