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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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