Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

If a bunch of butchers got together and lobbied to prevent any new butchers from opening up in the neighbourhood, we'd call it anti-competitive collusion. Yet it's apparently fine for a bunch of home-owners to get together and lobby to prevent any new home building in the neighbourhood. People with a vested interest in limiting housing supply (in order to increase the value of their own properties) should not be allowed any significant input into decisions regarding the construction of new housing.

View on HN

> People with a vested interest in limiting housing supply (in order to increase the value of their own properties) should not be allowed any significant input into decisions regarding the construction of new housing

So if someone opposes a new housing development in an area where only well water is available because the local aquifer can barely support the existing houses in years of low rain, they don't get any significant input just because stopping the development would also raise the value of their house?

I don’t want to limit the housing supply around me to increase the value of my house. I want to limit the housing supply of my neighborhood to prevent it from becoming an unlivable hellscape.

Yes, NIMBYs tend to have creative rationalizations for their behaviors.

Hey, man, at least I have a back yard.

Well, what about your own dwelling. Each of your rooms can house one additional family. And yes, I am counting a living room and a dining room too:

Communal apartments (Russian singular: коммунальная квартира, romanized: kommunal'naya kvartira, colloquial: kommunalka) are apartments in which several unrelated persons or families live in isolated living rooms and share common areas such a kitchen, shower, and toilet.[1] They generally lack privacy.

Well, I’ve lived in a communalka without a shower, a toilet was outside. These are bourgeois luxuries, they increase price of the house.

> Each of your rooms can house one additional family. And yes, I am counting a living room and a dining room too

laughs in San Francisco

Who can afford not to have roommates living in a converted living room and in the dining room? I probably know a couple rich people who don't, but most people I can think of don't have the luxury of a dining room or a living room. Certainly not both!

Right direction to go, comrades!

Now, start dismantling the shower and the toilet - save the Earth.

> Well, what about your own dwelling. Each of your rooms can house one additional family. And yes, I am counting a living room and a dining room too:

You own your own house; you don't own the land around it, and you should have no right to tell other people what to do with that land.

Managed methodical growth can be more liveable than suburban stroad hellscapes, with the advantage that children aren't forced to move far away or sacrifice their finances when they come of age.

It's really rich being on HN having everyone seemingly not understand that non-exclusionary communities don't scale. You can't take a good neighborhood and make it bigger and keep the good, you just regress to the mean.

We all have watched the enshittification of everything in the pursuit of scale and profits from everything from social networks and subcultures to appliances but somehow forget that the high buy-in either in the form of investment in the community in early stages to the extremely high price in the later stages is what makes it work. In places where there is legitimately nowhere to start a new community sure, but the loudest complainers about housing affordability in my area ignore there there are sub $300k, $200k and even a few sub $100k houses right fucking next to the $600k houses. You could break one of their windows with a stray baseball they're so close. You just think that living there is beneath you.

If you don't have dollars you're supposed to pick somewhere cheap to live and put in the work instead to make it the next good neighborhood but seems like the people complaining want good cheap and easy.

> You can't take a good neighborhood and make it bigger and keep the good

I suppose this is true, but I don’t feel like it contradicts the option of: instead of making a good neighborhood very large, building many small neighborhoods. This was the principle of the scaling of the Web back when it was agreed to be pretty good, and it is in a sense the principle of the scaling of the United States (and most governments). As an added bonus, most people would live closer to places to work and shop, since each neighborhood must necessarily have those, rather than being in the far-flung reaches of sprawl.

The only trick then, I guess, is the neighborhoods do need to be small.

Are urban homes "unlivable hellscapes" now?

They are! Haven't you seen your two minutes of San Francisco hate on Fox News today, citizen? You'd best report to your local GOP town hall for reeducation at once!

Sometimes, yes. But there's no reason to strawman the parent - developers are not benevolent. They just want to meet demand, even in the cases where the demand is only because an area is desirable, not because the alternative is the streets. Even in cases where that demand can only be met by destroying communities full of existing human beings who have worked hard for decades to attain the simple dream of living in a middle class home in a reasonably nice environment.

Yeah, at this point I'm never going to move again, so the value of my house going up is not enticing to me (because it increases my taxes and I don't plan to sell). Nevertheless I still don't want a five story apartment complex to be built just south of my vegetable garden.

That's a false equivalency.

In a democracy, voters are free to vote themselves in to oblivion (ie price out their children) or profit off non-voters (ie those that want to move in).

Why aren't butchers Ina democracy?

I smell hypocrisy and double standards

If real estate companies/landlords sneak in favorable legislation by buying favor with politicians, that would count as collusion. Same as butchers.

If the citizens of an area freely vote for legislation that aligns with their common good, perhaps over people who are not citizens of that area... how is that collusion in any sense of the word?

If my state votes for stringent data privacy regulations, is that "colluding" against foreign companies? What about banning types of mining, agriculture?

Could you please suggest any mechanism for limiting anybody’s input into decisions?

Remove zoning laws/building permits, so people can build what they want on the land they own (assuming it doesn't breach any federal safety regulations etc.).

Houses arent retail businesses. They are your home. The citizens of a community have an absolute right to control the direction of their community - and aspirational transplants have no right at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com