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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Bizarre NIMBYism (for HN) going on in these comments right now.

I have a fairly obvious theory.

NIMBYism is directly proportionate to the amount of capital you can access. More money, more protectionist of the status quo.

It's the same reason people say you get more conservative politically as you age. When you have nothing, you don't mind if the system changes, and vice versa.

I call it Loughla's Theory of Pulling Up the Ladder.

Possibly, I suspect though that most Americans here grew up in SFH and are reluctant to see that lifestyle go away.

I'm not so certain, I grew up in a (modular) sfh in a nice suburb. My experience with sfh as a child was that it meant being far from any other friends I could interact with.

The only time where this wasn't the case was a brief period where I lived in a dense set of homes near a lake.

As an adult, I have no love for the lifestyle.

Maybe a majority outside of HN, but NIMBYs (and even just people who don't particularly like apartments) are not exactly welcome here on HN, so it's unusual when their comments appear. They are all predictably being downvoted to -4, so it looks like it's temporary. I usually stay out of these discussions because the strong groupthink on this topic tends to keep discussions one-sided.

That lifestyle will never go away, but it has no place to be required in big cities that would instead benefit from much more housing in total.

"NIMBYism is directly proportionate to the amount of capital you can access."

I tend to think it's more of a bell curve. The lower classes want more housing. The middle classes are NIMBY because the majority of their net worth is tied to their house value. The upper classes don't care, with rare exceptions for people who don't want their views spoiled.

If you live in a 20,000 sqft. penthouse in Manhattan with a doorman and a private elevator what do you care what they're building or not building at the end of the block? Safe to say it won't be anything that kills your property values. A lot of vocal YIMBYs to be Silicon Valley tech moguls.

Not all that bizarre, if you've ever been around for these conversations. HNers are, by and large, affluent, white (or "white-aspiring"), grew up in middle-class or immigrant families. They want things to stay the way they were when they were growing up/when they came here, and have little experience with political battles where they disagreed with the status quo but couldn't influence a shift (because network/money). This is par for the course for that kind of entitlement.

Also, the elephant in the room is that a repeat of 2008 (roping in commercial real estate, while we're at it) is not completely out of the question. Anyone with a significant portion of their wealth in real estate at the moment is going to be restless, waiting for the other shoe to drop. That means circling the wagons.

White Aspiring! That's a new one. I'll go tell my wife her parents didn't move here to flee communism. They actually fled to this country so they could be white!

>They actually fled to this country so they could be white!

We could have an interesting conversation about how this very well could be true, if you'd like.

I am not affluent and I have never had an ounce of power to influence anything, and I believe we need more housing, speaking as broadly as possible, yet I still disagree loudly with development in cases where it significantly harms middle-class communities in nice places that people have worked their whole lives to live in, and I am called NIMBY as an insult for it (exclusively on the internet - people in real life are generally more charitable).

In fact, I believe the problem is the inverse of the one you've described (aside from race, which I'm not particularly interested in making people feel bad about) - that there are a lot of people in internet politics who are so caught up with focusing on the image of their political enemies (e.g. affluent housing-as-an-investment NIMBYs a la California) that they lose their imagination for reasonable NIMBYism and start making enemies of reasonable people.

In that environment, a comment like mine might look like "Bizarre NIMBYism (for HN) going on in these comments right now."

>yet I still disagree loudly with development in cases where it significantly harms middle-class communities in nice places that people have worked their whole lives to live in, and I am called NIMBY as an insult for it

It sounds like you are.

The issue, to me, is this idea of viewing "keeping" communities "middle-class" and "nice" through some sort of race/discrimination-agnostic lens, in a country that's historically (within living memory)(of Millennials) done anything but.

Unfortunately, race and racial politics are inextricably linked with housing policy in America. It's impossible to talk about "nice places" without digging into the racialized meaning of "nice", or to talk about "middle-class" places when those encompass everywhere from "shops at Dollar General" areas to "orders Instacart from Whole Foods" areas. And, in terms of "keeping" neighborhood character, it'd be interesting to know the history of the specific neighborhoods you have in mind. "Were they gentrified, or just always inaccessible to marginalized people?" I wonder.

So, sorry, these nebulous harms to "niceness" don't cut it as reasons to forbid development prospective (and, often, current!) residents desire.

>I am not affluent and I have never had an ounce of power to influence anything

I've never met someone who was who'd admit to it. However, giving you the benefit of the doubt: that characterization was not directed solely and expressly at happytoexplain.

It's not even NIMBYism. It's some sort of even-more-radical "Never Build Anywhere"

Really bizarre! What’s going on?

It’s just contrarianism. Most articles are about how cities are not building housing so most of the time, HN commenters talk about how we need more housing. As soon as an article is about building housing, all anyone wants to talk about is NIMBY. Taking the article’s topic/argument and making your comment the opposite is a standard HN trope.

To contradict still further: I think it's a general law of comment pages. People who agree just read the content and nod silently, perhaps upvoting. People who disagree will voice their disagreement.

So it looks like a constant vortex of contradiction and confusion.

It's why "ratio" is such a big thing on Twitter: ratio of likes to comments, because comments tend to be 'negative' towards the post.

People on the U.S. west coast are still asleep! So all the commenters you see are posting from their McMansions in the Midwest.

Wouldn't the NE be up now and replying with pro-building comments?

Also, not everyone in the Midwest lives in a McMansion, your snide comments are not helpful. Is it possible that people don't agree with you?

Possible. Yet as a Midwesterner most of my life, almost all new construction since the late 90s have been -- and continue to be -- McMansions.

NE is in church.

Consider that in this thread, the premise of which is that an ostensibly shallow attitude is strange for HN, your comment is "all the commenters you see are posting from their McMansions in the Midwest", and it is still not grey or flagged after seven hours at the time of my writing this.

To me, that's more concerning than HNer's not all having a single voice on the broad and complex topic of housing development.

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