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Comment by underlipton | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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