Government of the NIMBY, for the NIMBY, by the NIMBY | Hacker News Reader

Government of the NIMBY, for the NIMBY, by the NIMBY

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16 pointsvwoolf25 comments

I have hard time grasping the NIMBY concept. How does it have a negative connotation? Why would anyone out of the blue willingly make their personal area worse? It's like asking for a quite significant donation out of nowhere. All of those things affect your property value and life quality, why should anyone out of the blue have to be compelled to do that? If that is the case, they should be paid appropriately for the damage that a new building/infra causes there. You should spread out the damage, so increase taxes for everyone, and pay the damage from those taxes in a fair way.

I would also be opposed to anything that makes my neighborhood less desirable, it's all a property value drop. If my property is right now 300k, and new development makes it 250k, it's like I'm making a 50k donation out of nowhere. Now imagine, I bought the property on loan, and I owe 300k, and I have to essentially hand out 50k.

Why not also shame anyone who is unwilling to make donations that everyone else aren't compelled to make? If it's taxes, it's fine, but it makes no sense to have random or directed donation asks.

Living in a society is sometimes a short term negative to a particular individual. If everyone solely optimized for their own situation, society would fail.

Why should I have to be OK to have a sidewalk on my property when it lowers my property value? Why should I have to agree to have utilities be buried in my yard if it might lead to a loss of use if said utilities need to be repaired? Why should I need to be OK with housing that will give people a place to live if it means I have to endure more traffic?

>If everyone solely optimized for their own situation, society would fail.

So why should we allow profiteers to exploit working people endlessly instead of building public housing? YIMBYs are precisely as insufferable as NIMBYs.

Garbage in, garbage out. If society is told to be exploitative and annoying to get ahead, that’s what you get.

When it was asked to work together equitably (before Reagan cut the tax rate from 70%+) more equitable society is what we got.

>If society is told to be exploitative and annoying to get ahead, that’s what you get.

Nonsense. If a society is structured as such, it makes no difference what is "told". And who is doing this "telling" anyhow?

Many neighborhoods do not have sidewalks. Many streets have a sidewalk on one side of the street. People who move into those neighborhoods do so willingly.

> If everyone solely optimized for their own situation, society would fail

I don’t buy it. Most people’s interests are aligned within the context of a healthy and functioning neighborhood, and by extension society

> Why would anyone out of the blue willingly make their personal area worse?

Because infrastructure has go somewhere.

The Netherlands has this issue: everyone resists any energy infrastructure in their area. Now there are many people who own new houses who can't move in because there's no electric power for them. Nuclear power is impossible because of NIMBY, so 85% of the energy is fossil fuel based.

How is it that someone purchased a home that can not receive electricity? Was the home sold for much cheaper, since the electricity was, "up to the buyer" to figure out?

They said "own new homes". So it's not an existing house and was probably a development job.

And of course they probably never attempted to get electrical utility planning permission until they already sunk money into construction.

The same actually very rarely happens in the US, where utilities of all kinds have capacity planning that can result in a denial of services for new hookups.

No, brand-new homes - see my other comment.

There is a huge housing crisis in the Netherlands, so people purchase homes before they are built, and sometimes a group of people get together to build homes that way.

In order to do this, you need to have all your permits in order. Unfortunately, the energy companies announced out of the blue that they didn't have enough energy to accommodate all their new obligations...

There are many potential motivations, avoiding something like this is one of them:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge

People don’t get to choose where the jobs are, especially in places like the Bay Area. There are no affordable suburbs here - you’d have to commute for over 1.5h one way to find anything cheap. I don’t get to choose where my job is (post COVID it’s slightly different but companies are putting the RTO screws on) and if I want to get decent healthcare and raise a family there’s really no other choice.

If you bought a place in the 90s, you pretty much lucked into your house tripling in value. They don’t acknowledge that they pretty much stumbled into wealth, it’s not like you bought the property by seeing the future. They say “build somewhere else” but where do you build? People will keep coming, jobs aren’t going anywhere, there’s no good mass transit and I can’t choose when I was born. So what am I supposed to do?

And finally, housing shouldn’t be your ticket to wealth - it’s a place to live and raise a family. The asset value going up is the cherry on top, but shouldn’t be the focus.

It's not a "donation", because it's not NOMPY (Not On My PropertY); we're not talking about expropriation here. NIMBYs are opposed to other people/companies/the government doing what they want with their property. They're not taking from you in the form of a coerced donation, you're taking freedom from them.

This applies to the financial perspective as well. Contra NIMBY fears, development increases property values. A plot of land where a developer can build an apartment is worth vastly more than one restricted to single family housing; a home close to amenities and well connected by transit is more desirable than one in the middle of nowhere, etc. A plot of land in New York City ain't cheap, and it's not because NIMBYs managed to keep it nice and quiet - it's precisely because the city was allowed to develop and densify. So, again, it's the NIMBYs taking from others (and themselves), not vice versa.

There are many examples of being affected at a distance: e.g. A tall building built two property lines over that puts a home in permanent shadow is effectively expropriation of an aspect of their property.

Do you not understand the concept of being affected by others at a distance?

Practically everyone would consider a home in permanent shadow to be worth less, be less attractive, etc…

If it is something that increases property value for the "NIMBY" then it seems unreasonable to me yes, but many examples in the OP at least seem to decrease that value.

Yeah, it's totally rational from the perspective of a homeowner. The reason the US has these problems is because we treat housing as an investment vehicle, rather than a resource for consumption like Japan and some other countries (mostly) do.

Would be nice to instead have a societal framework and government policies which make growth and new development in the interests of the majority.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

- Upton Sinclair

I think that our mortgage scheme generally, and treating real estate as an investment specifically, leads to competing incentives.

Controlling what other landowners can do with their land can always be financially advantageous, but I don't understand why you'd think this is a good way to run society.

Shall we not build anything anywhere that could result in a negative externality? No one is suggesting that they want to open 'Blood Plants' [0] or similar in your neighborhood.

Furthermore, if subtracting 50k from homeowner's property values nationally were to actually result in affordable housing for all, I'm all for it.

[0] https://www.shouldyoumovetosibleyia.com/blood-plant

I would be all for it if it was done in equal terms for everyone who owns a property. Which is how taxes should work here.

You should build beneficial infrastructure for the society, but then you should also compensate for the unlucky ones whose property values would get hit by thay, instead of blaming them for something that any rational actor would opt for.

I think I hear what you're getting at. It sounds like you would advocate for the state to pay Stephen Curry a cash settlement for his upcoming property value losses from affordable housing mandates in Atherton, CA? [0]

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/atherton-backs-curry-op...

I don't know about that case at all, so I wouldn't know what to advocate for without going deeper into this.

In any case if there's zoning changes that were not planned or communicated in advance when purchase decision was made then the damage to the property value from those should be compensated.

If you should be compensated by the public for valuations dropping due to some new public infrastructure, presumably you also agree that you should donate any valuation increases back to the public when public infrastructure projects increase the valuation of your property? Or is it one way?

Classic "NIMBY" concept is pretty understandable, like we don't want coal power plant on my backyard. It's weird to hear that US people apply it to apartment. You guys live there too.

This is a huge useless strawman. Talk specifics and we can get somewhere. Talk specifics and we can begin to understand the problems with X in Y because Z. It sounds like the author is trying and failing to understand why some specific group of people he does not like do not agree with his ideals.

If there is some context I'm missing, then I wish the author had included it. I don't like having a conversation about guessing what the author is upset about.

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