Hacker News Reader

Comment by grumple | Hacker News Reader

We are also legally entitled to that as well, this is how voting works. Community boards and local governments are intended to give people democratic control over the areas in which they live.

View on HN

The problem is that people overwhelming vote for neighborhood stasis, which makes it completely unable to handle long-term changes in growth patterns. People always want to preserve their nice neighborhood, but they never see that a neighborhood that can't change is a neighborhood in permanent decline.

And they are entitled to do so. Who's to tell them otherwise?

They are entitled to do so, but a neighborhood in perpetual decline is a neighborhood that will eventually die. It's kind of the opposite of people planting trees who's shade they'll never sit in. It's people preserving trees who's shade ONLY THEY will get to sit in. I don't think people are so heartless as to want their community to die after they're gone, they just don't see the long-term impacts of their desire for stability in the moment.

Why do you think the neighborhoods will die without more housing? I've watched wealthy neighborhoods in my city continue relatively unchanged for multiple generations. Once you have a thriving neighborhood, you don't need to continue changing things just to squeeze more people into it. What ends up happening (and I see this in some other neighborhoods, like my own) is that the things that made the neighborhood desirable (restaurants, retail, parks, affordable single family homes) get squeezed out in order to make room for more housing. The rents for the commercial spaces increase beyond what they could possibly earn. Once this is completed, now you have a bunch of housing in an area nobody wants to live in. People leave, then the area becomes blighted and the density gets torn down to build single family homes with yards...

This happened in my neighborhood in the mid-20th century - a huge, thriving, dense neighborhood was abandoned and destroyed as the industry in the area slowly failed. Buildings were turned into suburban-style lots, and over the past 50 years gradually gentrified and those empty spaces turned into more, denser housing. We're currently somewhere between the "local amenities can't keep up with the population" stage and the "housing is replacing commerce" stage.

If you've ever observed the sea of grey hair in a community input meeting you'd know it is not a representative democracy. People across many cities have voted in favour of change to the status quo, only to be met with non-democratic resistance from back channels and other apparatuses established by incumbent homeowners who have infinite time and seemingly infinite resources to fight the will of the people to preserve their fiefdom.

I've gone to those meetings. It was a mix of younger and older people, a diverse crowd. Felt representative of the neighborhood. Maybe it's just my neighborhood.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com