Comment by datsci_est_2015 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by datsci_est_2015 | Hacker News Reader

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datsci_est_2015

Any real estate regulation can be labeled as NIMBYism. You're invoking it here as a thought-terminating cliché.

Building without considering consequences at all, or building the way that capital demands, is how you end up with urban communities getting obliterated by highways[1], or rural communities getting decimated by industrial plants[2], or indigenous communities getting destroyed by military testing[3], or indigenous people AND fragile ecosystems getting erased by military testing[4].

  - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses
  - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossville,_Louisiana
  - [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people
  - [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll

Edit: formatting

The key aspect of NIMBY isn't even in the acronym. The key aspect is the implication that it _is_ something that's wanted, just not here.

Being a NIMBY is wanting affordable housing... somewhere else.

Being a NIMBY is wanting more homeless shelters... somewhere else.

What i always wondered - why wasn't building completely new cities from scratch where nothing stands now, and far from other residential areas, considered as a solution to NIMBY problem?

Not really. The regulation where everyone has to meet the same long term, unbiased standard on noise, emissions whatever, while it can also be excessive, is different from the regulation where to make use of your private property you have to follow the whims of whoever has the power. Why would data centers need to be built using union labor when there's no such requirement for anything else? In the old days you needed to placate the whims of a king to be granted the right to use your own property, now you need to placate a union boss or some design review bureaucrat.

And of course most of the examples you give are irrelevant - they don't even involve private property or specifically involve the government taking private property.

Eminent domain used to seize private land is more similar to prohibiting construction on private land, than allowing it.

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