The thing that gets me is how many people are seemingly in favor of preserving zoning that keeps out mom and pop corner grocers and cute coffee shops and the like.
It’s just like… why?! I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s no downside to being able to top off on milk and eggs by taking a leisurely stroll on a sunny Saturday morning. That sounds downright idyllic.
People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away.
It is confusing, especially because the few places in the US that have walkable neighborhoods like you're describing are also extremely expensive, so clearly they are desirable. It is rational to buy a cheaper house in an area that doesn't have this stuff, because that's what you can afford or you want to save your money for other things you care about, but then why fight against it once you live there? Wouldn't it make your neighborhood a better place to live while also raising your property value?
Everyone where I live wants a corner store or corner bar 2 or 3 blocks away from them. Close enough to walk to conveniently but far enough they never have to know it exists unless they are personally interacting with the establishment in the moment.
No one wants such a thing a few houses down. So the local neighbors get their friends who live close by to join the local neighborhood meetings and rail against the noise/traffic/crime/etc. And of course the ever-present “property values” boogeyman. Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away. There also might be traffic!
Sitting through local neighborhood association meetings is exhausting. Anyone who actually desires to get things done burns out pretty quick.
> Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away
This could be true but I would want to see some data. I have paid extra for an apartment before because it it had a grocery store on the first floor, so it's not obvious to me that being adjacent and having to walk past the shop every day would drive a home price down. I know apartments and detached homes are different, but still.
I just think the common explanation for NIMBYism, that everyone wants to protect their property value, doesn't actually make sense when it seems like the densest American cities are also the most expensive to live in. I have the same confusion about public transit. It's common for suburbs to fight very hard to keep public transit out of their town, but it's incredibly expensive to live within walking distance of a train station, so property values don't work as an explanation for this either. You also hear people say it's because the NIMBYs are afraid of the city folk invading their suburban paradise, but if you go to NYC or DC nobody is taking the train from the city to the suburbs to have fun, there's nothing to do there. These stops are almost exclusively used by upper middle class office workers going into the city for work. You don't have to worry about poor city people because as soon as the stop is built, they won't be able to afford a house anywhere near it.
Through some interesting turns of events I've made more and more acquaintances with some people well outside the city I live in. One thing that caught me off guard was just how true this is. People there would rather-- by a large margin-- see stagnancy than improvement. Literally arguing against adding a grocery store due to there being nothing there to support it, no roads, nowhere to even buy food. They are fiercely opposed to anyone doing anything.
It has made me wonder what proportion of that sentiment is held by my neighbors in spite of the obvious city problems we face.
Have you never lived in a suburban house? I would never want a store to be next to any of the houses I lived in. It would completely ruin that environment. Conservative viewpoint or not, house prices or whatever, it is very aesthetically displeasing to me.
I live in as suburban of an area as you can imagine with master planned communities and what not. I can still walk to 3 grocery stores, multiple bars, fast food restaurants, fast casual restaurants, coffee shops, medical offices, convenience stores, and loads of other services in under 15 minutes. The suburbs built in the 90s and 2000s are not the dystopia people make them out to be.
My neighborhood was built in the late 90s. Single family home small town suburbia. I can walk to just about anything I need in daily life. Within 10 minutes walk there are 2 supermarkets, movies, many restaurants, variety of services, library, parks, theaters, doctors, and more.
If we count cycling, I can bike to 99% of what I could need in life. (Problem in practice is lack of safe bike parking but that's not a distance problem.)
Most places I've lived in the US in my adult life have been similar. The exception was once when I lived in a very rural area and had to drive 10 minutes to the nearest supermarket.
I don't understand these threads that talk about suburbs where you have to drive an hour to the nearest convenience store. I'm skeptical that such places exist. Where are they?
They're kind of all over the place. It seems to me non-walkable suburbs are the default from the places I've lived and visited. Unless you're either living near the town square of a small town or adjacent to the downtown area of a big city it's probably not really walkable.
An hour to a store is probably hyperbole for most places, but I definitely have friends where it's like 5+ minutes to drive from the middle to the edge of the neighborhood of only single family houses, and then you're just on a street in nearly the middle of nowhere with no shops right outside just other neighborhoods full of houses.
The claim at the top of the thread was "essentials being a 30-45m drive away".
I clicked on each of those links and asked for directions to food shops and in every case google maps gave me a route less than 10 minutes drive.
So I remain unconvinced that suburbs with "essentials being a 30-45m drive away" are somehow a common thing. You need to go pretty far off into the boonies for that to be the case but then it is no longer a suburb.
Ah, 30-45m drive, yeah. A lot of these places will still be within 15min or so to a lot of amenities, probably 20min most to most things. There are still some that are pretty way out there, easily 20+ minutes to most real amenities. A couple I can think of close by:
But a 10 minute walk to most of those amenities is also pretty uncommon. You look up walking directions for most of those places? I'll be amazed if there's a real grocery store within a 10 minute walk.
Two trains of thought; I was reacting to the OP line of "People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away", which I maintain is a nearly impossible scenario.
(Because everyone needs food and other essentials, so if you have "an endless desert of houses" somewhere, that's a lot of people, so inevitably very soon there will be stores nearby.)
The other point is whether you can walk to them in 10min (or 15min as lotsoweiners above said). I don't claim you can always walk to shops in 10min from suburban houses, it is easy to find cases where it's further away (but far far far closer than "30-45m drive away").
But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them. The idea (which often comes up in these topics on HN) that it is impossible to walk to stores/restaurants in the US outside of Manhattan & SF, is nonsense. If you like to walk (I do) just pick a suitable spot.
A few examples where I've lived: next to Pruneyard in Campbell, a bit further south in San Jose around Cambrian, and in Cupertino not far from DeAnza College. In all of these it was easy to walk to a supermarket in 10min. All of these are in Silicon Valley, where the story goes you can't walk anywhere but I was easily walking to stores.
I agree, I totally missed your comment was related to the 30+min concept.
> But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them
I agree, you can find some housing stock like that in most housing markets. It's less rare than finding a unicorn, I agree. But they're also often not a large chunk of the overall housing market.
It sounds like all those experiences are in Southern California. That's pretty dense compared to a lot of the places I've lived, even though I wouldn't call it extremely dense. It's also a place that while still having a lot of notable NIMBY stuff going on it tends to be way more amenable to pedestrian and bike infrastructure and city design. Weather also leads to more and more people willing to be outside. You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.
Look around the rest of North Texas for a good example. You can find pockets where it's decently walkable. Plano and Richardson and some parts of Dallas can be pretty bikeable. But Frisco? Little Elm? Arlington (outside the college campus)? Aledo? You can live at the edge of a large neighborhood and still have it be walkable/bikeable. But then there's still the rest of the neighborhood where it's going to take a while to walk to the edge.
Look at Kansas City, KS [0]. You'll find tons of neighborhoods like this. Not exactly walkable, like much of the metro area. Once again, sure, pick a house at the edge of this neighborhood and it's okay, but that's not the majority of the housing stock. Once again, sure, you'll find some neighborhood around that is relatively bikeable, but percentage of hosing stock it's pretty rare. Not unicorn rare, but still pretty limiting on the housing market. Can you find houses that are walkable? Sure. Is it in your budget? Does it meet your other needs? Is it close to your work? Are the schools still pretty OK?
Can you find some place walkable and bikeable in practically any decently sized metro area in the US? Sure. It's it even a quarter of the overall suburban housing stock in that metro? Probably not!
> You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.
(Silicon Valley is NorCal but still)
I've also lived in Pittsburgh, did not own a car or a bike just walked everywhere. And northern New Jersey, was also walking distance to shops and restaurants.
The one and only place I've lived in the US where walking to shops was not practical was out in the countryside in northwestern NJ. That's a pretty rural area so needed the car, closest supermarket was a 5 minute drive.
Also have family in Phoenix, have lived there for decades and never had a drivers license. Supermarket is 1.5 blocks away. The heat can be rough, but in distance it is very near.
Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
Pittsburgh (especially the actual city proper) is well above average in walkabiliy compared to the rest of the country. Also a good bit of New England, especially the older towns.
> Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
I mean yeah, that goes along with what I'm saying. If you just ignore 85+% of the housing stock in a lot of metros it's all walkable! Just limit yourself to just the most walkable places in the country and you'll only find it walkable. Look up the walk scores of the areas I'm talking about.
You even acknowledged a lot of the areas I shared earlier would be a 10 minute drive to get to a grocery store. How fast do you walk? 40+mph?
It shouldn't be so hard to find affordable homes without massive tradeoffs that are walkable/bikeable. And by find I don't mean see it on Google Maps, I mean actually afford it and have it be available when you're ready to move and not have other massive tradeoffs.
If you actually want walkable, big metro areas are overrated. Look for small towns, that's where walkability rules. The town is small, so everything is near.
Where I live now, most of the town is in a 1 mile radius. And the bulk of it is in a 0.3 mile radius. When everything is small and near, everything is walkable.
As I mentioned, in a 10 minute walk I can reach two supermarkets, one big box store, countless restaurants, several pharmacies, a few bars, stores of all kinds (hardware, clothing, etc), post office, library, theater, movie theater, soccer, tennis and basketball courts and plenty more.
I say if you live in a place where you can't walk anywhere, that's by choice. Tons of walkable places exist all over the US.
Where in suburbs are you a 10 minute walk of all that? Even living in a major metro city center it's a push to get to all that in 10 minutes. A 10 minute walk is like 1/3 mile at most. An hour drive is unlikely but 20-30 minutes is no exaggeration with traffic. 90% of suburbs in Atlanta are like this, with zero traffic it could be a 5-10 minute drive to the closest shopping center.
Not all are but most are. I too live in a single family zone surrounded by commercial zones in walking distance and it’s fantastic! But most of my city and its surroundings are not like this and you would need to drive to get anywhere. It’s really an almost perfect spot that I’ve found.
It really depends what region of the USA you are in. The south? Ya, things are hard, walkability was never emphasized because of harsh weather. The west coast or northeast will be more reasonable, the intermountain west is more hit or miss.
In Washington, a half million dollar home is generally becoming a demo lot for property builders, if you don't you just bought a half mil crack house... What state are you in?
A lot of the country has houses for less than $200k. I'm not the person you are replying to, but in my home state of Wisconsin it's very common.
I myself live in a fairly high COL city (Denver), and even here things aren't as dire as what you are describing. I think your area (Seattle I'm guessing?) is rather an outlier.
Even Spokane is expensive these days, but you could get a house for $150k in 2010 at least. The west in general has higher housing costs, it applies to Idaho and Utah as well, and especially western Montana. Things don’t get cheap until you hit eastern Montana or New Mexico.
This isn't true at all though. There's a small amount of areas that are able to be super expensive and you can walk to stuff. Then there's far more cheap areas where you can walk to stuff that aren't generally desirable. The slightly more expensive unwalkable areas are intentional because the only way to keep the area safe is to make it inhospitable for people who can't afford cars.
Allowing business also does the opposite to property values, it creates demand to sell because fewer people want to live adjacent to heavily trafficked areas.
There has to be a careful mix to have business and residential in the US and it not devolve into Vape Shops, lottery stores and other highly profitable but exploitative businesses.
It really only works if there's some other sort of barrier like general unaffordability.
The average person does not think about such things at all. They live in Car World, where they sit in a giant metal box for 30-45m and then wind up at the place where they can actually buy their shit. Their brain shuts off during driving[1]. To them, it's just The Way Things Are. And then they go take a trip to Tokyo and wonder why it feels so much nicer[0].
The thing to note is that NIMBYs are loud and obnoxious, but they do not have broad democratic support. What the average person has is a deep aversion to change they were not consulted with. What gives NIMBYs power is the fact that the average zoning agency is not very good at explaining the rationale of their changes or collecting and incorporating public feedback. It's very easy for a NIMBY to take a few things out of context, bring out a parade of horribles, and scare the average guy into opposing something they otherwise might have liked.
Since NIMBYs are inherently minoritarian, the real base of their power isn't even democratic outrage. Their favored tool to stop projects they don't like is paper terrorism: i.e. finding as many legal complaints as possible that they can sue over to block the project. Even if they're bullshit, it'll take a year or two to get the lawsuit thrown out. Which means that, congratulations, you just increased the cost of the project by about 10% or so, and you're probably gonna have to explain to the feds why the grants you applied for aren't enough and your project is late.
[0] And, in the process, piss off a bunch of locals as they bumble their way through the city using their translator app
[1] In fact, a lot of the hype surrounding self-driving cars is just to make it possible to completely shut off one's brain while driving. I would argue that trains and buses already do that, but...
How about if your neighborhood wanted to keep out people of a certain ethnicity instead? Is that a democratic outcome that we need to respect?
The definition of democracy is that we hold regular elections for political office. It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level. 51% of my neighbors cannot decide that they'd like expropriate my house or checking account. The point of YIMBYism is that these kinds of decisions have negative externalities and a larger group of voters- at the state or national level- are removing that decision-making power from a smaller group at the local level. This is a democratically legitimate outcome!
> How about if your neighborhood wanted to keep out people of a certain ethnicity instead? Is that a democratic outcome that we need to respect?
Come on, you know that's not analogous.
> It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level.
It also doesn't mean "any policy the voters want, as long as long as it's the one I want."
Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
Not who you responded to, but I thought it was completely fair. We were a nation filled with Sundown Towns[0,1] very recently. Some probably still exist but are more discrete about it to avoid unwanted attention from those of us who would (loudly) call bullshit on the practice.
> Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
I think you're trying to shutdown someone who has a different opinion from yours by delegitimizing their position. It's not reading the way you thought it would.
Maybe not analogous, but closely related: Many of those suburbs were built for people who wanted to segregate themselves from minorities, and took steps to keep them out.
> when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
You seem to be shutting down the conversation. IME that is what happens overhwhelmingly when attempting to discuss issues of racism - far more than the few times people address the issue seriously. It's as if they think racism doesn't exist.
It's definitely analogous. The suburbs around me are voting to leave the regional transit org. Many people openly state the reason why they want to leave is because it brings "the wrong kind of people" to our neighborhoods.
This kind of voting still happens today. Don't bury your head in the sand.
The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?
If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
> If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
>> The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?
>> If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences. It's not supposed to "push these processes...towards more globally optimal outcome," which when decoded means "what you or what some distant technocrat prefers."
> In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences.
In a representative, constitutional democracy, we're supposed to elect people who can more fully understand issues and possible outcomes, and work from there to create a system of laws and policies that is predictable and fair to all the parties.
This means that not every policy will be fully understood or agreed with by the populace. If we wanted to just implement what the public wants, we could just directly vote on every issue.
Orthogonally, there's a whole lot of the fabric of our daily lives that is just a certain way because that's how it's been so far. It works, but is neither popular nor unpopular-- it just is. That doesn't mean it couldn't be better.
> Governments should be working on multi-generational scales. Not "fads" of what people want because they saw it in a movie or they grew up with it.
If the people disagree with you, then you're not talking about democracy, you're talking about "benevolent" authoritarianism ("we know what's good for you, and that's what you're going to get, like it or not").
No, what we need is not "democracy" as in "we get what every idiot thinks is good off the top of their head".
What we need is a representative democracy, where our representatives genuinely care about getting the best outcomes, so they enlist experts who actually know what they're talking about, and make policy based on that.
Yes, sometimes that will disagree with what the masses want—and in most of those cases, that means that our representatives need to enlist some communication experts to explain why it's actually best.
Democracy isn't an end in itself. It's supposed to be the means to an end of better governance for all. We don't have to accept things that are actively worse for us just because 50%+1 of the relevant voters think they're better right this second.
Since when is government a democracy? Roman times or something like that? Most? Some? Or at least a few government officials are elected. Pretty sure most are hired.
Since today. We elect our representatives and they are supposed to reflect the people's wishes as they go about their duties. Some city government staff might be hired employees, even most. But they are still fundamentally accountable to the elected representatives, and thus to the people.
They run an election based on a platform. You are voting for the person and the platform. They aren’t there to do your wishes, but to accomplish their agenda the people “agreed” was the best of all options that election cycle.
Sometimes this agenda is altruistic, like reducing crime. Sometimes it is populist, or social, or even fascist. Even then, elected officials are supposed to have limited power, not unlimited power. In some (many, depending on where you live) cases, they’re not even accountable to the people — the people can’t recall them, to remove them is a political act by other parts of government.
There's also been studies showing how changing infrastructure designs can often be most unpopular just before the change but then become very popular after once the effects of the change are actually felt.
> If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
The flaw in this argument here is that the opposition is trying to prevent these folks from even having a voice, which is fundamentally undemocratic. So this isn't a relevant statement here because this isn't a complaint about a democratic outcome. It's a complaint about people trying to eliminate voices who want to solve a problem. It's an attempt to silence discussion, which has the effect of preventing action.
It’s not democracy when you exclude people impacted by the decision making process from the decision. Preselecting the outcome before the vote destroys any legitimacy the outcome has.
Selecting who is eligible to vote is one of the most obvious ways to manipulate the outcome. At the extreme, you can have large scale slavery in a system with voting, but it’s not a Democracy.
Who gets to decide on expanding an interstate or zoning has a huge impact when the votes are counted, so drawing lines on a map is suddenly where the power lies not with the people.
Democracy needs to exist before it can fail, but there’s a wide range of systems possible that will give more or less power to the general public.
Representative democracy tends to large numbers of parties with proportional representation give far more power to the voters than a two party first past the post voting system. On the other hand having zero input on who specifically ends up being a representative is problematic in a different way.
It’s interesting just how many different reasonable systems you can come up with and how few of them have ever actually been tried.
Is it still a democratic outcome when NIMBYs are doing things like abusing environmental regulations to choke out developments that citizens had approved of with their votes?
The whole issue with NIMBYism are: contradictory democratic wishes and disproportional power of home owners. This points to issues with the democratic process, and not democracy itself.
Most people agree that more homes need to be built, but no home owner wants it in their backyard. So you end up with a deadlock where nothing is done.
NIMBYism is frequently driven by a small number of people who feel very strongly and use rules designed to protect minority rights to get their way. Is it democratic? I don't know... much of what's going on if put to a vote would be split 3 ways. A minority in favor, a large number who don't really care and another minority against (but they either don't get a vote or the default result is to go against their wishes).
Recently moved to an area that has some very small local shopping centers every .4 mile or so and it's been amazing. I can walk to a local bodega, a hardware store, some coffee shops, restaurants and a local pharmacy within 15-20 minutes. Not sure how I ever lived without the options.
Yeah I love that about living in a European City. I don't even own a car and haven't driven one for 8 years now. I hope I'll never need one again. There's stores, restaurants, a laundromat all within 2 minutes walk. The subway is 5-10 minutes (3 different lines with different walking times)
Additionally I spend so much less on transport and no longer waste time driving. When I'm riding public transport I can read stuff. I don't see any negatives.
Most northeast American cities are older and denser - Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore (at least parts of it), Washington DC (at least parts of it) ... smaller cities on that region too.
Almost any "rural but not two bars and a gas station" town in the USA will match that to some variation. Everything is walkable if the entire town fits in a 2 mile circle (which can be a pretty big town).
I was living in Bath, ME wherein I could walk to multiple bars and restaurants, a farmer's market, gym, two different grocery stores, as well as the town riverwalk. I currently live back in New Hampshire, and, while it's certainly rural, its more than just a "two bars and a gas station" town but its also a 20 minute drive to the closest grocery store, 15 minutes to the nearest gas station, 30 minutes to a hospital, etc.
I lived next to a mom and pop store, not grocery, selling crystals and such. The owner of the store allowed a homeless camp on the store's lot. City could not clean it out because it's on a private property. The closest tent was less than 50' from my bedroom. The homeless fought, burned stuff, blasted music and hopped over 8' fence into my backyard to help themselves with anything they found there. Store owner was not bothered perhaps because during the day the homeless wondered off, perhaps he just liked them. The police did not do anything, would not even come over noise complaints. Would you like to live like this?
Ah, but my old landlord did exactly this, with the back yard of his home and the lot behind it, which once upon a time held his first home. Until the city tore it down for neglect, at which point it became a vacant lot - that he still owned. Largely with the assistance of his unofficial husband, who’d moved into the backyard, partly due to them no longer getting along so well, and partly due to the house becoming overrun with their hoarder tendencies.
Said unofficial husband was dealing drugs out of the backyard, and, as time passed, the backyard, followed by the vacant lot behind - for some unknown reason referred to as “the sand lot” became home to numerous homeless junkies. It became a rodent infested, trash filled, needle strewn nightmare, abhorred by the neighborhood.
The landlord, bless his heart, was, once upon a time, a sweet, naive, hippy, and very talented artisan. Until “someone” introduced him to meth, and it all went downhill from there. He remained a kind soul - and unable to say no to anyone, even when he could no longer stand the situation himself, and knew he was close to losing his remaining house.
Well, actually, he’d started trying to by the end, with our help; we were happy to play the role of “the bad guys” so he didn’t have to. But it was too late, someone gave him a hotshot (meth and heroin) and that was the end of all that.
(Who were/are we? My partner and I rented the other half of his house in March 2020. It was rundown, but cheap, and we were still getting back on our feet after my partner spent several months in the hospital with bacterial pneumonia and we ended up quasi-homeless. We knew the landlord and his unofficial husband from many many years earlier, long before all the nonsense began, and were in a hurry to find a new place so we did not do our due diligence. Didn’t take long to figure out the hell we’d landed in, but thanks to that little pandemic that started around the same time, it became impossible to move.)
It's a problem of people owning non-residential property next to residential. I am against that, not just stores but the comment I responded to asked about stores specifically.
I live next door to some drunks who party all night. If that house were a store it would be locked up and empty after 10pm. This is a problem of people owning residential property next to residential.
Seems like this is just an extension of any other dispute, and failure to resolve conflict between neighbors, perhaps due to lack of community cohesion between the store owner and yourself or others. This is the nature of living, and if there are problems, we should have ways to resolve it without crazy blanket rules like no commercial next to residential. The failure is in the reasons become homeless and in responding to people who actively disrupt the peace and intrude, not the existence of a store.
It's not just that it's not a fundamental characteristic of stores, but it's also not a fundamental characteristic of homeless people, it's just a characteristic of these homeless people and this store. Depending on the type of store, I'd grant you that other issues could have arisen, such as rodents, smells, etc.. but also any other neighbor could be hosting parties, smoking near your window, leaving debris around. In some cases, you either need to accept it, adapt, or find somewhere else to live.
I had a neighbor in the burbs growing up that didn't like the way we behaved on our property, or how it looked, and stuck her nose in and intruded frequently, often threatening to call the police for all sorts of absurd reasons.
What if a neighbor allowed homeless to camp in front of their house?
Seems like the issue is the store owner (i.e. the neighbor), not the fact that it is a store.
When I lived in Houston I used to jog past a house where the front yard was absolutely covered in garbage. Super nice neighborhood and all the houses in the neighborhood looked great, but just this one guy clearly had issues. It smelled horrendous.
>What if a neighbor allowed homeless to camp in front of their house?
People keep writing this, obviously, without thinking even for a minute.
A neighbor who allowed homeless camp in front of their house would:
1) have to live behind a homeless camp himself
2) be tanking his own house value
3) be open to sanctions from the code as there are way more restrictions on residential property use than there are on commercial.
>When I lived in Houston
Your experience in Houston, where there is no zoning, is not very irrelevant in discussion of zoning, don't you think? Unless you are actually making an example why zoning is important, of course.
1) the business owner has to operate a business behind the camp
2) the business owner tanks the value of their own property
3) what code? The building code? If we can apply a “code” to a home, then we can apply it to a business. So if there really is such a disparity where you live, the issue is that disparity in application of building codes, not zoning laws.
Re: Houston, what does zoning have to do with anything? My story could have happened i”anywhere. Zoning doesn’t control whether you are allowed to cover your property with trash. My point is that even in an area with nothing but houses, you can have horrendous neighbors.
Not at all. There are tons of businesses next to homeless camps in every American city, and the value of a business is not in the building but in the location and zoning, the code is the city code attached to zoning, the thing you don't have in Huston. The zoning for a residential and commercial is different thus you cannot apply residential zoning to commercial and vice versa.
There is no place in the world that is zoned for homeless encampments. Zoning is stuff like residential, commercial, industrial, mixed use, and so on. If you are talking about homeless encampments, it’s not a zoning discussion.
I don’t support homeless encampments. Out here where I live in California they tend to be on public land like parks. But wherever they are, there should be laws, enforcement mechanisms, and social support to deal with them. But none of those things have anything to do with zoning.
I think you are confused. Zoning is not words, zoning is a set of regulations. There is no zoning for an Indian restaurant yet you can open one in a commercial lot and can't in a residential or agricultural. Same with homeless camps: there is no specific zoning for a homeless camp only but they are much easier to keep in commercial lots than residential, where it will immediately run into occupancy limits, impervious cover, trash and other restrictions.
Where do you live? Where I live, the overnight occupancy limit for commercial zoning is 0 people, so (at least here) your comment makes no sense. I think commercial zoning that allows anyone to live on the property is basically rare. So if you live in a weird place where its ok for people to live on commercial zoned property, then I agree, that is super weird. But if not, then your issue is just enforcement. In which case, yea I agree, laws should be enforced, but again that has nothing to do with zoning.
I doubt very much there is any place in the US where overnight occupancy is 0 for a commercial property. Where I live you can have a 24 hour business. Living in commercial property is forbidden, but what exactly is living is up to the code officer. In my case the officer decided that homeless did not live there but just visited the business.
Ok by why does the code officer enforce the zoning code in residential zones but not the commercial ones? It’s not like anyone doing their job in good faith could confuse a business patron and someone camping out in a parking lot.
Seems like your code officer is obviously crooked. Not sure what that has to do with zoning though.
Camping in front of business is not against the code, people used to do that for big movie openings or for other commercial events some time ago. With the residential property there are actual overnight occupancy limits which are easy to show being violated. And the occupancy is just one of the codes which would be easy to prove violated by a camp on a residential property, there are tons of other codes. Where I live, you cannot replace an exterior door without a permit, while the commercial zoning is much more permissive.
Don't punish/restrict responsible people for a problem caused by an irresponsible person.
Fix the irresponsible behavior directly.
Most residential codes define minimum living standards, and as a result people camping/crashing on a property whose structure they don't live in, is prohibited.
Apparently your zone code needs to be corrected. Small businesses in residential areas need to be held to relevant/responsible residential zone code.
(You are proposing a zoning code fix too, but for reasons I don't understand, seem fixated on eliminating non-offending businesses, instead of directly addressing the problem.)
I am glad that going directly after illegal behavior is an option for you but I live in a blue city, where DA practices "restorative justice" and the mayor allowed homeless to camp everywhere by a decree (it took a referendum and numerous lawsuits to remove giant camps he created out of downtown, they are still free to camp in residential areas despite the referendum explicitly forbidding that on top of the city and state laws to the safe effect). Nobody gets ticketed for noise, the "defund police" campaign from 2020 ended with the police not even enforcing traffic anymore so nobody is holding small business responsible.
Well, you should probably respond to the person who could not figure any downsides of a mom and pop store in a residential neighborhood because I am well aware of the downsides.
I don't see anything wrong with being selfish but your comment still made me giggle: you want me to bend over to provide your specific benefit or you will call me bad words.
Very specific problem to me = zoning laws and higher prices for everyone. You could be a victim of crystal stores allowing homeless camps on their lot, act now!
This is why I openly call myself a NIMBY and don’t feel bad about it. I paid good money for the house, my family lives there, and I expect the neighborhood to stay clean and safe. Damn right, not in my backyard.
It's unfortunate that you have had that terrible experience and that the legal system in your location failed you.
I'm not sure however that there's anything to indicate that mom and pop stores are especially susceptible to these kinds of outcomes. It sounds more like you got a case of shitty neighbour which is possible whether or not the neighbour is a commercial lot or a small home.
If your negative experience had been with a neighbour living in a private home instead of a neighbour who owned a small business would that change your view around the matter of zoning for small businesses in residential neighbourhoods?
The probability is exactly 0% if the city doesn't allow it. This has nothing to do with zoning. If it was a house next door allowing a homeless encampment would you conclude that having houses next to other houses should be disallowed?
But the city allows it. And it has everything to do with zoning. If it was a house next door allowing a homeless encampment the owner would be paying fines, at least, not to mention he would be living in a homeless camp, which is not something most homeowners are eager to do.
> If it was a house next door allowing a homeless encampment the owner would be paying fines
I don't see why this is to be expected, but a business shouldn't expect to pay a fine
>not to mention he would be living in a homeless camp, which is not something most homeowners are eager to do.
Again, most business owners are not eager to do this either. You've told an anecdote that doesn't support your argument because it's not common (an understatement) for businesses to be a homeless camp, so to use that as an argument for why someone wouldn't want to live next to a business is ridiculous.
>I don't see why this is to be expected, but a business shouldn't expect to pay a fine
Understandable, you don't seem to know what zoning does so it might not be evident to you that commercial zoning is different from residential and available property uses are also different. Residential zoning restricts the occupancy and structures you can have on your property more so than commercial. That's why if you run a store in your house you will be fined unless you keep your customers and vendors under a very low limit and running a store from a commercial lot does not get you fined, for example.
This seems like a wildly specifically bad outcome.. I’m a bit confused why your city allows this? You can call the cops on owners for noise violations, unsafe conditions, etc, etc.
Having lived in a dense walkable place with plentiful stores mingled with residential housing, I can say I’ve never seen that particular problem before.
What you don't seem to see is that the problem is not the fact that the shop owner let the homeless people stay there.
The problem is the fact that those people were homeless to begin with.
So many people like you seem to just accept the idea that there will always be homeless people—you just don't want to have to see them. Ideally, they should just go die, and decrease the surplus population, right? At least that way they won't be bothering you.
If a few of them are breaking noise ordinances or stealing stuff and the police won't do anything, then complain to the city about that, not about the fact that the shop owner has the compassion to allow them a place to exist.
And if you actually want there to be fewer homeless people overall......then maybe, just maybe, you might have to accept fewer zoning regulations that raise the price of housing.
Why would you think that I don't see that the homeless are a problem? They are a huge problem and I don't really care what happens to them just as they don't care what happens to me but yes, they should not be allowed to camp on the streets in my city.
Are you willing to see the city pay to house them?
Because otherwise, you're basically saying "I don't think the fact that they're homeless is a problem; I think the fact that I have to see them be homeless is a problem."
Wherever it's legal for them to do what they do. In my city it's illegal to camp on the streets. And yes, I don't think the fact that they are homeless is a problem, the fact that they harass citizens with the permission of the government is.
So you're really just full on board with the Ebenezer Scrooge "if they would rather die, then let them get on with it!" school of thought, then, huh?
It's been a while since I had to break out the I Don't Know How To Tell You You Should Care About Other People; most people at least pretend that they're not absolute moral voids.
You should care about other people, I think: the people who live in American cities and being harassed by homeless. Nobody is above the law, being on drugs or mentally ill is not an excuse. And if you cared about the homeless, you'd understand than continuing with shielding them from the law is not going to end with the people saying "Fuck the laws and the Constitution, let them be themselves!".
The city should have gone after the property owner, they are responsible for any encampments on their property, and nuisance is definitely included in that, even here in liberal Seattle, and let’s not get into liability (your fire insurance has to cover them, so your insurance company gets involved and jacks your rates up really high). So in Seattle if they setup on private property, the property owner is in big trouble, so they mostly setup on public land.
You realize homes are also private property right? You can have a shitty neighbor like the one described that is also enabled by the fact that they're in their own home. That doesn't justify what they're doing, but your argument against stores as "private property" doesn't hold water.
I could, but most people, even the ones who advocate for "homeless rights" don't want to live in a homeless camp. They are fine with letting others though.
I did explore it, but there is not much to do without police reports. I had only reports for theft but those were not investigated, could not get noise reports as the cops would not come or come during daytime when the homeless went off the camp.
I had been reporting the property to code every week - it's indeed against the law to allow people to live in a commercial property. The code officer they've sent was unable to find people living on the property each time, she said that the people hanging around the property are just guests of the of the owner and don't live there.
For perspective I didn't even learn to drive till 30 so I know the pros and cons of walkability.
And since learning I shifted firmly into car dependent camp and regret that we bought a house with 60 walkscore and not say 20.
First of all convenience is overblown for everything except drinking and children (paradoxically - people go to the burbs for kids but it must be pretty bad for those who can't drive). Shopping for groceries on foot every other day is a waste of time. Local stores for hardware, clothes etc. are typically more expensive with worse quality and selection. Anything remotely specialized like a climbing gym or a bar that is a good place for dancing is unlikely to be walking distance unless you optimize for it, so you need a car or transit - slow and inconvenient. Restaurants in the US are expensive.. sure if I had a Tokyo style joint nearby maybe, otherwise going out is not a daily thing and if prefer variety, so the walking options quickly lose appeal. The only thing it's unquestionably better for is going to a local bar to drink a beer or eight. I lived blocks from Granville st in Vancouver when I was 25, that was great. Maybe a local park would be nice too, but suburbs do have those. Driving everywhere, as I found out, is just better for everything else.
The second, in the US it filters out the wrong kind of people to a large degree. Given non-existent law enforcement for property crime and disorder in many cities, this is why I suspect people protect their low density. Places where people have to drive, and places without services, will have many fewer people of the kind that cause crime and disorder. The economic lower middle gets caught in the crossfire - I have lived next to affordable housing and I believe 95% of the people there are probably great, but they didn't enforce the law on the other 5%, so if they tried to build anything affordable next to me i would fight it tooth and nail.
> It’s just like… why?! I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s no downside to being able to top off on milk and eggs by taking a leisurely stroll on a sunny Saturday morning. That sounds downright idyllic.
Traffic? Parking?
Yesterday I went to a neighborhood corner coffee shop that I'd never been to before. They had a little parking lot across the street that was full (and a disaster, I had to back out onto the street), so I had to park around the block in front of someone's house. All the street parking near the shop was full.
I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away
There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away." I can literally drive all the way across my metro area in about 45 minutes, passing dozens and dozens of grocery stores, coffee shops, and restaurants during the journey. A 45 min drive is a huge distance.
Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.
The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.
No one is going across town for the coffee in either case. I’m willing to bet time to coffee is about 5 minutes for the SUV driving say Denver suburbanite as it is for the walking Tokyo urban dweller. Same temporal convenience just different scale based on the predominant mode of transportation.
Also median commute times in car dominant cities are usually less than 30 mins. The narrative of people driving far distances to work represents a few (loud) supercommuters in most american cities. What people forget about with suburban sprawl is that jobs have sprawled as much as housing; oftentimes the old downtown is not even the major job center any longer for the region, a vestigial center whether the city realizes it or not (many a cases of new build american hub and spoke rail networks to long faded downtowns only because that’s how it used to be done not because that is reflective of most people’s travel patterns today. hence poor ridership capture of many of these newer networks).
Commute times in large transit oriented cities are often longer with metros averaging less than 20mph, an hour or more is not unheard of in places like nyc. It is really hard to beat the convenience offered by a car and a say flyover american city barely 25 miles wide with 60mph point to point travel pretty much everywhere at any time. That is why people drive almost exclusively in those places.
As someone who has lived in public transportation heavy cities, and currently lives in a flyover American city where we all drive everywhere, I strongly disagree. I live in a very popular commuter suburb of a larger American city, and the commute is about 30 minutes in the best case scenario. If you are in rush hour, or there is an accident (and there inevitably is), it pushes 45-60.
But the bigger point is that even for a similar amount of time, driving is far less convenient than public transportation. Cars demand your full attention. Public transportation does not. I can sleep on the bus or train. I can read. I can work. In the car my options are limited to music/podcasts/audiobooks. Cars are extremely expensive. They are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and expensive to insure. Cars are deadly. Driving is the single riskiest thing people do with regularity, by a large margin. Cars are less efficient and have more externalities. They require more space for roads and parking, they produce more pollution, in terms of both greenhouse gasses and noise. They are also possibly the single biggest factor in the obesity crisis. Part of the reason America is among the fattest countries in the world is because a trip to anywhere requires driving there, where in many other countries people walk or ride their bike to many places the need to go to.
It’s very hard to live in a place with proper, functional urban design and public transportation, and walk away preferring car-centric culture.
> The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.
You did it again. There nowhere in the US where you need to "[cart] a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee." Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").
That kind of black-and-white thinking does no one any good. And it's probably a big part of the reason why, like you said above, you "can’t wrap [your] head around it". You're not going to understand things without empathizing (or at least reasonably hypothesizing) about the other group's feelings and experiences.
> Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.
So? No American city is going to be bulldozed to build a clone that works like Tokyo, even assuming the Americans want to make the same tradeoffs the people of Tokyo make. If you want to any progress towards walkability, you're going to have to make serious compromises away from that ideal.
If you open up zoning to mixed density with light commercial, get rid of parking minimums, and design infrastructure that's walkable and bikeable, you don't need to intentionally bulldoze and rebuild any city from scratch. Instead people and companies will do it piecemeal because it makes sense to. New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.
> If you open up zoning to mixed density with light commercial, get rid of parking minimums, and design infrastructure that's walkable and bikeable, you don't need to intentionally bulldoze and rebuild any city from scratch. Instead people and companies will do it piecemeal because it makes sense to.
You should be smarter than that because...
> New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.
...situations like are a nuisance and engender resistance. Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.
So I think "get rid of parking minimums" is actually a pretty bad idea. You need parking minimums (but maybe not as large as is typical nowadays), plus zealous parking enforcement, to control the negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood.
> Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.
This doesn't feel like a realistic scenario at all. A "suddenly very popular coffee shop" or "several shops opening close to each other" over here wouldn't significantly affect parking/traffic for several reasons. 1. a coffee shop's capacity (as in: seating, queue times) is already much smaller than parking space nearby; 2. of people in the queue, most will be locals already; 3. "it's hard to park nearby" by itself acts as a filter that naturally pulls people either to shops closer to their location, or to public transport.
There's just no such thing as "people from outside my neighborhood going out of their way to drive to the local XYZ". And places that _do_ want wider audience like fancier restaurants or wholesale won't pick a middle of the neighborhood to set up even if they were allowed to.
Also, we may be having different definitions of a quiet street. If anything, traffic in a mostly-residential area should decrease since locals could do things like small groceries without using a car?
It's ridiculous to need to drive at all, and just about anything called an SUV or crossover is a good deal larger than it needs to be and certainly big relative to the cars of the 80s, 90s, and even 00s.
I say this living in a suburb and driving a crossover myself. The charms of this lifestyle are not lost on me, but I would kill to have consistent coverage of proper sidewalks, bike paths, and corner shops. I'd love to not need the car at all.
And no bulldozing is necessary. Just tweak zoning to allow small businesses and people will organically start live-in corner shops.
Good thing there are microcenters on every corner.
If thats not your thing, Walmarts, or Stop and Shops, you know for people who don’t want to spend their whole pay check on a single meal worth of food (we exist)
> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").
A 1990s Ford Explorer weighs around 4000 lbs. That was considered big at the time. A current one is a couple hundred pounds heavier, a Ford Edge around the same, Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V a little less but still almost 4000 lbs. By contrast a 1990s sedan was generally under 3000 lbs with ~2400 lbs being pretty common.
The main difference isn't that SUVs got smaller, it's that sedans got bigger. A 1989 Honda Accord was ~2500 lbs, the 1990s ones were ~2800 lbs, the current ones are well over 3000 lbs.
That's more because of things like airbags and crumple zones than bigger cars. Weight doesn't help you when you hit an overpass or a utility pole, and is only a relative advantage when you hit another car, so the average going up doesn't help anybody.
I’m sorry, would you prefer lighter cars with fewer (heavy) safety features? I’m not opposed to that with informed consent from the customers, however I’m not sure what point you’re making
True body-on-frame SUVs are definitely much less common then they were at their peak around the turn of the millennium as buyers moved to either unibody crossover SUVs or quad-cab pickups. That said, I have no idea what the point making that distinction was as it really doesn't matter in this context.
I know this isn't your main point but I was sadly laughing at that sentence. Pretty much anywhere I go in the U.S. there are giant SUVs. Plus crossovers and even sedans are just getting bigger, with smaller cars like subcompacts being phased out and compact cars growing in size.
The premise of these places is that it's on your way. That's not any more traffic, it's just the people already passing by stopping there momentarily.
> Parking?
That's this:
> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
You would also get things like part-time shops. You have someone with a work-from-home job and they put out a sign in front of their house saying you can get coffee and food there. They mainly get a few customers during the morning rush and a few more at lunchtime and do the work-from-home job the rest of the day.
Those would be everywhere if it was allowed, and they wouldn't even need parking lots because they wouldn't have enough simultaneous customers to fill one and there would generally be one within walking distance of any given place anyway.
> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
>> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
> This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
No, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. What I'm saying is a busy coffee shop has negative externalites on its surrounding neighborhood (traffic, people parking in front of your house all the time). That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.
So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
>> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
> Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
Like have you lived in a suburb? Shops aren't usually walkable, but they're not "concentrated downtown" either. The middle is totally an option, and that's probably the usual situation. I don't know why people are gravitating to this false dichotomy (walkable OR 45min away, NO in-between). Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
> That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.
As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.
Your premise is that the median one couldn't survive unless it was inundated, but that's contrary to all the currently operating ones in locations where that isn't happening.
> So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
What really happens is that people look at the traffic at one when there is a severe constraint on where they can be built and expect that to happen everywhere without that constraint, when the constraint is the reason for the traffic being concentrated in that one place to begin with.
> Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
The problem is the example was "45 minutes" which is actually pretty excessive, whereas the overall issue is "have to sit in traffic or circle to find parking to get there".
And then isn't your contention here contrary to your previous premise? If there is no traffic with that number of shops, what result when there are more, smaller shops so that each one has less traffic than that?
> As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.
That's not actually guaranteed - it is possible for all or most of them to go out of business because of over-expansion - the key is that there are other sources of coffee that they're also competing against.
> That's not actually guaranteed - it is possible for all or most of them to go out of business because of over-expansion - the key is that there are other sources of coffee that they're also competing against.
Suppose there are currently 5 coffee shops because the area zoned to allow them is already saturated, and then you rezone to allow them in other areas.
If the maximum number that can be sustained is still 5 because the zoning wasn't actually the constraint to begin with then either no one will build another one or someone will, there will be 6+ until some of them go out of business, and then there will be 5 again which is back to being sustainable. You still don't end up with 0.
If the zoning was the thing preventing there from sustainably being more than 5 then rezoning allows there to be e.g. 10. Then if there are 11+, some go out of business until there are 10.
About the closest approximation you could get to that is if you could sustain 5 but had 6+ and then several of them went out of business simultaneously, before the first one's exit could save the second or third one. But that's just a temporary condition where you have e.g. 3 in an area that can support 5 or more until people notice that the area is underserved and sustainably open more.
And that has little to do with zoning except that changing the zoning could allow the sustainable number to increase. If the number was 5 with the existing zoning and you don't change it, someone could still open a 6th downtown where that isn't sustainable and then have the temporary condition when there are less than the sustainable number if more than one of the 6 fail simultaneously.
Cars are the most sensitive form of transport to both traffic and parking, and even then the only other form of transport I can think of where parking is an issue is biking. If you could walk or take public transit, there would be no need to park, and traffic would be much lower because much less space is needed per commuter. Wider roads and more parking spaces are easy to point to as solutions but the real problem is subpar, uncomfortable, or even non-existent public transportation.
> but then they might not be economically viable
I want a source for this. I've never been to Tokyo or Amsterdam, but everyone I know who's been there describe the zoning working exactly this way and it seems economically viable.
Somehow all our neighborhood corner stores, cafes, village centers, and such seem to get by without a huge amount of parking. Likely because there's bus service and lots of housing within walking distance and actual bike lanes and such to get around.
It’d also help if people in single family houses and some townhouses used their garage for its intended purpose. In my neighborhood the number of cars parked on the street would drop by 80-90% if people sold or dumpstered the mountains of junk sitting in their garages and parked their cars in there.
In my experience I’ve come to realize there is a segment of the population who is against any kind of change at all, of any kind. Even if they have complaints, if action is taken to address that complaint, they will complain about the action.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away
I live far enough out of DC where there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me. On the way to my parent’s house, there’s a bison farm. But I’m also a 5 minute drive to the closest strip mall (which has a CVS and several restaurants, both sit down and fast food). The ALDI is 10 minutes, and almost everything else, including the Apple Store, is within 15.
There are some suburbs where it’s 30 minutes to get to essentials, but most aren’t like that. Heck, the average one-way commute to work in Dallas Texas is under 30 minutes.
Even if we ignore freeways and such, a 15 minute drive at 30 mph is about 7 miles, which is a circle containing 176 square miles - or the entirety of the city of New Orleans or Denver.
A 15 minute walk is about a mile, so that's a 3.14159 sq mile circle - that's a small town or a neighborhood or two.
As much as I love going to bat for New Orleans, I will point out that people drive to Metairie all the time for things. The eastern part of New Orleans is also very spread out. (It's also not the 24/7 city it was before the pandemic.) A better comparison would be the towns on the Northshore.
It all boils down to perceived drop in home values. It is a vicious cycle that feeds on itself. Less supply, higher prices, bigger mortgages, more NIMBY to prevent drop in home values.
Any real estate agent will tell you what people actually want. Ask one who's been around for a while, in an unofficial setting over drinks. Ask what questions people ask. Ask what they follow up on. Really dig into it. You'll realize that while nobody likes commuting, a commute is the price one pays for those other things people want that you'll hear about over those drinks. It'll give you a lot to think about, i promise.
You make it sound so charming, but as an example there’s a rural-ish neighborhood nearby that has a commercial lot which they’re going to put a 24 hour convenience store in. And all the neighbors are freaking out about it because of the clientele and noise they’re worried it will bring in.
I'd like more 24/7 options too but it can be a problem. For example, there's a 24/7 7/11 in downtown Austin, TX that has had many crime issues and is in a generally nice area.
People like that but no existing person tolerates the potential of having it next door. 4am deliveries. Plates clinking. People making noise. Commercial dumpster operations. Customers taking up all the parking including illegally in your private parking space. There are certain potential disruptions you get living there 24/7 that you don’t get stopping by for 20 mins once a week contributing to that disruption.
Not saying these people are right or wrong. Just that it isn’t so black and white an issue. It is one thing when a place is already “lively” and tacitly accepting of all that comes with that vs going into that especially when it is unknown and easy to just say ‘no’ before seeing it how it may play out.
Someone imagining they are able to hear plates clinking from several buildings away may have issues that extend beyond having chosen to live next to a restaurant.
Allowing cafes into neighborhoods doesn't mean mandating you turn your living room into one.
Eh, I think it’s a bullshit complaint too - but you can absolutely hear a commercial kitchen in operation a few buildings away if the doors or windows are open on a summer day.
I personally find it quite pleasant - and if not I can just shut my damn window - but many others apparently get super annoyed at even the tiniest of potential inconveniences.
You can argue that but someone might stand up at that zoning review meeting and say well what if they allow outdoor seating in the future. Or what if they throw out takeout trash in my yard. Or what if the customers fill up my trashcan and I can’t put any in myself. Or they are double parking my driveway making it hard for my mother to back out.
At the end of the day, it is going to cause friction something happening somewhere there wasn’t something going on previously. Not saying these people are right or wrong, just that they have grievances that are based on real issues, however big they may be in the grand scheme of
things, that they may value more than the prospects of an $8 latte a few minutes sooner than the one already down the road at the strip mall in a sort of containment zone.
Because when I buy a house in a quiet neighborhood I don't want a cafe or bar open right next to my bedroom window? Is this actually mystifying? Everyone wants the shops near, but not too near, but you can't zone for that; someone will be too near.
In Seattle I lived on the 20th floor above a bar and it still awoke me some nights.
Because absolutely no city wants to become Houston? The USA doesn’t have great examples, and we aren’t Japan. Houston not being walkable at all probably has a lot to do with the fear.
I live in a walkable neighborhood in Seattle and had to pay for it. Also lived in Lausanne and Beijing so I still know what I’m missing.
Places full of single family houses with essentials being 30 minutes away don't tend to stay like that for long. They are great business opportunities for developers of supermarkets, malls and the like. You buy some cheap land, build some cheap commercial low-rises, and rake cash as the tenants come flooding in.
There's not a single home in Summerlin, NV that's more than a 10 minute drive from a large supermarket. Majority of the houses are less than 5 minutes drive.
Sorry, I misread. I was giving an example of "They are great business opportunities for developers of supermarkets, malls and the like.", not of an isolated neighborhood.
what is so important about being able to walk to a store?
take 1 weekly trip to walmart or costco and you’re done shopping for the week
my soulless suburb has lots of parks, trails, and friends and neighbors houses for me to walk to, why do i need a commercial development in the middle of this?
Being able to make small grocery trips means less spoiled perishables (only buy what you plan to use right away) and more flexibility when cooking, since it’s no big deal to go grab whatever it is that you need in the moment. It also prevents the annoyance of realizing you forgot that one thing last week’s trip, which is just going to have to wait until next week’s trip.
This is how it is in the sleepy residential parts of Tokyo. An interesting knock-on effect is smaller, simpler, cheaper refrigerators since you don’t need to store a ton of refrigerated goods for long periods when groceries are within arm’s reach.
Well said. I wonder about this too in my city (Australia). Apparently many people think "living the dream" is having an excessively large copy-pasted house in a copy-pasted suburb in the middle of nowhere, with no amenities, no green/community space, and you have to drive for an hour to get anywhere. It sounds like a dystopian lifestyle to me.
Or, you could live in a somewhat smaller residence where you actually have access to the things that make life good. But god forbid there's a train nearby that increases the sound by 10dB every 10 minutes and brings in all those dodgy (i.e. working class) people! Grrr functional society makes me angry!!
Could it be possible that what makes life good is subjective and people have different enjoyments and hobbies?
Having space for a woodworking shop or a large garden or a backyard pool or any other such things bring joy to some people. Not everyone wants to live in an apartment in Manhattan.
This is a strange opinion to me and I guess it's just "the divide". The things that make life good to me, of the things that change with home location, are peace/quiet, privacy, safety, meditative aspects, nature, space to host and play and have kids run around. Hearing that a city block contains "the things that make life good" is kind of baffling. Driving time is suboptimal but it's nowhere near an hour and it's worthwhile.
The suburbs I'm talking about do not really have nature or space to play. They are by no means rural, but endless seas of identical streets and houses. They are basically the worst of both worlds (no nature and no accessibility), with the advantage of a little extra space. And often they don't have shops either because again, they're so far from anything. Just sad places in my opinion.
Also, there is such thing as medium density, in between "city block" and "endless houses". No one seems to want to acknowledge this exists and may be a good option. I'm fortunate to live in a medium density area and I think it's very pleasant. It is absolutely not a city block but there's a train station 1 minute away and a local shopping/community precinct 10 minutes away (by walking). A decent amount of green space, and it seems to be popular with couples and small families. But suburbs like this seem to be rare and that's my point.
'Walkable' has been heavily influenced by the car culture we live in.
Too many, crossing an intersection with a traffic light makes that commute unwalkable. In my suburbia, going from one shop to another 5 doors down requires driving.
Please give an example of somewhere that has groceries 30 minutes away and is denying some small business to move in near by. This makes it sound like you have never seen a suburb and are describing some extremely rural area.
This “practicing without a license” tactic has been used before. This case where a city fined someone for making a mathematical model of traffic lights. [ij](https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...)
This will keep happening unless there are consequences for those in government that abuse their authority.
It's a common tactic to gain state enforcement of gate keeping and protectionism. It's extremely useful at both preventing individuals from acting for themselves but also limiting individuals from recourse against the misdeeds of those who are licensed. See also, The Licensing Racket by Rebecca Haw Allensworth: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217564698-the-licensing-...
> filed a complaint with the California State Bar, saying that I was practicing law without a license
California gave birth to anti-SLAPP torts for a reason I guess.[1] Then you can have a mini-litigation about litigation, which would prove the NIMBY wrong for their “complaint” or the state bar wrong for failing to screen frivolous or malicious use of their processes.
For some reason this article brought home to me that these NIMBYs are expressing hostility to neighbors, community and to the idea that people should have a place to live. I wonder if they realize or even consider the implications of their positions.
> one of them filed a complaint with the California State Bar, saying that I was practicing law without a license. They said because I’m not an attorney (which is true), I was offering “legal analysis,” which only licensed attorneys are allowed to do.
Do lawyers still really believe they can just throw some legal jargon at laypeople and we will just get confused and back down? Like not only do we have every single law and legal precedent on a device in our pocket, we also have AI's that can instantly answer questions. I am sure shit like that might have worked before 2010 when you would have to scramble to figure out if what they were saying was true or not, but it just seems antiquated to attempt it nowadays.
There are a lot of old laws on the books about licensing that go beyond legal advice.
In many places it’s illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you match certain criteria, such as being a licensed engineer or working for a company in the industry that can oversee your work in a specified capacity.
There was a famous case where someone tried to get some attention about a traffic problem at an intersection in their city. They included a drawing of the intersection. The politicians involved didn’t like person so they tried to retaliate by going after the person for doing civil engineering work (aka making a drawing of a road) without an engineering license.
The worst part is that they actually might have had a case under the licensing laws. The licensing laws are outdated and mostly unenforced, but they’re out there. If you call yourself a software engineer you might be breaking a law in your location.
> In many places it’s illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you match certain criteria, such as being a licensed engineer or working for a company in the industry that can oversee your work in a specified capacity.
that is the case in most countries. the US is an outlier in the First World in that sense.
only country where you could be called a Sandwich Engineer with a straight face and not get sued.
Also hilarious to think you can't offer "legal analysis" without a license. As long as you don't do it for hire or while representing yourself as an attorney, the first amendment protects your right to offer your legal analysis of something. The exceptions are either are in regards to offering commercial services or representation without a license, not the underlying speech.
This is probably the one issue that has the biggest online/offline divide. Online, I hear nothing but YIMBY-ism. Is there any centralized online NIMBY advocacy?
nobody thinks they're a nimby. every nimby ever will tell you they aren't against development, they just don't think this project is right for this neighbourhood.
if there was any centralized advocacy, they'd have to confront the fact that they all want development to happen in each other's backyards and it would expose the lie.
Here's where I come out and maybe others end up in the same scenario.
I think it's definitely a good thing to build up more high density housing. I've got no complaints there.
However, a major problem we are having locally is that while that local housing is being built like gangbusters, the infrastructure to support that housing, such as the roads and public transport, hasn't been upgraded in tandem. 10 years ago, I could drive to work in 20 minutes. Today during rush hour it's a 40 to 60 minute affair. It's start/stop traffic through the neighborhood because there's no buses, interstate, etc to service the area where all the growth is happening.
It also doesn't help that promised projects, like new parks, have been stuck in limbo for the last 15 years with more than a few proposals to try and turn that land into new housing developments.
What I'm saying is housing is important and nice, but we actually need public utilities to be upgraded and to grow with the housing increase. It's untenable to add 10,000 housing units into an area originally designed to service 1000.
>because there's no buses, interstate, etc to service the area where all the growth is happening.
right, it'd be great if that stuff could be built to support the housing before the housing gets built. but you can't do that either without people having a fit about wasting money building a road to nowhere, or buses just being for homeless people. the NIMBYism doesn't just apply to housing, it applies to building literally anything. often because people think they can block new housing development by opposing the infrastructure that might support it.
nothing about YIMBY is about opposing infrastructure development. we need to build all the things that humans need to exist - housing, infrastructure, recreation, businesses. build it all.
"we shouldn't build any housing until there's a highway" is just another variant of "i support housing, just not here". opposing housing because there's no bus route is still opposing housing. those are fixable problems.
They are fixable problems that very clearly are not being fixed here.
I might have a different attitude if new bus routes or highways were being built in response to the new housing that's gone in, but like I've said, we've failed to build infrastructure for the massive expansion we've seen in the last 10 years.
Why should I think it's a good thing to build another 1000 units of housing when none of the infrastructure is able to handle the current population? It's not a case of "busses to nowhere" it's a case of "we are filled to the gill and they want to add even more people".
My kid's school, for example, has started paving over the playground and installing trailers in order to accommodate the kids coming in. Instead of building a new school for all the new housing, we have exactly the same schools and school buildings that we had when I first moved here.
And I should say, we have even more housing planned and in construction right now all around me. That's all been approved yet I've not heard or seen a peep about adding another school, bus, etc.
When the new people are actually living in the area and paying property taxes, then there will be enough money to build new schools, pave roads, etc. There's a delay in other words.
None of this should be unexpected. All construction requires permits so you know ahead of time what's being built and almost certainly can just extrapolate out how many new kids will be in the school system based on the current rates.
It's like how a bunch of cities approve new commercial construction but then don't also don't fast-track some residential construction; you're just going to generate traffic because nobody can live close to work.
School financing needs drives a lot of local government decisions. It's an invisible force like gravity. Approving office buildings and retail stores adds tax revenue without adding to school district costs (enrolling students). Approving housing construction means more students to absorb.
The public cannot directly vote to reject the electric company's price increases, or more expensive groceries, or car dealers charging MSRP. Requiring voters to directly approve school taxes or public services is great for cost control. But you get what you pay for with austerity: long waits for service, crowding, short hours, lower quality employees. Voters only approve the school levy when the pain of service cuts exceeds the pain of forking over another $$$/yr in tax. While residents choose politicians, over long periods of time politicians choose what mix of residents can move into the area! Think of downtown areas that are purely zoned for office buildings and parking garages.
Ask your town to implement robhit's municipal bonds. Should be automatic but govt often fails our expectations. Perhaps that is the knowledge lost when term limits kick in.
> However, a major problem we are having locally is that while that local housing is being built like gangbusters, the infrastructure to support that housing, such as the roads and public transport, hasn't been upgraded in tandem.
The correct response is not to shutdown building more housing. It's for you to get involved and petition your local government to build the infrastructure that you desire.
IMO, people need affordable housing more than you need a short commute. If you don't like that, do something to improve conditions.
I don't know were you're from but in California that is not the focus of YIMBY advocacy. The entire focus of the California RHNA process is to allocate development capacity in proportion to the existing infrastructure of a place.
I'm not a libertarian. I'm an Idaho native. But really this is just an underscore of why libertarian ideals are dumb. Some government is necessary and those are basic things like public roads and schools.
It may be surprising, but Idaho actually had pretty decent infrastructure throughout my youth. This "defund everything" attitude is relatively new to idaho politics. Idaho's drift into libertarianism started around the tea party era and just slowly has gotten worse since then.
I’m also an Idaho native and you’re spot-on. It’s been sad to see our political zeitgeist rapidly diverge from anything remotely reasonable.
I generally consider myself a YIMBY but I think you make a good point and I found it very uncharitable for the parent comment to characterize it as whining. Who wants to spend 10 hours a week in traffic?
Yeah, I don't think the commentators here realize how fast Idaho has grown. There are some NIMBY attitudes here, but by and large we do just greenlight almost all development.
I'm from south central Idaho and it's really astonishing to see how much growth has happened in both poky and Burley. But basically all the cities I'm familiar with are also operating with roughly the same infrastructure they had when I was a kid, and that's the problem. Idaho isn't upgrading that infrastructure. Instead they keep finding inventive ways to keep cutting taxes and ignoring infrastructure.
Are you suggesting libertarians believe the government should not build infrastructure?
I realize libertarians by nature have unique viewpoints but that feels like a bit of a mischaracterization. In general libertarians support a smaller government that increases focu on areas where societal collaboration is strictly necessary like roads, police, and firefighters while by default opposing government involvement in other areas beyond baseline rule of law (like NIMBY zoning).
I wasn't suggesting such things. But the juxtaposition amuses me. On the one hand, Ammon Bundy says he can do anything he likes, on public land, because freedom. But on the other: zoning. Which are ideologically opposites.
There are a lot of libertarians that would argue against all 3 of these things. They'd solve roads with tolls, police with private militia, and firefighters with private companies.
I agree that libertarian ideology is all over the board and that a broad generalization is impossible. That said the majority, and especially the load majority, are against basically all public spending and taxation. To the point where you'll find prominent libertarians arguing for things like private judicial systems.
The problem is that by being reasonable, you eventually arrive at a government that isn't considered libertarian by most libertarians. That's why I call libertarianism dumb. There are basic requirements and regulations needed. We've had governments without them, particularly in the US.
For example, libertarians have no solution to what the USDA solves. Go read up about the quality of milk in early america before the foundation of the USDA. That was a libertarian government. The best solution I've heard from libertarians is reviews and 3rd party verification that you pay for but, as we can see on amazon, those are very easy to manipulate. The force of law is the only thing that really solves problems like people selling unpasteurized and diseased milk. With raw milk we are already seeing the rollback of the enforcement of those laws and the impact of that rollback [1]
The best method of insuring that is charging developers impact fees, which are then used to perform the upgrades you describe. Impact fees are also the primary target of the very weathy and powerful realty lobby groups -- they will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on political campaigns to elect people who will then save them tens of thousands of dollars by removing impact fees. If you ever wonder why most city councils are composed of developers, this is why.
This works when the developers are doing large redevelopments - it works great in suburbs where the developers are converting farmland, for example, because the total number of projects is low.
But when the "developers" are people replacing single-family homes with duplexes, etc, it gets harder to manage.
Everyone is nimby when it touches the most valuable thing in their life. You'll turn nimby once you buy a house. There's no lie, anyone will be against a landfill or skyscrapers near their house. If you think otherwise, you're lying.
I own a house and I don't give a shit what happens on the lot next to mine. Not my property, not my right to complain. So you're wrong. Also kind of rude for calling people liars when they disagree with you.
What if next door they put in a combination slaughter house and sewage treatment plant? What if they built a gigantic speaker pointed in your direction?
Or made a home for wayward youths who live yelling slurs?
Public polling is very YIMBY too, they are the majority.
It's just the public input process is a filter that selects for extremely high activation, interest, and agency. So if a democratic vote ruled these decisions, YIMBYism would rule the day, but if you go to the meetings it's NIMBYs who are prevalent.
There are definitely centralized NIMBY groups, like Livable California:
And there are tons of smaller groups that organize locally, far more than YIMBY groups. In my city there are 2-3 people that typically organize a group, give it a new name, make a web page, and act like they have the backing of everybody in the city when they talk even though most people disagree with them. They've been doing it for decades, and have found many tactics to amplify their voice to be much larger than the sum of the individual group members. YIMBYs are far behind on doing this, though they are getting better at it.
When I first joined NextDoor about a decade ago I dared speak up in favor of a plan to allow apartments to be built on a commercial thoroughfare, and the onslaught of a single person in their replies and direct messages was completely overwhelming (If people here think I'm loquacious, well, I have been far bested in that....). That was my first entrance into city politics, and I quickly learned that this person was in charge of a large "group" that mostly consisted of that single person. They had also been doing it for years, with creative group names, the best of which was probably "Don't Morph the Wharf" which even launched lawsuits to prevent changes to the wharf, delaying necessary maintenance and repairs which a few years ago resulted in the front falling off of the wharf. Individuals can have very undemocratic impacts on local politics.
Ish. Polling is very YIMBY. So long as it is exactly what I want in my back yard. With a lot more leeway granted to what should be allowed in someone else's back yard.
Not sure why people think that no one thinks they're a NIMBY. I am. I bought a house in a neighborhood with a particular character and if it turns into a bunch of urban high-rises, I won't like that.
I would make money, since more high rises means higher price per square foot of land, but I wouldn't like having to move. If someone moves into an area that is zoned for particular types of properties, then new zoning is imposed by outside fiat (not a vote of the people who live there) is not appropriate.
my own brand of yimbyism at least respects that. there's nothing wrong with quiet neighborhoods and loud neighborhoods. the sort of things i want to allow in neighborhoods like yours are locally-owned corner stores and cafes and wine bars and walkable development like cut-throughs and bikelanes. part of the problem with the urbanism debates is that no one has quite figured out how to allow "the good stuff" while keeping out "the bad stuff" because as soon as you upzone, like, walgreens and gas stations and corporate high rises are expected to start showing up. IMO this is something of a "social technology" problem: if we can't figure out how to allow healthy development without stopping unhealthy development, that's a problem to solve systematically.
the other issue with urbanism debates is that everyone's version of Yimbyism is different and you end up not trusting any of them because some people really DO think that you should shut up and allow high rises. They have a moral reason for that too---because housing really is at a shortage and costs too much and some people getting their fancy neighborhoods while others have access to nothing is sorta unfair. But that position is basically untenable, if you try to enforce it you just make an enemy of everyone. But it seems to me that the happy medium, the "build good stuff and not bad (carefully)", is an everyone-wins situation (except for a few crotchety people I suppose). That goal is to break the equilibrium of "some (established) people get to govern what happens to almost-everybody" and replace it with something more generally democratic, but without letting in all the repugnance of how the free market will build things if you don't govern it at all.
(this is all very idealistic of course. The problem is that a random anti-development suburban neighborhood that likes being that way has no incentive to let anyone change at all, and is probably basically right that the urbanism program doesn't benefit them at all. I imagine that only really systematic way around that is to end up in a higher-trust version of society where towns are mostly nice, instead of mostly not, so that people actually crave this sort of development instead of reacting negatively to it.)
I don't have a problem with little corner stores, though I don't think they would be very sustainable in most suburban areas. I just drive for 5-10 mins to a grocery store and get pretty much everything I need there.
The bigger issue I have is that people seem to think that suburban areas can be required to be urbanized, but urban areas could never be suburbanized (from a zoning/setbacks/etc. perspective). That is, they don't seem to think that areas can be forced to change, in general. They seem to think that forcing urbanization is fine, but it's a one-way ratchet.
I always find this 'character' argument disingenuous.
The character of the neighbourhood is only invoked for perceived negative externalities. No one complains when the cracked sidewalks get repaved, or fiber internet lines replace slow copper, when increasing affluence mean that houses are better maintained, when a new sewer line allows people to remove septic tanks. That all changes the character of a neighbourhood, but never gets fought.
Go ahead and commit to the bit, lock in on the character in ALL ways: make sure you fight any alteration to any building, any change in the shade of paint should be fought! Your neighbour replacing their front door? Denied! Replacing a concrete driveway with pavers? unacceptable? Replacing incandescent bulbs with LED? Uncharacteristic! Increasing home values changing who can afford to live there? Not acceptable, gotta sell your home for what you paid to maintain the character!
> If someone moves into an area that is zoned for particular types of properties, then new zoning is imposed by outside fiat (not a vote of the people who live there) is not appropriate.
How small are we going to allow the "area" to be defined? Is it one vote per property owner, or one vote per resident? Can we call a block an area? Who decides the arbitrary boundaries? Do people living on the boundary line get to vote for projects in adjacent properties in adjacent jurisdictions?
Just call NIMBYism what it is, selfish justification for control of other people's property. Your position is - explicitly - that other people and property owners should be made less well off for your comfort. "The Character of the Neighbourhood" is a red herring.
HOA restrictions are at least more defensible than non-HOA NIMBYs. HOAs that don’t allow significant rule changes are reasonable, as you can understand up front what you are buying into. The problem is when HOA rules grow way beyond their original scope or become used as weapons in personal feuds.
> No one complains when the cracked sidewalks get repaved, or fiber internet lines replace slow copper, when increasing affluence mean that houses are better maintained, when a new sewer line allows people to remove septic tanks.
Not sure about the other two, but I've seen groups defending repairs of things that had been broken so long they had become "local institutions".
> Go ahead and commit to the bit, lock in on the character in ALL ways: make sure you fight any alteration to any building, any change in the shade of paint should be fought! Your neighbour replacing their front door? Denied! Replacing a concrete driveway with pavers? unacceptable? Replacing incandescent bulbs with LED? Uncharacteristic! Increasing home values changing who can afford to live there? Not acceptable, gotta sell your home for what you paid to maintain the character!
Buy a historical property in some jurisdictions at everything you listed would happen exactly as described, except maybe the sale price.
Doesn't seem disingenuous. Some places still have "character" in a world increasingly turning into the same strip malls and cookie cutter suburbs. In most small to mid size towns in the US, you can't really tell where you're at without reading signs. They all trend towards the same generic look with the same generic stores. Some towns fight this with varying degrees of success. But the Dollar Generals will not be stopped.
One example that springs to mind for me is Pasadena, CA and their trees. They are (or were) very NIMBY about things which would impact their trees. And I can't blame them. It's one of the few areas in the valley with significant shade thanks to their investment and protection of trees. Their roads were planned around mature existing trees instead of cutting them down as is so common. There's no doubt that Pasadena could have more dense housing if they cut down more trees to make room. It also doesn't seem at all disingenuous to feel like that would be a loss for the "character" of the city and a negative for the collective residents due to rising temperatures and loss of shade.
> Some places still have "character" in a world increasingly turning into the same strip malls and cookie cutter suburbs.
A huge reason for this is arguably NIMBYism. The reason that sort of thing exists is because suburbs very intentionally separate commercial from residential, and will not reconsider as things change. As a result, you end up with putting all the stores on busy roads, and they need parking lots since the people live so far away. All of the homes go in rigidly controlled neighborhoods that are both politically and physically difficult to change. Neighborhoods used to have stores interspersed, old ones, and ones in other countries still do. They don't anymore because we cluster buildings by use in North America, and especially in suburbs.
I'm highlighting the picking and choosing aspect.
Wanna keep everything the same? Sure, argue for that, but that isn't what "character" arguments are about. It is about claiming the things that you like as inside an arbitrary sacred protection line, and the things you don't as outside. Claiming maintaining character if you don't fight every single change is a way of painting over selfish interests in the name of the community. There's nothing wrong with selfish interest, but don't try to hide behind a claim that you are doing it for the greater good, or to preserve something indefinable.
E.g. I could just as easily argue that the "character" of a neighborhood is derived from the affordability and diverse socio-economic backgrounds of residents. Therefore densification, infill, reducing parking for transit lanes and other YIMBY efforts in advancement of those characteristics of the neighborhood are about preserving 'character'.
I'll also point out that your example seems to concern public preservation of nature, not restrictions on private property. There's a stronger argument there since it is a public good. Raising a stink about your neighbor wanting to build an inlaw suite, or - god forbid - a few townhomes, or multifamily housing on their lot is a whole other thing.
> I could just as easily argue that the "character" of a neighborhood is derived from the affordability and diverse socio-economic backgrounds of residents. Therefore densification, infill, reducing parking for transit lanes and other YIMBY efforts in advancement of those characteristics of the neighborhood are about preserving 'character'.
If you argue that the character of a neighborhood is based on all of those things, then keeping them the same would maintain the character. What you seem to advocate is for changing them, which is then changing the character.
> Raising a stink about your neighbor wanting to build an inlaw suite, or - god forbid - a few townhomes, or multifamily housing on their lot is a whole other thing.
If someone builds an apartment complex on land near mine, the builder it is not my "neighbor". The builder is an LLC that owns the land. They do not live there and do not care if traffic gets awful, crime goes up, or quality of life of the pre-existing neighbors gets worse. That's because they aren't our neighbor. They're an LLC.
>If you argue that the character of a neighborhood is based on all of those things, then keeping them the same would maintain the character. What you seem to advocate is for changing them, which is then changing the character.
You totally missed what they're saying, which is that "character" is a nebulous term and can mean anything one wants it to be. For example, it could be argued that you're the one changing the neighborhood by refusing any change, and causing people to be priced out, thus changing the neighborhood's "character".
>If someone builds an apartment complex on land near mine, the builder it is not my "neighbor". The builder is an LLC that owns the land. They do not live there and do not care if traffic gets awful, crime goes up, or quality of life of the pre-existing neighbors gets worse. That's because they aren't our neighbor. They're an LLC.
Why would a builder ever be a neighbor? Your neighbors are the people that live in the complex, and they would indeed care if traffic gets awful. Not wanting to suffer through traffic is a major reason one would pick an apartment complex near one's job.
Ultimately NIMBY's want to control property they do not own to the detriment of others. If you don't want an apartment complex next to your house, then consider buying that land and not building an apartment complex.
GP refers to a "neighbor wanting to build...multifamily housing on their lot". That's referring to the land owner as a neighbor, which I would not do in the case of an LLC. I would refer to the tenants as neighbors, as you say, but GP wants to use that warm and fuzzy term to describe the company that builds the apartment complex.
Ultimately it is selfish interest. Either because they literally have money invested or they are "losing" their childhood. But it's not disingenuous. It's how they actually feel. The area losing its "character" is an accurate description of that. It doesn't matter if I think or you think the mixed use zoning would vastly improve things long term. Doesn't matter how many studies are shown. Things will necessarily change in ways many people don't want and many times there are actual downsides for existing residents to make way for the new. Especially during transition periods.
None of these are arguments from me against new development or pushing past NIMBYs where they become intractable. But if development in Pasadena can maintain as much existing green space as possible and commit to building out more, it would be a lot palatable to the "natives". And I think it would lead to better results for future residents as well. I think it's okay that people want to live in a neighborhood full of quaint small family businesses and resist the Subway and the McDonald's and the Dollar General. But that's "NIMBY" too so where do you draw the line? We live in a capitalist society after all, and the only thing preventing these large mega-corporations from being absolutely everywhere are the few NIMBY willing to say no to it with the little power they have over their slice of the world.
I'm not saying the feelings are disingenuous or that you can't object on personal grounds.
I'm saying that using 'character' as a catchall for things you personally don't like is disingenuous. It's hard to argue against since it can't be defined.
Don't like multi-story infill? fine. Argue against that specifically and provide reasons that don't rely on something indefinable. Personal feelings about specific issues are a fine reason for arguing since those can be dealt with. I can argue that parking is or isn't an issue and can be mitigated. I can't really argue that the neighborhood isn't losing its character.
I can do the same thing by invoking "problematic" which carries social connotation in the same way that "character of a neighborhood" carries social meaning. If I say an argument is "problematic" you can't really rebut in any meaningful way because you don't even know what I mean. If I say an argument is using false premises or invalid logic, there is a discussion to be had.
I agree that "problematic" is vague. But you have to be a bit dense to not understand what people mean when they say they want to preserve the character of a neighborhood. That means they generally liked it the way it was when they moved in, and they want it to stay largely that way, especially when it comes to zoning changes.
The word problematic differs because it can be applied to any type of thing (not just neighborhoods/zoning) and has no hints as to what it might mean. Everyone understands that people who move somewhere generally want it to stay that type of place. This is why people complain about gentrification, urbanization, and all other types of neighborhood change. They chose to live in that place because that was the kind of place they wanted to live.
I don’t have to be dense to raise my eyebrows at “character”.
It has been invoked in plenty of examples in the name of preventing other cultures and skin colors from a neighborhood, among other less defensible reasons. My parents weren’t sold a house because the seller thought “a good Christian family” would be better suited to the character of the neighborhood. That’s not a rare story. Ask some of your visible minority friends. So if you want others to assume what “character” means, you don’t get to be upset when people assume that your motives are rooted in something ugly. If that isn’t you, don’t be surprised when you find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder with a person like that.
That’s why I prefer if people elaborate what exactly they are objecting to. It keeps you from providing cover for assholes (or exposes you for one), and allows a conversation about what changes might actually be welcome.
Raise your eyebrows all you like! Just don't tell me (a visible minority, as you so eloquently put it) to consult a visible minority.
The notion that a word is poisonous because it is used by people who use it in a different way is silly. According to this logic, democrats should not advocate for "progressive" policies because some of the people who call for progressive policies are actually calling for the confiscation of private property.
It's like saying that vegetarianism is poisonous because Hitler was rumored to have been vegetarian. It's like ad hominem, but dumber.
Reductio ad absurdium is a logically valid ment technique to expose a fallacious argument. Since you aren't attacking my premises - is it safe to say that you accept the fallacy in your argument?
/s
I get what you're saying about my comment. But I stand by NIMBYism being essentially a selfish restriction on other's property rights, and 'character' arguments being window dressing for that.
> 'character' arguments being window dressing for that.
You think people don't care about what their neighborhood is like? Given the extraordinarily high costs of moving (thousands in moving costs, tens/hundreds of thousands in realtor fees, weeks of time and disruption, tens of thousands annually in property taxes if basis is reset), it is very understandable that people would care about their neighborhood not being drastically transformed (suburb to high-rises).
When I read the HN thread [1] about how upset people get by people in neighboring apts playing the TV too loud or smoking, it reinforced how much I don't want my neighbor's property to be transformed into an apt complex.
> You think people don't care about what their neighborhood is like?
I'm not saying that at all. I haven't said anything like that. I'm saying that people care so deeply that they come up with horseshit to justify personal wants as community needs instead of just saying it.
I'm saying - repeatedly - that 'character' is a term that is so nebulous as to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. In my sibling comment that you also responded to I pointed out that I can use the "character" of a neighborhood to justify infill, densification, and transit lanes as easily as I can use it to argue against the exact same things. It can, and is, weaponized for really petty gripes.
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't argue for or against changes that affect you. I'm arguing that "character" is a virtuous shield that people use to hide behind the argument of "I personally don't want this, but can't come up with a reason that sounds better than personal preference". The problem with "character of the neighborhood" is that you can't really argue against something that is so loosely defined.
Your complaint about apartments can just be straightforward, you can say that you are concerned with the possible nuisances that can come with dense housing, and you don't trust the current enforcement or rules to allow you to enjoy your property peacefully. That is a perfectly valid reason to oppose something.
> Your complaint about apartments can just be straightforward, you can say that you are concerned with the possible nuisances that can come with dense housing, and you don't trust the current enforcement or rules to allow you to enjoy your property peacefully. That is a perfectly valid reason to oppose something.
Great, that's one of the things I wouldn't want. But I also don't want to live in a city, which is why I didn't move to one. The other aspects of city life (noise all the time higher crime rates, etc.) are what many suburbanites are referring to when they talk about the character of their suburban neighborhoods. It's not hard to grasp, and there's significant overlap in what individual people mean. That's why "character" is used as a shorthand.
Not many people consider themselves a nimby even if they are. I was talking with my mom about how I'll never be able to afford a house and she agrees with me it's insane then says that she voted against allowing apartments near her house because it will bring in more crime, she wasn't connecting the dots.
There's also a lot of them because many people live in cities.
Also many online communities driven by user moderation are controlled by folks with a lot of time to participate and skewed against certain segments of society. Online views often skew wildly from real life.
I've basically given up trying to find community online. Talking with real people is so much more rewarding and less frustrating.
The urbanists are vocal online because of something they're unsatisfied with in their life - if you talk to them and dig into it, they're complaining about a lack, a lack that they think would be filled if they could just afford to live in NY or Europe (because they assume everyone in NY lives like Friends or something).
If instead of trying to solve loneliness through urban development they dedicated their efforts to "touching grass/concrete" and got to know their community - suddenly they'd discover they have the power to urbanize - but do they still have the desire?
Yes, there are plenty. They don't call themselves NIMBY though. Usually it's stuff like opposing gentrification, protecting the environment/green spaces, or protecting historical areas. The net effect is NIMBY.
I totally get it. People don't like change - I certainly don't. Especially when it changes the neighborhood you're living in.
It’s not “centralized” (because as the sibling comment noted, nobody thinks they’re a NIMBY, they just want to stop development in their town), but some of it happens on Facebook and NextDoor. I think a lot more happens face-to-face at the sort of activities that older and retired people hang out at though.
Oh they're all over Nextdoor and local mailing lists and Facebook groups. They organize in small local communities though, different model from yimby types who band together in cross-regional interest groups instead.
YIMBYs in my area are almost exclusively terminally online young adults who are bitter that they can't afford to live precisely where they like with their single 20-something income, and basically want to make desirable areas more affordable (aka less desirable) so they can move in. The worst of them are openly hostile to anyone who made the apparent mistake of choosing to live in an upper income area.
I am pretty much in favor of people being able to do what they want with their properties, as long as they are responsible for any externalities the changes create, and I still largely find these groups insufferable (in case you couldn't tell from the paragraph above).
NIMBYs are mostly people who have other things to do with their day than agitate to make their neighborhood worse (where worse is a change from the status quo, which they presumably are at least okay with given they live in the neighborhood), so you don't hear much from them most of the time.
In short, there is no need for advocacy for the status quo unless someone is attempting to modify it, as it just continues on by default.
This is amusing, because the usual NIMBY argument I hear is about "gentrification", i.e. it makes the neighborhood better and that's bad.
terminally online young adults who are bitter that they can't afford to live precisely where they like
More accurately: they would like to live in a particular location, the owner of that location would like to sell or rent it to them, but a third party wants to forcibly prevent that transaction.
> This is amusing, because the usual NIMBY argument I hear is about "gentrification", i.e. it makes the neighborhood better and that's bad.
Change is bad as far as existing residents are concerned, which is why external YIMBYs are particularly annoying. I live in a pretty nice area so gentrification isn't really possible, and the people who want to live there but can't afford to are the ones agitating for change.
> More accurately: they would like to live in a particular location, the owner of that location would like to sell or rent it to them, but a third party wants to forcibly prevent that transaction.
No, the accurate description in CA (and YIMBYs are trying to replicate this elsewhere) is that a group of people collectively decided how land can be used in their area, and people who disagree are going over their head to change the rules.
Why don't we let people who like living in dense housing build and live in dense housing? And leave those who don't in peace? Right now we only do the second one but make the first one illegal.
Sure, we do let people do that. The thing that's objectionable is when a suburban neighborhood is rezoned by people who live hundreds of miles away, and developers get the green light to build towers there. Why do people who don't live in a place think they're entitled to change the zoning of that place?
What's to stop them from saying that it should now be zoned for industrial, and a chemical treatment plant can open up next door to a school? It's the same line of thinking.
When someone buys land, they should be allowed to do whatever they want to do to it, subject to the zoning laws that were in effect at the time of purchase, or passed by a majority of voters in that area after purchase.
If you're talking about CA's state laws, you're right that they supersede local laws. You'll notice that I used the word "should" in my comment, indicating a normative view. I think CA's state legislators have passed many laws that were unwise, including several that voters have had to undo via constitutional amendments.
While I would place state laws passed by popular vote above local laws passed by popular vote, I would say that laws passed by representatives, without much awareness of voters that this was their intention, should not necessarily be put above local laws passed by voters themselves.
A Reddit-style reply feels apropos here: "That's just like...your opinion man."
And in this case "local laws passed by voters themselves" are one of the causes of the state's housing crisis. I think the state has a legitimate interest in overriding local laws here.
Like if you don't want high density in your neighborhood, buy all the houses. Form a neighborhood association and buy every house that's put up for sale. When selling properties, include covenants restricting resale to a developer, or giving the association first right of refusal. Spend your own money. Don't use state violence to achieve private ends.
Is it wrong? If I try to build an apartment building on land I legally own in violation of a zoning law voted in before I was born, by people who never paid a cent for my land, the sheriffs department pays me a visit.
And that would be totally unfair if the law was kept secret, and then sprung on unsuspecting property owners.
But we all know that's not the case. Prospective purchasers are well aware of zoning laws. Same reason you can't build a fuel refinery on your tidy plot of R1 land. It would put existing owners, who have a reliance interest in existing zoning laws being respected, in an awfully unfair position.
Is it demand for condos or is it demand for reasonably-priced housing and condos are the only even remote possibility?
I've met a few people who really loved condo living but almost every one would have taken the single family home next to the condo building if it had been even remotely similar in price.
Those are the same thing? Not sure what youre asking, there is limited space, people recognize that having a SFH involves tradeoffs, just as most other things in life do.
People who are living like that are being invaded by high density people who want to live in high density in their communities. They want to take over and force people out.
And generally they just want to flip. Find somewhere cheap and make it expensive to make money by lowering everybody's quality of life and calling it progress.
How do you "force" people out? The existing owners have to sell land, and once they do the new owners have as much right to decide as the other residents. Are there thugs going door to door forcing sellers to sign papers?
Allowing higher density construction doesn't mean higher density must get built there. That's still up to the property owner to decide. True freedom.
> Property taxes...causing people who own to be priced out
That's an important price signal that the land is under-utilized. If we actually allowed denser residential then those people could sell their land to a condominium or townhouse developer in exchange for a new unit and some cash. They get to stay in the same place, their property taxes stay roughly the same, and they get to enjoy the cash. While everyone else also benefits from more housing. Win-win-win.
It's an ironic comment because this article mostly talks about California, which is already one of the most expensive places to live and the most NIMBY. Every other state in the US is generally cheaper to live in. The places that are cost as much as California are just as NIMBY and heavily influenced by Californians (Hawaii) or is the cultural and financial center of the country (NYC).
> Look up property taxes, cost of living expenses, and overheads like parking, schools, etc.
I currently live in an arguably not very dense city, in the suburbs. I pay thousands of dollars in property taxes. I must own two cars to serve the whole family, for things as basic as going grocery shopping. My HOA is almost a thousand dollars a year. A couple years ago I had to replace the roof, at a cost of several thousands of dollars.
I had none of these problems when I was living in a more dense city, and on top of that, I could actually walk to the nearest coffee shop.
> Is NYC the cheapest place to live in the country?
NYC is dense because it appeals to more people, and the more people that move to the city, the more expensive it gets, precisely because there are not enough homes.
Are you assuming that less dense cities are more desirable to live in? Is Anchorage a more appealing city to live in than NYC?
A key issue that often gets missed is that job growth and housing supply are tightly linked. When cities add office jobs without adding enough housing, the results are predictable: longer commutes, overcrowded housing, or both.
In that sense, it makes little sense to approve large amounts of office space without considering the housing capacity needed to support it. If the jobs-to-housing ratio grows too high, the costs are pushed onto workers and surrounding areas rather than being addressed directly.
This problem is compounded by limited public transit and inadequate road infrastructure. Framing the issue solely as NIMBY opposition misses the structural imbalance at the core of the problem.
Instead of treating symptoms or assigning blame, governments should focus on correcting the underlying mismatch between employment growth and housing supply.
I think this is the issue - if the NIMBYs want to protest things they should really start when the office space gets built.
The filled office space full of white collar jobs paying $200K is what triggers the eye of the residential developers of high density housing as it provides a basis for the profit margin spreadsheet model.
Local governments have a huge incentive to favor commercial construction over residential construction: schools. Adding an office building adds tax revenue without adding students. Adding housing means they have to enroll students.
I'm so NIMBY that I moved my backyard from a county with 4,000 to 1 people per square mile. A big attraction was the dark nights for amateur astronomy. Then the state decided that this was the perfect place to build 100 megawatts of 630 foot tall wind turbines with a blinking red beacon on top of each one.
My best bet now may be to move to orbit like S.R. Hadden. But it'll have to be high orbit, away from the satellite constellations.
If NIMBY were all willing to move away from civilisation, nobody would have a problem with them. You wanting peace and quiet in the middle of nowhere affects no one else - that's quite different from demanding everyone around you cater to your desire in the middle of an urban area
Yes, had this conversation with people complaining about an apartment building being built over a decrepit strip mall in central Los Angeles. "Perhaps living in the center of a megacity is not for you..."
It does feel sometimes like you can't escape. I got tired of the nonstop noise and loud cars of a big city and moved to a smaller suburb. Then I learned about Leaf Blowers. If every neighbor has gardeners come at ~7am once every two weeks, the odds are you will wake up to the soothing sound of a 2 stroke Leaf Blower almost every morning!
Car thing is so sad. For some reason people think it’s socially acceptable to blast music from their car at 7am. I can’t tell if they don’t understand they are annoying people, if they don’t care, or they are just a menace
Welcome to the sound of spring/summer/fall in the suburbs. 7am to 6pm, 6 days a week. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Most landscaping teams have 2-3 dedicated guys who do nothing but leaf blow the entire time they are at a house. Towns have been largely unsuccessful in curbing this, mostly because demand for landscaping services is so high.
That's actually not NIMBY behavior at all, because you moved rather than trying to control everybody else around you!
It's great to want to be around few people, that's a choice that should be respected. Just as there should be a choice to allow people to associate at higher densities. But in practice, the law only works against one of these choices.
> 1 people per square mile... Then the state decided that this was the perfect place to build 100 MW of 630 foot wind turbines
That is correct, for the reason you yourself gave. Since it bothers you so much personally, I'm very sorry about your bad luck. But it was objectively the right decision.
I was reading some stuff a while back about either the FAA or its Euro equivalent coming up with hazard lighting beacons being activated by plane transponders within the area but otherwise off if nothing was actively around. To solve this exact issue.
I really hope such technology comes to fruition and becomes the standard sooner than later.
Isn't there a first mover advantage? Whoever breaks the strike would be sitting on gold? Think if a low density city in California said "OK we are zoning up" and everyone there could sell out for $$$. It's only useful while the prices are high. Seems like a good idea anyway
> they don’t even think we should be allowed to argue for more housing. They don’t think we are even entitled to a fair hearing. We should all recognize that silencing your political rivals is beyond the pale and that complaints like this one, even if they end up going nowhere, can have a chilling effect on activists and ordinary people who want to exercise their rights.
Don't worry, there are sooo many free speech absolutists that will come out of the woodwork to protect this dastardly attempt to stifle speech through abuse of legal procedures.
My theory is that the major parties are currently going through another swap of ideals, so the free-speech absolutists don't have a home.
The regions that give the strongest support to the Democrats, like Marin County in California, don't want anything built, are actively kicking out ranchers that have lived there for generations, are adamantly against anyone calling anyone else something offensive, and are in general against what was classically liberal.
Meanwhile, rural Texas counties that give the strongest support to the Republicans are for worker protections, generally against government-prohibitions on insulting someone, are increasing in their support for populism, and so on.
The Democrats used to support free-speech absolutists, who are no longer welcome there, but the Republicans are just opening up to the ideal, and don't fully support it yet.
I am not even sure it’s a swap. I see a lot of RW sentiment lately that libertarian principles are self-defeating, and the only thing that matters is Straussian friend-enemy distinction.
Basically, the extreme wings of both parties are seizing power and preparing for battle, while the moderate wings are tuning out. (Or to put it another way, more of the center is becoming politically independent.)
Traditional ideological lines break down under these conditions, because the important thing is damaging your enemies, not maintaining ideological consistency.
It’s driven by a fundamental shift in political economy. Technology centralizing power and making computation and communication (and thus control) cheap means that politics becomes a winner take all industry, in the parlance of the valley. Those who have read more than a little history understand what being the loser in such a contest means and thus the rush to the extremes and the escalation spiral (and of course the associated democratic backsliding) you see not just in the US but in most western countries.
No, your comment is an example of "argument by joke" and "false equivalency".
The bad faith free speech argument that somehow applies to only some people, to only one side of the political divide, but never to the other was prevalent mainstream argument for years now. Some peoples free speech was sacred and if you criticized or opposed them, the criticism and opposition themselves did not counted as free speech - even if it in fact consisted of speech only.
So like, kicking at those people is entirely fair. Because they actively damaged "free speech". Not that they care or ever cared.
For this to be anything like "so you hate waffles" there would have to somebody going around declaring to all that "all breakfast foods are good and can not be criticized" and them only showing up to defend pancakes on the basis of "all breakfast foods" but then deafening silence when waffles or bacon or scrambled eggs get trampled on in a far more prevalant manner.
Even the one reply to me from a self-proclaimed absolutist didn't bother to defend the political speech and petition of government, just said that they were present!
Please speak plainly. It comes across like you allege that "free speech absolutists" would betray their principles due to aligning with NIMBYs (I read "protect" as "protect against", because otherwise it makes even less sense). But where on Earth does that assumption come from? If your intent is not to sneer at a political outgroup (based on a prediction, not even actual conduct) when why adopt this tone?
Many prominent Republicans in recent years have railed against censorship and espoused a strong belief in free speech principles. Then they got back into power last year and most of those same people did a complete 180 and have been happily supporting censorship of speech that they don't like.
> Can you name one such individual and give examples of each phenomenon?
But it seems that you conflate "Republicans" who are actually members of government with people who simply support the party; and anyway the concept of "free speech absolutism" is inherently not partisan. The existence of 1A defenders on either side of the aisle (or representing any niche interest) doesn't say anything about the existence of principled, consistent 1A defenders.
They were sued by the current administration and recorded as domestic terrorists,held down and sprayed in the face by irregular paramilitary with extrajudicial powers, detained without probable cause or charges, investigated by the FBI in the dead of night, placed on no fly lists, post retirement rank demoted, fired, laid off, swatted, delivered pizza in the name of dead relatives, and all the wonderful stuff that’s making America great again.
Free speech should obviously be protected in all circumstances including this one. I don’t know what you are going on about, but it’s probably the unfortunately common and flawed perception that anyone who supports “free speech” right now is an unprincipled right winger who only supports it for their ideological allies.
Which strikes me as bizarre, first because it requires that fallacious assumption and secondly because it requires mapping NIMBY onto the right wing. Which arguably tracks with what one would naturally expect from free-associating words like "conservative", but the evidence doesn't show me any strong correlations except possibly in the opposite direction (considering the evidence of new housing starts vs. local voting patterns).
Yeah, I find NIMBY vs YIMBY arguments interesting because they're almost entirely orthogonal to traditional left vs right. This alignment chart is the best I've seen; for me you can just circle the whole bottom center: https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1dz4ssk/where_are_...
> Everyone wanna get down with a gang in America these days. "I'm liberal!" "I'm conservative!" Be a fucking person, ok? No good, decent person is all one thing. I got some shit I'm liberal about, and I got some shit I'm conservative about.
I think he's absolutely right, and that labeling things as "left" or "right" is a thought-terminating cliche that one should strive to avoid. What matters is the idea, not which faction people might stereotype it with.
> After finding out that the city council was considering a housing element that would have bowed to NIMBY pressure, we sent two letters to the city, reminding it of its legal obligations under state law to approve the upzoning — and that a failure to do so would open the city up to a lawsuit.
This seems entirely reasonable to me, and I'm grateful that a group like this exists.
But I'm a YIMBY, so of course. If lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar on the basis of laws that I disagreed with, I can imagine feeling frustrated, conspiratorial, or disenfranchised.
Maintaining a consistent commitment to liberal democracy, the legal system and due process is one of life's great challenges!
If you live in California I can assure you beyond any doubt that people from some far-away place have had outrageous levels of influence on your local housing policy. Almost the entire body of CEQA jurisprudence has been developed by two lawyers and a handful of labor union executives.
If your local building code requires an elevator that can accommodate a hospital stretcher, which is almost certainly does, that was jotted down in the building code by literally one guy from Glendale, Arizona, on the basis of a whim.
My county eliminated code compliance checks (and building plan review) 2 decades ago for owner-builders and it's made things so much cheaper and easier to build. It is the only way I was able to afford a house.
We were warned by nay-sayers the county would burn down but that never came to fruition and meanwhile I've seen so many code-Nazi places in California burn down from wildfires.
It's hilarious watching the systematic destruction of the counter points when people tell me about the horrors
(1) "You wouldn't want to live in such a house, it would burn down." I already do, and have been.
(2) Your neighborhood would catch fire. I live in such a neighborhood, it didn't.
(3) Just wait long enough! It will happen eventually. Eventually you'll have bad luck! This has been going on for 20+ years.
I sympathize with your experience but the code situation for multifamily is so much worse. The original motivating reason for the multifamily code was to stop people from building them, so it's all cursed, even 100 years later. It is wall-to-wall vibes and the fixes are not coming fast enough. Recently my city decided to amend out the requirement for firefighter air replenishment systems on every floor of buildings higher than three stories because, it turns out, even though this requirement exists nationwide, literally nobody has ever needed or used the FARS. It was made up and codified by the guy who sells the system!
It's also important to consider what the code is, anywho decides it, and for what reasons.
Most cities adopt a mishmash, but they take them from large private organizations that publish big books of code, and how that whole process happens is far more opaque than most standards bodies because it's so obscure. Is there evidence backing the changes? Is it vibes? Is there financial benefit for the code writers for certain choices?
This mishmash of choices by local cities also greatly reduces building efficiency, because even if I learn the fine details of my city, that doesn't guarantee I can apply my hard won code knowledge a few miles away.
Building code is important and I wouldn't go as far as saying "if you own the house you don't have to follow anything" but our current situation is also not providing much safety in the US. Code mostly exists to justify checks, not improve safety. A simpler, more uniform code, with clearer motivations and evidence would go a long way to reducing unnecessary costs.
LMAO. I built the house for $60,000. Myself. And I have the construction heavy equipment to demolish it, so I can demolish it for next to nothing. It paid for itself in 3 years vs renting.
I couldn't give a shit if I have to sell it for land value (which has massively appreciated by my own development, since I did all the prospecting for water, electric, and septic -- the land was basically worthless when I bought it), on the off chance someone doesn't want a mega cheap house in cash for break even. I didn't build it as an investment, I built it to live in.
It's by escaping your mentality, which is what has poisoned the real estate problem writ large, is how I escaped the inflated property price conundrum.
I agree that local communities are best at determining their own line when disputes arise between protecting the freedoms of one party versus another, which is a stance also held by the supreme court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_standards
In this case though, it's not someone going to a non-local city council or school board meeting and arguing for or against some policy that is up to that local board, but it is someone pointing out a policy that has been set at the state level. Any arguments for or against that policy need to take place at the state level, because that is the only place where it can be changed.
> If lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar on the basis of laws that I disagreed with
Hah, they most certainly are! To such an extreme extent that I figure you'd probably reword this to something like "If I was aware of all the ways that lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar". They are most certainly constantly and relentlessly influencing your municipality on every issue that is relevant to them.
To those downvoting, if you tell me your municipality I will provide you with evidence of corporate lobbying influencing decisions of governance at the municipal level.
Rancho Palos Verdes is a small established hillside community with equestrian 1 - 5 acre lots. The absurdity of adding 650 homes to this area is astounding. Right next door is Hawthorne which has plenty of space for such housing. Activists like this person, lobbying a city they have no relation to, to enforce an overreaching state law, are part of what is making people and companies leave California.
OP said "established hillside community with equestrian 1 - 5 acre lots".
It is reasonably likely that people who lived there chose the location because they wanted to have horses, otherwise why buy there?
When dense apartments get built next door, soon enough the city prohibits horses because the thinking goes that horses don't belong in a dense population area.
I'm not familiar with the area OP mentions, but exact same thing happened around here. Some 30 years ago most houses had horses, then a lot of smaller building came around and they prohibited horses.
Doesn't impact me personally but I'm sad for the long time residents who specifically moved here to have horses. Not fair to them. Some have moved of course, but moving isn't always easy if you have job and kids in school in town.
If the neighbors of these lots care to maintain their vacancy, they ought to do so the more naturally legal way: by collectively buying and owning those lots.
Which is likely why they are doing it. The City of Huntington Beach had a similar problem: there was simply no room to build additional housing. They sued the state and lost. The law is overreaching, but it's the law.
30 minutes drive in no traffic, crossing half a dozen cities and the 405. There's reasons to inveigh against the YIMBYs (why are they celebrating densifying a coastal area that's actively falling into the pacific[1], nevermind it's inherent beauty) but let's not deny geography.
Also RPV doesn't have 1-5 acre lots, it just costs ~$4m for an house on a normal lot, rising to ~$20m as you get to the coast. You might be thin thinking of Rolling Hills, to the extent you're thinking of anything on the peninsula at all?
He probably shouldn't call his group "Yimby Law". Just like if you're not a PE you can't (legally) call your company "Foobar Engineering" in most states.
If he tries to incorprate as "Yimby Law" he may hit a roadblock in some areas. Secretaries of State regulate business entity names and often bar or scrutinize words that imply a regulated profession (e.g., “bank,” “trust,” sometimes “law”) if you are not licensed or not forming the appropriate kind of professional corporation.
However he's free to send a letter, just not incorporate a business called "Yimby Law". He should change it to "Yimby Citizens Group" or "Yimby Institute" or something.
States do have rules against business entity names that mislead about regulated professions. California, for example, prohibits names that suggest an entity is a "professional corporation", a particular type of entity limited to regulated professions, when it is not. But I would be very surprised to learn that "Law" alone has been relegated to lawyer practice in any state of the union. Presumably so would organizations like Bloomberg Law, Westlaw, FindLaw, Free Law Project, Groklaw, etc.
Lawyers don't own law. The law belongs to the public. So says this active attorney member of the State Bar of California, and I'll stand on any law firm's conference table in my boots and say that.
Going around to municipalities that you are not a resident of and saying "we will sue you into obeying state law" is basically being a tattletale. Nobody likes that. I'm sympathetic to more housing, and I think state laws should be followed, but I'm not sympathetic to the author.
Also, I just dislike activism in general, which seems like it generally is trying to force people to do things they don't want to do through passing laws. I get that there is sometimes a need raise attention. But generally it seems like activists are very one-sided, agenda/ideologically driven. It also feels like they are trying to find meaning in activism (yeah, we forced other people to do what we think is Right), instead of healthier, more traditional forms of meaning.
So if I build an apartment building on some lots zoned for single-family and someone complains, they're a "tattletale" too? And nobody should like that either?
Unpopular opinion: there's nothing wrong with NIMBY. It's totally ok to not volunteer to have a dumpster at your house. Society may want it, but they lose nothing, gain everything, and you're left with a house with dumpster nearby.
If society wants to put dumpster so badly, compensate to those who (practically) lose their house. Let everyone pay, that's fair. Picking "haha this will be the loser this time" is not.
It's easy to be YIMBY when you don't own anything.
Such a strange assumption that your neighborhood would get worse by increasing density.
It seems there’s some strange bias in play where NIMBYs are somehow fearful of density.
FWIW SFH economics isn’t sustainable in highly desirable areas. You have to redistribute wealth from workers to land owners (the CA model), or raise taxes commensurate to resource consumption. I suspect there’s a limit to how much feudalism the working class will allow, and if land owners had to pay for the resources they consume they’d have to densify anyway.
Really the whole thing survives on handouts from workers to landowners
Quality is subjective. You would need an arbiter. For example, I would enjoy having an art collective and a funky performance space nearby, but I’m sure many people would consider that a downgrade
Yimby vs Nimby is yet another divisive jingoism - simply putting tags on things and then using them as if significant.
The situation is more complex. The forces about housing right now are incredibly destructive. Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes. In this case NIMBY is the correct solution. In other cases Rich People want to prevent affordable housing. In this case YIMBY is the correct solution. But blindly applying these terms provides a cover for a complicated situation. We have cults of personality, and now we have cults of Jargonism. Neither helps us.
Being outraged because lawyers don't want you to speak is great. The issues legal and housing issues are far more complex and important.
Affordable housing itself is typically used as a poison pill because it makes it harder to turn a profit building. My biggest pet peeve is when some 5 over 1, 9 foot ceiling, crappy finishes, bound to be ghost-town ground level retail, apartment building is characterized as "luxury" by NIMBY who then proceed to say that it needs to have an affordable component. Guess what? It's going to be so clapped out in 15 years that the rent will have to have gone down (inflation adjusted).
> Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes.
Rich people want to make more money by blocking homes from being built, thereby driving up their property values and making all housing in the area more expensive.
You present a very simplistic view that does not begin to capture the complexity of what's actually happening in practice:
> Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes. In this case NIMBY is the correct solution.
Why would NIMBYism ever be the answer here? What values does it represent? Allowing rich people to build housing for rich people means that the rich in need of housing don't take away more affordable housing. And when rich people are forced to pay for more affordable hosuing, what used to be affordable becomes unaffordable.
Ensuring that rich people's money goes to new building that doesn't hurt less rich people is the correct solution, if one values keeping housing affordable. One should only block that rich housing if one wants the existing housing to become more expensive.
As far as I can tell, you responded to someone literally saying "The situation is more complex." and attempting a refutation of your absolutist view, by accusing that this is a "very simplistic view" — and then generalizing "rich people" as a group without considering strata of wealth at all nor considering more than one possible strategy for accumulating real estate wealth.
The "refutation" is the common view tha has been repeated for years and years, and is not complex at all. It in fact misses the dominant trends that have made US housing situation so unaffordable, and is only a tenable view if one has an overly simplistic and narrow view of the players in housing, specifically from the viewpoint of a home owner that does not struggle with the current high costs, and in fact implicitly benefits from those high costs that increase their wealth while locking the next generation out of the opportunity they had.
I don't think my views are absolutist at all, but please do point out wha you think is absolutist if you believe that is a fair criticism instead of a passing swipe.
> generalizing "rich people" as a group without considering strata of wealth at all
I did nothing of the sort, but I did point out that if the basis of opposing something is because rich people benefit, well, that is an argument to support more housing. If somebody is saying that only certain slices or classes should not benefit but that other rich people should benefit, then let that person make that argument, rather than the overly simplistic "rich person" argument. And let them add enough complexity to concretely state the profits: a homeowner is making 5% a year on their home due to scarcity by locking others out of opportunity, while the developer makes their investors 10%-15% over 2-3 years by adding productively to society and benefiting lots of new people with access to economic opportunity and housing.
Yes, different people are profiting, but one strata is doing it by making others wealthy at the same time, and their profits are to a REIT, and one times. Whereas the landlord and homeowner getting compounded annual returns at a high rate by increasing economic inequality and segregation, through rentierism and exclusion. When developers build an apartment building, investors profit but so does labor and the new residents and city coffers through new taxation.
The comment I was replying to did not present a single shred of complexity, and their petite bourgeois naïveté presents themselves as the only people in the world deserving of profit or consideration or agency or influence. They did not refute my world view at all, and my entire worldview on housing has come about from their same overly simplistic starting point and then learning that there's a vast world out there beyond it.
The use of "back yard" refers to the local area, not the literal extent of one's property. This usage is not unique to NIMBY and it's derivatives. YIMBY sentiment also clearly extends beyond developers themselves and simple libertine principles. Many people want development to occur around them, in their back-yard so to speak, because they prefer it occurs. The semantic change you're arguing for erases this concept just to sidestep the notion of local community. It's a needlessly aggravating approach when the simple answer is just that both NIMBY and YIMBY advocates can support their cause beyond their own area because they believe their cohort is right and deserves it.
Communities are fully in control how they manage themselves, as long as they do it within the law of the state.
Rancho Palos Verdes should comply with the law, or face the consequences of not being able continue that control of their land management.
A great value of democracy is that a "random activist" can petition the government to enforce the law, that's how we keep the whole thing in check. The idea that random activists could not be a check on illegal behavior of the government is a very, well, authoritarian idea that is not compatible with any of the values embodied in the US or California constitutions, our legal system, or the very character and culture of the US.
> Communities are fully in control how they manage themselves, as long as they do it within the law of the state.
Yes, and my point is that continued trend of state and national laws overriding local jurisdiction over things like land use is not a positive one for residents of desirable areas (and arguably any land owner) and not something I agree with philosophically, not the litany of things you decided to rail about that have nothing to do with my comment.
Presumably you think it's not good for land owners of "desirable areas" because local laws create a monopoly that allows the landowners to extract wealth from others, through restriction of land use?
Can you see why there might be laws against that?
It is pretty well established that zoning was invented and is justified merely to enforce economic segregation. That economic segregation is perhaps the interest of landowners in these "desirable areas"?
I think by surfacing the true motivations of what's going on, it will become very clear why municipalities must be subjected to laws to enforce better behavior.
> Presumably you think it's not good for land owners of "desirable areas" because local laws create a monopoly that allows the landowners to extract wealth from others, through restriction of land use?
I think individuals should reap the rewards or suffer the losses from their individual decisions. If a community generates value, they are entitled to the rewards. If they run things into the ground (see Detroit as a notorious example), they're left holding the bag.
> Can you see why there might be laws against that?
Can I see why people would want to force themselves into a desirable situation that they had no part in creating? Sure. That doesn't make it right.
> It is pretty well established that zoning was invented and is justified merely to enforce economic segregation. That economic segregation is perhaps the interest of landowners in these "desirable areas"?
Citation needed on the first claim, but yes economic segregation is desirable to most people. That's not news.
> I think by surfacing the true motivations of what's going on, it will become very clear why municipalities must be subjected to laws to enforce better behavior.
The true motivations aren't hidden. Have nots are trying to get a piece of something desirable, and the people who already have it want to keep it.
US cities are under the jurisdiction of their states. States hold the power to abolish or establish cities. Cities are required to follow state law. Whether residents or non-residents remind cities of their legal obligations is utterly irrelevant.
If a city was allowing racial discrimination and no one within the city sued, would that make it ok?
State law recently increased my neighborhood’s density. It’s obliging these towns to do the same. I’m happy about both, which makes me YIMBY like the people in this organization
Let’s remember, CA is in a housing CRISIS. I feel an immediate urgency to build as many houses as possible in this state so that my young children can feasibly afford to live here without being an AI engineer when they are adults
There is an abundance of houses in the US, just in less desirable areas than Rancho Palos Verdes.
Your young children have no right to live in any specific location, and your usage of CRISIS to describe a lack of access to highly desirable housing is not compelling.
I mean, also not in my back yard if the people who don't own the land vote for a bunch of micro managerial laws that make it illegal to do things without jumping through hoops that are so expensive as to be a non-starter.
Nobody is gonna go through the "everything else" approval process that strip clubs and heavy industry have to go through just to expand their business parking or do $10k of environmental impact assessment to drop off a $1k garden shed. (literal examples from my town).
These evil people can't make things illegal outright so they make the process so expensive almost nobody can do it and it takes decades for someone to come along with a lucrative enough development that's worth expensively challenging it inn court over.
People who do own the land aren't able to collectively agree on how to manage it because of state law. That's the issue. The source of the "NIMBY pressure" mentioned in the article is local residents, who should have much more say over local zoning code than someone who lives hundreds of miles away.
> More housing in region X will result in lower housing prices in region Y.
Or higher prices in Y, because X will be both more crowded and with on average poorer people than before the supply increase, and people who prefer a less crowded area and less poor people (either directly because they are poor, or because of other demographic traits that correlate with wealth in the broader society, like race in the USA) around them will have an even higher relative preference for living in Y than before.
> The interests of people from region Y are valid.
They exist, validity is...at best, not a case you have made. Existence of a material interest does not imply validitym
That's a very theoretical argument, and there's nothing stopping people in region Y from building all the housing they could possibly need in region Y. If it's such a great idea, region Y will thrive and reap the rewards of this policy.
And my point is that there are limits on the impact region X has on region Y based on their proximity. Should someone in downtown LA be able to compel someone in Palo Alto to upzone based on this "impact"? What about someone in Kansas or Florida?
The state of California is forcing Rancho Palos Verde to upzone. Because it's good for California even though whether it's good for Rancho Palos Verde is debatable.
1. Yes, and the people who are in favor of this specific law will be completely and utterly shocked when the state government uses their power to enact and enforce a different law that takes away local decision making which they don't agree with.
2. I take it you're done discussing the theoretical merits of this law?
I can say their interests don't meet a threshold of significance.
As an extreme example, I can say that hurricane victims have an interest in butterfly wing flaps across the world because there is some indirect causation.
Housing expansion advocates consistently describe the simplest of supply-demand mechanisms, whereas housing demand is heavily driven by local and national economic conditions as well. Gary IN doesn't have a housing shortage.
I'm not saying I'm favor of NIMBY - it depends on what's actually going on - but I would expect that there might be a lobby of constructors, rather than citizens looking to lower house prices, behind such an effort.
I think the back yard in all of these initialism is not limited to the person’s private back yard property.
NIMBY seeks to prevent the development of nearby properties to preserve some sort of “neighborhood character,” so the “back yard” is actually the whole neighborhood (and I think part of the negative connotation of that phrase is that they are treating shared spaces like their own personal yard). Then, YIMBY seeks to allow their neighborhoods to be developed.
If we’re going to extend it to “YIYBY” and “NIYBY,” we should apply the same logic, right?
Rather, I think YIYBY mostly doesn’t make sense because YIMBY people are trying to convince people that they should allow development in their neighborhood. Zoning rules… I mean, they have difference policies for changing them, but YIMBY activists aren’t usually manually and unilaterally changing them for other people.
Ultimately the decision making process is probably (depending on local regulation of course) “yes or no in our back yards,” when you get down to the details.
YIYBY is the concept of wanting it nearby to your residence but not having to suffer any of the direct consequences - imo it's a good thing to acknowledge but generally indistinguishable from NIMBYism. You want the benefits but aren't willing to pay the costs.
It's like a thirty minute city. You want those services nearish to you but never so close that they'd effect property value. "Nobody" wants to live next to a high school - your house might be TP'd, but you want a good school within bus range, "Nobody" wants to live next to a super market, they have large parking lots and are "undesirable" but you want to be able to drive half a dozen blocks to it.
I've never thought of the B in NIMBY as literally meaning backyard - it figuratively means "near enough to effect me" but people still want it within reach - so the ultimate NIMBY dream would likely be to live in an island of placid suburbia surround by a ring of vital services that are just far away enough that you don't need to see them every day.
(There's also, I think, a separate environmental NIMBYism but that's a really strange concept and usually more of a deliberate misinterpretation by people with an agenda to push - I'm more concerned with city service NIMBYism around public transit, food availability, hospitals, etc...)
There is a large forest near your local community. You and others often walk in the forest and kids play there. Its calming and has been there forever.
The state wants your community to turn it into apartments, but obviously the community is icey about it.
Then activists from another city dozens of miles away, who have never cared for your town or really been to it, show up at Town Hall meetings and are scheduling meetings with town councilors to push for building the apartments.
Those out of town people jumping into your community to dictate change are the YIYBY people.
If the apartments are built, they'll put another feather in their cap while walking around the forest near their home.
Why would they cut down the forest to turn it into apartments? It's more economical to bulldoze existing single-family homes and do it there. The roads are already built, you'd just need to upgrade utilities and so on. There are people living in those single-family homes who would gladly take the opportunity to sell their land for higher than market value but are prevented from doing so.
It's more common for forests to be cut down because dense housing is illegal, so cities have to keep expanding outwards.
Are these out of town people, who surely can’t vote in local elections, somehow forcing the town to sell the forest to developers? If so then that is the problem. Local zoning shouldn’t have an impact on whether or not a city-owned forest (or a park, or vacant land) is forcibly sold and developed. That’s a different problem.
If someone already owns the forest, then they should get to build on their land.
>Are these out of town people, who surely can’t vote in local elections, somehow forcing the town to sell the forest to developers? If so then that is the problem.
They are "forcing" in the same way billionaires "force" politicians to lower taxes on them.
I think the term you meant to use is "lobbying", which is in fact what these YIYBY groups would be doing. They are lobbying a random town that they are no part of to cut down their forest and build apartments.
Correct, not sure what point you are trying to make.
People who live in the community don't want unaffiliated outsiders lobbying their town leaders. Those people doing the lobbying would be "Yes In Your Backyard" people. They would be this because it is not their backyard they are lobbying for, but yours.
I cannot be more straightforward in explaining the term YIYBY than that, heh
Yet that lobbying is legal under the first amendment, so the people have no ground to stand on. They can do their own lobbying in response.
If the voters did their job and elected good representatives, who respect the interest of the voters, then they have nothing to worry about: the forest will not be sold.
Voters could also try to establish a referendum system where public lands cannot be sold without a local vote, assuming this is not in conflict with state law.
Edit: The point I am trying to make:
- You said that the town owns the forest in your example. I presented points to explain why this is not an issue, as lobbyists cannot force the sale of public land.
- I wanted to clarify that YIMBYs cannot force property owners to build against their will, except in limited circumstances (eminent domain) that usually requires assent from local government.
- To be clear, I think that individual property rights should be respected. I can build on my land, I can’t force you to build (or not build) on your land unless you are voluntarily bound by some covenant.
I would implore you to go back and read the top comment, the person was asking what YIYBY is. I explained.
For some reason you are trying to argue with me about the merits of YIYBY, when I never took a stance on it, just explained what it is and why people don't like it.
And what's you argument? That people wouldn't be upset that outsiders are lobbying their town?
I never said anything about outsiders forcing anything. They simply lobby and people get mad about it, those lobbyists are "YIYBY". Its the origin of a term.
You built a strawman about forcing a town to do something, and are really intent on attacking that strawman. But you built it, I never said anything to that effect. Of course they cannot force the town to do anything and of course the lobbyiest have first amendment rights. Never said anything to the contrary.
EDIT: Our convo is now rate limited, but I'm glad you live in a place where politicians work for voters and ignore lobbyists. Treasure it, most are not that lucky.
How is it YIYBY if they can’t force the town to sell the land? They can lobby until they are blue in the face, but they can’t really accomplish anything.
You are the one who said the town owns the land. If they own the land, it looks like the voters are safe—nothing should happen.
You are the one who built the strawman by inventing a public forest under threat from lobbyists. I was just showing that this strawman was an illusion.
I believe that NIMBYs often try to do a motte and bailey argument where they make it seem like someone is literally going to force property owners to build something, when in reality they are trying to prevent property owners from using their property as they want. That really gets my goat, because it’s dishonest.
It's a pretty core element of democracy, that if the majority says they get to do a violence against you for a certain behavior, then they get to do that. It might be immoral but it's the current religion of this area of the world *.
* But muh republic -- spare me, the zoning fiasco shows the current constitutional limits on democracy doesn't stop it.
Which costs? Driving 30 miles in heavy traffic because density is not allowed close to you? Paying excessive taxes because of huge oceans of SFHs? Having to own a car because public transportation doesn't work in low density?
There is no free lunch, only which costs you're going to pay.
Personally, I find NIMBYism completely irrational and am a dedicated urbanite - I love being able to walk to my local grocery store and have a hospital within two blocks of me. I'm definitely not the right person to advocate against your stance.
Literal NIMBY-ism, where the backyard is one's own property, is just straightforward property rights. They want to control other people's property and tell them what they can and can't do with it. That's basically communism.
Two comments about this...
- "Housing as investment" might not be the best policy
- Side effect of above, people have strong incentive to ignore all the negative externalities caused by that policy (ie, sprawl and lots of car mileage when society would better with more compact towns)
You’re allowed to advocate for your own interests, but there are limits to what you’re actually allowed to accomplish with that advocacy. At least in the US. You can’t just pass laws to confiscate the wealth of your political opponents, for instance. You can advocate for it (free speech), you just can’t do it.
I think the ROI criticism is generally off the mark. Most homeowners that resist rezoning, etc. are concerned about quality of life issues rather than home values (although those are aligned if significantly lower quality of life reduces home values). For example, the idea that I'd benefit if my area was upzoned because I could sell my home/land for much more doesn't appeal to me at all. I don't want to sell my home, and I don't want the neighborhood to change around me in a way that I would eventually want to.
Casting shadow on their backyard. Bringing noise to their street. Ultimately, lowering the value of their property.
The key problem of US housing is that a house is seen as an investment vehicle, which should appreciate, or at least appreciate no slower than inflation. Keeping prices high and rising can't but go hand in hand with keeping supply scarce.
Is this regularly true? IME, in Northern VA, land values have always increased with infill development. Thinking specifically of Arlington in the Courthouse/Ballston/Clarendon strip in the 90s and 00s. And now Reston.
Traffic and noise concerns might be legitimate, but I'm not buying the loss of value argument.
Is it always true? More than once I heard fears about undesirables moving in, crime rate growing, the neighborhood "losing its character" that commands the high prices, etc. The resistance is real at some places.
The land value argument is downstream of the real issues - some people don't want change and fight it.
If it was purely a money question you could just get some billionaire to go around buying out entire neighborhoods, redeveloping them, and turning around and selling them off for a profit (because they'd be worth more, right?) - the fact that this is not being done either means there's a great new startup or there are other issues.
The thing that gets me is how many people are seemingly in favor of preserving zoning that keeps out mom and pop corner grocers and cute coffee shops and the like.
It’s just like… why?! I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s no downside to being able to top off on milk and eggs by taking a leisurely stroll on a sunny Saturday morning. That sounds downright idyllic.
People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away.
It is confusing, especially because the few places in the US that have walkable neighborhoods like you're describing are also extremely expensive, so clearly they are desirable. It is rational to buy a cheaper house in an area that doesn't have this stuff, because that's what you can afford or you want to save your money for other things you care about, but then why fight against it once you live there? Wouldn't it make your neighborhood a better place to live while also raising your property value?
It’s just hyper-local nimby vs regular nimby.
Everyone where I live wants a corner store or corner bar 2 or 3 blocks away from them. Close enough to walk to conveniently but far enough they never have to know it exists unless they are personally interacting with the establishment in the moment.
No one wants such a thing a few houses down. So the local neighbors get their friends who live close by to join the local neighborhood meetings and rail against the noise/traffic/crime/etc. And of course the ever-present “property values” boogeyman. Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away. There also might be traffic!
Sitting through local neighborhood association meetings is exhausting. Anyone who actually desires to get things done burns out pretty quick.
> Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away
This could be true but I would want to see some data. I have paid extra for an apartment before because it it had a grocery store on the first floor, so it's not obvious to me that being adjacent and having to walk past the shop every day would drive a home price down. I know apartments and detached homes are different, but still.
I just think the common explanation for NIMBYism, that everyone wants to protect their property value, doesn't actually make sense when it seems like the densest American cities are also the most expensive to live in. I have the same confusion about public transit. It's common for suburbs to fight very hard to keep public transit out of their town, but it's incredibly expensive to live within walking distance of a train station, so property values don't work as an explanation for this either. You also hear people say it's because the NIMBYs are afraid of the city folk invading their suburban paradise, but if you go to NYC or DC nobody is taking the train from the city to the suburbs to have fun, there's nothing to do there. These stops are almost exclusively used by upper middle class office workers going into the city for work. You don't have to worry about poor city people because as soon as the stop is built, they won't be able to afford a house anywhere near it.
You have to look at it through a "conservative" lens - not the political one, but literally "I don't want things to change!"
Through some interesting turns of events I've made more and more acquaintances with some people well outside the city I live in. One thing that caught me off guard was just how true this is. People there would rather-- by a large margin-- see stagnancy than improvement. Literally arguing against adding a grocery store due to there being nothing there to support it, no roads, nowhere to even buy food. They are fiercely opposed to anyone doing anything.
It has made me wonder what proportion of that sentiment is held by my neighbors in spite of the obvious city problems we face.
Have you never lived in a suburban house? I would never want a store to be next to any of the houses I lived in. It would completely ruin that environment. Conservative viewpoint or not, house prices or whatever, it is very aesthetically displeasing to me.
> few places in the US that have walkable neighborhoods
Lots of places in the US have walkable neighborhods. You just have to live in a place that was developed before WW2 and car ownership wasn't assumed.
I live in as suburban of an area as you can imagine with master planned communities and what not. I can still walk to 3 grocery stores, multiple bars, fast food restaurants, fast casual restaurants, coffee shops, medical offices, convenience stores, and loads of other services in under 15 minutes. The suburbs built in the 90s and 2000s are not the dystopia people make them out to be.
Very much this.
My neighborhood was built in the late 90s. Single family home small town suburbia. I can walk to just about anything I need in daily life. Within 10 minutes walk there are 2 supermarkets, movies, many restaurants, variety of services, library, parks, theaters, doctors, and more.
If we count cycling, I can bike to 99% of what I could need in life. (Problem in practice is lack of safe bike parking but that's not a distance problem.)
Most places I've lived in the US in my adult life have been similar. The exception was once when I lived in a very rural area and had to drive 10 minutes to the nearest supermarket.
I don't understand these threads that talk about suburbs where you have to drive an hour to the nearest convenience store. I'm skeptical that such places exist. Where are they?
https://maps.app.goo.gl/xEkHB8ZQiCUAZH7T6
https://maps.app.goo.gl/KmSjG465pkAGJia19
https://maps.app.goo.gl/DvCv5oMbhfXRDVAR6
https://maps.app.goo.gl/14duytarnCn8UPR37
They're kind of all over the place. It seems to me non-walkable suburbs are the default from the places I've lived and visited. Unless you're either living near the town square of a small town or adjacent to the downtown area of a big city it's probably not really walkable.
An hour to a store is probably hyperbole for most places, but I definitely have friends where it's like 5+ minutes to drive from the middle to the edge of the neighborhood of only single family houses, and then you're just on a street in nearly the middle of nowhere with no shops right outside just other neighborhoods full of houses.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/GB7SPqHZoDeRE7eX6
https://maps.app.goo.gl/zEA7sBQ6Jxccc2fFA
https://maps.app.goo.gl/oZRNZ3Td2NDqH8nw7
The claim at the top of the thread was "essentials being a 30-45m drive away".
I clicked on each of those links and asked for directions to food shops and in every case google maps gave me a route less than 10 minutes drive.
So I remain unconvinced that suburbs with "essentials being a 30-45m drive away" are somehow a common thing. You need to go pretty far off into the boonies for that to be the case but then it is no longer a suburb.
Ah, 30-45m drive, yeah. A lot of these places will still be within 15min or so to a lot of amenities, probably 20min most to most things. There are still some that are pretty way out there, easily 20+ minutes to most real amenities. A couple I can think of close by:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/fc2DS3dMQrDJK3na9
https://maps.app.goo.gl/AnygKw17WmFxHkc58
https://maps.app.goo.gl/kppAZYyDJuJZBGtD6
But a 10 minute walk to most of those amenities is also pretty uncommon. You look up walking directions for most of those places? I'll be amazed if there's a real grocery store within a 10 minute walk.
Two trains of thought; I was reacting to the OP line of "People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away", which I maintain is a nearly impossible scenario.
(Because everyone needs food and other essentials, so if you have "an endless desert of houses" somewhere, that's a lot of people, so inevitably very soon there will be stores nearby.)
The other point is whether you can walk to them in 10min (or 15min as lotsoweiners above said). I don't claim you can always walk to shops in 10min from suburban houses, it is easy to find cases where it's further away (but far far far closer than "30-45m drive away").
But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them. The idea (which often comes up in these topics on HN) that it is impossible to walk to stores/restaurants in the US outside of Manhattan & SF, is nonsense. If you like to walk (I do) just pick a suitable spot.
A few examples where I've lived: next to Pruneyard in Campbell, a bit further south in San Jose around Cambrian, and in Cupertino not far from DeAnza College. In all of these it was easy to walk to a supermarket in 10min. All of these are in Silicon Valley, where the story goes you can't walk anywhere but I was easily walking to stores.
I agree, I totally missed your comment was related to the 30+min concept.
> But, you can also easily find suburban places where you can do it, and those places are all over, there is nothing rare about them
I agree, you can find some housing stock like that in most housing markets. It's less rare than finding a unicorn, I agree. But they're also often not a large chunk of the overall housing market.
It sounds like all those experiences are in Southern California. That's pretty dense compared to a lot of the places I've lived, even though I wouldn't call it extremely dense. It's also a place that while still having a lot of notable NIMBY stuff going on it tends to be way more amenable to pedestrian and bike infrastructure and city design. Weather also leads to more and more people willing to be outside. You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.
Look around the rest of North Texas for a good example. You can find pockets where it's decently walkable. Plano and Richardson and some parts of Dallas can be pretty bikeable. But Frisco? Little Elm? Arlington (outside the college campus)? Aledo? You can live at the edge of a large neighborhood and still have it be walkable/bikeable. But then there's still the rest of the neighborhood where it's going to take a while to walk to the edge.
Look at Kansas City, KS [0]. You'll find tons of neighborhoods like this. Not exactly walkable, like much of the metro area. Once again, sure, pick a house at the edge of this neighborhood and it's okay, but that's not the majority of the housing stock. Once again, sure, you'll find some neighborhood around that is relatively bikeable, but percentage of hosing stock it's pretty rare. Not unicorn rare, but still pretty limiting on the housing market. Can you find houses that are walkable? Sure. Is it in your budget? Does it meet your other needs? Is it close to your work? Are the schools still pretty OK?
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/L7vRMc4v4ouS9uuh9
Go to St Louis [1]. See it's pretty much the same story? Most of this suburban housing stock isn't walkable and is not very bikeable.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/CLZDVKjdVkwj92sq6
Can you find some place walkable and bikeable in practically any decently sized metro area in the US? Sure. It's it even a quarter of the overall suburban housing stock in that metro? Probably not!
> You should expand your study to other areas, not every place in the US is Southern California.
(Silicon Valley is NorCal but still)
I've also lived in Pittsburgh, did not own a car or a bike just walked everywhere. And northern New Jersey, was also walking distance to shops and restaurants.
The one and only place I've lived in the US where walking to shops was not practical was out in the countryside in northwestern NJ. That's a pretty rural area so needed the car, closest supermarket was a 5 minute drive.
Also have family in Phoenix, have lived there for decades and never had a drivers license. Supermarket is 1.5 blocks away. The heat can be rough, but in distance it is very near.
Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
> I've also lived in Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh (especially the actual city proper) is well above average in walkabiliy compared to the rest of the country. Also a good bit of New England, especially the older towns.
> Sure, it's easy to find places where you can't pragmatically walk to a supermarket, but it's just as easy to find places where you can, if it is something you find valuable.
I mean yeah, that goes along with what I'm saying. If you just ignore 85+% of the housing stock in a lot of metros it's all walkable! Just limit yourself to just the most walkable places in the country and you'll only find it walkable. Look up the walk scores of the areas I'm talking about.
You even acknowledged a lot of the areas I shared earlier would be a 10 minute drive to get to a grocery store. How fast do you walk? 40+mph?
It shouldn't be so hard to find affordable homes without massive tradeoffs that are walkable/bikeable. And by find I don't mean see it on Google Maps, I mean actually afford it and have it be available when you're ready to move and not have other massive tradeoffs.
> housing stock in a lot of metros
If you actually want walkable, big metro areas are overrated. Look for small towns, that's where walkability rules. The town is small, so everything is near.
Where I live now, most of the town is in a 1 mile radius. And the bulk of it is in a 0.3 mile radius. When everything is small and near, everything is walkable.
As I mentioned, in a 10 minute walk I can reach two supermarkets, one big box store, countless restaurants, several pharmacies, a few bars, stores of all kinds (hardware, clothing, etc), post office, library, theater, movie theater, soccer, tennis and basketball courts and plenty more.
I say if you live in a place where you can't walk anywhere, that's by choice. Tons of walkable places exist all over the US.
Where in suburbs are you a 10 minute walk of all that? Even living in a major metro city center it's a push to get to all that in 10 minutes. A 10 minute walk is like 1/3 mile at most. An hour drive is unlikely but 20-30 minutes is no exaggeration with traffic. 90% of suburbs in Atlanta are like this, with zero traffic it could be a 5-10 minute drive to the closest shopping center.
Not all are but most are. I too live in a single family zone surrounded by commercial zones in walking distance and it’s fantastic! But most of my city and its surroundings are not like this and you would need to drive to get anywhere. It’s really an almost perfect spot that I’ve found.
It really depends what region of the USA you are in. The south? Ya, things are hard, walkability was never emphasized because of harsh weather. The west coast or northeast will be more reasonable, the intermountain west is more hit or miss.
Where are these two places?!
Those are often the expensive places.
I have a pre-civil war cottage behind me. The neighborhood built out in 1870 and then again in 1925. All the houses are below $200k.
In Washington, a half million dollar home is generally becoming a demo lot for property builders, if you don't you just bought a half mil crack house... What state are you in?
A lot of the country has houses for less than $200k. I'm not the person you are replying to, but in my home state of Wisconsin it's very common.
I myself live in a fairly high COL city (Denver), and even here things aren't as dire as what you are describing. I think your area (Seattle I'm guessing?) is rather an outlier.
Even Spokane is expensive these days, but you could get a house for $150k in 2010 at least. The west in general has higher housing costs, it applies to Idaho and Utah as well, and especially western Montana. Things don’t get cheap until you hit eastern Montana or New Mexico.
This isn't true at all though. There's a small amount of areas that are able to be super expensive and you can walk to stuff. Then there's far more cheap areas where you can walk to stuff that aren't generally desirable. The slightly more expensive unwalkable areas are intentional because the only way to keep the area safe is to make it inhospitable for people who can't afford cars.
Allowing business also does the opposite to property values, it creates demand to sell because fewer people want to live adjacent to heavily trafficked areas.
There has to be a careful mix to have business and residential in the US and it not devolve into Vape Shops, lottery stores and other highly profitable but exploitative businesses.
It really only works if there's some other sort of barrier like general unaffordability.
Judging by what the moms in my neighborhood say—traffic and parking.
The average person does not think about such things at all. They live in Car World, where they sit in a giant metal box for 30-45m and then wind up at the place where they can actually buy their shit. Their brain shuts off during driving[1]. To them, it's just The Way Things Are. And then they go take a trip to Tokyo and wonder why it feels so much nicer[0].
The thing to note is that NIMBYs are loud and obnoxious, but they do not have broad democratic support. What the average person has is a deep aversion to change they were not consulted with. What gives NIMBYs power is the fact that the average zoning agency is not very good at explaining the rationale of their changes or collecting and incorporating public feedback. It's very easy for a NIMBY to take a few things out of context, bring out a parade of horribles, and scare the average guy into opposing something they otherwise might have liked.
Since NIMBYs are inherently minoritarian, the real base of their power isn't even democratic outrage. Their favored tool to stop projects they don't like is paper terrorism: i.e. finding as many legal complaints as possible that they can sue over to block the project. Even if they're bullshit, it'll take a year or two to get the lawsuit thrown out. Which means that, congratulations, you just increased the cost of the project by about 10% or so, and you're probably gonna have to explain to the feds why the grants you applied for aren't enough and your project is late.
[0] And, in the process, piss off a bunch of locals as they bumble their way through the city using their translator app
[1] In fact, a lot of the hype surrounding self-driving cars is just to make it possible to completely shut off one's brain while driving. I would argue that trains and buses already do that, but...
"People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away."
Not my preference but also not out of bounds as a democratic outcome.
If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
How about if your neighborhood wanted to keep out people of a certain ethnicity instead? Is that a democratic outcome that we need to respect?
The definition of democracy is that we hold regular elections for political office. It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level. 51% of my neighbors cannot decide that they'd like expropriate my house or checking account. The point of YIMBYism is that these kinds of decisions have negative externalities and a larger group of voters- at the state or national level- are removing that decision-making power from a smaller group at the local level. This is a democratically legitimate outcome!
> How about if your neighborhood wanted to keep out people of a certain ethnicity instead? Is that a democratic outcome that we need to respect?
Come on, you know that's not analogous.
> It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level.
It also doesn't mean "any policy the voters want, as long as long as it's the one I want."
Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
> Come on, you know that's not analogous.
Not who you responded to, but I thought it was completely fair. We were a nation filled with Sundown Towns[0,1] very recently. Some probably still exist but are more discrete about it to avoid unwanted attention from those of us who would (loudly) call bullshit on the practice.
> Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
I think you're trying to shutdown someone who has a different opinion from yours by delegitimizing their position. It's not reading the way you thought it would.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
1. https://thenewpress.org/books/sundown-towns/
> I think you're trying to shutdown someone who has a different opinion from yours by delegitimizing their position.
I'm trying to delegimimize the delegitimization that was being directed at me.
> I'm trying to delegimimize the delegitimization that was being directed at me.
And yet you did it again.
I wish we could say “were” :/ http://radicalcartography.net/bayarea.html
Discrimination based on money is so much more elegant than silly old race.
> Come on, you know that's not analogous.
Maybe not analogous, but closely related: Many of those suburbs were built for people who wanted to segregate themselves from minorities, and took steps to keep them out.
> when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
You seem to be shutting down the conversation. IME that is what happens overhwhelmingly when attempting to discuss issues of racism - far more than the few times people address the issue seriously. It's as if they think racism doesn't exist.
It's definitely analogous. The suburbs around me are voting to leave the regional transit org. Many people openly state the reason why they want to leave is because it brings "the wrong kind of people" to our neighborhoods.
This kind of voting still happens today. Don't bury your head in the sand.
The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?
If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
> If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
>> The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?
>> If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences. It's not supposed to "push these processes...towards more globally optimal outcome," which when decoded means "what you or what some distant technocrat prefers."
> In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences.
In a representative, constitutional democracy, we're supposed to elect people who can more fully understand issues and possible outcomes, and work from there to create a system of laws and policies that is predictable and fair to all the parties.
This means that not every policy will be fully understood or agreed with by the populace. If we wanted to just implement what the public wants, we could just directly vote on every issue.
Orthogonally, there's a whole lot of the fabric of our daily lives that is just a certain way because that's how it's been so far. It works, but is neither popular nor unpopular-- it just is. That doesn't mean it couldn't be better.
Governments should be working on multi-generational scales. Not "fads" of what people want because they saw it in a movie or they grew up with it.
> Governments should be working on multi-generational scales. Not "fads" of what people want because they saw it in a movie or they grew up with it.
If the people disagree with you, then you're not talking about democracy, you're talking about "benevolent" authoritarianism ("we know what's good for you, and that's what you're going to get, like it or not").
Just be clear what you're really advocating for.
No, what we need is not "democracy" as in "we get what every idiot thinks is good off the top of their head".
What we need is a representative democracy, where our representatives genuinely care about getting the best outcomes, so they enlist experts who actually know what they're talking about, and make policy based on that.
Yes, sometimes that will disagree with what the masses want—and in most of those cases, that means that our representatives need to enlist some communication experts to explain why it's actually best.
Democracy isn't an end in itself. It's supposed to be the means to an end of better governance for all. We don't have to accept things that are actively worse for us just because 50%+1 of the relevant voters think they're better right this second.
Since when is government a democracy? Roman times or something like that? Most? Some? Or at least a few government officials are elected. Pretty sure most are hired.
Since today. We elect our representatives and they are supposed to reflect the people's wishes as they go about their duties. Some city government staff might be hired employees, even most. But they are still fundamentally accountable to the elected representatives, and thus to the people.
They run an election based on a platform. You are voting for the person and the platform. They aren’t there to do your wishes, but to accomplish their agenda the people “agreed” was the best of all options that election cycle.
Sometimes this agenda is altruistic, like reducing crime. Sometimes it is populist, or social, or even fascist. Even then, elected officials are supposed to have limited power, not unlimited power. In some (many, depending on where you live) cases, they’re not even accountable to the people — the people can’t recall them, to remove them is a political act by other parts of government.
When you pan out, walkable neighborhoods are at the multi generational scale — car centric suburbia is the fad.
There's also been studies showing how changing infrastructure designs can often be most unpopular just before the change but then become very popular after once the effects of the change are actually felt.
Change-- especially infrastructure change- almost never does anything good immediately and tends to screw everything up, too.
> If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
The flaw in this argument here is that the opposition is trying to prevent these folks from even having a voice, which is fundamentally undemocratic. So this isn't a relevant statement here because this isn't a complaint about a democratic outcome. It's a complaint about people trying to eliminate voices who want to solve a problem. It's an attempt to silence discussion, which has the effect of preventing action.
It’s not democracy when you exclude people impacted by the decision making process from the decision. Preselecting the outcome before the vote destroys any legitimacy the outcome has.
Anybody who is eligible to vote can vote. How is this not democracy?
Selecting who is eligible to vote is one of the most obvious ways to manipulate the outcome. At the extreme, you can have large scale slavery in a system with voting, but it’s not a Democracy.
Who gets to decide on expanding an interstate or zoning has a huge impact when the votes are counted, so drawing lines on a map is suddenly where the power lies not with the people.
Democracy falls apart when the vast majority of people just don't give a care.
And with representative democracy, it's impossible to give a care about more than one or two things.
Democracy needs to exist before it can fail, but there’s a wide range of systems possible that will give more or less power to the general public.
Representative democracy tends to large numbers of parties with proportional representation give far more power to the voters than a two party first past the post voting system. On the other hand having zero input on who specifically ends up being a representative is problematic in a different way.
It’s interesting just how many different reasonable systems you can come up with and how few of them have ever actually been tried.
Is it still a democratic outcome when NIMBYs are doing things like abusing environmental regulations to choke out developments that citizens had approved of with their votes?
The whole issue with NIMBYism are: contradictory democratic wishes and disproportional power of home owners. This points to issues with the democratic process, and not democracy itself.
Most people agree that more homes need to be built, but no home owner wants it in their backyard. So you end up with a deadlock where nothing is done.
NIMBYism is frequently driven by a small number of people who feel very strongly and use rules designed to protect minority rights to get their way. Is it democratic? I don't know... much of what's going on if put to a vote would be split 3 ways. A minority in favor, a large number who don't really care and another minority against (but they either don't get a vote or the default result is to go against their wishes).
What an odd viewpoint.
Effectively, we are all living in a shrinking prison of all decisions made before us. A "democratic" dystopia.
Respecting an outcome doesn't mean you have to (1) give up on differing views, or (2) stop working respectfully for another outcome.
I support upzoning. It is a bad idea to come after people’s comfy, expensive cars. People like cars.
Recently moved to an area that has some very small local shopping centers every .4 mile or so and it's been amazing. I can walk to a local bodega, a hardware store, some coffee shops, restaurants and a local pharmacy within 15-20 minutes. Not sure how I ever lived without the options.
Curious where this might be - assuming NYC?
NYC, Seattle, Chicago, probably lots of places in CA, literally anywhere in Europe
Yeah I love that about living in a European City. I don't even own a car and haven't driven one for 8 years now. I hope I'll never need one again. There's stores, restaurants, a laundromat all within 2 minutes walk. The subway is 5-10 minutes (3 different lines with different walking times)
Additionally I spend so much less on transport and no longer waste time driving. When I'm riding public transport I can read stuff. I don't see any negatives.
Most northeast American cities are older and denser - Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore (at least parts of it), Washington DC (at least parts of it) ... smaller cities on that region too.
downtown Edmonton, Canada.
had a similar experience in RDU in NC. Or Anacortes, WA.
plenty of cities can and do run these locations. it's not just an NYC thing.
I've had something similar in the middle of nowhere Maine.
I miss it so much.
Almost any "rural but not two bars and a gas station" town in the USA will match that to some variation. Everything is walkable if the entire town fits in a 2 mile circle (which can be a pretty big town).
I mean, obviously not? Why else would I miss it?
I was living in Bath, ME wherein I could walk to multiple bars and restaurants, a farmer's market, gym, two different grocery stores, as well as the town riverwalk. I currently live back in New Hampshire, and, while it's certainly rural, its more than just a "two bars and a gas station" town but its also a 20 minute drive to the closest grocery store, 15 minutes to the nearest gas station, 30 minutes to a hospital, etc.
Colorado
I lived next to a mom and pop store, not grocery, selling crystals and such. The owner of the store allowed a homeless camp on the store's lot. City could not clean it out because it's on a private property. The closest tent was less than 50' from my bedroom. The homeless fought, burned stuff, blasted music and hopped over 8' fence into my backyard to help themselves with anything they found there. Store owner was not bothered perhaps because during the day the homeless wondered off, perhaps he just liked them. The police did not do anything, would not even come over noise complaints. Would you like to live like this?
Could you clarify why it is important to your point that the neglectful property owners next door, owned a store rather than a house or vacant lot?
It was not neglected, it was an functioning store. I doubt someone would do the same with their house, an empty lot is also a concern.
Why do you doubt it? Sounds like the owner didn't care. If it was a house, what would be different?
Spending 7am to 7pm next to a homeless encampment isn't the same as sleeping next to it, or letting your wife and kids sleep next to it.
Although in this instance I think NIMBYism is less useful than having functioning local government, police, and homeless services.
Because the owner didn't live in his store he could afford not to care.
Ah, but my old landlord did exactly this, with the back yard of his home and the lot behind it, which once upon a time held his first home. Until the city tore it down for neglect, at which point it became a vacant lot - that he still owned. Largely with the assistance of his unofficial husband, who’d moved into the backyard, partly due to them no longer getting along so well, and partly due to the house becoming overrun with their hoarder tendencies.
Said unofficial husband was dealing drugs out of the backyard, and, as time passed, the backyard, followed by the vacant lot behind - for some unknown reason referred to as “the sand lot” became home to numerous homeless junkies. It became a rodent infested, trash filled, needle strewn nightmare, abhorred by the neighborhood.
The landlord, bless his heart, was, once upon a time, a sweet, naive, hippy, and very talented artisan. Until “someone” introduced him to meth, and it all went downhill from there. He remained a kind soul - and unable to say no to anyone, even when he could no longer stand the situation himself, and knew he was close to losing his remaining house.
Well, actually, he’d started trying to by the end, with our help; we were happy to play the role of “the bad guys” so he didn’t have to. But it was too late, someone gave him a hotshot (meth and heroin) and that was the end of all that.
(Who were/are we? My partner and I rented the other half of his house in March 2020. It was rundown, but cheap, and we were still getting back on our feet after my partner spent several months in the hospital with bacterial pneumonia and we ended up quasi-homeless. We knew the landlord and his unofficial husband from many many years earlier, long before all the nonsense began, and were in a hurry to find a new place so we did not do our due diligence. Didn’t take long to figure out the hell we’d landed in, but thanks to that little pandemic that started around the same time, it became impossible to move.)
So, yes, people have done that with their house.
The fact that the problem happened at a store, didn't make the store itself the problem.
Any more than the problem of loud neighbors, is a problem of having neighbors.
It's a problem of people owning non-residential property next to residential. I am against that, not just stores but the comment I responded to asked about stores specifically.
I live next door to some drunks who party all night. If that house were a store it would be locked up and empty after 10pm. This is a problem of people owning residential property next to residential.
Seems like this is just an extension of any other dispute, and failure to resolve conflict between neighbors, perhaps due to lack of community cohesion between the store owner and yourself or others. This is the nature of living, and if there are problems, we should have ways to resolve it without crazy blanket rules like no commercial next to residential. The failure is in the reasons become homeless and in responding to people who actively disrupt the peace and intrude, not the existence of a store.
It's not just that it's not a fundamental characteristic of stores, but it's also not a fundamental characteristic of homeless people, it's just a characteristic of these homeless people and this store. Depending on the type of store, I'd grant you that other issues could have arisen, such as rodents, smells, etc.. but also any other neighbor could be hosting parties, smoking near your window, leaving debris around. In some cases, you either need to accept it, adapt, or find somewhere else to live.
I had a neighbor in the burbs growing up that didn't like the way we behaved on our property, or how it looked, and stuck her nose in and intruded frequently, often threatening to call the police for all sorts of absurd reasons.
What if a neighbor allowed homeless to camp in front of their house?
Seems like the issue is the store owner (i.e. the neighbor), not the fact that it is a store.
When I lived in Houston I used to jog past a house where the front yard was absolutely covered in garbage. Super nice neighborhood and all the houses in the neighborhood looked great, but just this one guy clearly had issues. It smelled horrendous.
Anyway, seems unrelated to it being a store.
>What if a neighbor allowed homeless to camp in front of their house?
People keep writing this, obviously, without thinking even for a minute. A neighbor who allowed homeless camp in front of their house would:
1) have to live behind a homeless camp himself
2) be tanking his own house value
3) be open to sanctions from the code as there are way more restrictions on residential property use than there are on commercial.
>When I lived in Houston
Your experience in Houston, where there is no zoning, is not very irrelevant in discussion of zoning, don't you think? Unless you are actually making an example why zoning is important, of course.
It’s the same man.
1) the business owner has to operate a business behind the camp
2) the business owner tanks the value of their own property
3) what code? The building code? If we can apply a “code” to a home, then we can apply it to a business. So if there really is such a disparity where you live, the issue is that disparity in application of building codes, not zoning laws.
Re: Houston, what does zoning have to do with anything? My story could have happened i”anywhere. Zoning doesn’t control whether you are allowed to cover your property with trash. My point is that even in an area with nothing but houses, you can have horrendous neighbors.
>It’s the same man.
Not at all. There are tons of businesses next to homeless camps in every American city, and the value of a business is not in the building but in the location and zoning, the code is the city code attached to zoning, the thing you don't have in Huston. The zoning for a residential and commercial is different thus you cannot apply residential zoning to commercial and vice versa.
I think you’re just confused.
There is no place in the world that is zoned for homeless encampments. Zoning is stuff like residential, commercial, industrial, mixed use, and so on. If you are talking about homeless encampments, it’s not a zoning discussion.
I don’t support homeless encampments. Out here where I live in California they tend to be on public land like parks. But wherever they are, there should be laws, enforcement mechanisms, and social support to deal with them. But none of those things have anything to do with zoning.
I think you are confused. Zoning is not words, zoning is a set of regulations. There is no zoning for an Indian restaurant yet you can open one in a commercial lot and can't in a residential or agricultural. Same with homeless camps: there is no specific zoning for a homeless camp only but they are much easier to keep in commercial lots than residential, where it will immediately run into occupancy limits, impervious cover, trash and other restrictions.
Where do you live? Where I live, the overnight occupancy limit for commercial zoning is 0 people, so (at least here) your comment makes no sense. I think commercial zoning that allows anyone to live on the property is basically rare. So if you live in a weird place where its ok for people to live on commercial zoned property, then I agree, that is super weird. But if not, then your issue is just enforcement. In which case, yea I agree, laws should be enforced, but again that has nothing to do with zoning.
I doubt very much there is any place in the US where overnight occupancy is 0 for a commercial property. Where I live you can have a 24 hour business. Living in commercial property is forbidden, but what exactly is living is up to the code officer. In my case the officer decided that homeless did not live there but just visited the business.
Ok by why does the code officer enforce the zoning code in residential zones but not the commercial ones? It’s not like anyone doing their job in good faith could confuse a business patron and someone camping out in a parking lot.
Seems like your code officer is obviously crooked. Not sure what that has to do with zoning though.
Camping in front of business is not against the code, people used to do that for big movie openings or for other commercial events some time ago. With the residential property there are actual overnight occupancy limits which are easy to show being violated. And the occupancy is just one of the codes which would be easy to prove violated by a camp on a residential property, there are tons of other codes. Where I live, you cannot replace an exterior door without a permit, while the commercial zoning is much more permissive.
Don't punish/restrict responsible people for a problem caused by an irresponsible person.
Fix the irresponsible behavior directly.
Most residential codes define minimum living standards, and as a result people camping/crashing on a property whose structure they don't live in, is prohibited.
Apparently your zone code needs to be corrected. Small businesses in residential areas need to be held to relevant/responsible residential zone code.
(You are proposing a zoning code fix too, but for reasons I don't understand, seem fixated on eliminating non-offending businesses, instead of directly addressing the problem.)
I am glad that going directly after illegal behavior is an option for you but I live in a blue city, where DA practices "restorative justice" and the mayor allowed homeless to camp everywhere by a decree (it took a referendum and numerous lawsuits to remove giant camps he created out of downtown, they are still free to camp in residential areas despite the referendum explicitly forbidding that on top of the city and state laws to the safe effect). Nobody gets ticketed for noise, the "defund police" campaign from 2020 ended with the police not even enforcing traffic anymore so nobody is holding small business responsible.
Well that makes sense. The problem goes way beyond the individuals in question.
I can see now why you would pretty much make any change if a side-effect was a solution.
Probably should have disclosed when you first stated your opinion, that it was dependent on local dysfunctional, so others could have understood.
Definitely not the norm.
It's same in every big city in the US. It's not normal in the sense of conforming to customs and laws, but definitely is a norm in the sense of usual.
If a house near you were abandoned, could you do something about it?
Perhaps, but how is it relevant? I responded to a question of what are possible downsides of a mom and pop store next to your house.
Everything has a downside. The American approach is to take the absolute worst possible outcome and plaster it over any average scenario.
>Everything has a downside.
Well, you should probably respond to the person who could not figure any downsides of a mom and pop store in a residential neighborhood because I am well aware of the downsides.
I mean yea, youre a nimby then.
I am against your views because it increases the price of living for everyone, for your own specific benefit.
My own specific benefit as sleeping at night, wow, I sure feel bad now, thank you kind redditor for opening my eyes!
Yes, and you are the reason everytime I went to buy a house in the neighborhood I was renting in, the value doubled.
If you want to be selfish feel free to be openly selfish, but don't be surprised when people like me respond in kind.
I am down for property taxes 10xing to fund building homes because of people like you.
>My own specific benefit as sleeping at night...
invest in ear plugs
I don't see anything wrong with being selfish but your comment still made me giggle: you want me to bend over to provide your specific benefit or you will call me bad words.
> I don't see anything wrong with being selfish…
I already said you were a nimby, no need to reiterate my position
I see, the whole point of you being selfish flew over your head.
Very specific problem to me = zoning laws and higher prices for everyone. You could be a victim of crystal stores allowing homeless camps on their lot, act now!
It's not a "very specific problem", it's a general problem - commercial property next to residential.
This is why I openly call myself a NIMBY and don’t feel bad about it. I paid good money for the house, my family lives there, and I expect the neighborhood to stay clean and safe. Damn right, not in my backyard.
It's unfortunate that you have had that terrible experience and that the legal system in your location failed you.
I'm not sure however that there's anything to indicate that mom and pop stores are especially susceptible to these kinds of outcomes. It sounds more like you got a case of shitty neighbour which is possible whether or not the neighbour is a commercial lot or a small home.
If your negative experience had been with a neighbour living in a private home instead of a neighbour who owned a small business would that change your view around the matter of zoning for small businesses in residential neighbourhoods?
I don’t think it’s a common pattern for mom and pop stores to have a homeless camp on their lot.
Neither do I, yet it's a much higher probability with a commercial property vs residential.
The probability is exactly 0% if the city doesn't allow it. This has nothing to do with zoning. If it was a house next door allowing a homeless encampment would you conclude that having houses next to other houses should be disallowed?
But the city allows it. And it has everything to do with zoning. If it was a house next door allowing a homeless encampment the owner would be paying fines, at least, not to mention he would be living in a homeless camp, which is not something most homeowners are eager to do.
> If it was a house next door allowing a homeless encampment the owner would be paying fines
I don't see why this is to be expected, but a business shouldn't expect to pay a fine
>not to mention he would be living in a homeless camp, which is not something most homeowners are eager to do.
Again, most business owners are not eager to do this either. You've told an anecdote that doesn't support your argument because it's not common (an understatement) for businesses to be a homeless camp, so to use that as an argument for why someone wouldn't want to live next to a business is ridiculous.
>I don't see why this is to be expected, but a business shouldn't expect to pay a fine
Understandable, you don't seem to know what zoning does so it might not be evident to you that commercial zoning is different from residential and available property uses are also different. Residential zoning restricts the occupancy and structures you can have on your property more so than commercial. That's why if you run a store in your house you will be fined unless you keep your customers and vendors under a very low limit and running a store from a commercial lot does not get you fined, for example.
This seems like a wildly specifically bad outcome.. I’m a bit confused why your city allows this? You can call the cops on owners for noise violations, unsafe conditions, etc, etc.
Having lived in a dense walkable place with plentiful stores mingled with residential housing, I can say I’ve never seen that particular problem before.
You are not from the US, are you? The government of big cities here is taken over by people who believe the society we have is to be dismantled.
I live in a big city and have not had this experience whatsoever. The most damaging policies I’ve encountered are a direct byproduct of NIMBYism
What you don't seem to see is that the problem is not the fact that the shop owner let the homeless people stay there.
The problem is the fact that those people were homeless to begin with.
So many people like you seem to just accept the idea that there will always be homeless people—you just don't want to have to see them. Ideally, they should just go die, and decrease the surplus population, right? At least that way they won't be bothering you.
If a few of them are breaking noise ordinances or stealing stuff and the police won't do anything, then complain to the city about that, not about the fact that the shop owner has the compassion to allow them a place to exist.
And if you actually want there to be fewer homeless people overall......then maybe, just maybe, you might have to accept fewer zoning regulations that raise the price of housing.
Why would you think that I don't see that the homeless are a problem? They are a huge problem and I don't really care what happens to them just as they don't care what happens to me but yes, they should not be allowed to camp on the streets in my city.
Where do you think they should go, then?
Are you willing to see the city pay to house them?
Because otherwise, you're basically saying "I don't think the fact that they're homeless is a problem; I think the fact that I have to see them be homeless is a problem."
Wherever it's legal for them to do what they do. In my city it's illegal to camp on the streets. And yes, I don't think the fact that they are homeless is a problem, the fact that they harass citizens with the permission of the government is.
So you're really just full on board with the Ebenezer Scrooge "if they would rather die, then let them get on with it!" school of thought, then, huh?
It's been a while since I had to break out the I Don't Know How To Tell You You Should Care About Other People; most people at least pretend that they're not absolute moral voids.
You should care about other people, I think: the people who live in American cities and being harassed by homeless. Nobody is above the law, being on drugs or mentally ill is not an excuse. And if you cared about the homeless, you'd understand than continuing with shielding them from the law is not going to end with the people saying "Fuck the laws and the Constitution, let them be themselves!".
The city should have gone after the property owner, they are responsible for any encampments on their property, and nuisance is definitely included in that, even here in liberal Seattle, and let’s not get into liability (your fire insurance has to cover them, so your insurance company gets involved and jacks your rates up really high). So in Seattle if they setup on private property, the property owner is in big trouble, so they mostly setup on public land.
I would not like to live like this. I don't believe that relaxed zoning laws would make a situation like this more likely.
You realize homes are also private property right? You can have a shitty neighbor like the one described that is also enabled by the fact that they're in their own home. That doesn't justify what they're doing, but your argument against stores as "private property" doesn't hold water.
I could, but most people, even the ones who advocate for "homeless rights" don't want to live in a homeless camp. They are fine with letting others though.
That sounds awful. Did you take them to civil court or explore doing so?
I did explore it, but there is not much to do without police reports. I had only reports for theft but those were not investigated, could not get noise reports as the cops would not come or come during daytime when the homeless went off the camp.
The trick is to report them as being illegal landlords ;)
Only half-joking.
I had been reporting the property to code every week - it's indeed against the law to allow people to live in a commercial property. The code officer they've sent was unable to find people living on the property each time, she said that the people hanging around the property are just guests of the of the owner and don't live there.
Did you talk to the store owner about the problem?
For perspective I didn't even learn to drive till 30 so I know the pros and cons of walkability.
And since learning I shifted firmly into car dependent camp and regret that we bought a house with 60 walkscore and not say 20.
First of all convenience is overblown for everything except drinking and children (paradoxically - people go to the burbs for kids but it must be pretty bad for those who can't drive). Shopping for groceries on foot every other day is a waste of time. Local stores for hardware, clothes etc. are typically more expensive with worse quality and selection. Anything remotely specialized like a climbing gym or a bar that is a good place for dancing is unlikely to be walking distance unless you optimize for it, so you need a car or transit - slow and inconvenient. Restaurants in the US are expensive.. sure if I had a Tokyo style joint nearby maybe, otherwise going out is not a daily thing and if prefer variety, so the walking options quickly lose appeal. The only thing it's unquestionably better for is going to a local bar to drink a beer or eight. I lived blocks from Granville st in Vancouver when I was 25, that was great. Maybe a local park would be nice too, but suburbs do have those. Driving everywhere, as I found out, is just better for everything else.
The second, in the US it filters out the wrong kind of people to a large degree. Given non-existent law enforcement for property crime and disorder in many cities, this is why I suspect people protect their low density. Places where people have to drive, and places without services, will have many fewer people of the kind that cause crime and disorder. The economic lower middle gets caught in the crossfire - I have lived next to affordable housing and I believe 95% of the people there are probably great, but they didn't enforce the law on the other 5%, so if they tried to build anything affordable next to me i would fight it tooth and nail.
> It’s just like… why?! I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s no downside to being able to top off on milk and eggs by taking a leisurely stroll on a sunny Saturday morning. That sounds downright idyllic.
Traffic? Parking?
Yesterday I went to a neighborhood corner coffee shop that I'd never been to before. They had a little parking lot across the street that was full (and a disaster, I had to back out onto the street), so I had to park around the block in front of someone's house. All the street parking near the shop was full.
I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away
There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away." I can literally drive all the way across my metro area in about 45 minutes, passing dozens and dozens of grocery stores, coffee shops, and restaurants during the journey. A 45 min drive is a huge distance.
Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.
The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.
No one is going across town for the coffee in either case. I’m willing to bet time to coffee is about 5 minutes for the SUV driving say Denver suburbanite as it is for the walking Tokyo urban dweller. Same temporal convenience just different scale based on the predominant mode of transportation.
Also median commute times in car dominant cities are usually less than 30 mins. The narrative of people driving far distances to work represents a few (loud) supercommuters in most american cities. What people forget about with suburban sprawl is that jobs have sprawled as much as housing; oftentimes the old downtown is not even the major job center any longer for the region, a vestigial center whether the city realizes it or not (many a cases of new build american hub and spoke rail networks to long faded downtowns only because that’s how it used to be done not because that is reflective of most people’s travel patterns today. hence poor ridership capture of many of these newer networks).
Commute times in large transit oriented cities are often longer with metros averaging less than 20mph, an hour or more is not unheard of in places like nyc. It is really hard to beat the convenience offered by a car and a say flyover american city barely 25 miles wide with 60mph point to point travel pretty much everywhere at any time. That is why people drive almost exclusively in those places.
As someone who has lived in public transportation heavy cities, and currently lives in a flyover American city where we all drive everywhere, I strongly disagree. I live in a very popular commuter suburb of a larger American city, and the commute is about 30 minutes in the best case scenario. If you are in rush hour, or there is an accident (and there inevitably is), it pushes 45-60.
But the bigger point is that even for a similar amount of time, driving is far less convenient than public transportation. Cars demand your full attention. Public transportation does not. I can sleep on the bus or train. I can read. I can work. In the car my options are limited to music/podcasts/audiobooks. Cars are extremely expensive. They are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and expensive to insure. Cars are deadly. Driving is the single riskiest thing people do with regularity, by a large margin. Cars are less efficient and have more externalities. They require more space for roads and parking, they produce more pollution, in terms of both greenhouse gasses and noise. They are also possibly the single biggest factor in the obesity crisis. Part of the reason America is among the fattest countries in the world is because a trip to anywhere requires driving there, where in many other countries people walk or ride their bike to many places the need to go to.
It’s very hard to live in a place with proper, functional urban design and public transportation, and walk away preferring car-centric culture.
> The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.
You did it again. There nowhere in the US where you need to "[cart] a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee." Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").
That kind of black-and-white thinking does no one any good. And it's probably a big part of the reason why, like you said above, you "can’t wrap [your] head around it". You're not going to understand things without empathizing (or at least reasonably hypothesizing) about the other group's feelings and experiences.
> Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.
So? No American city is going to be bulldozed to build a clone that works like Tokyo, even assuming the Americans want to make the same tradeoffs the people of Tokyo make. If you want to any progress towards walkability, you're going to have to make serious compromises away from that ideal.
If you open up zoning to mixed density with light commercial, get rid of parking minimums, and design infrastructure that's walkable and bikeable, you don't need to intentionally bulldoze and rebuild any city from scratch. Instead people and companies will do it piecemeal because it makes sense to. New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.
> If you open up zoning to mixed density with light commercial, get rid of parking minimums, and design infrastructure that's walkable and bikeable, you don't need to intentionally bulldoze and rebuild any city from scratch. Instead people and companies will do it piecemeal because it makes sense to.
You should be smarter than that because...
> New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.
...situations like are a nuisance and engender resistance. Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.
So I think "get rid of parking minimums" is actually a pretty bad idea. You need parking minimums (but maybe not as large as is typical nowadays), plus zealous parking enforcement, to control the negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood.
> Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.
This doesn't feel like a realistic scenario at all. A "suddenly very popular coffee shop" or "several shops opening close to each other" over here wouldn't significantly affect parking/traffic for several reasons. 1. a coffee shop's capacity (as in: seating, queue times) is already much smaller than parking space nearby; 2. of people in the queue, most will be locals already; 3. "it's hard to park nearby" by itself acts as a filter that naturally pulls people either to shops closer to their location, or to public transport.
There's just no such thing as "people from outside my neighborhood going out of their way to drive to the local XYZ". And places that _do_ want wider audience like fancier restaurants or wholesale won't pick a middle of the neighborhood to set up even if they were allowed to.
Also, we may be having different definitions of a quiet street. If anything, traffic in a mostly-residential area should decrease since locals could do things like small groceries without using a car?
It's ridiculous to need to drive at all, and just about anything called an SUV or crossover is a good deal larger than it needs to be and certainly big relative to the cars of the 80s, 90s, and even 00s.
I say this living in a suburb and driving a crossover myself. The charms of this lifestyle are not lost on me, but I would kill to have consistent coverage of proper sidewalks, bike paths, and corner shops. I'd love to not need the car at all.
And no bulldozing is necessary. Just tweak zoning to allow small businesses and people will organically start live-in corner shops.
Good thing there are microcenters on every corner.
If thats not your thing, Walmarts, or Stop and Shops, you know for people who don’t want to spend their whole pay check on a single meal worth of food (we exist)
> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").
A 1990s Ford Explorer weighs around 4000 lbs. That was considered big at the time. A current one is a couple hundred pounds heavier, a Ford Edge around the same, Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V a little less but still almost 4000 lbs. By contrast a 1990s sedan was generally under 3000 lbs with ~2400 lbs being pretty common.
The main difference isn't that SUVs got smaller, it's that sedans got bigger. A 1989 Honda Accord was ~2500 lbs, the 1990s ones were ~2800 lbs, the current ones are well over 3000 lbs.
A lot more people cone out of accidents in modern Accords without a scratch than their 1989 counterparts.
That's more because of things like airbags and crumple zones than bigger cars. Weight doesn't help you when you hit an overpass or a utility pole, and is only a relative advantage when you hit another car, so the average going up doesn't help anybody.
I’m sorry, would you prefer lighter cars with fewer (heavy) safety features? I’m not opposed to that with informed consent from the customers, however I’m not sure what point you’re making
Modern cars are heavier primarily because they're bigger, not because they have modern safety features. How much do you expect airbags actually weigh?
> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore
dunno what america you're in. unless your point is they're big pickup trucks now?
True body-on-frame SUVs are definitely much less common then they were at their peak around the turn of the millennium as buyers moved to either unibody crossover SUVs or quad-cab pickups. That said, I have no idea what the point making that distinction was as it really doesn't matter in this context.
> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore.
I know this isn't your main point but I was sadly laughing at that sentence. Pretty much anywhere I go in the U.S. there are giant SUVs. Plus crossovers and even sedans are just getting bigger, with smaller cars like subcompacts being phased out and compact cars growing in size.
> Traffic?
The premise of these places is that it's on your way. That's not any more traffic, it's just the people already passing by stopping there momentarily.
> Parking?
That's this:
> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
You would also get things like part-time shops. You have someone with a work-from-home job and they put out a sign in front of their house saying you can get coffee and food there. They mainly get a few customers during the morning rush and a few more at lunchtime and do the work-from-home job the rest of the day.
Those would be everywhere if it was allowed, and they wouldn't even need parking lots because they wouldn't have enough simultaneous customers to fill one and there would generally be one within walking distance of any given place anyway.
> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
>> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
> This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
No, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. What I'm saying is a busy coffee shop has negative externalites on its surrounding neighborhood (traffic, people parking in front of your house all the time). That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.
So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
>> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
> Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
Like have you lived in a suburb? Shops aren't usually walkable, but they're not "concentrated downtown" either. The middle is totally an option, and that's probably the usual situation. I don't know why people are gravitating to this false dichotomy (walkable OR 45min away, NO in-between). Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
> That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.
As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.
Your premise is that the median one couldn't survive unless it was inundated, but that's contrary to all the currently operating ones in locations where that isn't happening.
> So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
What really happens is that people look at the traffic at one when there is a severe constraint on where they can be built and expect that to happen everywhere without that constraint, when the constraint is the reason for the traffic being concentrated in that one place to begin with.
> Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
The problem is the example was "45 minutes" which is actually pretty excessive, whereas the overall issue is "have to sit in traffic or circle to find parking to get there".
And then isn't your contention here contrary to your previous premise? If there is no traffic with that number of shops, what result when there are more, smaller shops so that each one has less traffic than that?
> As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.
That's not actually guaranteed - it is possible for all or most of them to go out of business because of over-expansion - the key is that there are other sources of coffee that they're also competing against.
> That's not actually guaranteed - it is possible for all or most of them to go out of business because of over-expansion - the key is that there are other sources of coffee that they're also competing against.
Suppose there are currently 5 coffee shops because the area zoned to allow them is already saturated, and then you rezone to allow them in other areas.
If the maximum number that can be sustained is still 5 because the zoning wasn't actually the constraint to begin with then either no one will build another one or someone will, there will be 6+ until some of them go out of business, and then there will be 5 again which is back to being sustainable. You still don't end up with 0.
If the zoning was the thing preventing there from sustainably being more than 5 then rezoning allows there to be e.g. 10. Then if there are 11+, some go out of business until there are 10.
About the closest approximation you could get to that is if you could sustain 5 but had 6+ and then several of them went out of business simultaneously, before the first one's exit could save the second or third one. But that's just a temporary condition where you have e.g. 3 in an area that can support 5 or more until people notice that the area is underserved and sustainably open more.
And that has little to do with zoning except that changing the zoning could allow the sustainable number to increase. If the number was 5 with the existing zoning and you don't change it, someone could still open a 6th downtown where that isn't sustainable and then have the temporary condition when there are less than the sustainable number if more than one of the 6 fail simultaneously.
Cars are the most sensitive form of transport to both traffic and parking, and even then the only other form of transport I can think of where parking is an issue is biking. If you could walk or take public transit, there would be no need to park, and traffic would be much lower because much less space is needed per commuter. Wider roads and more parking spaces are easy to point to as solutions but the real problem is subpar, uncomfortable, or even non-existent public transportation.
> but then they might not be economically viable
I want a source for this. I've never been to Tokyo or Amsterdam, but everyone I know who's been there describe the zoning working exactly this way and it seems economically viable.
>> A 45 min drive is a huge distance.
Not in Cambridge, Massachusetts traffic!
Somehow all our neighborhood corner stores, cafes, village centers, and such seem to get by without a huge amount of parking. Likely because there's bus service and lots of housing within walking distance and actual bike lanes and such to get around.
The street parking issue is solved by making people pay for it, but people insist on their right to be given free space on public streets.
It’d also help if people in single family houses and some townhouses used their garage for its intended purpose. In my neighborhood the number of cars parked on the street would drop by 80-90% if people sold or dumpstered the mountains of junk sitting in their garages and parked their cars in there.
You don't need to worry about traffic or parking when you take a leisurely stroll to the store.
In my experience I’ve come to realize there is a segment of the population who is against any kind of change at all, of any kind. Even if they have complaints, if action is taken to address that complaint, they will complain about the action.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away
I live far enough out of DC where there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me. On the way to my parent’s house, there’s a bison farm. But I’m also a 5 minute drive to the closest strip mall (which has a CVS and several restaurants, both sit down and fast food). The ALDI is 10 minutes, and almost everything else, including the Apple Store, is within 15.
There are some suburbs where it’s 30 minutes to get to essentials, but most aren’t like that. Heck, the average one-way commute to work in Dallas Texas is under 30 minutes.
Even if we ignore freeways and such, a 15 minute drive at 30 mph is about 7 miles, which is a circle containing 176 square miles - or the entirety of the city of New Orleans or Denver.
A 15 minute walk is about a mile, so that's a 3.14159 sq mile circle - that's a small town or a neighborhood or two.
As much as I love going to bat for New Orleans, I will point out that people drive to Metairie all the time for things. The eastern part of New Orleans is also very spread out. (It's also not the 24/7 city it was before the pandemic.) A better comparison would be the towns on the Northshore.
It all boils down to perceived drop in home values. It is a vicious cycle that feeds on itself. Less supply, higher prices, bigger mortgages, more NIMBY to prevent drop in home values.
Any real estate agent will tell you what people actually want. Ask one who's been around for a while, in an unofficial setting over drinks. Ask what questions people ask. Ask what they follow up on. Really dig into it. You'll realize that while nobody likes commuting, a commute is the price one pays for those other things people want that you'll hear about over those drinks. It'll give you a lot to think about, i promise.
This is 1000% the truth - nobody passes up a house because there's a similar one further away.
You make it sound so charming, but as an example there’s a rural-ish neighborhood nearby that has a commercial lot which they’re going to put a 24 hour convenience store in. And all the neighbors are freaking out about it because of the clientele and noise they’re worried it will bring in.
I would also be a bit alarmed by a 24h convenience store, but that's quite a different thing than a normal-business-hours small grocer or similar.
why alarmed? do you live in Meth-town?
I'd love more 24/7 options around, even if it's just a 7/11
To be fair, in the US the places able to support 24 hour stores do tend to be places with higher quantities of drug use and homelessness.
What the 24/7 store is really depends on the area, it's not causal but revealing.
Many small towns have a 24hr gas station that doubles as a convenience store/minor grocery and they're often quite nice, clean, and quiet.
I'd like more 24/7 options too but it can be a problem. For example, there's a 24/7 7/11 in downtown Austin, TX that has had many crime issues and is in a generally nice area.
People like that but no existing person tolerates the potential of having it next door. 4am deliveries. Plates clinking. People making noise. Commercial dumpster operations. Customers taking up all the parking including illegally in your private parking space. There are certain potential disruptions you get living there 24/7 that you don’t get stopping by for 20 mins once a week contributing to that disruption.
Not saying these people are right or wrong. Just that it isn’t so black and white an issue. It is one thing when a place is already “lively” and tacitly accepting of all that comes with that vs going into that especially when it is unknown and easy to just say ‘no’ before seeing it how it may play out.
Someone imagining they are able to hear plates clinking from several buildings away may have issues that extend beyond having chosen to live next to a restaurant.
Allowing cafes into neighborhoods doesn't mean mandating you turn your living room into one.
Eh, I think it’s a bullshit complaint too - but you can absolutely hear a commercial kitchen in operation a few buildings away if the doors or windows are open on a summer day.
I personally find it quite pleasant - and if not I can just shut my damn window - but many others apparently get super annoyed at even the tiniest of potential inconveniences.
You can argue that but someone might stand up at that zoning review meeting and say well what if they allow outdoor seating in the future. Or what if they throw out takeout trash in my yard. Or what if the customers fill up my trashcan and I can’t put any in myself. Or they are double parking my driveway making it hard for my mother to back out.
At the end of the day, it is going to cause friction something happening somewhere there wasn’t something going on previously. Not saying these people are right or wrong, just that they have grievances that are based on real issues, however big they may be in the grand scheme of things, that they may value more than the prospects of an $8 latte a few minutes sooner than the one already down the road at the strip mall in a sort of containment zone.
> what if they allow outdoor seating in the future
God forbid.
What if my neighbor has a BBQ?
Because when I buy a house in a quiet neighborhood I don't want a cafe or bar open right next to my bedroom window? Is this actually mystifying? Everyone wants the shops near, but not too near, but you can't zone for that; someone will be too near.
In Seattle I lived on the 20th floor above a bar and it still awoke me some nights.
Because absolutely no city wants to become Houston? The USA doesn’t have great examples, and we aren’t Japan. Houston not being walkable at all probably has a lot to do with the fear.
I live in a walkable neighborhood in Seattle and had to pay for it. Also lived in Lausanne and Beijing so I still know what I’m missing.
Places full of single family houses with essentials being 30 minutes away don't tend to stay like that for long. They are great business opportunities for developers of supermarkets, malls and the like. You buy some cheap land, build some cheap commercial low-rises, and rake cash as the tenants come flooding in.
I wish people would give examples of these places so we could look at them!
Summerlin, NV
There's not a single home in Summerlin, NV that's more than a 10 minute drive from a large supermarket. Majority of the houses are less than 5 minutes drive.
Sorry, I misread. I was giving an example of "They are great business opportunities for developers of supermarkets, malls and the like.", not of an isolated neighborhood.
what is so important about being able to walk to a store? take 1 weekly trip to walmart or costco and you’re done shopping for the week
my soulless suburb has lots of parks, trails, and friends and neighbors houses for me to walk to, why do i need a commercial development in the middle of this?
Being able to make small grocery trips means less spoiled perishables (only buy what you plan to use right away) and more flexibility when cooking, since it’s no big deal to go grab whatever it is that you need in the moment. It also prevents the annoyance of realizing you forgot that one thing last week’s trip, which is just going to have to wait until next week’s trip.
This is how it is in the sleepy residential parts of Tokyo. An interesting knock-on effect is smaller, simpler, cheaper refrigerators since you don’t need to store a ton of refrigerated goods for long periods when groceries are within arm’s reach.
Well said. I wonder about this too in my city (Australia). Apparently many people think "living the dream" is having an excessively large copy-pasted house in a copy-pasted suburb in the middle of nowhere, with no amenities, no green/community space, and you have to drive for an hour to get anywhere. It sounds like a dystopian lifestyle to me.
Or, you could live in a somewhat smaller residence where you actually have access to the things that make life good. But god forbid there's a train nearby that increases the sound by 10dB every 10 minutes and brings in all those dodgy (i.e. working class) people! Grrr functional society makes me angry!!
> access to the things that make life good
Could it be possible that what makes life good is subjective and people have different enjoyments and hobbies?
Having space for a woodworking shop or a large garden or a backyard pool or any other such things bring joy to some people. Not everyone wants to live in an apartment in Manhattan.
> access to the things that make life good.
This is a strange opinion to me and I guess it's just "the divide". The things that make life good to me, of the things that change with home location, are peace/quiet, privacy, safety, meditative aspects, nature, space to host and play and have kids run around. Hearing that a city block contains "the things that make life good" is kind of baffling. Driving time is suboptimal but it's nowhere near an hour and it's worthwhile.
The suburbs I'm talking about do not really have nature or space to play. They are by no means rural, but endless seas of identical streets and houses. They are basically the worst of both worlds (no nature and no accessibility), with the advantage of a little extra space. And often they don't have shops either because again, they're so far from anything. Just sad places in my opinion.
Also, there is such thing as medium density, in between "city block" and "endless houses". No one seems to want to acknowledge this exists and may be a good option. I'm fortunate to live in a medium density area and I think it's very pleasant. It is absolutely not a city block but there's a train station 1 minute away and a local shopping/community precinct 10 minutes away (by walking). A decent amount of green space, and it seems to be popular with couples and small families. But suburbs like this seem to be rare and that's my point.
Some people just don't want anything to change ever.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away.
Please tell me where in the US, aside from very remote desert areas, can you possibly be 45m (min or mile? either way) away from essentials.
Eh, I live in a fairly typical midwest suburb and I don't have access to walkable groceries. But my local grocery store is about a 5 min drive.
Is that a "five mile" drive or is that literally five minutes from car start to car park?
Because I can get about 2 miles by car in that time, if I'm really honest about stop lights and such.
'Walkable' has been heavily influenced by the car culture we live in.
Too many, crossing an intersection with a traffic light makes that commute unwalkable. In my suburbia, going from one shop to another 5 doors down requires driving.
well yeah the point is that it would be so nice to have
Please give an example of somewhere that has groceries 30 minutes away and is denying some small business to move in near by. This makes it sound like you have never seen a suburb and are describing some extremely rural area.
This “practicing without a license” tactic has been used before. This case where a city fined someone for making a mathematical model of traffic lights. [ij](https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...) This will keep happening unless there are consequences for those in government that abuse their authority.
It's a common tactic to gain state enforcement of gate keeping and protectionism. It's extremely useful at both preventing individuals from acting for themselves but also limiting individuals from recourse against the misdeeds of those who are licensed. See also, The Licensing Racket by Rebecca Haw Allensworth: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217564698-the-licensing-...
> filed a complaint with the California State Bar, saying that I was practicing law without a license
California gave birth to anti-SLAPP torts for a reason I guess.[1] Then you can have a mini-litigation about litigation, which would prove the NIMBY wrong for their “complaint” or the state bar wrong for failing to screen frivolous or malicious use of their processes.
For some reason this article brought home to me that these NIMBYs are expressing hostility to neighbors, community and to the idea that people should have a place to live. I wonder if they realize or even consider the implications of their positions.
[1] https://www.sfbar.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/anti-slapp....
> one of them filed a complaint with the California State Bar, saying that I was practicing law without a license. They said because I’m not an attorney (which is true), I was offering “legal analysis,” which only licensed attorneys are allowed to do.
Do lawyers still really believe they can just throw some legal jargon at laypeople and we will just get confused and back down? Like not only do we have every single law and legal precedent on a device in our pocket, we also have AI's that can instantly answer questions. I am sure shit like that might have worked before 2010 when you would have to scramble to figure out if what they were saying was true or not, but it just seems antiquated to attempt it nowadays.
There are a lot of old laws on the books about licensing that go beyond legal advice.
In many places it’s illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you match certain criteria, such as being a licensed engineer or working for a company in the industry that can oversee your work in a specified capacity.
There was a famous case where someone tried to get some attention about a traffic problem at an intersection in their city. They included a drawing of the intersection. The politicians involved didn’t like person so they tried to retaliate by going after the person for doing civil engineering work (aka making a drawing of a road) without an engineering license.
The worst part is that they actually might have had a case under the licensing laws. The licensing laws are outdated and mostly unenforced, but they’re out there. If you call yourself a software engineer you might be breaking a law in your location.
> In many places it’s illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you match certain criteria, such as being a licensed engineer or working for a company in the industry that can oversee your work in a specified capacity.
that is the case in most countries. the US is an outlier in the First World in that sense.
only country where you could be called a Sandwich Engineer with a straight face and not get sued.
> only country where you could be called a Sandwich Engineer with a straight face and not get sued.
Is the implication that being sued for calling yourself a "sandwich engineer" is a desirable state of society?
The aftermath of the regulatory capture involved in credentialing and licensing sandwich engineering would be funny
Also hilarious to think you can't offer "legal analysis" without a license. As long as you don't do it for hire or while representing yourself as an attorney, the first amendment protects your right to offer your legal analysis of something. The exceptions are either are in regards to offering commercial services or representation without a license, not the underlying speech.
This is probably the one issue that has the biggest online/offline divide. Online, I hear nothing but YIMBY-ism. Is there any centralized online NIMBY advocacy?
nobody thinks they're a nimby. every nimby ever will tell you they aren't against development, they just don't think this project is right for this neighbourhood.
if there was any centralized advocacy, they'd have to confront the fact that they all want development to happen in each other's backyards and it would expose the lie.
Here's where I come out and maybe others end up in the same scenario.
I think it's definitely a good thing to build up more high density housing. I've got no complaints there.
However, a major problem we are having locally is that while that local housing is being built like gangbusters, the infrastructure to support that housing, such as the roads and public transport, hasn't been upgraded in tandem. 10 years ago, I could drive to work in 20 minutes. Today during rush hour it's a 40 to 60 minute affair. It's start/stop traffic through the neighborhood because there's no buses, interstate, etc to service the area where all the growth is happening.
It also doesn't help that promised projects, like new parks, have been stuck in limbo for the last 15 years with more than a few proposals to try and turn that land into new housing developments.
What I'm saying is housing is important and nice, but we actually need public utilities to be upgraded and to grow with the housing increase. It's untenable to add 10,000 housing units into an area originally designed to service 1000.
>because there's no buses, interstate, etc to service the area where all the growth is happening.
right, it'd be great if that stuff could be built to support the housing before the housing gets built. but you can't do that either without people having a fit about wasting money building a road to nowhere, or buses just being for homeless people. the NIMBYism doesn't just apply to housing, it applies to building literally anything. often because people think they can block new housing development by opposing the infrastructure that might support it.
nothing about YIMBY is about opposing infrastructure development. we need to build all the things that humans need to exist - housing, infrastructure, recreation, businesses. build it all.
"we shouldn't build any housing until there's a highway" is just another variant of "i support housing, just not here". opposing housing because there's no bus route is still opposing housing. those are fixable problems.
> those are fixable problems.
They are fixable problems that very clearly are not being fixed here.
I might have a different attitude if new bus routes or highways were being built in response to the new housing that's gone in, but like I've said, we've failed to build infrastructure for the massive expansion we've seen in the last 10 years.
Why should I think it's a good thing to build another 1000 units of housing when none of the infrastructure is able to handle the current population? It's not a case of "busses to nowhere" it's a case of "we are filled to the gill and they want to add even more people".
My kid's school, for example, has started paving over the playground and installing trailers in order to accommodate the kids coming in. Instead of building a new school for all the new housing, we have exactly the same schools and school buildings that we had when I first moved here.
And I should say, we have even more housing planned and in construction right now all around me. That's all been approved yet I've not heard or seen a peep about adding another school, bus, etc.
That's why I have a hard time seeing it as NIMBY.
When the new people are actually living in the area and paying property taxes, then there will be enough money to build new schools, pave roads, etc. There's a delay in other words.
But why?
None of this should be unexpected. All construction requires permits so you know ahead of time what's being built and almost certainly can just extrapolate out how many new kids will be in the school system based on the current rates.
It's like how a bunch of cities approve new commercial construction but then don't also don't fast-track some residential construction; you're just going to generate traffic because nobody can live close to work.
School financing needs drives a lot of local government decisions. It's an invisible force like gravity. Approving office buildings and retail stores adds tax revenue without adding to school district costs (enrolling students). Approving housing construction means more students to absorb.
The public cannot directly vote to reject the electric company's price increases, or more expensive groceries, or car dealers charging MSRP. Requiring voters to directly approve school taxes or public services is great for cost control. But you get what you pay for with austerity: long waits for service, crowding, short hours, lower quality employees. Voters only approve the school levy when the pain of service cuts exceeds the pain of forking over another $$$/yr in tax. While residents choose politicians, over long periods of time politicians choose what mix of residents can move into the area! Think of downtown areas that are purely zoned for office buildings and parking garages.
Ask your town to implement robhit's municipal bonds. Should be automatic but govt often fails our expectations. Perhaps that is the knowledge lost when term limits kick in.
> robhit's municipal bonds.
https://www.google.com/search?q=+robhit%27s+municipal+bonds
What exactly am I search for?
The sibling to your "But why?" comment.
Municipal bonds are meant to address this. The city can borrow against that future tax revenue to build infrastructure today.
> However, a major problem we are having locally is that while that local housing is being built like gangbusters, the infrastructure to support that housing, such as the roads and public transport, hasn't been upgraded in tandem.
The correct response is not to shutdown building more housing. It's for you to get involved and petition your local government to build the infrastructure that you desire.
IMO, people need affordable housing more than you need a short commute. If you don't like that, do something to improve conditions.
I don't know were you're from but in California that is not the focus of YIMBY advocacy. The entire focus of the California RHNA process is to allocate development capacity in proportion to the existing infrastructure of a place.
Idaho, where a lot of the Californians are fleeing to.
How does Idaho's libertarian self-image coexist with whining about the traffic?
I'm not a libertarian. I'm an Idaho native. But really this is just an underscore of why libertarian ideals are dumb. Some government is necessary and those are basic things like public roads and schools.
It may be surprising, but Idaho actually had pretty decent infrastructure throughout my youth. This "defund everything" attitude is relatively new to idaho politics. Idaho's drift into libertarianism started around the tea party era and just slowly has gotten worse since then.
I’m also an Idaho native and you’re spot-on. It’s been sad to see our political zeitgeist rapidly diverge from anything remotely reasonable.
I generally consider myself a YIMBY but I think you make a good point and I found it very uncharitable for the parent comment to characterize it as whining. Who wants to spend 10 hours a week in traffic?
Yeah, I don't think the commentators here realize how fast Idaho has grown. There are some NIMBY attitudes here, but by and large we do just greenlight almost all development.
I'm from south central Idaho and it's really astonishing to see how much growth has happened in both poky and Burley. But basically all the cities I'm familiar with are also operating with roughly the same infrastructure they had when I was a kid, and that's the problem. Idaho isn't upgrading that infrastructure. Instead they keep finding inventive ways to keep cutting taxes and ignoring infrastructure.
Are you suggesting libertarians believe the government should not build infrastructure?
I realize libertarians by nature have unique viewpoints but that feels like a bit of a mischaracterization. In general libertarians support a smaller government that increases focu on areas where societal collaboration is strictly necessary like roads, police, and firefighters while by default opposing government involvement in other areas beyond baseline rule of law (like NIMBY zoning).
I wasn't suggesting such things. But the juxtaposition amuses me. On the one hand, Ammon Bundy says he can do anything he likes, on public land, because freedom. But on the other: zoning. Which are ideologically opposites.
> like roads, police, and firefighters
There are a lot of libertarians that would argue against all 3 of these things. They'd solve roads with tolls, police with private militia, and firefighters with private companies.
I agree that libertarian ideology is all over the board and that a broad generalization is impossible. That said the majority, and especially the load majority, are against basically all public spending and taxation. To the point where you'll find prominent libertarians arguing for things like private judicial systems.
The problem is that by being reasonable, you eventually arrive at a government that isn't considered libertarian by most libertarians. That's why I call libertarianism dumb. There are basic requirements and regulations needed. We've had governments without them, particularly in the US.
For example, libertarians have no solution to what the USDA solves. Go read up about the quality of milk in early america before the foundation of the USDA. That was a libertarian government. The best solution I've heard from libertarians is reviews and 3rd party verification that you pay for but, as we can see on amazon, those are very easy to manipulate. The force of law is the only thing that really solves problems like people selling unpasteurized and diseased milk. With raw milk we are already seeing the rollback of the enforcement of those laws and the impact of that rollback [1]
[1] https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/health/2026-02-05/r-ba...
The best method of insuring that is charging developers impact fees, which are then used to perform the upgrades you describe. Impact fees are also the primary target of the very weathy and powerful realty lobby groups -- they will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on political campaigns to elect people who will then save them tens of thousands of dollars by removing impact fees. If you ever wonder why most city councils are composed of developers, this is why.
This works when the developers are doing large redevelopments - it works great in suburbs where the developers are converting farmland, for example, because the total number of projects is low.
But when the "developers" are people replacing single-family homes with duplexes, etc, it gets harder to manage.
No, I’m a nimby.
Basically the law should be the newly added properties be more valuable than the existing ones.
Everyone is nimby when it touches the most valuable thing in their life. You'll turn nimby once you buy a house. There's no lie, anyone will be against a landfill or skyscrapers near their house. If you think otherwise, you're lying.
There's nothing wrong with nimby.
I own a house and I don't give a shit what happens on the lot next to mine. Not my property, not my right to complain. So you're wrong. Also kind of rude for calling people liars when they disagree with you.
> Not my property, not my right to complain.
Unless you own a shitty property in a very bad area, you're clearly lying.
What if next door they put in a combination slaughter house and sewage treatment plant? What if they built a gigantic speaker pointed in your direction?
Or made a home for wayward youths who live yelling slurs?
They're either a troll, or a liar.
Public polling is very YIMBY too, they are the majority.
It's just the public input process is a filter that selects for extremely high activation, interest, and agency. So if a democratic vote ruled these decisions, YIMBYism would rule the day, but if you go to the meetings it's NIMBYs who are prevalent.
There are definitely centralized NIMBY groups, like Livable California:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-26/how-to-br...
And there are tons of smaller groups that organize locally, far more than YIMBY groups. In my city there are 2-3 people that typically organize a group, give it a new name, make a web page, and act like they have the backing of everybody in the city when they talk even though most people disagree with them. They've been doing it for decades, and have found many tactics to amplify their voice to be much larger than the sum of the individual group members. YIMBYs are far behind on doing this, though they are getting better at it.
When I first joined NextDoor about a decade ago I dared speak up in favor of a plan to allow apartments to be built on a commercial thoroughfare, and the onslaught of a single person in their replies and direct messages was completely overwhelming (If people here think I'm loquacious, well, I have been far bested in that....). That was my first entrance into city politics, and I quickly learned that this person was in charge of a large "group" that mostly consisted of that single person. They had also been doing it for years, with creative group names, the best of which was probably "Don't Morph the Wharf" which even launched lawsuits to prevent changes to the wharf, delaying necessary maintenance and repairs which a few years ago resulted in the front falling off of the wharf. Individuals can have very undemocratic impacts on local politics.
Ish. Polling is very YIMBY. So long as it is exactly what I want in my back yard. With a lot more leeway granted to what should be allowed in someone else's back yard.
You see this time and time again, what people say they want and how they act are often completely disjointed - and they see no problem with it.
Not sure why people think that no one thinks they're a NIMBY. I am. I bought a house in a neighborhood with a particular character and if it turns into a bunch of urban high-rises, I won't like that.
I would make money, since more high rises means higher price per square foot of land, but I wouldn't like having to move. If someone moves into an area that is zoned for particular types of properties, then new zoning is imposed by outside fiat (not a vote of the people who live there) is not appropriate.
my own brand of yimbyism at least respects that. there's nothing wrong with quiet neighborhoods and loud neighborhoods. the sort of things i want to allow in neighborhoods like yours are locally-owned corner stores and cafes and wine bars and walkable development like cut-throughs and bikelanes. part of the problem with the urbanism debates is that no one has quite figured out how to allow "the good stuff" while keeping out "the bad stuff" because as soon as you upzone, like, walgreens and gas stations and corporate high rises are expected to start showing up. IMO this is something of a "social technology" problem: if we can't figure out how to allow healthy development without stopping unhealthy development, that's a problem to solve systematically.
the other issue with urbanism debates is that everyone's version of Yimbyism is different and you end up not trusting any of them because some people really DO think that you should shut up and allow high rises. They have a moral reason for that too---because housing really is at a shortage and costs too much and some people getting their fancy neighborhoods while others have access to nothing is sorta unfair. But that position is basically untenable, if you try to enforce it you just make an enemy of everyone. But it seems to me that the happy medium, the "build good stuff and not bad (carefully)", is an everyone-wins situation (except for a few crotchety people I suppose). That goal is to break the equilibrium of "some (established) people get to govern what happens to almost-everybody" and replace it with something more generally democratic, but without letting in all the repugnance of how the free market will build things if you don't govern it at all.
(this is all very idealistic of course. The problem is that a random anti-development suburban neighborhood that likes being that way has no incentive to let anyone change at all, and is probably basically right that the urbanism program doesn't benefit them at all. I imagine that only really systematic way around that is to end up in a higher-trust version of society where towns are mostly nice, instead of mostly not, so that people actually crave this sort of development instead of reacting negatively to it.)
I don't have a problem with little corner stores, though I don't think they would be very sustainable in most suburban areas. I just drive for 5-10 mins to a grocery store and get pretty much everything I need there.
The bigger issue I have is that people seem to think that suburban areas can be required to be urbanized, but urban areas could never be suburbanized (from a zoning/setbacks/etc. perspective). That is, they don't seem to think that areas can be forced to change, in general. They seem to think that forcing urbanization is fine, but it's a one-way ratchet.
Ojai banned chains inside the city limits: https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/2021/08/05/ojai-extends-ba...
(Which results in amusing things like a cluster of chains just outside the city limits but ah, well, Americans gonna America.)
and also you'll get like, single-proprietor neon-lit smoke shops.
I always find this 'character' argument disingenuous.
The character of the neighbourhood is only invoked for perceived negative externalities. No one complains when the cracked sidewalks get repaved, or fiber internet lines replace slow copper, when increasing affluence mean that houses are better maintained, when a new sewer line allows people to remove septic tanks. That all changes the character of a neighbourhood, but never gets fought.
Go ahead and commit to the bit, lock in on the character in ALL ways: make sure you fight any alteration to any building, any change in the shade of paint should be fought! Your neighbour replacing their front door? Denied! Replacing a concrete driveway with pavers? unacceptable? Replacing incandescent bulbs with LED? Uncharacteristic! Increasing home values changing who can afford to live there? Not acceptable, gotta sell your home for what you paid to maintain the character!
> If someone moves into an area that is zoned for particular types of properties, then new zoning is imposed by outside fiat (not a vote of the people who live there) is not appropriate.
How small are we going to allow the "area" to be defined? Is it one vote per property owner, or one vote per resident? Can we call a block an area? Who decides the arbitrary boundaries? Do people living on the boundary line get to vote for projects in adjacent properties in adjacent jurisdictions?
Just call NIMBYism what it is, selfish justification for control of other people's property. Your position is - explicitly - that other people and property owners should be made less well off for your comfort. "The Character of the Neighbourhood" is a red herring.
> make sure you fight any alteration to any building, any change in the shade of paint should be fought!
You are now describing an HOA, which overlaps with NIMBYs.
HOA restrictions are at least more defensible than non-HOA NIMBYs. HOAs that don’t allow significant rule changes are reasonable, as you can understand up front what you are buying into. The problem is when HOA rules grow way beyond their original scope or become used as weapons in personal feuds.
> No one complains when the cracked sidewalks get repaved, or fiber internet lines replace slow copper, when increasing affluence mean that houses are better maintained, when a new sewer line allows people to remove septic tanks.
Not sure about the other two, but I've seen groups defending repairs of things that had been broken so long they had become "local institutions".
> Go ahead and commit to the bit, lock in on the character in ALL ways: make sure you fight any alteration to any building, any change in the shade of paint should be fought! Your neighbour replacing their front door? Denied! Replacing a concrete driveway with pavers? unacceptable? Replacing incandescent bulbs with LED? Uncharacteristic! Increasing home values changing who can afford to live there? Not acceptable, gotta sell your home for what you paid to maintain the character!
Buy a historical property in some jurisdictions at everything you listed would happen exactly as described, except maybe the sale price.
Doesn't seem disingenuous. Some places still have "character" in a world increasingly turning into the same strip malls and cookie cutter suburbs. In most small to mid size towns in the US, you can't really tell where you're at without reading signs. They all trend towards the same generic look with the same generic stores. Some towns fight this with varying degrees of success. But the Dollar Generals will not be stopped.
One example that springs to mind for me is Pasadena, CA and their trees. They are (or were) very NIMBY about things which would impact their trees. And I can't blame them. It's one of the few areas in the valley with significant shade thanks to their investment and protection of trees. Their roads were planned around mature existing trees instead of cutting them down as is so common. There's no doubt that Pasadena could have more dense housing if they cut down more trees to make room. It also doesn't seem at all disingenuous to feel like that would be a loss for the "character" of the city and a negative for the collective residents due to rising temperatures and loss of shade.
> Some places still have "character" in a world increasingly turning into the same strip malls and cookie cutter suburbs.
A huge reason for this is arguably NIMBYism. The reason that sort of thing exists is because suburbs very intentionally separate commercial from residential, and will not reconsider as things change. As a result, you end up with putting all the stores on busy roads, and they need parking lots since the people live so far away. All of the homes go in rigidly controlled neighborhoods that are both politically and physically difficult to change. Neighborhoods used to have stores interspersed, old ones, and ones in other countries still do. They don't anymore because we cluster buildings by use in North America, and especially in suburbs.
I'm highlighting the picking and choosing aspect.
Wanna keep everything the same? Sure, argue for that, but that isn't what "character" arguments are about. It is about claiming the things that you like as inside an arbitrary sacred protection line, and the things you don't as outside. Claiming maintaining character if you don't fight every single change is a way of painting over selfish interests in the name of the community. There's nothing wrong with selfish interest, but don't try to hide behind a claim that you are doing it for the greater good, or to preserve something indefinable.
E.g. I could just as easily argue that the "character" of a neighborhood is derived from the affordability and diverse socio-economic backgrounds of residents. Therefore densification, infill, reducing parking for transit lanes and other YIMBY efforts in advancement of those characteristics of the neighborhood are about preserving 'character'.
I'll also point out that your example seems to concern public preservation of nature, not restrictions on private property. There's a stronger argument there since it is a public good. Raising a stink about your neighbor wanting to build an inlaw suite, or - god forbid - a few townhomes, or multifamily housing on their lot is a whole other thing.
> I could just as easily argue that the "character" of a neighborhood is derived from the affordability and diverse socio-economic backgrounds of residents. Therefore densification, infill, reducing parking for transit lanes and other YIMBY efforts in advancement of those characteristics of the neighborhood are about preserving 'character'.
If you argue that the character of a neighborhood is based on all of those things, then keeping them the same would maintain the character. What you seem to advocate is for changing them, which is then changing the character.
> Raising a stink about your neighbor wanting to build an inlaw suite, or - god forbid - a few townhomes, or multifamily housing on their lot is a whole other thing.
If someone builds an apartment complex on land near mine, the builder it is not my "neighbor". The builder is an LLC that owns the land. They do not live there and do not care if traffic gets awful, crime goes up, or quality of life of the pre-existing neighbors gets worse. That's because they aren't our neighbor. They're an LLC.
>If you argue that the character of a neighborhood is based on all of those things, then keeping them the same would maintain the character. What you seem to advocate is for changing them, which is then changing the character.
You totally missed what they're saying, which is that "character" is a nebulous term and can mean anything one wants it to be. For example, it could be argued that you're the one changing the neighborhood by refusing any change, and causing people to be priced out, thus changing the neighborhood's "character".
>If someone builds an apartment complex on land near mine, the builder it is not my "neighbor". The builder is an LLC that owns the land. They do not live there and do not care if traffic gets awful, crime goes up, or quality of life of the pre-existing neighbors gets worse. That's because they aren't our neighbor. They're an LLC.
Why would a builder ever be a neighbor? Your neighbors are the people that live in the complex, and they would indeed care if traffic gets awful. Not wanting to suffer through traffic is a major reason one would pick an apartment complex near one's job.
Ultimately NIMBY's want to control property they do not own to the detriment of others. If you don't want an apartment complex next to your house, then consider buying that land and not building an apartment complex.
GP refers to a "neighbor wanting to build...multifamily housing on their lot". That's referring to the land owner as a neighbor, which I would not do in the case of an LLC. I would refer to the tenants as neighbors, as you say, but GP wants to use that warm and fuzzy term to describe the company that builds the apartment complex.
Ultimately it is selfish interest. Either because they literally have money invested or they are "losing" their childhood. But it's not disingenuous. It's how they actually feel. The area losing its "character" is an accurate description of that. It doesn't matter if I think or you think the mixed use zoning would vastly improve things long term. Doesn't matter how many studies are shown. Things will necessarily change in ways many people don't want and many times there are actual downsides for existing residents to make way for the new. Especially during transition periods.
None of these are arguments from me against new development or pushing past NIMBYs where they become intractable. But if development in Pasadena can maintain as much existing green space as possible and commit to building out more, it would be a lot palatable to the "natives". And I think it would lead to better results for future residents as well. I think it's okay that people want to live in a neighborhood full of quaint small family businesses and resist the Subway and the McDonald's and the Dollar General. But that's "NIMBY" too so where do you draw the line? We live in a capitalist society after all, and the only thing preventing these large mega-corporations from being absolutely everywhere are the few NIMBY willing to say no to it with the little power they have over their slice of the world.
Again,
I'm not saying the feelings are disingenuous or that you can't object on personal grounds.
I'm saying that using 'character' as a catchall for things you personally don't like is disingenuous. It's hard to argue against since it can't be defined.
Don't like multi-story infill? fine. Argue against that specifically and provide reasons that don't rely on something indefinable. Personal feelings about specific issues are a fine reason for arguing since those can be dealt with. I can argue that parking is or isn't an issue and can be mitigated. I can't really argue that the neighborhood isn't losing its character.
I can do the same thing by invoking "problematic" which carries social connotation in the same way that "character of a neighborhood" carries social meaning. If I say an argument is "problematic" you can't really rebut in any meaningful way because you don't even know what I mean. If I say an argument is using false premises or invalid logic, there is a discussion to be had.
I agree that "problematic" is vague. But you have to be a bit dense to not understand what people mean when they say they want to preserve the character of a neighborhood. That means they generally liked it the way it was when they moved in, and they want it to stay largely that way, especially when it comes to zoning changes.
The word problematic differs because it can be applied to any type of thing (not just neighborhoods/zoning) and has no hints as to what it might mean. Everyone understands that people who move somewhere generally want it to stay that type of place. This is why people complain about gentrification, urbanization, and all other types of neighborhood change. They chose to live in that place because that was the kind of place they wanted to live.
I don’t have to be dense to raise my eyebrows at “character”.
It has been invoked in plenty of examples in the name of preventing other cultures and skin colors from a neighborhood, among other less defensible reasons. My parents weren’t sold a house because the seller thought “a good Christian family” would be better suited to the character of the neighborhood. That’s not a rare story. Ask some of your visible minority friends. So if you want others to assume what “character” means, you don’t get to be upset when people assume that your motives are rooted in something ugly. If that isn’t you, don’t be surprised when you find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder with a person like that.
That’s why I prefer if people elaborate what exactly they are objecting to. It keeps you from providing cover for assholes (or exposes you for one), and allows a conversation about what changes might actually be welcome.
Raise your eyebrows all you like! Just don't tell me (a visible minority, as you so eloquently put it) to consult a visible minority.
The notion that a word is poisonous because it is used by people who use it in a different way is silly. According to this logic, democrats should not advocate for "progressive" policies because some of the people who call for progressive policies are actually calling for the confiscation of private property.
It's like saying that vegetarianism is poisonous because Hitler was rumored to have been vegetarian. It's like ad hominem, but dumber.
This is an excellent example of reductio ad absurdum. Well done!
Thank you.
Reductio ad absurdium is a logically valid ment technique to expose a fallacious argument. Since you aren't attacking my premises - is it safe to say that you accept the fallacy in your argument?
/s
I get what you're saying about my comment. But I stand by NIMBYism being essentially a selfish restriction on other's property rights, and 'character' arguments being window dressing for that.
> 'character' arguments being window dressing for that.
You think people don't care about what their neighborhood is like? Given the extraordinarily high costs of moving (thousands in moving costs, tens/hundreds of thousands in realtor fees, weeks of time and disruption, tens of thousands annually in property taxes if basis is reset), it is very understandable that people would care about their neighborhood not being drastically transformed (suburb to high-rises).
When I read the HN thread [1] about how upset people get by people in neighboring apts playing the TV too loud or smoking, it reinforced how much I don't want my neighbor's property to be transformed into an apt complex.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848415
> You think people don't care about what their neighborhood is like?
I'm not saying that at all. I haven't said anything like that. I'm saying that people care so deeply that they come up with horseshit to justify personal wants as community needs instead of just saying it.
I'm saying - repeatedly - that 'character' is a term that is so nebulous as to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. In my sibling comment that you also responded to I pointed out that I can use the "character" of a neighborhood to justify infill, densification, and transit lanes as easily as I can use it to argue against the exact same things. It can, and is, weaponized for really petty gripes.
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't argue for or against changes that affect you. I'm arguing that "character" is a virtuous shield that people use to hide behind the argument of "I personally don't want this, but can't come up with a reason that sounds better than personal preference". The problem with "character of the neighborhood" is that you can't really argue against something that is so loosely defined.
Your complaint about apartments can just be straightforward, you can say that you are concerned with the possible nuisances that can come with dense housing, and you don't trust the current enforcement or rules to allow you to enjoy your property peacefully. That is a perfectly valid reason to oppose something.
> Your complaint about apartments can just be straightforward, you can say that you are concerned with the possible nuisances that can come with dense housing, and you don't trust the current enforcement or rules to allow you to enjoy your property peacefully. That is a perfectly valid reason to oppose something.
Great, that's one of the things I wouldn't want. But I also don't want to live in a city, which is why I didn't move to one. The other aspects of city life (noise all the time higher crime rates, etc.) are what many suburbanites are referring to when they talk about the character of their suburban neighborhoods. It's not hard to grasp, and there's significant overlap in what individual people mean. That's why "character" is used as a shorthand.
Got mine!
Not many people consider themselves a nimby even if they are. I was talking with my mom about how I'll never be able to afford a house and she agrees with me it's insane then says that she voted against allowing apartments near her house because it will bring in more crime, she wasn't connecting the dots.
My thoughts would be - is she right (denser apartments would raise the crime rate), and then - if she is, is there some way it can be mitigated?
The urbanists are very, very vocal.
There's also a lot of them because many people live in cities.
Also many online communities driven by user moderation are controlled by folks with a lot of time to participate and skewed against certain segments of society. Online views often skew wildly from real life.
I've basically given up trying to find community online. Talking with real people is so much more rewarding and less frustrating.
The urbanists are vocal online because of something they're unsatisfied with in their life - if you talk to them and dig into it, they're complaining about a lack, a lack that they think would be filled if they could just afford to live in NY or Europe (because they assume everyone in NY lives like Friends or something).
If instead of trying to solve loneliness through urban development they dedicated their efforts to "touching grass/concrete" and got to know their community - suddenly they'd discover they have the power to urbanize - but do they still have the desire?
Yes, there are plenty. They don't call themselves NIMBY though. Usually it's stuff like opposing gentrification, protecting the environment/green spaces, or protecting historical areas. The net effect is NIMBY.
I totally get it. People don't like change - I certainly don't. Especially when it changes the neighborhood you're living in.
It’s not “centralized” (because as the sibling comment noted, nobody thinks they’re a NIMBY, they just want to stop development in their town), but some of it happens on Facebook and NextDoor. I think a lot more happens face-to-face at the sort of activities that older and retired people hang out at though.
Oh they're all over Nextdoor and local mailing lists and Facebook groups. They organize in small local communities though, different model from yimby types who band together in cross-regional interest groups instead.
YIMBYs in my area are almost exclusively terminally online young adults who are bitter that they can't afford to live precisely where they like with their single 20-something income, and basically want to make desirable areas more affordable (aka less desirable) so they can move in. The worst of them are openly hostile to anyone who made the apparent mistake of choosing to live in an upper income area.
I am pretty much in favor of people being able to do what they want with their properties, as long as they are responsible for any externalities the changes create, and I still largely find these groups insufferable (in case you couldn't tell from the paragraph above).
NIMBYs are mostly people who have other things to do with their day than agitate to make their neighborhood worse (where worse is a change from the status quo, which they presumably are at least okay with given they live in the neighborhood), so you don't hear much from them most of the time.
In short, there is no need for advocacy for the status quo unless someone is attempting to modify it, as it just continues on by default.
This is amusing, because the usual NIMBY argument I hear is about "gentrification", i.e. it makes the neighborhood better and that's bad.
terminally online young adults who are bitter that they can't afford to live precisely where they like
More accurately: they would like to live in a particular location, the owner of that location would like to sell or rent it to them, but a third party wants to forcibly prevent that transaction.
> This is amusing, because the usual NIMBY argument I hear is about "gentrification", i.e. it makes the neighborhood better and that's bad.
Change is bad as far as existing residents are concerned, which is why external YIMBYs are particularly annoying. I live in a pretty nice area so gentrification isn't really possible, and the people who want to live there but can't afford to are the ones agitating for change.
> More accurately: they would like to live in a particular location, the owner of that location would like to sell or rent it to them, but a third party wants to forcibly prevent that transaction.
No, the accurate description in CA (and YIMBYs are trying to replicate this elsewhere) is that a group of people collectively decided how land can be used in their area, and people who disagree are going over their head to change the rules.
> This is amusing, because the usual NIMBY argument I hear is about "gentrification", i.e. it makes the neighborhood better and that's bad.
It's just a current argument that flies well in the existing political climate; if that climate were to change they'd have another one.
Housing density sucks.
It makes people unable to do anything themselves because they don't have space.
It gives investor groups exclusive power over housing and locks even people who own into rent-like housing association fees.
It removes people even further from nature.
It drives up costs.
Why don't we let people who like living in dense housing build and live in dense housing? And leave those who don't in peace? Right now we only do the second one but make the first one illegal.
Sure, we do let people do that. The thing that's objectionable is when a suburban neighborhood is rezoned by people who live hundreds of miles away, and developers get the green light to build towers there. Why do people who don't live in a place think they're entitled to change the zoning of that place?
What's to stop them from saying that it should now be zoned for industrial, and a chemical treatment plant can open up next door to a school? It's the same line of thinking.
> Why do people who don't live in a place think they're entitled to change the zoning of that place?
Why do people who don't own the land think they're entitled to tell the actual owners what they can build?
> It's the same line of thinking.
It is not. This is a made up slippery slope.
When someone buys land, they should be allowed to do whatever they want to do to it, subject to the zoning laws that were in effect at the time of purchase, or passed by a majority of voters in that area after purchase.
State law supersedes local law. These new purchasers would like cities to follow the law.
If you're talking about CA's state laws, you're right that they supersede local laws. You'll notice that I used the word "should" in my comment, indicating a normative view. I think CA's state legislators have passed many laws that were unwise, including several that voters have had to undo via constitutional amendments.
While I would place state laws passed by popular vote above local laws passed by popular vote, I would say that laws passed by representatives, without much awareness of voters that this was their intention, should not necessarily be put above local laws passed by voters themselves.
A Reddit-style reply feels apropos here: "That's just like...your opinion man."
And in this case "local laws passed by voters themselves" are one of the causes of the state's housing crisis. I think the state has a legitimate interest in overriding local laws here.
Like if you don't want high density in your neighborhood, buy all the houses. Form a neighborhood association and buy every house that's put up for sale. When selling properties, include covenants restricting resale to a developer, or giving the association first right of refusal. Spend your own money. Don't use state violence to achieve private ends.
"state violence", what an awesome way to hyperbolize! I'll have to remember this next time there's a law I don't like.
Is it wrong? If I try to build an apartment building on land I legally own in violation of a zoning law voted in before I was born, by people who never paid a cent for my land, the sheriffs department pays me a visit.
And that would be totally unfair if the law was kept secret, and then sprung on unsuspecting property owners.
But we all know that's not the case. Prospective purchasers are well aware of zoning laws. Same reason you can't build a fuel refinery on your tidy plot of R1 land. It would put existing owners, who have a reliance interest in existing zoning laws being respected, in an awfully unfair position.
Not in California we don’t let people do that. The demand for condos far outstrips the amount of land zoned for them
Is it demand for condos or is it demand for reasonably-priced housing and condos are the only even remote possibility?
I've met a few people who really loved condo living but almost every one would have taken the single family home next to the condo building if it had been even remotely similar in price.
Those are the same thing? Not sure what youre asking, there is limited space, people recognize that having a SFH involves tradeoffs, just as most other things in life do.
>And leave those who don't in peace?
That's not what's happening.
People who are living like that are being invaded by high density people who want to live in high density in their communities. They want to take over and force people out.
And generally they just want to flip. Find somewhere cheap and make it expensive to make money by lowering everybody's quality of life and calling it progress.
> They want to take over and force people out.
How do you "force" people out? The existing owners have to sell land, and once they do the new owners have as much right to decide as the other residents. Are there thugs going door to door forcing sellers to sign papers?
Allowing higher density construction doesn't mean higher density must get built there. That's still up to the property owner to decide. True freedom.
Property taxes and cost of living causing people who own to be priced out and forced to sell their homes because of bankruptcy.
And the occasional eminent domain.
> Property taxes...causing people who own to be priced out
That's an important price signal that the land is under-utilized. If we actually allowed denser residential then those people could sell their land to a condominium or townhouse developer in exchange for a new unit and some cash. They get to stay in the same place, their property taxes stay roughly the same, and they get to enjoy the cash. While everyone else also benefits from more housing. Win-win-win.
Property taxes? Not in California (prop 13).
and the YIMBY (but really somebody else's back yard) yell loudly about this property tax carveout and how terrible it is for their density goals
And that yelling is their free speech. As is your complaint in response.
> It drives up costs.
How?
Upkeep is arguably more expensive for a detached house, and suburbs make cars almost mandatory.
It's an ironic comment because this article mostly talks about California, which is already one of the most expensive places to live and the most NIMBY. Every other state in the US is generally cheaper to live in. The places that are cost as much as California are just as NIMBY and heavily influenced by Californians (Hawaii) or is the cultural and financial center of the country (NYC).
I suspect that prices and NIMBYism are driven by the higher classes, not Californians.
Also, Hawaii is expensive for reasons way beyond the reach of NIMBYs, and highly influenced by travel corporations.
Look up HOA fees for a condo building.
Look up property taxes, cost of living expenses, and overheads like parking, schools, etc.
Is NYC the cheapest place to live in the country?
Is there a cost of living chart: density vs. cost?
> Look up property taxes, cost of living expenses, and overheads like parking, schools, etc.
I currently live in an arguably not very dense city, in the suburbs. I pay thousands of dollars in property taxes. I must own two cars to serve the whole family, for things as basic as going grocery shopping. My HOA is almost a thousand dollars a year. A couple years ago I had to replace the roof, at a cost of several thousands of dollars.
I had none of these problems when I was living in a more dense city, and on top of that, I could actually walk to the nearest coffee shop.
> Is NYC the cheapest place to live in the country?
NYC is dense because it appeals to more people, and the more people that move to the city, the more expensive it gets, precisely because there are not enough homes.
Are you assuming that less dense cities are more desirable to live in? Is Anchorage a more appealing city to live in than NYC?
I agree from a personal perspective, but sprawl is also terrible in its own way. The real problem is too many people.
In any case, it shouldn’t be illegal to build either dense or sparse housing.
Unless you're the only one who thinks that, you'd think there would be some centralized advocacy for your position, is what I'm saying.
A key issue that often gets missed is that job growth and housing supply are tightly linked. When cities add office jobs without adding enough housing, the results are predictable: longer commutes, overcrowded housing, or both.
In that sense, it makes little sense to approve large amounts of office space without considering the housing capacity needed to support it. If the jobs-to-housing ratio grows too high, the costs are pushed onto workers and surrounding areas rather than being addressed directly.
This problem is compounded by limited public transit and inadequate road infrastructure. Framing the issue solely as NIMBY opposition misses the structural imbalance at the core of the problem.
Instead of treating symptoms or assigning blame, governments should focus on correcting the underlying mismatch between employment growth and housing supply.
I think this is the issue - if the NIMBYs want to protest things they should really start when the office space gets built.
The filled office space full of white collar jobs paying $200K is what triggers the eye of the residential developers of high density housing as it provides a basis for the profit margin spreadsheet model.
Local governments have a huge incentive to favor commercial construction over residential construction: schools. Adding an office building adds tax revenue without adding students. Adding housing means they have to enroll students.
I'm so NIMBY that I moved my backyard from a county with 4,000 to 1 people per square mile. A big attraction was the dark nights for amateur astronomy. Then the state decided that this was the perfect place to build 100 megawatts of 630 foot tall wind turbines with a blinking red beacon on top of each one.
My best bet now may be to move to orbit like S.R. Hadden. But it'll have to be high orbit, away from the satellite constellations.
If NIMBY were all willing to move away from civilisation, nobody would have a problem with them. You wanting peace and quiet in the middle of nowhere affects no one else - that's quite different from demanding everyone around you cater to your desire in the middle of an urban area
Yes, had this conversation with people complaining about an apartment building being built over a decrepit strip mall in central Los Angeles. "Perhaps living in the center of a megacity is not for you..."
It does feel sometimes like you can't escape. I got tired of the nonstop noise and loud cars of a big city and moved to a smaller suburb. Then I learned about Leaf Blowers. If every neighbor has gardeners come at ~7am once every two weeks, the odds are you will wake up to the soothing sound of a 2 stroke Leaf Blower almost every morning!
Car thing is so sad. For some reason people think it’s socially acceptable to blast music from their car at 7am. I can’t tell if they don’t understand they are annoying people, if they don’t care, or they are just a menace
Once you interpret it as a mating call, it all starts to make sense in some weird way.
Welcome to the sound of spring/summer/fall in the suburbs. 7am to 6pm, 6 days a week. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Most landscaping teams have 2-3 dedicated guys who do nothing but leaf blow the entire time they are at a house. Towns have been largely unsuccessful in curbing this, mostly because demand for landscaping services is so high.
Four days a week on our street, thankfully not so early.
That's actually not NIMBY behavior at all, because you moved rather than trying to control everybody else around you!
It's great to want to be around few people, that's a choice that should be respected. Just as there should be a choice to allow people to associate at higher densities. But in practice, the law only works against one of these choices.
> 1 people per square mile... Then the state decided that this was the perfect place to build 100 MW of 630 foot wind turbines
That is correct, for the reason you yourself gave. Since it bothers you so much personally, I'm very sorry about your bad luck. But it was objectively the right decision.
I was reading some stuff a while back about either the FAA or its Euro equivalent coming up with hazard lighting beacons being activated by plane transponders within the area but otherwise off if nothing was actively around. To solve this exact issue.
I really hope such technology comes to fruition and becomes the standard sooner than later.
I found your new house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...
I'd say the blinking red lights are pretty mild compared to the non-stop LEO satellites you see zipping across the sky anywhere on earth nowadays.
How do you measure?
I can't really think of a way to measure it that would come out how you said.
You can point the telescope away from the wind turbines, you can't point your telescope away from the night sky?
Isn't there a first mover advantage? Whoever breaks the strike would be sitting on gold? Think if a low density city in California said "OK we are zoning up" and everyone there could sell out for $$$. It's only useful while the prices are high. Seems like a good idea anyway
Not all of California is as desirable as the Bay Area, LA, or other coastal cities. Actually most of it is quite undesirable comparatively.
> they don’t even think we should be allowed to argue for more housing. They don’t think we are even entitled to a fair hearing. We should all recognize that silencing your political rivals is beyond the pale and that complaints like this one, even if they end up going nowhere, can have a chilling effect on activists and ordinary people who want to exercise their rights.
Don't worry, there are sooo many free speech absolutists that will come out of the woodwork to protect this dastardly attempt to stifle speech through abuse of legal procedures.
No? Where did all those absolutists go?
My theory is that the major parties are currently going through another swap of ideals, so the free-speech absolutists don't have a home.
The regions that give the strongest support to the Democrats, like Marin County in California, don't want anything built, are actively kicking out ranchers that have lived there for generations, are adamantly against anyone calling anyone else something offensive, and are in general against what was classically liberal.
Meanwhile, rural Texas counties that give the strongest support to the Republicans are for worker protections, generally against government-prohibitions on insulting someone, are increasing in their support for populism, and so on.
The Democrats used to support free-speech absolutists, who are no longer welcome there, but the Republicans are just opening up to the ideal, and don't fully support it yet.
I am not even sure it’s a swap. I see a lot of RW sentiment lately that libertarian principles are self-defeating, and the only thing that matters is Straussian friend-enemy distinction.
Basically, the extreme wings of both parties are seizing power and preparing for battle, while the moderate wings are tuning out. (Or to put it another way, more of the center is becoming politically independent.)
Traditional ideological lines break down under these conditions, because the important thing is damaging your enemies, not maintaining ideological consistency.
It’s driven by a fundamental shift in political economy. Technology centralizing power and making computation and communication (and thus control) cheap means that politics becomes a winner take all industry, in the parlance of the valley. Those who have read more than a little history understand what being the loser in such a contest means and thus the rush to the extremes and the escalation spiral (and of course the associated democratic backsliding) you see not just in the US but in most western countries.
This comment is a hilarious example of: https://x.com/AustingrahamZ1/status/1029385497213366279?lang...
No, your comment is an example of "argument by joke" and "false equivalency".
The bad faith free speech argument that somehow applies to only some people, to only one side of the political divide, but never to the other was prevalent mainstream argument for years now. Some peoples free speech was sacred and if you criticized or opposed them, the criticism and opposition themselves did not counted as free speech - even if it in fact consisted of speech only.
So like, kicking at those people is entirely fair. Because they actively damaged "free speech". Not that they care or ever cared.
No, this is not the phenomenon that post is referring to.
The phenomenon is "I believe X" and the reaction is "SO YOU DON'T BELIEVE Y."
Elsewhere people have reacted to a situation by saying "I believe this is okay, because free speech."
But those people didn't include this specific incident, so they apparently don't believe in this one.
The difference is a statement on waffles is not a statement on pancakes, but a statement on absolute free speech is a statement on all speech.
The first one is using a statement on an adjacent issue to demand attention on one’s own pet issue. The latter is calling out alleged hypocrisy.
For this to be anything like "so you hate waffles" there would have to somebody going around declaring to all that "all breakfast foods are good and can not be criticized" and them only showing up to defend pancakes on the basis of "all breakfast foods" but then deafening silence when waffles or bacon or scrambled eggs get trampled on in a far more prevalant manner.
Even the one reply to me from a self-proclaimed absolutist didn't bother to defend the political speech and petition of government, just said that they were present!
THat's basically my activity on HN. 10% arguing why I like pancakes, and 90% replying to the stream of people accusing me of hating waffles.
Flashbacks... https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2001-11-05
Yeah but waffles have been historically excluded from the breakfast table. /s
Please speak plainly. It comes across like you allege that "free speech absolutists" would betray their principles due to aligning with NIMBYs (I read "protect" as "protect against", because otherwise it makes even less sense). But where on Earth does that assumption come from? If your intent is not to sneer at a political outgroup (based on a prediction, not even actual conduct) when why adopt this tone?
Many prominent Republicans in recent years have railed against censorship and espoused a strong belief in free speech principles. Then they got back into power last year and most of those same people did a complete 180 and have been happily supporting censorship of speech that they don't like.
Here is where I would normally ask you:
> Can you name one such individual and give examples of each phenomenon?
But it seems that you conflate "Republicans" who are actually members of government with people who simply support the party; and anyway the concept of "free speech absolutism" is inherently not partisan. The existence of 1A defenders on either side of the aisle (or representing any niche interest) doesn't say anything about the existence of principled, consistent 1A defenders.
They were sued by the current administration and recorded as domestic terrorists,held down and sprayed in the face by irregular paramilitary with extrajudicial powers, detained without probable cause or charges, investigated by the FBI in the dead of night, placed on no fly lists, post retirement rank demoted, fired, laid off, swatted, delivered pizza in the name of dead relatives, and all the wonderful stuff that’s making America great again.
I like free speech.
I also oppose mandatory licensing. (In this case, to practice law)
The latter is the accusation, it seems impossible it’s not thrown out.
Hi I'm right here
Nice! Any thoughts on this matter, as in does it get you outraged as a free speech absolutist?
Free speech should obviously be protected in all circumstances including this one. I don’t know what you are going on about, but it’s probably the unfortunately common and flawed perception that anyone who supports “free speech” right now is an unprincipled right winger who only supports it for their ideological allies.
Which strikes me as bizarre, first because it requires that fallacious assumption and secondly because it requires mapping NIMBY onto the right wing. Which arguably tracks with what one would naturally expect from free-associating words like "conservative", but the evidence doesn't show me any strong correlations except possibly in the opposite direction (considering the evidence of new housing starts vs. local voting patterns).
Yeah, I find NIMBY vs YIMBY arguments interesting because they're almost entirely orthogonal to traditional left vs right. This alignment chart is the best I've seen; for me you can just circle the whole bottom center: https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1dz4ssk/where_are_...
At times like this I like to quote Chris Rock:
> Everyone wanna get down with a gang in America these days. "I'm liberal!" "I'm conservative!" Be a fucking person, ok? No good, decent person is all one thing. I got some shit I'm liberal about, and I got some shit I'm conservative about.
I think he's absolutely right, and that labeling things as "left" or "right" is a thought-terminating cliche that one should strive to avoid. What matters is the idea, not which faction people might stereotype it with.
We're rocketing toward a problem with how our country is setup - you have to encode your entire summation of beliefs into a single binary digit.
[flagged]
> After finding out that the city council was considering a housing element that would have bowed to NIMBY pressure, we sent two letters to the city, reminding it of its legal obligations under state law to approve the upzoning — and that a failure to do so would open the city up to a lawsuit.
This seems entirely reasonable to me, and I'm grateful that a group like this exists.
But I'm a YIMBY, so of course. If lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar on the basis of laws that I disagreed with, I can imagine feeling frustrated, conspiratorial, or disenfranchised.
Maintaining a consistent commitment to liberal democracy, the legal system and due process is one of life's great challenges!
If you live in California I can assure you beyond any doubt that people from some far-away place have had outrageous levels of influence on your local housing policy. Almost the entire body of CEQA jurisprudence has been developed by two lawyers and a handful of labor union executives.
If your local building code requires an elevator that can accommodate a hospital stretcher, which is almost certainly does, that was jotted down in the building code by literally one guy from Glendale, Arizona, on the basis of a whim.
My county eliminated code compliance checks (and building plan review) 2 decades ago for owner-builders and it's made things so much cheaper and easier to build. It is the only way I was able to afford a house.
We were warned by nay-sayers the county would burn down but that never came to fruition and meanwhile I've seen so many code-Nazi places in California burn down from wildfires.
It's hilarious watching the systematic destruction of the counter points when people tell me about the horrors
(1) "You wouldn't want to live in such a house, it would burn down." I already do, and have been.
(2) Your neighborhood would catch fire. I live in such a neighborhood, it didn't.
(3) Just wait long enough! It will happen eventually. Eventually you'll have bad luck! This has been going on for 20+ years.
I sympathize with your experience but the code situation for multifamily is so much worse. The original motivating reason for the multifamily code was to stop people from building them, so it's all cursed, even 100 years later. It is wall-to-wall vibes and the fixes are not coming fast enough. Recently my city decided to amend out the requirement for firefighter air replenishment systems on every floor of buildings higher than three stories because, it turns out, even though this requirement exists nationwide, literally nobody has ever needed or used the FARS. It was made up and codified by the guy who sells the system!
It's also important to consider what the code is, anywho decides it, and for what reasons.
Most cities adopt a mishmash, but they take them from large private organizations that publish big books of code, and how that whole process happens is far more opaque than most standards bodies because it's so obscure. Is there evidence backing the changes? Is it vibes? Is there financial benefit for the code writers for certain choices?
This mishmash of choices by local cities also greatly reduces building efficiency, because even if I learn the fine details of my city, that doesn't guarantee I can apply my hard won code knowledge a few miles away.
Building code is important and I wouldn't go as far as saying "if you own the house you don't have to follow anything" but our current situation is also not providing much safety in the US. Code mostly exists to justify checks, not improve safety. A simpler, more uniform code, with clearer motivations and evidence would go a long way to reducing unnecessary costs.
They'll change their tune when they find out they can't sell the property.
LMAO. I built the house for $60,000. Myself. And I have the construction heavy equipment to demolish it, so I can demolish it for next to nothing. It paid for itself in 3 years vs renting.
I couldn't give a shit if I have to sell it for land value (which has massively appreciated by my own development, since I did all the prospecting for water, electric, and septic -- the land was basically worthless when I bought it), on the off chance someone doesn't want a mega cheap house in cash for break even. I didn't build it as an investment, I built it to live in.
It's by escaping your mentality, which is what has poisoned the real estate problem writ large, is how I escaped the inflated property price conundrum.
I agree that local communities are best at determining their own line when disputes arise between protecting the freedoms of one party versus another, which is a stance also held by the supreme court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_standards
In this case though, it's not someone going to a non-local city council or school board meeting and arguing for or against some policy that is up to that local board, but it is someone pointing out a policy that has been set at the state level. Any arguments for or against that policy need to take place at the state level, because that is the only place where it can be changed.
> If lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar on the basis of laws that I disagreed with
Hah, they most certainly are! To such an extreme extent that I figure you'd probably reword this to something like "If I was aware of all the ways that lobbyists were influencing my municipality from afar". They are most certainly constantly and relentlessly influencing your municipality on every issue that is relevant to them.
To those downvoting, if you tell me your municipality I will provide you with evidence of corporate lobbying influencing decisions of governance at the municipal level.
https://www.govtech.com/archive/uber-encourages-voting-gets-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dkIiLWuXBE
Rancho Palos Verdes is a small established hillside community with equestrian 1 - 5 acre lots. The absurdity of adding 650 homes to this area is astounding. Right next door is Hawthorne which has plenty of space for such housing. Activists like this person, lobbying a city they have no relation to, to enforce an overreaching state law, are part of what is making people and companies leave California.
Can you clarify why it is absurd to add density to an area with huge 5 acre lots?
OP said "established hillside community with equestrian 1 - 5 acre lots".
It is reasonably likely that people who lived there chose the location because they wanted to have horses, otherwise why buy there?
When dense apartments get built next door, soon enough the city prohibits horses because the thinking goes that horses don't belong in a dense population area.
I'm not familiar with the area OP mentions, but exact same thing happened around here. Some 30 years ago most houses had horses, then a lot of smaller building came around and they prohibited horses.
Doesn't impact me personally but I'm sad for the long time residents who specifically moved here to have horses. Not fair to them. Some have moved of course, but moving isn't always easy if you have job and kids in school in town.
A community of 5-acre equestrian lots is pastoral. Dumping a 650 housing project in the middle of that would destroy its character.
If the neighbors of these lots care to maintain their vacancy, they ought to do so the more naturally legal way: by collectively buying and owning those lots.
Horses aren't native, maybe they destroyed the character first.
Or why cities should be able to ignore state laws, for that matter.
Which is likely why they are doing it. The City of Huntington Beach had a similar problem: there was simply no room to build additional housing. They sued the state and lost. The law is overreaching, but it's the law.
> Right next door is Hawthorne
30 minutes drive in no traffic, crossing half a dozen cities and the 405. There's reasons to inveigh against the YIMBYs (why are they celebrating densifying a coastal area that's actively falling into the pacific[1], nevermind it's inherent beauty) but let's not deny geography.
Also RPV doesn't have 1-5 acre lots, it just costs ~$4m for an house on a normal lot, rising to ~$20m as you get to the coast. You might be thin thinking of Rolling Hills, to the extent you're thinking of anything on the peninsula at all?
[1]: https://www.rpvca.gov/719/Landslide-Management-Program
How is that absurd? If I own land and want to build 650 new homes, what exactly is the argument for stopping me, besides "I don't like it"?
If you don't want people developing their 5 acre lots, you should buy all of the 5 acre lots. Problem solved.
> The absurdity of adding 650 homes to this area is astounding
Let the free market decide whether it wants the homes or not.
I think insane real estate prices are more of a motivation to leave California than local political drama.
Hawthorne is easily 20 miles and 30+ minutes away from RPV, not exactly next door
(I am biased as someone who thinks public parks should allow nonresidents to visit and is pissed at how Portuguese Bend has been managed
So leave?
NIMBYs thinking they have some social right to land, a shared resource. Land value belongs to society silly.
He probably shouldn't call his group "Yimby Law". Just like if you're not a PE you can't (legally) call your company "Foobar Engineering" in most states.
If he tries to incorprate as "Yimby Law" he may hit a roadblock in some areas. Secretaries of State regulate business entity names and often bar or scrutinize words that imply a regulated profession (e.g., “bank,” “trust,” sometimes “law”) if you are not licensed or not forming the appropriate kind of professional corporation.
However he's free to send a letter, just not incorporate a business called "Yimby Law". He should change it to "Yimby Citizens Group" or "Yimby Institute" or something.
States do have rules against business entity names that mislead about regulated professions. California, for example, prohibits names that suggest an entity is a "professional corporation", a particular type of entity limited to regulated professions, when it is not. But I would be very surprised to learn that "Law" alone has been relegated to lawyer practice in any state of the union. Presumably so would organizations like Bloomberg Law, Westlaw, FindLaw, Free Law Project, Groklaw, etc.
Lawyers don't own law. The law belongs to the public. So says this active attorney member of the State Bar of California, and I'll stand on any law firm's conference table in my boots and say that.
>one of them filed a complaint with the California State Bar, saying that I was practicing law without a license.
This sounds suspiciously similar to what happened to Chuck Marohn from StrongTowns.
I sure hope the people who assaulted others in those stories faced charges. People in the USA are entirely too entitled.
Going around to municipalities that you are not a resident of and saying "we will sue you into obeying state law" is basically being a tattletale. Nobody likes that. I'm sympathetic to more housing, and I think state laws should be followed, but I'm not sympathetic to the author.
Also, I just dislike activism in general, which seems like it generally is trying to force people to do things they don't want to do through passing laws. I get that there is sometimes a need raise attention. But generally it seems like activists are very one-sided, agenda/ideologically driven. It also feels like they are trying to find meaning in activism (yeah, we forced other people to do what we think is Right), instead of healthier, more traditional forms of meaning.
So if I build an apartment building on some lots zoned for single-family and someone complains, they're a "tattletale" too? And nobody should like that either?
> "we will sue you into obeying state law" is basically being a tattletale.
Is going into cities that are violating civil rights laws basically being a tattletale?
>they don't want to do through passing laws.
Yes, that is how the rule of law works.
[dead]
> They want to shut down our right to be heard in the first place.
there's no such right, never been. Just because one has a right to speak, doesn't make it an obligation for others to listen
The first amendment explicitly gives you the right to petition the government. They actually do have to listen.
citizens have a right to be heard by their government.
That's mostly true, but may not be in the case of government representatives.
> I’m leaving out the name of the person who filed the complaint
Why? Should be outed
Because starting online lynch mobs is harmful to the fabric of society, and that is what happens when you name and shame individuals online.
But it's concrete information (a letter) shared with the public. It's not hearsay.
Especially for a purported lawyer should be able to stand by their demands in public.
Unpopular opinion: there's nothing wrong with NIMBY. It's totally ok to not volunteer to have a dumpster at your house. Society may want it, but they lose nothing, gain everything, and you're left with a house with dumpster nearby.
If society wants to put dumpster so badly, compensate to those who (practically) lose their house. Let everyone pay, that's fair. Picking "haha this will be the loser this time" is not.
It's easy to be YIMBY when you don't own anything.
Such a strange assumption that your neighborhood would get worse by increasing density.
It seems there’s some strange bias in play where NIMBYs are somehow fearful of density.
FWIW SFH economics isn’t sustainable in highly desirable areas. You have to redistribute wealth from workers to land owners (the CA model), or raise taxes commensurate to resource consumption. I suspect there’s a limit to how much feudalism the working class will allow, and if land owners had to pay for the resources they consume they’d have to densify anyway.
Really the whole thing survives on handouts from workers to landowners
> strange assumption that your neighborhood would get worse by increasing density.
I didn't make such assumption, I don't understand it either.
Hypothetically, what about allowing new property only of higher quality than existing ones? That way to assure it’s a net improvement for everyone
Quality is subjective. You would need an arbiter. For example, I would enjoy having an art collective and a funky performance space nearby, but I’m sure many people would consider that a downgrade
Native americans were initially pretty YIMBY and that ended up very well for them.
In any sane world, being open and welcoming is a pretty rad posture to have. But in a capitalist world? Naive and stupid.
Yimby vs Nimby is yet another divisive jingoism - simply putting tags on things and then using them as if significant.
The situation is more complex. The forces about housing right now are incredibly destructive. Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes. In this case NIMBY is the correct solution. In other cases Rich People want to prevent affordable housing. In this case YIMBY is the correct solution. But blindly applying these terms provides a cover for a complicated situation. We have cults of personality, and now we have cults of Jargonism. Neither helps us.
Being outraged because lawyers don't want you to speak is great. The issues legal and housing issues are far more complex and important.
Affordable housing itself is typically used as a poison pill because it makes it harder to turn a profit building. My biggest pet peeve is when some 5 over 1, 9 foot ceiling, crappy finishes, bound to be ghost-town ground level retail, apartment building is characterized as "luxury" by NIMBY who then proceed to say that it needs to have an affordable component. Guess what? It's going to be so clapped out in 15 years that the rent will have to have gone down (inflation adjusted).
> Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes.
Rich people want to make more money by blocking homes from being built, thereby driving up their property values and making all housing in the area more expensive.
You present a very simplistic view that does not begin to capture the complexity of what's actually happening in practice:
> Rich people want to make more money by building expensive homes. In this case NIMBY is the correct solution.
Why would NIMBYism ever be the answer here? What values does it represent? Allowing rich people to build housing for rich people means that the rich in need of housing don't take away more affordable housing. And when rich people are forced to pay for more affordable hosuing, what used to be affordable becomes unaffordable.
Ensuring that rich people's money goes to new building that doesn't hurt less rich people is the correct solution, if one values keeping housing affordable. One should only block that rich housing if one wants the existing housing to become more expensive.
As far as I can tell, you responded to someone literally saying "The situation is more complex." and attempting a refutation of your absolutist view, by accusing that this is a "very simplistic view" — and then generalizing "rich people" as a group without considering strata of wealth at all nor considering more than one possible strategy for accumulating real estate wealth.
The "refutation" is the common view tha has been repeated for years and years, and is not complex at all. It in fact misses the dominant trends that have made US housing situation so unaffordable, and is only a tenable view if one has an overly simplistic and narrow view of the players in housing, specifically from the viewpoint of a home owner that does not struggle with the current high costs, and in fact implicitly benefits from those high costs that increase their wealth while locking the next generation out of the opportunity they had.
I don't think my views are absolutist at all, but please do point out wha you think is absolutist if you believe that is a fair criticism instead of a passing swipe.
> generalizing "rich people" as a group without considering strata of wealth at all
I did nothing of the sort, but I did point out that if the basis of opposing something is because rich people benefit, well, that is an argument to support more housing. If somebody is saying that only certain slices or classes should not benefit but that other rich people should benefit, then let that person make that argument, rather than the overly simplistic "rich person" argument. And let them add enough complexity to concretely state the profits: a homeowner is making 5% a year on their home due to scarcity by locking others out of opportunity, while the developer makes their investors 10%-15% over 2-3 years by adding productively to society and benefiting lots of new people with access to economic opportunity and housing.
Yes, different people are profiting, but one strata is doing it by making others wealthy at the same time, and their profits are to a REIT, and one times. Whereas the landlord and homeowner getting compounded annual returns at a high rate by increasing economic inequality and segregation, through rentierism and exclusion. When developers build an apartment building, investors profit but so does labor and the new residents and city coffers through new taxation.
The comment I was replying to did not present a single shred of complexity, and their petite bourgeois naïveté presents themselves as the only people in the world deserving of profit or consideration or agency or influence. They did not refute my world view at all, and my entire worldview on housing has come about from their same overly simplistic starting point and then learning that there's a vast world out there beyond it.
They’re not just x. They’re y.
The author needs to rename their organization to YIYBY (yes in your backyard).
The nationalization of every policy on earth needs to stop.
Are they appropriating other people's land and building in their backyard? That would be called eminent domain.
They just want everyone to build what they want in their own backyard.
NIMBYs might more accurately be called NIYBYs.
The use of "back yard" refers to the local area, not the literal extent of one's property. This usage is not unique to NIMBY and it's derivatives. YIMBY sentiment also clearly extends beyond developers themselves and simple libertine principles. Many people want development to occur around them, in their back-yard so to speak, because they prefer it occurs. The semantic change you're arguing for erases this concept just to sidestep the notion of local community. It's a needlessly aggravating approach when the simple answer is just that both NIMBY and YIMBY advocates can support their cause beyond their own area because they believe their cohort is right and deserves it.
> simple libertine principles
Lol
They are telling communities that they have no part of how to manage themselves.
Rancho Palos Verdes should not be required to comply with the request of some random activist who probably has never even stepped foot in the town.
Communities are fully in control how they manage themselves, as long as they do it within the law of the state.
Rancho Palos Verdes should comply with the law, or face the consequences of not being able continue that control of their land management.
A great value of democracy is that a "random activist" can petition the government to enforce the law, that's how we keep the whole thing in check. The idea that random activists could not be a check on illegal behavior of the government is a very, well, authoritarian idea that is not compatible with any of the values embodied in the US or California constitutions, our legal system, or the very character and culture of the US.
> Communities are fully in control how they manage themselves, as long as they do it within the law of the state.
Yes, and my point is that continued trend of state and national laws overriding local jurisdiction over things like land use is not a positive one for residents of desirable areas (and arguably any land owner) and not something I agree with philosophically, not the litany of things you decided to rail about that have nothing to do with my comment.
Presumably you think it's not good for land owners of "desirable areas" because local laws create a monopoly that allows the landowners to extract wealth from others, through restriction of land use?
Can you see why there might be laws against that?
It is pretty well established that zoning was invented and is justified merely to enforce economic segregation. That economic segregation is perhaps the interest of landowners in these "desirable areas"?
I think by surfacing the true motivations of what's going on, it will become very clear why municipalities must be subjected to laws to enforce better behavior.
> Presumably you think it's not good for land owners of "desirable areas" because local laws create a monopoly that allows the landowners to extract wealth from others, through restriction of land use?
I think individuals should reap the rewards or suffer the losses from their individual decisions. If a community generates value, they are entitled to the rewards. If they run things into the ground (see Detroit as a notorious example), they're left holding the bag.
> Can you see why there might be laws against that?
Can I see why people would want to force themselves into a desirable situation that they had no part in creating? Sure. That doesn't make it right.
> It is pretty well established that zoning was invented and is justified merely to enforce economic segregation. That economic segregation is perhaps the interest of landowners in these "desirable areas"?
Citation needed on the first claim, but yes economic segregation is desirable to most people. That's not news.
> I think by surfacing the true motivations of what's going on, it will become very clear why municipalities must be subjected to laws to enforce better behavior.
The true motivations aren't hidden. Have nots are trying to get a piece of something desirable, and the people who already have it want to keep it.
US cities are under the jurisdiction of their states. States hold the power to abolish or establish cities. Cities are required to follow state law. Whether residents or non-residents remind cities of their legal obligations is utterly irrelevant.
If a city was allowing racial discrimination and no one within the city sued, would that make it ok?
That's a euphemism for NIYBY.
State law recently increased my neighborhood’s density. It’s obliging these towns to do the same. I’m happy about both, which makes me YIMBY like the people in this organization
Let’s remember, CA is in a housing CRISIS. I feel an immediate urgency to build as many houses as possible in this state so that my young children can feasibly afford to live here without being an AI engineer when they are adults
There is an abundance of houses in the US, just in less desirable areas than Rancho Palos Verdes.
Your young children have no right to live in any specific location, and your usage of CRISIS to describe a lack of access to highly desirable housing is not compelling.
but time and again the opportunity is created in places where there's not enough housing which enriches the "landed gentry".
> Your young children have no right to live in any specific location
Strawman. I have a right to influence housing policy with my vote, which I’ve done and I’m pleased with the outcome.
Now, you nor any commenter nor any city official have the right to resist implementing this law, and the arguments against are not compelling.
not your back yard if you don't own the land.
I mean, also not in my back yard if the people who don't own the land vote for a bunch of micro managerial laws that make it illegal to do things without jumping through hoops that are so expensive as to be a non-starter.
Nobody is gonna go through the "everything else" approval process that strip clubs and heavy industry have to go through just to expand their business parking or do $10k of environmental impact assessment to drop off a $1k garden shed. (literal examples from my town).
These evil people can't make things illegal outright so they make the process so expensive almost nobody can do it and it takes decades for someone to come along with a lucrative enough development that's worth expensively challenging it inn court over.
People who do own the land aren't able to collectively agree on how to manage it because of state law. That's the issue. The source of the "NIMBY pressure" mentioned in the article is local residents, who should have much more say over local zoning code than someone who lives hundreds of miles away.
More housing in region X will result in lower housing prices in region Y. The interests of people from region Y are valid.
You can accuse them of being hypocrites if they don't also support more housing in region Y but that's a pretty big if you have to prove there.
But you can't say their interests are invalid.
> More housing in region X will result in lower housing prices in region Y.
Or higher prices in Y, because X will be both more crowded and with on average poorer people than before the supply increase, and people who prefer a less crowded area and less poor people (either directly because they are poor, or because of other demographic traits that correlate with wealth in the broader society, like race in the USA) around them will have an even higher relative preference for living in Y than before.
> The interests of people from region Y are valid.
They exist, validity is...at best, not a case you have made. Existence of a material interest does not imply validitym
That's a very theoretical argument, and there's nothing stopping people in region Y from building all the housing they could possibly need in region Y. If it's such a great idea, region Y will thrive and reap the rewards of this policy.
And my point is that there are limits on the impact region X has on region Y based on their proximity. Should someone in downtown LA be able to compel someone in Palo Alto to upzone based on this "impact"? What about someone in Kansas or Florida?
So region Y should shoulder all the costs while X benefits?
Wait, I thought upzoning and increased density increased quality of living? Are you saying that's not the case?
Putting that aside, no one is forcing region Y to upzone or not upzone in this scenario. They can make the choice they prefer, just like region X.
The state of California is forcing Rancho Palos Verde to upzone. Because it's good for California even though whether it's good for Rancho Palos Verde is debatable.
1. Yes, and the people who are in favor of this specific law will be completely and utterly shocked when the state government uses their power to enact and enforce a different law that takes away local decision making which they don't agree with.
2. I take it you're done discussing the theoretical merits of this law?
I can say their interests don't meet a threshold of significance.
As an extreme example, I can say that hurricane victims have an interest in butterfly wing flaps across the world because there is some indirect causation.
Housing expansion advocates consistently describe the simplest of supply-demand mechanisms, whereas housing demand is heavily driven by local and national economic conditions as well. Gary IN doesn't have a housing shortage.
It's this really YIMBY or actually YIYBY ? It's difficult to tell checking the whole website.
Edit to be more explicit: are the people that sent/asked to send the 2 letters to the City Council residents of Rancho Palos Verdes?
If you're going to invent the term YIYBY are you willing to acknowledge far more NIYBY than NIMBY behavior?
I'm not saying I'm favor of NIMBY - it depends on what's actually going on - but I would expect that there might be a lobby of constructors, rather than citizens looking to lower house prices, behind such an effort.
Barring eminent domain, YIYBY is impossible. It's always YIMBY.
I think the back yard in all of these initialism is not limited to the person’s private back yard property.
NIMBY seeks to prevent the development of nearby properties to preserve some sort of “neighborhood character,” so the “back yard” is actually the whole neighborhood (and I think part of the negative connotation of that phrase is that they are treating shared spaces like their own personal yard). Then, YIMBY seeks to allow their neighborhoods to be developed.
If we’re going to extend it to “YIYBY” and “NIYBY,” we should apply the same logic, right?
Rather, I think YIYBY mostly doesn’t make sense because YIMBY people are trying to convince people that they should allow development in their neighborhood. Zoning rules… I mean, they have difference policies for changing them, but YIMBY activists aren’t usually manually and unilaterally changing them for other people.
Ultimately the decision making process is probably (depending on local regulation of course) “yes or no in our back yards,” when you get down to the details.
YIYBY is the concept of wanting it nearby to your residence but not having to suffer any of the direct consequences - imo it's a good thing to acknowledge but generally indistinguishable from NIMBYism. You want the benefits but aren't willing to pay the costs.
> YIYBY is the concept of wanting it nearby to your residence but not having to suffer any of the direct consequences
How does that work exactly?
It's like a thirty minute city. You want those services nearish to you but never so close that they'd effect property value. "Nobody" wants to live next to a high school - your house might be TP'd, but you want a good school within bus range, "Nobody" wants to live next to a super market, they have large parking lots and are "undesirable" but you want to be able to drive half a dozen blocks to it.
I've never thought of the B in NIMBY as literally meaning backyard - it figuratively means "near enough to effect me" but people still want it within reach - so the ultimate NIMBY dream would likely be to live in an island of placid suburbia surround by a ring of vital services that are just far away enough that you don't need to see them every day.
(There's also, I think, a separate environmental NIMBYism but that's a really strange concept and usually more of a deliberate misinterpretation by people with an agenda to push - I'm more concerned with city service NIMBYism around public transit, food availability, hospitals, etc...)
Is that what YIMBY activists do? Live exclusively in SFHs and make everyone else build apartments?
There is a large forest near your local community. You and others often walk in the forest and kids play there. Its calming and has been there forever.
The state wants your community to turn it into apartments, but obviously the community is icey about it.
Then activists from another city dozens of miles away, who have never cared for your town or really been to it, show up at Town Hall meetings and are scheduling meetings with town councilors to push for building the apartments.
Those out of town people jumping into your community to dictate change are the YIYBY people.
If the apartments are built, they'll put another feather in their cap while walking around the forest near their home.
Why would they cut down the forest to turn it into apartments? It's more economical to bulldoze existing single-family homes and do it there. The roads are already built, you'd just need to upgrade utilities and so on. There are people living in those single-family homes who would gladly take the opportunity to sell their land for higher than market value but are prevented from doing so.
It's more common for forests to be cut down because dense housing is illegal, so cities have to keep expanding outwards.
> large forest near your local community.
Who owns the forest and why do you think you get to say if people build on it or not?
The town, a democratic institution for which you are a tax paying constituent, owns the forest.
Are these out of town people, who surely can’t vote in local elections, somehow forcing the town to sell the forest to developers? If so then that is the problem. Local zoning shouldn’t have an impact on whether or not a city-owned forest (or a park, or vacant land) is forcibly sold and developed. That’s a different problem.
If someone already owns the forest, then they should get to build on their land.
>Are these out of town people, who surely can’t vote in local elections, somehow forcing the town to sell the forest to developers? If so then that is the problem.
They are "forcing" in the same way billionaires "force" politicians to lower taxes on them.
I think the term you meant to use is "lobbying", which is in fact what these YIYBY groups would be doing. They are lobbying a random town that they are no part of to cut down their forest and build apartments.
Lobbying (through letters and meetings) is legal free speech. If they are engaging in kickbacks or other quid pro then that’s illegal.
Lobbying can’t force the town to sell the forest.
Correct, not sure what point you are trying to make.
People who live in the community don't want unaffiliated outsiders lobbying their town leaders. Those people doing the lobbying would be "Yes In Your Backyard" people. They would be this because it is not their backyard they are lobbying for, but yours.
I cannot be more straightforward in explaining the term YIYBY than that, heh
Yet that lobbying is legal under the first amendment, so the people have no ground to stand on. They can do their own lobbying in response.
If the voters did their job and elected good representatives, who respect the interest of the voters, then they have nothing to worry about: the forest will not be sold.
Voters could also try to establish a referendum system where public lands cannot be sold without a local vote, assuming this is not in conflict with state law.
Edit: The point I am trying to make:
- You said that the town owns the forest in your example. I presented points to explain why this is not an issue, as lobbyists cannot force the sale of public land.
- I wanted to clarify that YIMBYs cannot force property owners to build against their will, except in limited circumstances (eminent domain) that usually requires assent from local government.
- To be clear, I think that individual property rights should be respected. I can build on my land, I can’t force you to build (or not build) on your land unless you are voluntarily bound by some covenant.
I would implore you to go back and read the top comment, the person was asking what YIYBY is. I explained.
For some reason you are trying to argue with me about the merits of YIYBY, when I never took a stance on it, just explained what it is and why people don't like it.
Pixl97:
>> Who owns the forest and why do you think you get to say if people build on it or not?
You:
> The town, a democratic institution for which you are a tax paying constituent, owns the forest.
That’s what I was arguing about, primarily. The other points emerged after you deviated from that point further down.
And what's you argument? That people wouldn't be upset that outsiders are lobbying their town?
I never said anything about outsiders forcing anything. They simply lobby and people get mad about it, those lobbyists are "YIYBY". Its the origin of a term.
You built a strawman about forcing a town to do something, and are really intent on attacking that strawman. But you built it, I never said anything to that effect. Of course they cannot force the town to do anything and of course the lobbyiest have first amendment rights. Never said anything to the contrary.
EDIT: Our convo is now rate limited, but I'm glad you live in a place where politicians work for voters and ignore lobbyists. Treasure it, most are not that lucky.
How is it YIYBY if they can’t force the town to sell the land? They can lobby until they are blue in the face, but they can’t really accomplish anything.
You are the one who said the town owns the land. If they own the land, it looks like the voters are safe—nothing should happen.
You are the one who built the strawman by inventing a public forest under threat from lobbyists. I was just showing that this strawman was an illusion.
I believe that NIMBYs often try to do a motte and bailey argument where they make it seem like someone is literally going to force property owners to build something, when in reality they are trying to prevent property owners from using their property as they want. That really gets my goat, because it’s dishonest.
It's a pretty core element of democracy, that if the majority says they get to do a violence against you for a certain behavior, then they get to do that. It might be immoral but it's the current religion of this area of the world *.
* But muh republic -- spare me, the zoning fiasco shows the current constitutional limits on democracy doesn't stop it.
>to pay the costs
Which costs? Driving 30 miles in heavy traffic because density is not allowed close to you? Paying excessive taxes because of huge oceans of SFHs? Having to own a car because public transportation doesn't work in low density?
There is no free lunch, only which costs you're going to pay.
Personally, I find NIMBYism completely irrational and am a dedicated urbanite - I love being able to walk to my local grocery store and have a hospital within two blocks of me. I'm definitely not the right person to advocate against your stance.
More housing in the next town over helps everyone looking for a house in the surrounding towns. We all share a backyard called earth.
I don't know, does new housing or municipal services get built in anyone's literal backyard? So it's not Your or My Backyard, really.
NIMBYism has always been about nosy people obstructing progress.
"in my/your backyard" is a very old and pretty common idiomatic phrase that refers to the general area you live in (neighborhood, town, city, etc).
It should really be called NIYBY-ism.
Literal NIMBY-ism, where the backyard is one's own property, is just straightforward property rights. They want to control other people's property and tell them what they can and can't do with it. That's basically communism.
It's actually about people not wanting the largest investment of their life to change in ways they don't like.
Two comments about this... - "Housing as investment" might not be the best policy - Side effect of above, people have strong incentive to ignore all the negative externalities caused by that policy (ie, sprawl and lots of car mileage when society would better with more compact towns)
Trying to find the amendment in the bill of rights that guarantees your investment will go up. Can you point it out to me?
Trying to find the amendment where you aren't allowed to advocate for your own interests.
You’re allowed to advocate for your own interests, but there are limits to what you’re actually allowed to accomplish with that advocacy. At least in the US. You can’t just pass laws to confiscate the wealth of your political opponents, for instance. You can advocate for it (free speech), you just can’t do it.
Why should I? I said nothing about my investment going up.
"House as investment" is a terrible outcome of the North American housing market.
“I invested a lot of money in something and my ROI is literally more important than anything else.”
I think the ROI criticism is generally off the mark. Most homeowners that resist rezoning, etc. are concerned about quality of life issues rather than home values (although those are aligned if significantly lower quality of life reduces home values). For example, the idea that I'd benefit if my area was upzoned because I could sell my home/land for much more doesn't appeal to me at all. I don't want to sell my home, and I don't want the neighborhood to change around me in a way that I would eventually want to.
Cool
Ok, and?
Casting shadow on their backyard. Bringing noise to their street. Ultimately, lowering the value of their property.
The key problem of US housing is that a house is seen as an investment vehicle, which should appreciate, or at least appreciate no slower than inflation. Keeping prices high and rising can't but go hand in hand with keeping supply scarce.
Ultimately, lowering the value of their property.
Is this regularly true? IME, in Northern VA, land values have always increased with infill development. Thinking specifically of Arlington in the Courthouse/Ballston/Clarendon strip in the 90s and 00s. And now Reston.
Traffic and noise concerns might be legitimate, but I'm not buying the loss of value argument.
It's actually land that appreciates, which is why we should have a high land value tax and eliminate this extremely awful incentive.
If there's enough demand to build denser housing near your house, and that's allowed, your land is automatically worth more.
Is it always true? More than once I heard fears about undesirables moving in, crime rate growing, the neighborhood "losing its character" that commands the high prices, etc. The resistance is real at some places.
It depends on whether the neighborhood is highly valued for proximity to jobs and services, or for "character".
The land value argument is downstream of the real issues - some people don't want change and fight it.
If it was purely a money question you could just get some billionaire to go around buying out entire neighborhoods, redeveloping them, and turning around and selling them off for a profit (because they'd be worth more, right?) - the fact that this is not being done either means there's a great new startup or there are other issues.
Definitely YIYBY.