I'm skeptical. People seem to complain most of all because 1) they view the function of a city as moving and storing automobiles and anything that might hypothetically get in the way of that is bad ("we should only build these homes if they come with a massive amount of parking and generate no traffic!") or 2) just plain aversion to change, which is more understandable.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't push for things like single stair reform that could lead to more fine-grained, incremental urbanism.
I've been to a number of housing hearings and listened to what people actually say on the public record, and "I'd support this if it were more broken up" is not a thing I've heard. On the other hand "this is a NICE neighborhood and we do not want apartments here" is pretty common.
It is not complicated. People buy a property because they like to live in that location. If you are going to drastically change that environment, you destroy the very reason they liked it so much they made it the biggest purchase of their life.
I’ve sat through enough city public hearings to know what the author claims isn’t true.
People don’t care if the building is gorgeous; they will still oppose it simply because they hate new homes in their neighborhood. If making the building beautiful significantly helped getting through zoning reviews, developers would have figured this out long ago.
Aside: the reasons new buildings are bland is because no two people agree on what is ‘beautiful’; second, delays due to zoning and endless regulations already make it difficult for a project to pencil even before spending much money on the facade.
Feels like a stretch. What the author think are beautiful are probably being built somewhere in the world and I bet they have NIMBY as well (assuming they have free speech of course)
There are few recurring discussions on Hacker News that frustrate me more than this. There is so much mean-spirited and disinterested in truth stereotyping of the kinds of people who become NIMBYs and why.
Let's be clear right off the bat. I'm NOT a NIMBY. I live in a rapidly growing neighborhood adjacent to downtown Dallas. It's been continually under construction virtually everywhere for as long as I've lived here, which has now been about 13 years. I support it 100%. We need the housing. There's an enormous homelessness problem. Anything that can contribute to a solution is worth doing. But it isn't costless and I understand the other side. Off the top of my head, all the things I've seen over the years:
Single-family homes condemned for bullshit reasons to force the previous occupants out even when they didn't want to sell.
Lots all turned into condos that no one wanted to live, which invariably become short-term rentals, which mostly end up being party houses.
Renters who come in and ignore neighborhood rules, doing things like letting their dogs shit all over the place and not cleaning it up, throwing parties at 3 in the morning in units with shared walls, starting fights with strippers, getting the cops called our all hours of the night.
A Halloween party that went until 6 in the morning 20 feet from the downstairs bedroom my wife sleeps in, while she was in the middle of IVF hormone therapy and already couldn't sleep, with the people doing it completely ignoring us telling them to quiet down, in a neighbood where the legal noise ordinance is to quit that shit at 1130 PM on weekdays, 130 AM on weekends. They don't give a shit because it's a short-term rental.
Construction nails spilled all over the street, leading to every single one of my wife's tires going flat in the span of three weeks.
The gas company digging up bedrock and leaving it piled 8 feet high, never removing it, which eventually washed out after rain into the entire block. We now have thin yellow films over our houses and everything else kept outdoors, which reconstitutes itself within 10 minutes of cleaning something, because of this dirt getting blown into the air by Texas winds.
Sidewalks constantly dug into, unusable, closed for years at a time, even when projects halt or finish.
Everyone and their mother believing they could become a builder during the ZIRP era, invariably going out of business and leaving empty lots and half-finished buildings sitting for years waiting for a new builder to buy them out.
Above-ground power lines constantly being knocked down onto the roads by constuctions crews.
All of my power tools being stolen by a construction crew across the street, because our dumbass builder gave a unit two doors down the same radio channel for the garage door opener as me, so I couldn't keep my garage shut until I realized and disconnected the opener.
Construction crews cutting the locks to our gates.
Cable Internet contractors cutting corners and putting new residents on shared lines instead of running a new line to new units, leaking signal and getting our Internet perpetually cut to solve complaints down the block.
Completely unmaintained lots owned by builders who weren't actually building becoming overgrown by six foot tall weeds and constantly getting cited by the city.
Construction truck rock haulers dropping rocks all over the road, breaking windshields, shaking the whole neighborhood at 5 in the morning.
A crane dropping onto a building and killing five people 9 years ago.
Hacker News constantly wants to act like the only possible reason anyone might oppose construction is "but ma property value." Believe me, it isn't just that. In spite of all that, our property values have still more than doubled in the past decade. Believe it or not, having your neighborhood torn down and rebuilt while you're still living there can actually be incredibly disruptive and unpleasant. There are plenty of legitimat...
The idea that people object to the removal of old structures because they're more attractive is easy to disprove. People have protested against the removal of structures that even they admit are ugly.
There have been protests against removing rusting oil storage tanks. Our "industrial heritage" apparently.
People just grow to accept the eyesores and start to think of them as part of the local identity. You can find complaints about how ugly the Eiffel tower was when it was built. Symbol of the city now.
A whole lot of people in the comments who clearly didn't read the article, given the great lengths the author went to to distinguish NIMBYism (which most of the comments are about) from "NITBYism," i.e. historic conservationism which the article is actually about. Most of the objections being raised here are also points made in the article.
Of course all that's undermined by the choice to use NIMBY in the headline, which is perplexing.
It's a meaningless distinction if the market doesn't give a hoot about history. Playing this word game is extremely cynical when the housing shortage and homelessness are such problems, especially in a country like the US that doesn't have much history.
If it's worth preserving, then it's worth paying for out of your own pocket. Leaving it to the government just lets biased people decide what's worth preserving instead of letting the market work. Claiming market failure requires strong evidence beyond "a thing I don't like".
A related article on NITBYism and the built environment, but from the perspective of modern finance and how financial instruments may increase the amount of ugly buildings.
Modern architecture is ugly, influenced by Brutalism.
And it is common for developers to present at the city council some beautiful drawings of dwellings surrounded by trees, with couples walking together holding hands and children playing.
But when the actual thing is built it ends up looking like industrial warehouses.
And the people who complain about enshitification of diverse services are the same ones complaining that residents oppose anything in their neighborhood (Nimbyism) or anywhere (Bananaism) - they fail to apply the same criteria: no one likes enshitification, even less so in their neighborhoods.
12 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 45.9 ms ] threadThat doesn't mean we shouldn't push for things like single stair reform that could lead to more fine-grained, incremental urbanism.
I've been to a number of housing hearings and listened to what people actually say on the public record, and "I'd support this if it were more broken up" is not a thing I've heard. On the other hand "this is a NICE neighborhood and we do not want apartments here" is pretty common.
People don’t care if the building is gorgeous; they will still oppose it simply because they hate new homes in their neighborhood. If making the building beautiful significantly helped getting through zoning reviews, developers would have figured this out long ago.
Aside: the reasons new buildings are bland is because no two people agree on what is ‘beautiful’; second, delays due to zoning and endless regulations already make it difficult for a project to pencil even before spending much money on the facade.
Let's be clear right off the bat. I'm NOT a NIMBY. I live in a rapidly growing neighborhood adjacent to downtown Dallas. It's been continually under construction virtually everywhere for as long as I've lived here, which has now been about 13 years. I support it 100%. We need the housing. There's an enormous homelessness problem. Anything that can contribute to a solution is worth doing. But it isn't costless and I understand the other side. Off the top of my head, all the things I've seen over the years:
Single-family homes condemned for bullshit reasons to force the previous occupants out even when they didn't want to sell.
Lots all turned into condos that no one wanted to live, which invariably become short-term rentals, which mostly end up being party houses.
Renters who come in and ignore neighborhood rules, doing things like letting their dogs shit all over the place and not cleaning it up, throwing parties at 3 in the morning in units with shared walls, starting fights with strippers, getting the cops called our all hours of the night.
A Halloween party that went until 6 in the morning 20 feet from the downstairs bedroom my wife sleeps in, while she was in the middle of IVF hormone therapy and already couldn't sleep, with the people doing it completely ignoring us telling them to quiet down, in a neighbood where the legal noise ordinance is to quit that shit at 1130 PM on weekdays, 130 AM on weekends. They don't give a shit because it's a short-term rental.
Construction nails spilled all over the street, leading to every single one of my wife's tires going flat in the span of three weeks.
The gas company digging up bedrock and leaving it piled 8 feet high, never removing it, which eventually washed out after rain into the entire block. We now have thin yellow films over our houses and everything else kept outdoors, which reconstitutes itself within 10 minutes of cleaning something, because of this dirt getting blown into the air by Texas winds.
Sidewalks constantly dug into, unusable, closed for years at a time, even when projects halt or finish.
Everyone and their mother believing they could become a builder during the ZIRP era, invariably going out of business and leaving empty lots and half-finished buildings sitting for years waiting for a new builder to buy them out.
Above-ground power lines constantly being knocked down onto the roads by constuctions crews.
All of my power tools being stolen by a construction crew across the street, because our dumbass builder gave a unit two doors down the same radio channel for the garage door opener as me, so I couldn't keep my garage shut until I realized and disconnected the opener.
Construction crews cutting the locks to our gates.
Cable Internet contractors cutting corners and putting new residents on shared lines instead of running a new line to new units, leaking signal and getting our Internet perpetually cut to solve complaints down the block.
Completely unmaintained lots owned by builders who weren't actually building becoming overgrown by six foot tall weeds and constantly getting cited by the city.
Construction truck rock haulers dropping rocks all over the road, breaking windshields, shaking the whole neighborhood at 5 in the morning.
A crane dropping onto a building and killing five people 9 years ago.
Hacker News constantly wants to act like the only possible reason anyone might oppose construction is "but ma property value." Believe me, it isn't just that. In spite of all that, our property values have still more than doubled in the past decade. Believe it or not, having your neighborhood torn down and rebuilt while you're still living there can actually be incredibly disruptive and unpleasant. There are plenty of legitimat...
There have been protests against removing rusting oil storage tanks. Our "industrial heritage" apparently.
People just grow to accept the eyesores and start to think of them as part of the local identity. You can find complaints about how ugly the Eiffel tower was when it was built. Symbol of the city now.
Of course all that's undermined by the choice to use NIMBY in the headline, which is perplexing.
If it's worth preserving, then it's worth paying for out of your own pocket. Leaving it to the government just lets biased people decide what's worth preserving instead of letting the market work. Claiming market failure requires strong evidence beyond "a thing I don't like".
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/you-probably-own...
And it is common for developers to present at the city council some beautiful drawings of dwellings surrounded by trees, with couples walking together holding hands and children playing. But when the actual thing is built it ends up looking like industrial warehouses.
And the people who complain about enshitification of diverse services are the same ones complaining that residents oppose anything in their neighborhood (Nimbyism) or anywhere (Bananaism) - they fail to apply the same criteria: no one likes enshitification, even less so in their neighborhoods.
Actual brutalism is actually pretty. But what is today called modern architecture, is not brutalism, but a consequence of construction cost cuts.