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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
> 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").
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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-...
> 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.
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..."
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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!
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 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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
I've had something similar in the middle of nowhere Maine.
I miss it so much.
NYC, Seattle, Chicago, probably lots of places in CA, literally anywhere in Europe
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore
dunno what america you're in. unless your point is they're big pickup trucks now?
> 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.
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.
You don't need to worry about traffic or parking when you take a leisurely stroll to the store.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
When you pan out, walkable neighborhoods are at the multi generational scale — car centric suburbia is the fad.
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?
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?
I support upzoning. It is a bad idea to come after people’s comfy, expensive cars. People like cars.
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...
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.
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.
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.
well yeah the point is that it would be so nice to have
> 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....
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-...
> I’m leaving out the name of the person who filed the complaint
Why? Should be outed
> 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.
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..."
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.
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!
Four days a week on our street, thankfully not so early.
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.
> 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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not in California we don’t let people do that. The demand for condos far outstrips the amount of land zoned for them
>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? 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.
> 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!
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 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.
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.
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!
> 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
>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.
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.
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.
> 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?
This comment is a hilarious example of: https://x.com/AustingrahamZ1/status/1029385497213366279?lang...
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Hi I'm right here
Nice! Any thoughts on this matter, as in does it get you outraged as a free speech absolutist?
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's mostly true, but may not be in the case of government representatives.
citizens have a right to be heard by their government.
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.
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.
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".
not your back yard if you don't own the land.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
More housing in the next town over helps everyone looking for a house in the surrounding towns. We all share a backyard called earth.
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.
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).
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.
It's actually land that appreciates, which is why we should have a high land value tax and eliminate this extremely awful incentive.
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.
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 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?
Definitely YIYBY.