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by RobertRoberts
3032 days ago
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I really should have clarified that my situation described was in rural America. I realize that in larger cities the situation may seem completely different. The open space group that I ran into did not care about good quality housing, just making money. And they do exist, but since this happened many years ago, I don't have any of my paperwork left, and finding this online is very hard because of the nature of searching for "open spaces". The businesses involved are all rich land developers. And the kinds of houses they built were not only in-appropriate for the location (think basements in the south, or crawl space in the north) and abused town ordinances, lied to city councils, etc... It's amazing that people would think this stuff doesn't happen. Is this the mob mentality we have now? That because city people need open space, because it's in short supply, that when a developer sucks up the space and uses it up that it must be ok because a lot of people fit there? But when a home owner wants to have space they are wrong? |
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You're on well-trodden argumentative territory making early-stage and un-nuanced NIMBY talking points; people are going to be upset. Don't take it personally. I'll assume you just aren't very familiar with the dialogue around this issue yet.
1) The portrayal of sprawl as a lower-greed state is... suspect. Big houses and big yards make it necessary to drive cars everywhere, burn gasoline, pollute the environment with tailpipe emissions, run an enormous military-industrial complex to rig governments and destroy countries to ensure sufficient supply of oil, etc. The status quo for American land use involves an awful lot of resource burn with a whole lot of profit along the way. People have accepted these things as part of the landscape, but are outraged at developers profiting on density. We're looking at this the opposite way: let's be outraged at the auto and energy industries destroying the world, and accept developer greed as part of the landscape while unwinding that damage. YMMV.
2) Pre-automobile settlements (which are more common in Europe, but do exist here) suggest a compact and walkable model, even for small towns, that has a lot of nice properties. Proximity and walkability enable neighborly interactions that Americans just can't have in the built environments you insist on. They enable self-sufficiency for children and the elderly, livelier main streets with more personal interactions and local businesses vs. the big-box-store-with-giant-parking-lot model, etc. HN has an unusually high concentration of people who like the idea of this, and are upset that it's so rarely legal. And it's illegal because of precisely the mindset and activism you describe.
3) "But when a home owner wants to have space they are wrong? You are NOT fighting to have space. No one is taking your land. You're fighting to force other people to have space. Some of us don't want it, don't want to pay for it, don't want to accept the isolation that comes with it... and you've taken it upon yourself to make it mandatory for us to have it anyway.
You don't have to like density. You don't have to want it. You don't have to live in it yourself. All we ask is that when other people want to live compactly, you get out of the way.