I can agree to leave his property alone. He doesn't own his neighborhood, though. And anybody should be able to build multifamily housing on their own fucking property. Even if you don't like it. And if you really don't want it to happen, then buy the whole neighborhood. Nobody will force you to put apartments on your own property.
It does affect mine. High housing prices have ripple effects across entire regions. I know people that spend 4 hours of their lives in a car every day because of those ripple effects.
Again: Marc does not own his neighborhood. He owns his house. He can do whatever he wants with his house, but the moment you grant him control over the neighborhood, you grant him rights over everybody else's property.
But his neighborhood owns his neighborhood, and they vote to continue the multifamily zoning ban. Clearly if this was only Marc’s preference, it wouldn’t be law.
Surely the solution is to build more places for people to be employed rather than overcrowding existing ones and forcing people to commute from far away. COVID showed us the office centric commuter world is not necessary. I understand some people must be onsite, but still, drastic commute reductions and spreading out of people is a good thing.
It wasn't law. That is why they are objecting to it...cause the law doesn't ban it.
And no, the solution is to build more housing where people want to live, and let all the whiny nimby chucklefucks move to the places where nobody wants to live. That is, after all, what they want. If Marc Andreesen really hates people living near him, he can easily buy 100 acres in the Nevada desert where nobody would ever dare to build an apartment building.
I would consider zoning codes law. To argue otherwise is pedantic.
Sorry, just because you want to live somewhere, doesn’t entitle you to enough units built there for you to afford it.
I’d love to live in Atherton. But I can’t afford it. I don’t try and get more units built there when the community clearly doesn’t want that, so I choose somewhere else.
By that logic, the country owns the country, and the country should be able to force any part of the country to do what the broader country wants, and that is not considered force because, well, the country owns the country.
You've got it backwards. NIMBYs are the ones doing the forcing through government regulation. NIMBYs want to dictate what I can and can't build on my private property.
NIMBYs (the community and vast majority of single family homeowners) don’t want to see their neighborhoods overcrowded and changed completely by density, because they moved to such a neighborhood to get away from density. So they vote as a group to keep their neighborhoods nice low density places to live.
Meanwhile, YIMBY people in dense areas think they should have the final say over what SFR neighborhoods feel like and how they develop, even though they don’t even live there.
It’s never the other way around. No single family homeowner NIMBYs push back against another apartment building in an already dense area in the city nextdoor. Yet YIMBYs feel so strongly about controlling low density townships they don’t even live in that they advocate for state preemption. That preemption forces those places to change to adopt the YIMBY vision of walkability, density, public transport, and less cars, something few to none of the residents in that community want.
Nimbys don't own their neighborhoods. They own their houses, and they are free to do whatever they want with those houses. If they don't want density in the property that they don't own, the they shouldnt move to places where people want to live. Reno is calling out to them.
The neighborhood owns the neighborhood, and they vote to keep it low density. It’s not like there’s a single homeowner voting to control what the entire city builds.
No, actually they don't vote on zoning. No city has zoning votes...they have city planners who are hired by an appointee of someone that is voted in on a platform that is always way bigger than land use code. We're talking several degrees of separation between votes and land use code.
The closest thing neighborhoods have to votes on density are "town hall" style meetings where the crankiest asshole in the neighborhood shows up and pretends to speak for the entire neighborhood. And inevitably they're wrong, because there are always people that don't want to stay for whatever reason, and they rightfully want the highest price for their property, and that price is always going to be higher if they can sell to a developer which will build high density apartments in high demand locations.
Believe it or not, we actually do have a legal mechanism for entire neighborhoods to vote on density, and it actually has more power than zoning boards...it could prohibit density even where upzoning happens, because it can prohibit the density at the level of a deed covenant. They're called homeowners associations. They suck, and everybody hates them.
If Andreesen can't convince his neighborhood to form a homeowners association, and willingly introduce density-restricting covenants to their deeds, then you can be assured that density restrictions on zoning are actually minority rule...not some community decision.
Sure, YIMBYs want to force NIMBY communities to stop forcing individual homeowners from doing what they want with their own land. It's a justified act of force to prevent an unjustified act of force. If a small community got together and tried to legalize murder (an unjustified act of force on a victim), the broader community has every right to force that community to not do that (a justified act of force to prevent the unjustified force).