[kory]

No, I’m seeing it the correct way.

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.

[darksaints]

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.

[kory]

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.

[darksaints]

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.

[hackerlight]

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).