[bendmorris]

On a larger scale, people want more housing, vote for it, and vote for politicians that pass appropriate legislation. On a local level most people don't want it next to them, although they don't actually own the land in question. Developers that do own the land would love to build more housing but are opposed by their neighbors. How do we reconcile the different interests? Whose goals are considered "democracy" here?

[lawlessone]

Not in the US but it's similar where I am. Often older people will complain their children can't afford to live near them.

Some of the same people will protest any developments near them that could add more accommodation to the same area.

One of the arguments often used is that the area doesn't have the amenities e.g schools, larger roads, shops etc to support an increased population. But the development of more amenities in an area is blocked "because it isn't needed right now" etc.

Then you have people just trying to get a cut.. https://www.newstalk.com/news/dublin-residents-demand-e22500...

[Obscurity4340]

This is the point that gets me the most. They donMt own anything 99% of the time outside their specific lot. They are basically saying "My investment gives me dominion over that which I have invested $0 because it happens to border MUH propert"

Just appease me, non-investor and non-owner of whatever property is in question. I bet they circumcize their children as a matter of policy too. Cuz why should anyone else but me decide what happens to another person's body. After all, I sort of "own" them too"

Sick!

Edit: have these folks ever heard of buying surrounding lots or like, I dunno, buying options or whatever stuff pertains to this? The biggest NIMBY/Narcissitic trait is "I get everything, don't even have to pay! You get nothing! Im taking all your blocks and I refuse to share, here on the daycare mat!" ridiculous. Can't wait till they're all pallitaive and finally decisions can be made externally and with EVERYONEs best interest at heart, not just your chronically selfish nonsense.

[Obscurity4340]

I regret the use of "you/you" pronouns, at no point was I referring to you. Was more of a rhetorical fluorish gone amok

[j0hnyl]

I don't know why you lump NIMBY with Boomer. I think 99% of people don't want new constructions next to their properties.

[Obscurity4340]

What is your assessment outside of the unfortunate Boomer mis-reference?

[Tagbert]

Your argument had some juice up until the "boomer" slur. Are we still doing that?

[Obscurity4340]

K, that was admittedly excessive. My life experience up to now (btw definitely Boomers+Xers who display identical entitlement and offensive conduct) What say now?

[Obscurity4340]

Why do folks downvote mea culpas. Seems incredibly obtuse

[Obscurity4340]

* MUH investment

[barbazoo]

> Often older people will complain their children can't afford to live near them. Some of the same people will protest any developments near them

Cross referencing this must be tricky

[Obscurity4340]

Right?

If I'm role-playing as a boomer, I just cant understand how I dropped out in grade 10, got the good job at a local factory over a handshake and an all-expenses paid 3-martini lunch the moment I expressed interest in applying, and got a full pension plus zero or close to zero education costs and I have like 3 cars between me, wife, daughter, vacation at least 1x/year, and protested every subsequent development after I bought my house outright for $50k, and now my daughter needs to leave (she's 18, we HAVE to kick them out at that point?!) and she has nowhere to buy that doesn't rely upon me since she has no money and I fomented this monster?

Why me, Lord?

Edit: and even if I purchase nearby properties for fun and profit, she definitely can'tafford what I demand to be paid for rent in exchange for transferring partial use of the property that I aquired purely because I was stupidly financially empowered to have all these opportunities cuz my dad fucked my mom at the right historical timeframe to make sure that the content of mybirthdate took precedence over the content of my character or intentions or worthiness

[lazide]

The people who live there and vote clearly don’t want it, or they’d change the zoning?

I think what you’re saying is ‘people in general want to be able to live there but currently can’t afford to do so, and those jerks who live there won’t budge on making it happen’.

Which, okay?

[edgyquant]

You’ve completely skirted the question with most of this comment

> Whose goals are considered "democracy" here

The people who actually live in the area where decisions are made. People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.

[tyg13]

You're missing the point. The people in the area often do support building new housing, they just don't want it where they are. This is a fundamental paradox, as it has to be built _somewhere_, but seemingly none of the people who agree there is a problem want to disadvantage themselves to fix the problem.

Anyways, can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"? Seems like a hysterical reading of the situation.

[bhauer]

> Can I just say how absurd it is to call the government allowing developers to build new houses "tyranny"?

Yes, please do say this.

If anything in the system is tyranny-adjacent, it's zoning. Not to say I am against zoning holistically, but zoning is others telling you what you can and cannot do with your property. To characterize a liberalization of zoning as tyrannical is a great inversion.

[cbozeman]

He's not missing the point - everyone else is.

There's only so much highly desirable real estate. There are only so many beachfront properties. There's a shitload of millionaires out there. There's an assload of multi-millionaires out there. There's quite a few billionaires out there now.

If you make $100,000, you're not living on a beachfront house in Miami. You're not going to live in Downtown San Francisco in a nice home.

That's life. Life's not fair.

Too bad.

Poor people are going to have to reconcile that they can't afford to live in the cities. They're going to have to be content with the suburbs, because the affluent people want to live in the cities, and they don't want people around them that are going to bring down their property values, period.

Those affluent people, especially in places like NYC / SF / LA don't have the goddamn moral courage to just say, "I don't want a buncha poors around me, doing poor people shit, that's going to reduce the value of $4,500,000 home. This isn't just my house, it's an investment, and I cannot and will not allow you to tank my investment just because you want to live where I live."

Now that's the truth.

People should accept it, because you're not gonna change it; you're not gonna change it because it's human nature and you aren't going to change human nature without a lot of pain and suffering.

There's entirely too many people in Big Tech that don't want to accept this. "If we just XXXXX, we can fix XXXXX!"

No you can't. Evolution fixes these issues, not your money, not your regulations. We have to evolve into better angels - there are no shortcuts.

[fragmede]

So in this version of NYC / SF / LA, where do the service workers live? Who tends bar? who runs security at the door? who's sitting at the reception desk? Who cooks the food? Who delivers the food? who teaches the kids? who cleans the toilets? Who roasts the coffee? who delivers the Amazon packages?

Those people (clearly you are not one of them) need to live somewhere. They don't need to live in a luxury condo in downtown, but they do need to live somewhere, and if they all need to live in Yonkers / Fresno / Riverside to afford rent, they're not going to commute into your city of aristocrats.

we're seeing this in sf, with restaurants unable to hire, so self-sevice kisoks aren't a choice for the restaurant to use, they're sometimes the only option available. which is neat if you have a technology fetish, but sometimes we want a human person to talk to who understands something that hasn't been programmed into the computer.

[tyg13]

Can we just stop with the nonsense about "people wanting to live where the rich people live" as if a good majority of the people who are fighting for affordable housing aren't people who _already_ live there and are fighting against being priced out of where they grew up?

Your only response is an absurd defeatist appeal to human nature and trite clichés like "life isn't fair", ignoring that legislation is very capable of addressing this particular issue. That is currently the plan, and the plan is being executed by the state of California. If you think individual rich homeowners are more powerful than the state, then I think it might be you who is out of touch with the state of reality.

[piperswe]

Wonderful, but if you make $100,000 you can't afford a nice house in the suburbs of SF either.

[riversflow]

> People outside of a city enforcing their terms on a place they don’t live is tyranny actually.

This is ludicrous. Just like no man is an island, no city is self contained. Should the city be able to dump whatever pollutants into the river it sits on? Burn whatever, whenever as much as they want? Nobody else gets a say?

Other people share the same regional, state, and national identities with people who live in the city, should those people not get a say in how the place they actually live is run?

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Fortunately we don't just have cities: we also have counties, and states.

Every city needs teachers, firefighters, service industry workers, etc., and if they're not providing a place form them to live that they can afford with their current incomes, then they're not a real living, breathing city: they're Disneyland.

The state is well within her rights force cities to build housing for the people that are required to keep that city running, rather than externalizing their problems and forcing these folks to overflow into neighboring cities and endure inhumane commutes.

[partiallypro]

Seems like the government and residents blocking use of land that neither of them owns it more tyrannical than building a new housing development.

[kshacker]

Most of the grassroots level opposition is because developers lie, bribe and threaten their way out of honest development. I used to live in Cupertino (left 5 years back) and you had to be there to see the heavy handed tactics. Developers will promise one thing then once the contract was signed, bit by bit they will work with the city to roll back public benefits. And then the fights amongst city council - ugly at times in social media (Nextdoor). Nextdoor may be ugly itself but sometimes it exposes the fault lines very clearly since you see the same people parroting the lines over and over, after some time you just understand their tilt without anyone having to tell you so.

And this is not just Cupertino. I read stories from Saratoga, Sunnyvale, and San Jose. Wherever you get big money, some people get corrupted, and they don't work in the interest of the society. I mention San Jose but that is an example of city so big that neighborhood complaints can be killed quite easily since mobilizing the entire city to fight in behalf of one corner is not easy, so that's where the cities end up winning - they can do whatever without worrying "much" about the residents. But smaller cities can fight back and IMO they should until they get delivered what was promised.

[CydeWeys]

Why is it the responsibility of a developer to provide public benefits? That's the responsibility of the city. The developers should just be building the actual housing, which the cities by and large do not allow at all.

[lazide]

The benefits are essentially bribes to the citizens and planning departments.

It would be irritating if someone bribed you to be able to do something, then once they did it the check bounced!

[bhauer]

Indeed. It's especially irritating that such bribes are necessary to get approval to build anything in the first place.

[lazide]

On one hand? Yes.

On the other - real estate/physical locations are the one thing that fundamentally is limited and where distance and control really, really matter for a specific outcome or circumstance to exist.

Rural Idaho, little/no competition, no need for heavy rules to avoid it turning into complete anarchy.

Manhattan? Completely different story.

And there is only one manhattan (and only one of any given spot in rural Idaho, too, but a lot of any given spots).

The way these things tend to work in the cities is heavy rules, and then you have to apply for exceptions. Often, the rules are ‘no, you can’t build without an exception’.

So then, it’s all about making a good case you need an exception. The ‘benefits to the community’ is the ‘bribe’ as to why your good case should get the exception.

It’s hard to see what the alternative is, frankly, when you look at the on the ground reality - there is rarely a rule anyone could write that wouldn’t cause massive problems if applied naively in these dense environments.

And if the people living somewhere want to reduce/avoid certain types of problems, what else are they going to do?

And someone can say ‘fuck ‘em, they don’t get to say no’ - but most people saying that will very much change their tune when they’re on the other end of the bargain.

[CydeWeys]

Manhattan got the way it is today precisely because it DIDN'T use to have all of these restrictive rules prohibiting development. Indeed if those rules had been around a century or more ago, it wouldn't be the #1 city in the country. Chicago would be.

You've got it precisely backwards. The excessive rules are harmful, period, and are significantly hurting housing affordability. The lack of them is what made this city great back in the day (and it's still coasting on that inertia, though only growing more and more unaffordable over time).

The most recent dumb rule that was tacked on recently essentially made it impossible to build new hotels* (see https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2022/12/09/how-special-are-... ). Not a single hotel has been granted permission since that law passed several years back. Now add on top the AirBnb ban and we're making it significantly more expensive to visit NYC, which is hurting our tourism industry. All for completely dumb reasons. Build more hotels, build more housing, let the city thrive.

* This law was passed not because it's a good idea, but because of captured interests, namely, the existing hotel operators who didn't want further competition. It's anti-competitive, not "a good law that you need in a dense city" as you are characterizing things.

[b112]

I think the reference here, is to a certain amount of park land, trails, etc in a large project, and some low income housing.

[CydeWeys]

Right, none of that is the responsibility of the developers to provide. That's for the city to provide.

What's going on, however, is that California has hamstrung its ability to charge its existing citizens the costs of the services they are incurring thanks to Proposition 13, hence why expensive taxes, fees, and required public improvements are levied on new development. The wealthy older people who already own property (and aren't paying much for it) are being subsidized by the younger generation, and are paying out more than their fair share.

[FireBeyond]

> Most of the grassroots level opposition is because developers lie, bribe and threaten their way out of honest development. I used to live in Cupertino (left 5 years back) and you had to be there to see the heavy handed tactics. Developers will promise one thing then once the contract was signed, bit by bit they will work with the city to roll back public benefits.

I live in the state capitol of Washington. I could not agree more. What is even more galling is how open it is. Because I've done a lot with public services here, I have a lot of people on my FB feed who are involved in city politics, and several of them are close personal friends with many of the larger developers in the city. Not just socializing and meet and greets, but "We're going on vacation to Vegas together" and such. And then people wonder why our city is so "developer-friendly".

[anon84873628]

One way that I've seen this explained (not that I necessarily agree with it or care to defend it) is that the city somehow has an obligation to _future_ residents. Or put another way, to a minimum level of sustainability as a going concern.

Another commenter framed this as ensuring that essential service workers can afford to live in the area.

[wiseowise]

The ones that were here first.