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by vile_wretch 474 days ago
> You're describing a caricature, not an actual group of people.

It's a term used to describe people who find everything a "real nuisance". There are NIMBYs in my town who spent months protesting sidewalks being built in a new residential subdivision.

It's kind of inherently a caricature.

1 comments

The sorts of people you're describing do certainly exist, but that isn't how unemployed urban planners on YouTube have historically used the term, which is instead used to browbeat people who (quite reasonably) don't want their neighborhoods transformed by the construction of detox facilities, halfway houses, and mass transit infrastructure.
The first two, I’m sympathetic about. You’ve gotta put them somewhere, but I get not wanting them next door.

Transit? It’s a city. Don’t live there if you don’t want people moving around nearby.

And the ones protesting every single bit of housing development on grounds it mighty change their neighborhood? Yeah, you don’t have the eternal right to keep things exactly as they were the day you moved in.

Mass transit is a non-issue in a functional society which incarcerates criminals and institutionalizes the insane. This does not describe the vast majority of major cities in North America. This is why people move to the suburbs in the first place - the inaccessibility of every service except by car is a moat that keeps undesirables from settling there. In an ideal world I would prefer mass transit to driving a car, but not in a world where every train station has an addict using drugs in it, which describes the vast majority of mass transit systems in North America today.

> And the ones protesting every single bit of housing development on grounds it mighty change their neighborhood?

If they constitute an actual majority of residents, it's their right to dictate the development of the neighborhood as they see fit.

> Yeah, you don’t have the eternal right to keep things exactly as they were the day you moved in.

This is exactly the kind of hyperbolic dismissiveness that characterizes all of these arguments.