[nothercastle]

Many times it’s just unplanned uncontrolled growth. It causes issues that aren’t mitigated and generally makes life worse for existing residents. NIMBY is strong because residents know that their politicians are corrupted and incompetent. Politicians will get kick backs and infrastructure will never get extended sufficiently to support. Theoretically we all benefit from increased density due to reduced infrastructure costs and shared resources, in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings. Similar to how larger companies cost savings from size is offset by internal inefficiency and friction.

[epistasis]

I think the history of the 20th century shows that "planned growth" is in many ways far inferior to unplanned growth.

All of our favorite locations were created far before the era of modern planning, when growth was largely uncontrolled.

> in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings.

Do you have any examples of this? I've never heard of it before and never seen data that could support it. Unless the "government inefficiency" is highly restrictive zoning, which would be an unusual framing but one that I would highly endorse if that's what you mean!

[nothercastle]

Look at how any large American city is managed. Especially west coast ones that have recently grown. The city government is complete dysfunctional and dispite having significantly more revenue than neighboring smaller cities they piss it all away and produce much worse results than neighboring smaller cities. Seattle and Portland are good examples.