Why ugly buildings create NIMBYism

bbensouthwood about 3 hours ago 5 commentsRead Article on worksinprogress.news

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PeterStuer•about 1 hour ago

It is not complicated. People buy a property because they like to live in that location. If you are going to drastically change that environment, you destroy the very reason they liked it so much they made it the biggest purchase of their life.

davidw•19 minutes ago

"Destroy" - see, that's the kind of rhetoric we hear when it turns out they're building like a small apartment building or something.

Change happens one way or another. If a place has 10 homes and 100 people want to live there, you can either 1) build more homes or 2) see the 10 wealthiest of those 100 people eventually get the housing in that place. Both are pretty significant change, just one is more visible because you can see the homes that got built, rather than the less wealthy people priced out.

PeterStuer•14 minutes ago

What about "I bought this property because I like this environment to live here" is difficult to understand?

davidw•11 minutes ago

You bought a property, not the entire neighborhood or city. Those do not belong to you.

Cities change and adapt over time.

downrightmike•34 minutes ago

Like when they put up a datacenter next door and suddenly you're living in cyberpunk 2077

davidw•about 1 hour ago

I'm skeptical. People seem to complain most of all because 1) they view the function of a city as moving and storing automobiles and anything that might hypothetically get in the way of that is bad ("we should only build these homes if they come with a massive amount of parking and generate no traffic!") or 2) just plain aversion to change, which is more understandable.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't push for things like single stair reform that could lead to more fine-grained, incremental urbanism.

I've been to a number of housing hearings and listened to what people actually say on the public record, and "I'd support this if it were more broken up" is not a thing I've heard. On the other hand "this is a NICE neighborhood and we do not want apartments here" is pretty common.

graemep•35 minutes ago

NIMBYism happens in all sorts of places. Not just car oriented cities, or even just cities.

davidw•31 minutes ago

My experience is mostly with the car-oriented city I live in; I can't speak as much to what it might look like elsewhere.

pfdietz•about 1 hour ago

They want to keep out the poors (read: blacks.)

American racism, same as it ever was.

victorbjorklund•7 minutes ago

You have it everywhere in the world where people living somewhere has a say (of course no one in North Korea would ever NIMBY)

frantathefranta•about 1 hour ago

I think NIMBYism around the world is often "to keep out the poors", they don't have to be black. Slots in my theory that a lot of racism is just classism.

graemep•37 minutes ago

My understanding of racism in the US is that it is more like caste in India than like class in Britain, for example.

The big difference is that you are defined by your ancestry so there is little to no mobility.

This seems to be confirmed by the way Americans seem to regard someone's race as a fundamental and immutable characteristic, even while intellectually accepting race is just defined by social convention.

timschmidt•about 1 hour ago

> They want to keep out the poors

That's classism. Indirectly associated with racism in this country, sure. But naming the thing accurately communicates the full breadth of it's effect.

cucumber3732842•about 1 hour ago

> 1) they view the function of a city as moving and storing automobiles and anything that might hypothetically get in the way of that is bad ("we should only build these homes if they come with a massive amount of parking and generate no traffic!")

Imagine it's a thousand years ago and some cardinal is hearing a dispute between some guild representative and some local lord or something.

The parties will invariably appeal to religion because that's that the listener cares about. But they don't "really" care. They care about their dispute. And they care about religion insofar as it lets them convince, often actively misleading along the way, the audience into agreeing with their framing.

That's essentially what 1) is. People are screeching about traffic because the municipality invariable has rules that make they the municipality have to care about that.

People can, and do, do the same thing with other pretexts like safety and the environment, whatever the audience cares about.

davidw•27 minutes ago

I think their concerns about automobiles are actually genuine if overblown. People freak out about car stuff.

I do see 'concern trolling' as well. For instance I live in a place that doesn't see a lot of rain, so people will come out and "what about the WATER for those apartments?!" thinking they've found a gotcha, even while they themselves have a big green lawn and even if municipal use of water is a tiny fraction of the area's water

https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug...