It’s just hyper-local nimby vs regular nimby.

Everyone where I live wants a corner store or corner bar 2 or 3 blocks away from them. Close enough to walk to conveniently but far enough they never have to know it exists unless they are personally interacting with the establishment in the moment.

No one wants such a thing a few houses down. So the local neighbors get their friends who live close by to join the local neighborhood meetings and rail against the noise/traffic/crime/etc. And of course the ever-present “property values” boogeyman. Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away. There also might be traffic!

Sitting through local neighborhood association meetings is exhausting. Anyone who actually desires to get things done burns out pretty quick.

> few places in the US that have walkable neighborhoods

Lots of places in the US have walkable neighborhods. You just have to live in a place that was developed before WW2 and car ownership wasn't assumed.

Judging by what the moms in my neighborhood say—traffic and parking.

Curious where this might be - assuming NYC?

How about if your neighborhood wanted to keep out people of a certain ethnicity instead? Is that a democratic outcome that we need to respect?

The definition of democracy is that we hold regular elections for political office. It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level. 51% of my neighbors cannot decide that they'd like expropriate my house or checking account. The point of YIMBYism is that these kinds of decisions have negative externalities and a larger group of voters- at the state or national level- are removing that decision-making power from a smaller group at the local level. This is a democratically legitimate outcome!

The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?

If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.

Is it still a democratic outcome when NIMBYs are doing things like abusing environmental regulations to choke out developments that citizens had approved of with their votes?

> If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.

The flaw in this argument here is that the opposition is trying to prevent these folks from even having a voice, which is fundamentally undemocratic. So this isn't a relevant statement here because this isn't a complaint about a democratic outcome. It's a complaint about people trying to eliminate voices who want to solve a problem. It's an attempt to silence discussion, which has the effect of preventing action.

It’s not democracy when you exclude people impacted by the decision making process from the decision. Preselecting the outcome before the vote destroys any legitimacy the outcome has.

The whole issue with NIMBYism are: contradictory democratic wishes and disproportional power of home owners. This points to issues with the democratic process, and not democracy itself.

Most people agree that more homes need to be built, but no home owner wants it in their backyard. So you end up with a deadlock where nothing is done.

NIMBYism is frequently driven by a small number of people who feel very strongly and use rules designed to protect minority rights to get their way. Is it democratic? I don't know... much of what's going on if put to a vote would be split 3 ways. A minority in favor, a large number who don't really care and another minority against (but they either don't get a vote or the default result is to go against their wishes).

What an odd viewpoint.

Effectively, we are all living in a shrinking prison of all decisions made before us. A "democratic" dystopia.

Respecting an outcome doesn't mean you have to (1) give up on differing views, or (2) stop working respectfully for another outcome.

I support upzoning. It is a bad idea to come after people’s comfy, expensive cars. People like cars.

Could you clarify why it is important to your point that the neglectful property owners next door, owned a store rather than a house or vacant lot?

The fact that the problem happened at a store, didn't make the store itself the problem.

Any more than the problem of loud neighbors, is a problem of having neighbors.

This seems like a wildly specifically bad outcome.. I’m a bit confused why your city allows this? You can call the cops on owners for noise violations, unsafe conditions, etc, etc.

Having lived in a dense walkable place with plentiful stores mingled with residential housing, I can say I’ve never seen that particular problem before.

The city should have gone after the property owner, they are responsible for any encampments on their property, and nuisance is definitely included in that, even here in liberal Seattle, and let’s not get into liability (your fire insurance has to cover them, so your insurance company gets involved and jacks your rates up really high). So in Seattle if they setup on private property, the property owner is in big trouble, so they mostly setup on public land.

I don’t think it’s a common pattern for mom and pop stores to have a homeless camp on their lot.

I would not like to live like this. I don't believe that relaxed zoning laws would make a situation like this more likely.

That sounds awful. Did you take them to civil court or explore doing so?

It's unfortunate that you have had that terrible experience and that the legal system in your location failed you.

I'm not sure however that there's anything to indicate that mom and pop stores are especially susceptible to these kinds of outcomes. It sounds more like you got a case of shitty neighbour which is possible whether or not the neighbour is a commercial lot or a small home.

If your negative experience had been with a neighbour living in a private home instead of a neighbour who owned a small business would that change your view around the matter of zoning for small businesses in residential neighbourhoods?

You realize homes are also private property right? You can have a shitty neighbor like the one described that is also enabled by the fact that they're in their own home. That doesn't justify what they're doing, but your argument against stores as "private property" doesn't hold water.

Did you talk to the store owner about the problem?

What you don't seem to see is that the problem is not the fact that the shop owner let the homeless people stay there.

The problem is the fact that those people were homeless to begin with.

So many people like you seem to just accept the idea that there will always be homeless people—you just don't want to have to see them. Ideally, they should just go die, and decrease the surplus population, right? At least that way they won't be bothering you.

If a few of them are breaking noise ordinances or stealing stuff and the police won't do anything, then complain to the city about that, not about the fact that the shop owner has the compassion to allow them a place to exist.

And if you actually want there to be fewer homeless people overall......then maybe, just maybe, you might have to accept fewer zoning regulations that raise the price of housing.

Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.

The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.

> Traffic?

The premise of these places is that it's on your way. That's not any more traffic, it's just the people already passing by stopping there momentarily.

> Parking?

That's this:

> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.

This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.

You would also get things like part-time shops. You have someone with a work-from-home job and they put out a sign in front of their house saying you can get coffee and food there. They mainly get a few customers during the morning rush and a few more at lunchtime and do the work-from-home job the rest of the day.

Those would be everywhere if it was allowed, and they wouldn't even need parking lots because they wouldn't have enough simultaneous customers to fill one and there would generally be one within walking distance of any given place anyway.

> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."

Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.

Cars are the most sensitive form of transport to both traffic and parking, and even then the only other form of transport I can think of where parking is an issue is biking. If you could walk or take public transit, there would be no need to park, and traffic would be much lower because much less space is needed per commuter. Wider roads and more parking spaces are easy to point to as solutions but the real problem is subpar, uncomfortable, or even non-existent public transportation.

> but then they might not be economically viable

I want a source for this. I've never been to Tokyo or Amsterdam, but everyone I know who's been there describe the zoning working exactly this way and it seems economically viable.

>> A 45 min drive is a huge distance.

Not in Cambridge, Massachusetts traffic!

Somehow all our neighborhood corner stores, cafes, village centers, and such seem to get by without a huge amount of parking. Likely because there's bus service and lots of housing within walking distance and actual bike lanes and such to get around.

You don't need to worry about traffic or parking when you take a leisurely stroll to the store.

The street parking issue is solved by making people pay for it, but people insist on their right to be given free space on public streets.

Even if we ignore freeways and such, a 15 minute drive at 30 mph is about 7 miles, which is a circle containing 176 square miles - or the entirety of the city of New Orleans or Denver.

A 15 minute walk is about a mile, so that's a 3.14159 sq mile circle - that's a small town or a neighborhood or two.

I wish people would give examples of these places so we could look at them!

This is 1000% the truth - nobody passes up a house because there's a similar one further away.

I would also be a bit alarmed by a 24h convenience store, but that's quite a different thing than a normal-business-hours small grocer or similar.

Someone imagining they are able to hear plates clinking from several buildings away may have issues that extend beyond having chosen to live next to a restaurant.

Allowing cafes into neighborhoods doesn't mean mandating you turn your living room into one.

Is that a "five mile" drive or is that literally five minutes from car start to car park?

Because I can get about 2 miles by car in that time, if I'm really honest about stop lights and such.

'Walkable' has been heavily influenced by the car culture we live in.

Too many, crossing an intersection with a traffic light makes that commute unwalkable. In my suburbia, going from one shop to another 5 doors down requires driving.

well yeah the point is that it would be so nice to have

> In many places it’s illegal to call yourself an engineer unless you match certain criteria, such as being a licensed engineer or working for a company in the industry that can oversee your work in a specified capacity.

that is the case in most countries. the US is an outlier in the First World in that sense.

only country where you could be called a Sandwich Engineer with a straight face and not get sued.

Here's where I come out and maybe others end up in the same scenario.

I think it's definitely a good thing to build up more high density housing. I've got no complaints there.

However, a major problem we are having locally is that while that local housing is being built like gangbusters, the infrastructure to support that housing, such as the roads and public transport, hasn't been upgraded in tandem. 10 years ago, I could drive to work in 20 minutes. Today during rush hour it's a 40 to 60 minute affair. It's start/stop traffic through the neighborhood because there's no buses, interstate, etc to service the area where all the growth is happening.

It also doesn't help that promised projects, like new parks, have been stuck in limbo for the last 15 years with more than a few proposals to try and turn that land into new housing developments.

What I'm saying is housing is important and nice, but we actually need public utilities to be upgraded and to grow with the housing increase. It's untenable to add 10,000 housing units into an area originally designed to service 1000.

No, I’m a nimby.

Basically the law should be the newly added properties be more valuable than the existing ones.

Everyone is nimby when it touches the most valuable thing in their life. You'll turn nimby once you buy a house. There's no lie, anyone will be against a landfill or skyscrapers near their house. If you think otherwise, you're lying.

There's nothing wrong with nimby.

Ish. Polling is very YIMBY. So long as it is exactly what I want in my back yard. With a lot more leeway granted to what should be allowed in someone else's back yard.

my own brand of yimbyism at least respects that. there's nothing wrong with quiet neighborhoods and loud neighborhoods. the sort of things i want to allow in neighborhoods like yours are locally-owned corner stores and cafes and wine bars and walkable development like cut-throughs and bikelanes. part of the problem with the urbanism debates is that no one has quite figured out how to allow "the good stuff" while keeping out "the bad stuff" because as soon as you upzone, like, walgreens and gas stations and corporate high rises are expected to start showing up. IMO this is something of a "social technology" problem: if we can't figure out how to allow healthy development without stopping unhealthy development, that's a problem to solve systematically.

the other issue with urbanism debates is that everyone's version of Yimbyism is different and you end up not trusting any of them because some people really DO think that you should shut up and allow high rises. They have a moral reason for that too---because housing really is at a shortage and costs too much and some people getting their fancy neighborhoods while others have access to nothing is sorta unfair. But that position is basically untenable, if you try to enforce it you just make an enemy of everyone. But it seems to me that the happy medium, the "build good stuff and not bad (carefully)", is an everyone-wins situation (except for a few crotchety people I suppose). That goal is to break the equilibrium of "some (established) people get to govern what happens to almost-everybody" and replace it with something more generally democratic, but without letting in all the repugnance of how the free market will build things if you don't govern it at all.

(this is all very idealistic of course. The problem is that a random anti-development suburban neighborhood that likes being that way has no incentive to let anyone change at all, and is probably basically right that the urbanism program doesn't benefit them at all. I imagine that only really systematic way around that is to end up in a higher-trust version of society where towns are mostly nice, instead of mostly not, so that people actually crave this sort of development instead of reacting negatively to it.)

Got mine!

I always find this 'character' argument disingenuous.

The character of the neighbourhood is only invoked for perceived negative externalities. No one complains when the cracked sidewalks get repaved, or fiber internet lines replace slow copper, when increasing affluence mean that houses are better maintained, when a new sewer line allows people to remove septic tanks. That all changes the character of a neighbourhood, but never gets fought.

Go ahead and commit to the bit, lock in on the character in ALL ways: make sure you fight any alteration to any building, any change in the shade of paint should be fought! Your neighbour replacing their front door? Denied! Replacing a concrete driveway with pavers? unacceptable? Replacing incandescent bulbs with LED? Uncharacteristic! Increasing home values changing who can afford to live there? Not acceptable, gotta sell your home for what you paid to maintain the character!

> If someone moves into an area that is zoned for particular types of properties, then new zoning is imposed by outside fiat (not a vote of the people who live there) is not appropriate.

How small are we going to allow the "area" to be defined? Is it one vote per property owner, or one vote per resident? Can we call a block an area? Who decides the arbitrary boundaries? Do people living on the boundary line get to vote for projects in adjacent properties in adjacent jurisdictions?

Just call NIMBYism what it is, selfish justification for control of other people's property. Your position is - explicitly - that other people and property owners should be made less well off for your comfort. "The Character of the Neighbourhood" is a red herring.

The urbanists are vocal online because of something they're unsatisfied with in their life - if you talk to them and dig into it, they're complaining about a lack, a lack that they think would be filled if they could just afford to live in NY or Europe (because they assume everyone in NY lives like Friends or something).

If instead of trying to solve loneliness through urban development they dedicated their efforts to "touching grass/concrete" and got to know their community - suddenly they'd discover they have the power to urbanize - but do they still have the desire?

My thoughts would be - is she right (denser apartments would raise the crime rate), and then - if she is, is there some way it can be mitigated?

This is amusing, because the usual NIMBY argument I hear is about "gentrification", i.e. it makes the neighborhood better and that's bad.

terminally online young adults who are bitter that they can't afford to live precisely where they like

More accurately: they would like to live in a particular location, the owner of that location would like to sell or rent it to them, but a third party wants to forcibly prevent that transaction.

Why don't we let people who like living in dense housing build and live in dense housing? And leave those who don't in peace? Right now we only do the second one but make the first one illegal.

> It drives up costs.

How?

Upkeep is arguably more expensive for a detached house, and suburbs make cars almost mandatory.

I agree from a personal perspective, but sprawl is also terrible in its own way. The real problem is too many people.

In any case, it shouldn’t be illegal to build either dense or sparse housing.

Unless you're the only one who thinks that, you'd think there would be some centralized advocacy for your position, is what I'm saying.

Yes, had this conversation with people complaining about an apartment building being built over a decrepit strip mall in central Los Angeles. "Perhaps living in the center of a megacity is not for you..."

Car thing is so sad. For some reason people think it’s socially acceptable to blast music from their car at 7am. I can’t tell if they don’t understand they are annoying people, if they don’t care, or they are just a menace

Welcome to the sound of spring/summer/fall in the suburbs. 7am to 6pm, 6 days a week. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Most landscaping teams have 2-3 dedicated guys who do nothing but leaf blow the entire time they are at a house. Towns have been largely unsuccessful in curbing this, mostly because demand for landscaping services is so high.

Four days a week on our street, thankfully not so early.

How do you measure?

I can't really think of a way to measure it that would come out how you said.

I am not even sure it’s a swap. I see a lot of RW sentiment lately that libertarian principles are self-defeating, and the only thing that matters is Straussian friend-enemy distinction.

Basically, the extreme wings of both parties are seizing power and preparing for battle, while the moderate wings are tuning out. (Or to put it another way, more of the center is becoming politically independent.)

Traditional ideological lines break down under these conditions, because the important thing is damaging your enemies, not maintaining ideological consistency.

For this to be anything like "so you hate waffles" there would have to somebody going around declaring to all that "all breakfast foods are good and can not be criticized" and them only showing up to defend pancakes on the basis of "all breakfast foods" but then deafening silence when waffles or bacon or scrambled eggs get trampled on in a far more prevalant manner.

Even the one reply to me from a self-proclaimed absolutist didn't bother to defend the political speech and petition of government, just said that they were present!

No, this is not the phenomenon that post is referring to.

No, your comment is an example of "argument by joke" and "false equivalency".

The bad faith free speech argument that somehow applies to only some people, to only one side of the political divide, but never to the other was prevalent mainstream argument for years now. Some peoples free speech was sacred and if you criticized or opposed them, the criticism and opposition themselves did not counted as free speech - even if it in fact consisted of speech only.

So like, kicking at those people is entirely fair. Because they actively damaged "free speech". Not that they care or ever cared.

THat's basically my activity on HN. 10% arguing why I like pancakes, and 90% replying to the stream of people accusing me of hating waffles.

Many prominent Republicans in recent years have railed against censorship and espoused a strong belief in free speech principles. Then they got back into power last year and most of those same people did a complete 180 and have been happily supporting censorship of speech that they don't like.

Nice! Any thoughts on this matter, as in does it get you outraged as a free speech absolutist?

Which strikes me as bizarre, first because it requires that fallacious assumption and secondly because it requires mapping NIMBY onto the right wing. Which arguably tracks with what one would naturally expect from free-associating words like "conservative", but the evidence doesn't show me any strong correlations except possibly in the opposite direction (considering the evidence of new housing starts vs. local voting patterns).

My county eliminated code compliance checks (and building plan review) 2 decades ago for owner-builders and it's made things so much cheaper and easier to build. It is the only way I was able to afford a house.

We were warned by nay-sayers the county would burn down but that never came to fruition and meanwhile I've seen so many code-Nazi places in California burn down from wildfires.

It's hilarious watching the systematic destruction of the counter points when people tell me about the horrors

(1) "You wouldn't want to live in such a house, it would burn down." I already do, and have been.

(2) Your neighborhood would catch fire. I live in such a neighborhood, it didn't.

(3) Just wait long enough! It will happen eventually. Eventually you'll have bad luck! This has been going on for 20+ years.

Or why cities should be able to ignore state laws, for that matter.

A community of 5-acre equestrian lots is pastoral. Dumping a 650 housing project in the middle of that would destroy its character.

As far as I can tell, you responded to someone literally saying "The situation is more complex." and attempting a refutation of your absolutist view, by accusing that this is a "very simplistic view" — and then generalizing "rich people" as a group without considering strata of wealth at all nor considering more than one possible strategy for accumulating real estate wealth.

Hypothetically, what about allowing new property only of higher quality than existing ones? That way to assure it’s a net improvement for everyone

The use of "back yard" refers to the local area, not the literal extent of one's property. This usage is not unique to NIMBY and it's derivatives. YIMBY sentiment also clearly extends beyond developers themselves and simple libertine principles. Many people want development to occur around them, in their back-yard so to speak, because they prefer it occurs. The semantic change you're arguing for erases this concept just to sidestep the notion of local community. It's a needlessly aggravating approach when the simple answer is just that both NIMBY and YIMBY advocates can support their cause beyond their own area because they believe their cohort is right and deserves it.

They are telling communities that they have no part of how to manage themselves.

Rancho Palos Verdes should not be required to comply with the request of some random activist who probably has never even stepped foot in the town.

There is an abundance of houses in the US, just in less desirable areas than Rancho Palos Verdes.

Your young children have no right to live in any specific location, and your usage of CRISIS to describe a lack of access to highly desirable housing is not compelling.

I mean, also not in my back yard if the people who don't own the land vote for a bunch of micro managerial laws that make it illegal to do things without jumping through hoops that are so expensive as to be a non-starter.

Nobody is gonna go through the "everything else" approval process that strip clubs and heavy industry have to go through just to expand their business parking or do $10k of environmental impact assessment to drop off a $1k garden shed. (literal examples from my town).

These evil people can't make things illegal outright so they make the process so expensive almost nobody can do it and it takes decades for someone to come along with a lucrative enough development that's worth expensively challenging it inn court over.

People who do own the land aren't able to collectively agree on how to manage it because of state law. That's the issue. The source of the "NIMBY pressure" mentioned in the article is local residents, who should have much more say over local zoning code than someone who lives hundreds of miles away.

> More housing in region X will result in lower housing prices in region Y.

Or higher prices in Y, because X will be both more crowded and with on average poorer people than before the supply increase, and people who prefer a less crowded area and less poor people (either directly because they are poor, or because of other demographic traits that correlate with wealth in the broader society, like race in the USA) around them will have an even higher relative preference for living in Y than before.

> The interests of people from region Y are valid.

They exist, validity is...at best, not a case you have made. Existence of a material interest does not imply validitym

I can say their interests don't meet a threshold of significance.

As an extreme example, I can say that hurricane victims have an interest in butterfly wing flaps across the world because there is some indirect causation.

Housing expansion advocates consistently describe the simplest of supply-demand mechanisms, whereas housing demand is heavily driven by local and national economic conditions as well. Gary IN doesn't have a housing shortage.

That's a very theoretical argument, and there's nothing stopping people in region Y from building all the housing they could possibly need in region Y. If it's such a great idea, region Y will thrive and reap the rewards of this policy.

And my point is that there are limits on the impact region X has on region Y based on their proximity. Should someone in downtown LA be able to compel someone in Palo Alto to upzone based on this "impact"? What about someone in Kansas or Florida?

I'm not saying I'm favor of NIMBY - it depends on what's actually going on - but I would expect that there might be a lobby of constructors, rather than citizens looking to lower house prices, behind such an effort.

I think the back yard in all of these initialism is not limited to the person’s private back yard property.

NIMBY seeks to prevent the development of nearby properties to preserve some sort of “neighborhood character,” so the “back yard” is actually the whole neighborhood (and I think part of the negative connotation of that phrase is that they are treating shared spaces like their own personal yard). Then, YIMBY seeks to allow their neighborhoods to be developed.

If we’re going to extend it to “YIYBY” and “NIYBY,” we should apply the same logic, right?

Rather, I think YIYBY mostly doesn’t make sense because YIMBY people are trying to convince people that they should allow development in their neighborhood. Zoning rules… I mean, they have difference policies for changing them, but YIMBY activists aren’t usually manually and unilaterally changing them for other people.

Ultimately the decision making process is probably (depending on local regulation of course) “yes or no in our back yards,” when you get down to the details.

YIYBY is the concept of wanting it nearby to your residence but not having to suffer any of the direct consequences - imo it's a good thing to acknowledge but generally indistinguishable from NIMBYism. You want the benefits but aren't willing to pay the costs.

It should really be called NIYBY-ism.

Literal NIMBY-ism, where the backyard is one's own property, is just straightforward property rights. They want to control other people's property and tell them what they can and can't do with it. That's basically communism.

"in my/your backyard" is a very old and pretty common idiomatic phrase that refers to the general area you live in (neighborhood, town, city, etc).

It's actually about people not wanting the largest investment of their life to change in ways they don't like.

Casting shadow on their backyard. Bringing noise to their street. Ultimately, lowering the value of their property.

The key problem of US housing is that a house is seen as an investment vehicle, which should appreciate, or at least appreciate no slower than inflation. Keeping prices high and rising can't but go hand in hand with keeping supply scarce.