Single family homeowners own their own homes. It can't get sold out from underneath them. But they don't own the plots next store or across the street. If their happiness with their living situation is dependent on those plots having the same buildings on them then they need to buy those plots too. Then they get to decide what happens to them.

A homeowner NIMBYite is exactly the same as a renter that agitates for imposing rent control.

When we lived in the city I had to file a permit to fix my 3' high fence. Pay something like $100 just to have "permission" to start working on something that was rotting and falling over. I don't really consider that "owning".

Ditto zoning and a bunch of other things. When we had the chance we moved out to the country so we could use our land how we wanted without having to live in the covenants of what the city lays down(for instance one of the local towns doesn't allow beekeeping, regardless of plot size).

I totally understand that there's a place for high density living and that some people enjoy that life. However when you see rapid change in these tech centers understand that are some people didn't sign up for that when it came around.

[edit]

I should add that I really wish more companies would support remote work. It both solves the housing issue and lets people live in the areas that fit their lifestyle better.

Isn't it a reasonable expectation for city and suburb dwellers that when you affect your neighbors, you might have to get permission? And when your interest is greater than their inconvenience, that you should be granted permission? And that authority should be an expert at it and impartial?

I wasn't talking at all about what the neighboring plot does. The parent was making the claim that when you 'own' you can do whatever you want with your land which is far from the truth.

Look, I have no beef with people who want to live in high density spaces. That's totally cool(and more power to them) however in our case we had retired neighbors all up in our business(since they had nothing better to do) and city codes dictating exactly what we can do with our land.

Unless you research extensively before you buy(see beekeeping above) it's very easy for your neighbors to make your life a living hell after you buy your house(see also HoAs).

The cops will even close a major street for the food catering trucks for the private parties they throw on public lands and in public buildings.

I get that people want it all but for example. Friend bought 26th floor corner apartment in a 32 story buiding with amazing view. 2 years later someone built another 32 story building next door blocking 30% of his view. Did he have some kind of right to prevent that? Another friend bought a lot and had a house built on it in a downtown-ish area. All houses in the area have no yard, at most they have a backyard porch big enough for a couple of chairs. His house now blocks most of the sunlight into at least one of the houses around his lot. His neighbor complains. If she wanted not to be blocked she really needed to by the land.

I don't see any other reasonable solution to these types of problems. The fence seems like yet another where the owner of the land should be able to build the tall fence. I say that as well as my mom used to sunbath topless in our backyard as a kid. She mostly took advantage of the fact she didn't expect anyone to look over the fence but the fence was only about 7ft high and houses around us all 1 story tall.

Also, is there a substantive difference between being a "NIMBYite" and simply opposing market externalities?

You could argue it but it would be wrong. They could collectively own a given area -- form a corporation and buy a neighborhood. Then they would collectively own a given area and the collective entity would be entirely within its rights to decide what does or doesn't get built on a piece of land it owns (subject to the corporate governance rules).

That's essentially how co-op apartment buildings work. But these homeowner NIMBYites don't want to do that. They want to exercise the incidents of ownership without making an investment.

Given how local governments are set up they have the raw power to do what they are doing. But the rest of us don't have to pretend it is okay. This isn't stopping a gold mine from polluting a river, it's not building public schools, it's not defending the country from invasion -- it's exercising naked political power to take property rights from people that bought them simply because they want to and they have the votes.

They do, it's called a municipal corporation, and it makes it decisions through voting.

Even better, you don't even need to be a homeowner to influence the decision of this corporation -- anyone living there is allowed to vote.

This cuts both ways -- people who 'didn't invest' also have a voice in property development, precisely through that same democratic process that you seem to consider so illegitimate.

> it's exercising naked political power to take property rights from people that bought them simply because they want to and they have the votes.

I mean -- if you really want to live in a free-market paradise, there are plenty of places that don't practice much zoning, like Houston. Anyone who buys real estate in the Bay Area ought to research exactly what the local laws in the area are first, and if they don't that's on them.

In ancient Athens a plebiscite could exile any citizen. Do you consider that a legitimate exercise of democratic power?

> I mean -- if you really want to live in a free-market paradise

Is it fun to beat up strawmen? Believing the public policy ought to be driven by appeals to public reason and not naked special pleading is more Rawls than Rand.

Absolutely, it was part of the social contract and certainly understood by any citizen that their continued membership in the body public rests at the pleasure of the the public will.

Even today, it's the right of sovereign nations to claim or revoke citizenship as they please

> Believing the public policy ought to be driven by appeals to public reason

I agree that public policy ought to be driven by reason, but presuming that you have reason on your side, when 'reason' just so happens to also be nakedly self-serving, doesn't seem very honest.

Either it's ok to vote and agitate for your self-interest (including yourself), or it's not. You can't say 'it's evil for homeowners to want what's good for themselves', but then not apply that same standard to yourself.

What's to pretend? Local governments have a responsibility to their residents. Granted, that doesn't give them free reign to hurt non-residents, but they can't simply ignore the concerns of those who fund them and elected them into office.

I say this as someone who has been negatively impacted by the restrictive zoning in the bay area. It would benefit me personally more if they allowed more dense housing.

> it's exercising naked political power to take property rights from people that bought them simply because they want to and they have the votes.

Who's property right's are being revoked, the real estate developers? Again, what's the difference between that and the gold mine? The gold mine is a good thing. It provides jobs, adds wealth to the economy, etc. And yet, a gold mine polluting a river increases health risks, mars the natural beauty, and decreases the property value for those living downstream. We expect the gold mine to help reduce or bear the cost to those they affect.

On the other hand, real estate developers who build lots of high-density living also increase health risks (traffic, pollution), mar the natural beauty (bulldozing trees, fields) and decrease the property value of those living nearby. You may argue that it's not to the same degree, and I would agree, but I think it's still the same kind of situation.

But the benefits of resource extraction to society don't justify ignoring the interests of people living nearby. Ditto for creating new housing near highly desirable urban zones.

If anything the gold mine has an advantage in that, while people can live other places (even if at a somewhat lesser quality of life) you can't can't really build the mine somewhere else.

A NIMBY says it's fine to do something, just don't do it near me. Yes, freeways are necessary, just not too close to my house. Yes, we need a waste-water treatment plant, just don't put it in my neighborhood.

Unless you are a literal cartoon villain, you probably don't want public policy to minimize having a place to live. You just want people to have their places to live somewhere else.

Perhaps.

But a democratic process that generates NIMBY policies is the same as a democratic process that generates rent control: neither outcome is off-limits in our Democracy and both should be respected.

I personally value democracy more than I value land-use policy in one particular place. I further find it disheartening to hear of disregarding democratic outcomes from the very same progressive left that should be championing that process.

It is a fundamental principle of American democracy that the people ought to exercise thier power virtuously and it is entirely appropriate to chide them when they do not. Nothing in the “progressive left” philosophy is to the contrary as far as I’m aware.

The simplistic notion that whatever a bare majority of the people want is good went out of fashion more than 2000 years ago.

Well, that depends. One could argue that by allowing you to establish a home in their apartment building (in exchange for rent), they've taken on a responsibility towards you. Nobody can build up a decent life if they were under the constant fear to be evicted. That's why as a tenant, you are especially worth of protection from arbitrary actions would make you lose your home, no matter if the building you live in belongs to someone else. In other words, there must be a very good reason for the landlord to make you move out, such as e.g., they need it for themselves to live in.

At least that's one way of seeing it.

You're right. It's not at all -- like not even a little bit -- unreasonable to desire that your neighborhood stay the way it was on the day you bought into it. That's why you bought there in the first place, presumably; you liked it the way it was!

But it is 100% unreasonable to expect the rest of the world to help you achieve that goal. Times change. Places change. Building more density in the Bay Area is good for the most people and should be supported on those grounds.

I desire a lot of things. They aren't unreasonable desires. But that doesn't make them good policy goals for society as a whole.

The entire planet is nontrivially affected by creating and preserving car-dependent settlements; this sort of thing needs to be handled at the level of international climate treaties.

The entire country is nontrivially affected by the inaccessibility of moving to where there are jobs. Shadows on your garden don’t come close to being stuck in a place with no opportunity.

Imagine if other law was made at such a hyper-local level. Should residents of the 1200 block get to write themselves a murder statue that says residents of the 1100 block are fair game?

Good government is an antidote to the patchwork of small-scale actors making decisions in their own interests but dumping the downside of those decisions on society.

I disagree. I think that NIMBY has its place. Maybe not in Berkeley or 101-corridor Marin or in (insert miles and miles of shitty two story residential in SF) ... but I can quickly think of examples where NIMBY created tremendously valuable outcomes that were worth fighting for.

Here are a few, from places I live or have lived:

- West Marin County, with the accompanying Pt. Reyes National Seashore, is an incredible, awe-inspiring example not just of nature, but of the foresight and the hard work that a small community of people had to keep out development and large roadways.

- Boulder, CO, with all of its flaws and idiosyncrasies, is a quite impressive achievement that has grown up over many decades - starting with the original open space ring circling the city and continuing with height and density restrictions, etc.

Those are very expensive places to live with a fairly high bar for entry (and certainly for home ownership) ... and that is OK. It's OK that not everyone can live in Aspen. It's OK that we can't afford a home in Gstaad. It's OK that ranches in West Marin are expensive.

The world does not owe you these things.

The world doesn’t owe anybody anything. You’re right about that. The few white families lucky enough to buy cheap subsidized housing at just the right time in history as new highways ripped through existing (many times conveniently black) neighborhoods didn’t deserve to get rich off that decision.

But here we are.

It’s almost as if deserve’s got nothin to do with it.

I might agree that zoning should be all-or-nothing with respect to residential uses, and that there should not be such a thing as a "luxury residential only" (i.e. single family home only) zone.

But this is something totally different.

This is just urban incumbents opposing further urban developments in their neighborhoods on the grounds that they’ve got theirs and there’s no upside to making it any easier for other people to move there, too.

This isn’t about keeping the oil refinery out. This is about keeping other people out.

That’s a fundamentally different thing. NIMBY isn’t even the right word for it.

"Fuck you, I (literally) got mine"?

Seems like you either stay and fight (which history implies does not work) or keep moving to new similar-to-before places. Always. Expecting otherwise is not entirely reasonable either.

Ever increasing property values caused by artificially restricted zoning is basically a generational Ponzi scheme. It's stupid and wrong and it can't last forever. And like real Ponzi schemes, the only people who benefit are those who got in early.

Whereas, the whole "enrich myself off property values" thing only works if those values are continually increasing.

That is far from clear. No human civilization has ever had a stable population.

> the whole "enrich myself off property values" thing only works if those values are continually increasing.

That's true, but that's not what I was talking about. What I was talking about is people's reasonable desire for a stable environment. Rising housing costs is just a side-effect of that plus population growth.

You might as well blame the situation on people who have babies as on people who want to limit growth in their communities.

And if the local residents don't want a new housing development because it negatively impacts their home value, then maybe someone will find a way to make it worth their while (i.e. real-estate developer grants current residents a stake in the returns of the new development if they stay for 5 years after the new housing is constructed).

This is the local equivalent of Trump-style “close the borders and build a wall” anti-immigration rhetoric.