Because it's a cheap, lazy insult to throw out at people who have different preferences than you do. It originally applied more to things like power plants that we collectively need but that basically no one wants to live next to. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with a city not wanting an Amazon HQ because of its impact on current residents when plenty of other places do.

> Because it's a cheap, lazy insult to throw out at people who have different preferences than you do.

Agreed.

Because there are tremendous social costs to intentionally causing housing shortages.

https://www.axios.com/the-great-stagnation-americans-stopped...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti-growth-...

Right, but we're not talking about housing, we're talking about Amazon.

Well, no, you're talking about NIMBYism.

But bringing in Amazon is going to necessitate adding housing stock, and that just doesn't happen in like Boston that already have housing issues and rampant NIMBYism.