I think both of you are right. The Venn diagram of "people who moved to Seattle to take a job paying 5x the prevailing wage" and "people who think Seattle was perfect and should never change from the state it was in the day after they arrived" seems, in my experience, to be almost completely overlapping. The voice of "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody" often originates from locals but is amplified by the people who newly-arrived and who can afford a $900,000 single-family residence in a "bucolic neighborhood" and now live in mortal terror that four-floors-and-corner-stores will be built nearby.

And then they have kids so everything turns into "that will severely impact my family and my children" so the rest of us are monsters for proposing such a thing.

Sorry for being hyperbolic; this raises my hackles a bit.

This isn't a problem that exists alone in Seattle.

Tour elementary schools across the nation, and you'll encounter lines of cars waiting to pickup/dropoff children. This is emblematic of the shift that has occurred in pockets of American society--the needs of the individual over the good of society.

Seattle just has unique geographical constraints that exacerbate the issue of individualistic thinking.

They have this because people don't trust their kids to walk home or be unsupervised any more, not because of individualistic thinking. And to be blunt, they are not entirely wrong; a dirty little secret of the old days is how much bullying or worse happened among unsupervised kids.

> And to be blunt, they are not entirely wrong

Actually they are. Humans are notoriously bad for understanding risk.

The rise in helicopter parenting DESPITE the fact that in no time in American history have children been more safe [1] is due to the fact that we (parents) have access to more information and news, and stories of children being harmed are sensational.

Our children would be fine riding the bus and waiting for the bus stop like we did as kids, but the fact that it's MY child means that I must do everything I can to protect them, regardless of the rationality of it. It is very much about individualistic thinking.

1: https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/infant-child-and-teen...

> No, that's still wrong. There is nothing ethically problematic about "accepting a job", and it's entirely possible to have a hot job market but not leave people homeless.

Much like communism, this is theoretically possible, but is not practically possible in most US cities, in the year 2019. Certainly not in the ones that are actually undergoing tech booms.

Given the constraints and social norms that our society operates under, a hot job market = misery for a lot of people.

Note that a sufficiently cold job market, and the urban decay associated with a shrinking population also leads to misery for a lot of people.