Comment by rsync
18 days ago
"People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away."
Not my preference but also not out of bounds as a democratic outcome.
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.
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!
> 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?
Come on, you know that's not analogous.
> It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level.
It also doesn't mean "any policy the voters want, as long as long as it's the one I want."
Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
> Come on, you know that's not analogous.
Not who you responded to, but I thought it was completely fair. We were a nation filled with Sundown Towns[0,1] very recently. Some probably still exist but are more discrete about it to avoid unwanted attention from those of us who would (loudly) call bullshit on the practice.
> Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
I think you're trying to shutdown someone who has a different opinion from yours by delegitimizing their position. It's not reading the way you thought it would.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town
1. https://thenewpress.org/books/sundown-towns/
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> Come on, you know that's not analogous.
Maybe not analogous, but closely related: Many of those suburbs were built for people who wanted to segregate themselves from minorities, and took steps to keep them out.
> when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
You seem to be shutting down the conversation. IME that is what happens overhwhelmingly when attempting to discuss issues of racism - far more than the few times people address the issue seriously. It's as if they think racism doesn't exist.
It's definitely analogous. The suburbs around me are voting to leave the regional transit org. Many people openly state the reason why they want to leave is because it brings "the wrong kind of people" to our neighborhoods.
This kind of voting still happens today. Don't bury your head in the sand.
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.
> 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 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.
In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences. It's not supposed to "push these processes...towards more globally optimal outcome," which when decoded means "what you or what some distant technocrat prefers."
Governments should be working on multi-generational scales. Not "fads" of what people want because they saw it in a movie or they grew up with it.
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> In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences.
In a representative, constitutional democracy, we're supposed to elect people who can more fully understand issues and possible outcomes, and work from there to create a system of laws and policies that is predictable and fair to all the parties.
This means that not every policy will be fully understood or agreed with by the populace. If we wanted to just implement what the public wants, we could just directly vote on every issue.
Orthogonally, there's a whole lot of the fabric of our daily lives that is just a certain way because that's how it's been so far. It works, but is neither popular nor unpopular-- it just is. That doesn't mean it couldn't be better.
There's also been studies showing how changing infrastructure designs can often be most unpopular just before the change but then become very popular after once the effects of the change are actually felt.
Change-- especially infrastructure change- almost never does anything good immediately and tends to screw everything up, too.
> 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.
Anybody who is eligible to vote can vote. How is this not democracy?
Selecting who is eligible to vote is one of the most obvious ways to manipulate the outcome. At the extreme, you can have large scale slavery in a system with voting, but it’s not a Democracy.
Who gets to decide on expanding an interstate or zoning has a huge impact when the votes are counted, so drawing lines on a map is suddenly where the power lies not with the people.
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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?
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.