← Back to context

Comment by testdelacc1

3 days ago

I agree with Joan here, communities aren’t fungible. Building something where something already exists does carry a cost.

But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs. In addition to environmental, economic, political reasons not to build something, also consider the cost to potentially breaking existing community bonds. We shouldn’t build new high density housing because the new residents will never be able to replicate the community of the previous low density single family home neighbourhood.

You can tell this is a NIMBY piece because it doesn’t touch on how to build new communities, just that existing ones exist and new ones can’t be built and even if they can they’ll be poor imitations of the old ones. So instead of trying to build new things, let’s preserve what we have already. It would have been more interesting and honest if it had explored the role of say, third spaces and how consciously creating the right conditions can lead to community formation.

After all, even the communities that exist today were empty land once upon a time, until we built the infrastructure and community within. If all we ever did was preserve we wouldn’t even have the communities today that we value so much.

26 comments

testdelacc1

Reply
aragilar  3 days ago

It's not only the transition from low -> high that removes communities, there are multiple examples of public housing communities (of medium to high density) replaced by similar (or effectively low) density (as new expensive apartments) within Sydney.

Esn024  3 days ago

I think, unlike what the author writes, communities CAN be moved if they are sufficiently small and loyal to the leaders who do the move, and the leaders don't screw it up. Moreover, the move is sometimes an improvement.

I've witnessed it myself. For example, Commander Keen fans moving from various InsideTheWeb forums to a centralized phpBB following the ITW shutdown announcement in the late 1990s. I can't think of anybody that got lost, and it was actually an improvement because the new discussion infrastructure was better than it had been before. The community didn't scatter to the winds, far from it; it consolidated and grew.

Of course, such a situation is probably rarer with the enshittification these days, but it would be worth it to figure out when it works, too.

And history is replete with stories of groups who became most successful AFTER a migration, or at least were not so negatively affected by one.

  • testdelacc1  3 days ago

    Digg to Reddit was a positive migration. I can think of many small Reddit communities that couldn’t have flourished under Digg or the old phpBB style boards.

    Things can get better over time. When they don’t acknowledge this I can’t help but see the authors article as a dislike for any change of any kind.

DocTomoe  3 days ago

If you are in America, that 'empty land' was not 'empty land'. It was Native land. Displacement of Native Americans was genocidal and destroyed communities and cultures.

Also, the article touches Moses, right, but it is about communities as a concept, with a heavy emphasis on online communities, where 'new things to buy' do not come at the expense of 'tearing down the old' - and where, when you tear down the old, behaviour patterns change. Take, for instance, the reddit re-design, which changed the page's culture. Or usage patterns of RSS post Google-Reader-shutdown.

  • testdelacc1  3 days ago

    You will be pleased to know that I’m not from America, nor have I ever lived there.

    My point stands: there are a million excuses not to build more. And when we make that choice not to build, the costs are invisible but they definitely exist. But hypothetical benefits are not as easy to point to as the costs of building.

FranklinJabar  3 days ago

> But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs.

How much are NIMBYs actually a problem these days? It seems to me that YIMBYs insisting on building anything, anything, anything at all, damn the cost, be it a privately developed five over one or a publicly funded ferris wheel downtown, are a much bigger issue now. We should be intentional about the communities we are developing (say, FUCKING PUBLIC HOUSING), and ideally not spoonfeeding capital more of our lifeblood as most YIMYs insist on

  • testdelacc1  3 days ago

    I live in a city that consistently builds about 3-4% of the number of homes we need to build each year. We don’t build rail, we don’t electricity transmission infrastructure, all of which increases our cost of living.

    NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say.