Comment by dionidium
4 days ago
> That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY.
It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.
Incumbent homeowners (and sometimes renters in rent-control situations) voting for policies that prevent new housing from being built near them is a huge reason why housing costs so much where I live; and reducing local housing costs is probably the single biggest way that policy changes could directly improve my quality of life.
Also, housing itself is often a genuinely noxious use of land for incumbent homeowners. In part because construction creates noise and dust and requires upgrading other local physical infrastructure - but also because more housing implies more new people living in an existing neighborhood, and additional people living somewhere can themselves cause problems for the incumbent residents.
This is a little oversimplistic.
Developers share an enormous role in this problem. They want to enshittify nice places to live with overdevelopment, because people with lower standards want to live there - which is perfectly fine. But they could happily live in residential zones built outward instead - however, that doesn't get the developers as much money, so they don't.
This is an explicitly anti-density, pro-suburban-sprawl housing policy proposal. This is basically the opposite of what transit-oriented urbanists would like to see.
NIMBY is an acronym: No In My back Yard.