You get anger and vitriol because your views are part of the problem. NIMBY’s pull up the ladder and try to turn a nice semi-affordable car into a Porsche then tell everyone “sorry, it’s just expensive to be here. Not my fault!”
It's not a problem to me, that's the point. By saying I am a part of the problem, what you really mean is that my views are an obstacle to you getting what you want.
> Most of us aren't even asking you to do anything or pay higher taxes - just stop screwing it up for everyone whose income isn't as big as yours
It's true people don't have to "do" anything, but they are still affected by QOL decline: increase in traffic, not enough parking, schools get crowded, everything gets crowded, etc. So it's not a no-op.
But by buying a house they're not buying the whole city and the right to prevent others from living there.
If these are REALLY the objections, we could find ways to mitigate these issues.
A reasonable discussion could be had about how fast neighborhoods should change, or what reasonable expectations buyers should have about the neighborhood changing over what period of time around them.
However, if more people move in, their single family home in the period of 10-20 years will probably double in value and they'd probably be able to sell it and move to the outskirts of the now-expanded city with a similar character to what they had before, which has become the center of the growing city.
What if people simply don't want refugee camps in their back yard? You are assuming that an improvement for you is logically an improvement for others. It's not. Your opinion is worth as much as everyone else's; 1 vote
> There are an awful lot of suburbs in the Bay Area that would be massively improved in character by replacing a handful of mansions with refugee camps.
Not even refugees would want to live near refugee camps
Once again, you don't get to decide for me what 'the problem is'. You're just framing what you want as objectively what should be. But you're incorrect to frame it that way. You want what you want. I want what i want.
It's more than just framing. It's one set of people telling another set of people what they can and cannot do with the land they own. That seems to be a bit of a tie breaker. The parent you replied to wasn't telling other people what to do with land they owned, he was objecting to people telling him what he could do on land he owned (within reason, like a duplex/triplex, or an accessory dwelling unit).
There's no principal like safety behind how restrictive many of these rules are, unless you count fear of people in different economic demographics to be a reasonable justification. It's a difference of opinion.
People who want more flexible zoning are growing in number, these are people who can't find an affordable place to live or are otherwise not happy with the changes made to zoning in the last 75-100 years, and they are driving changes in more and more localities.
The basics of economics are that housing prices is a function of amount of housing and number of people who want housing. NIMBYism is about keeping the amount of housing low, thus pushing prices up.
On a side note, how can you be mad at people who have a home, are raising their kids and don't want an apartment building smacked down next to them and their kid's schools flooded with hundreds of extra students?
