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What Hacker News says
- In case anyone's looking for more background, there's a great book from a couple of years ago called "Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America," by NYT reporter Conor Dougherty, that covers the history of the YIMBY movement in California (and to some extent more generally). Sonja Trauss has a prominent role in the narrative.
- This is a reference to the NIMBY/YIMBY fight, where the YIMBY position is that most non-single-family-home developments, other than the super high end, have been effectively been made illegal through a combination of zoning laws, neighborhood review processes that add extraordinary costs, unreasonable requirements and delays, and other arbitrary veto points.
The best intro points to the argument are probably still https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B... or https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America... although neither is free.
- Reading *Golden Gates* by Conor Dougherty right now! If anyone is deciding on a book to read about the history of housing policies, then I recommend it to anyone in California over *The Color of Law* (which is also a great book).
Does a great job of painting how decades of decision making led to this point despite decades of warnings.
- By contrast consider Conor Dougherty's Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America..., which is about how California in particular works hard to raise the cost of housing.
Places like Seattle are a little better, with an emphasis on "little." https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...
- Can we stop the name calling, it's really not productive to the conversation. How many *IMBY's did you just throw out there?!
There's a couple really good books that delve into this complex issue [1], [2]. The TLDR is that early 20th century American cities were quick to level entire neighborhoods to bring in modern infrastructure. It was swift and brutal, wiping out 50 to 100 years of history without much thought. All replaced with boring concrete roads and bland architecture.
So in the 60s and 70s, activists changed city laws to empower local residents with the ability to delay or out-right block housing projects.
What you're seeing now is the result of 40-50 years of cities stuck going through very tedious processes to get anything moved forward.
The problem with empowering any local resident is that you see only the people who want to stop something at the hearings and all it really takes are a hand-full. The rest of the residents are impartial or just too busy to care.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Defenders-Participatory-...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America...
- This is attacking a straw man; the elimination of single-family zoning does not imply replacing that zoning with some other equally onerous requirement. Allowing students to attend school without requiring a dress code is hardly "imposing your preferred solution on everybody else".
Also, the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues, like the lack of housing in California causing sky-high home and rental prices. See e.g. a review of the book Golden Gates, which touches on NIMBY-ism in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-...
