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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Market housing will be expensive until you allow developers to build as much housing as the market demands.
Non-market housing will have extremely long wait times if there is not as much of it as the market demands.
And the NIMBYs and left-NIMBYs are still winning.
Relevant substack article (Towers Don't Cause the Housing Crisis):
https://open.substack.com/pub/shonczinner/p/towers-dont-caus...
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.
> NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say.
NIMBYs, or just typical anglo incompetence? How can you tell the difference? It's easy to blame other people for systemic dysfunction.
This sort of construction failure is present everywhere where the public is allowed to make extensive inputs into what gets built. It is not just a US-specific reaction to urban engineering by Robert Moses.
We've let the pendulum swing too hard and instead of a dictatorship of technocrats, we have a dictatorship of vetocrats. A relatively small group of people, sometimes one single individual, can make new construction more complicated than lunar exploration, and there are indeed neighbourhoods whose permitting process took longer than the entire Apollo project.
I live in a house built on a former brownfield, 32 semi-detached houses in total. The whole project was delayed by four years by one dedicated octogenarian who didn't like the idea of new people in "his" neighbourhood and pulled out all stops he could (or even couldn't).
What do you consider to be anglo incompetence in dwelling construction that isn't NIMBYism?
Owning land. Whoever came up with this idea needs to be hung and revived a million times, and then tortured to death a million more. Our society has been mutilated as a result.
I think you could ascribe this to either NIMBY or YIMBY harebrained thinking. We need a third option that's pro-human.
We need public fucking housing.
Most of NIMBY legislature and processes that block private construction also block public construction. So most YIMBY arguments to improve the situation apply to both public and private constructions. (Not to mention that public construction has a plenty of problems specific to it.)
There is no trade-off or contradiction between public housing and YIMBY deregulation to allow more private development. I want both. They are complementary.
There's also overlap between YIMBYs are Georgists, they share some skepticism around private land ownership.
> There is no trade-off or contradiction between public housing and YIMBY deregulation
Sucking off developers removes all air from the room.
This is a fictitious trade-off. Deregulation (of parking minimums, height limits) helps ensure public housing is affordable for the taxpayer and environmentally friendly. If it also helps private developers as a side effect, and that is no loss for public housing.
You seem fairly keen on building public housing. Wouldn't that qualify you as a YIMBY? The YIMBYs are the lobby that tends to be pro-new-buildings.
If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.
> Wouldn't that qualify you as a YIMBY?
YIMBY is the pro-private-development lobby, as best I can tell. PHIMBY is the term I've seen.
> If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.
I suspect most who go by YIMBY would also oppose this.
> I suspect most who go by YIMBY would also oppose this.
Well I'm not sure what you're proposing but if it can be characterised as "mass public housing" it sounds like a terrible idea on the face of it, and most people would probably oppose it on that ground. But the YIMBYs would have to agree that you're allowed to try it if you want, otherwise they'd be NIMBYs, on the basis that they are telling other people they can't build on their land.
We get it, you're a commie. No need to constantly repeat that you want public versions of everything that already exists.
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You can tell the difference by observing that, intra-city (not inter-city, inter-state, or inter-country, which introduces confounds), the suburban locations with the highest land values build the least. Enclaves like where Marc Andreessen lives, where his family unit has been involved in successful NIMBY activism. That is an outcome that can only be explained by asymmetric government interference due to more effective lobbying from politically active NIMBYs.
That would imply that 96-97% of population growth in your city immediately becomes homeless. Obviously, that is not the case.
I've seen people live with their parents till 40 while waiting for a tiny room that will cost 2 or 3 times what their parents pay for their large villa with large garden.
Its quite simple to me. We the grown ups (together) are to facilitate housing for the kids. If we can't do that anymore we should ask ourselves why we don't want to do that anymore?
Quite interesting is how the (now proverbial) 40 year old isn't really attacking the problem.
I won't be around but I'm curious how their kids in turn will share the tiny room till 40.
No it doesn't. The number would be the percentage of additional housing needed. Existing housing doesn't suddenly disappear each year.
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