alt Hacker News> 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
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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.
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...