People should pay for the costs of the negative externalities they impose on others, something that seems to be missing in the town you imagine. This is one thing I think YIMBYs constantly miss. "Build, build, build!" and when someone criticizes they say "you're just afraid to lose money on your house, housing should not be an investment" and I think that captures part of it, but it's not just that a $800k house is now worth $700k, it's that the entire character of the house is changed when it's in the shadow of a skyscraper for 6 hours a day. In this case the homeowner has not just lost money, they may have lost what made them desire the house in the first place - a calm neighborhood, a sunny garden, a beautiful view, easy parking, a neighborhood populated by similarly wealthy individuals. Now you probably take issue with at least one of those, but there are others that are perfectly reasonable and until YIMBYs confront the massive negative externalities they wish to unleash on people they'll continue to look on in disgust as entire communities show up to their council meetings and shout and howl and kill YIMBY proposals.
No one is building skyscrapers in the suburbs. Mid rises, of course. There are neighborhoods in LA with old mid rise apartments from the 1920s with hundreds of units, and you can't even zone for something that size in that neighborhood today. The zoned population of LA has actually shrunk in recent decades.
If you want stasis, California has never been that place. LA has had double digit growth per decade for most of its history, sometimes triple digit.
Agglomeration economies lead to positive externalities on balance, not negative ones. And YIMBY isn't arguing that one should build skyscrapers next to single-family houses. One can increase density in a rather gradual way, and a few skyscrapers here and there don't even give you a density advantage compared to building a far greater number of mid-rise and high-rise buildings.
This is very true. Vancouver has a huge housing issue because the main options are single-family homes (which are inaccessibly expensive) and ~20 storey condo towers (which are also inaccessibly expensive).
Then you end up with people opposed to densification because they only way that we can get sufficient density is to take this one small space and build 20 storeys of housing on it. If we wiped out one single-family neighborhood and replaced it with mid-rise residential with ground-floor commercial, it would be much more of a neighborhood and fit a lot more people sustainably.
Instead, they fight against any densification and argue that a three-storey walk-up is going to "change the character of the neighborhood" (because people who can't afford to buy homes will be able to live in their neighborhood) and now everyone is screwed (except the people who own).
The only way to ensure the neighborhood doesn't change is to own the entire neighborhood. Otherwise this is just individuals using the government's power to control what others do with their property.
> they may have lost what made them desire the house in the first place - a calm neighborhood, a sunny garden, a beautiful view, easy parking, a neighborhood populated by similarly wealthy individuals.
Good. If you want these things, you live rurally. Everything has trade-offs.
