Communities also evolve and devolve with time even without large external event. Maybe you don't feel the same belonging in the friend group after ten years or community grows to become something it wasn't in the beginning.
Maybe you have to accept that communities are here and now, but they can dissolve at any time.
It’d be helpful to cite which kind of economists / intellectuals make such claims. There are different incompatible schools.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
That would imply that 96-97% of population growth in your city immediately becomes homeless. Obviously, that is not the case.
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.
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.
This is why open source for communication platforms is so important.
Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.
These are the exact same arguments people make against immigration and diversity. I do not want this far-right drivel on HN, flagged.
Sure all the people who somehow find themselves unable to find community, are neurotic as fuck, and who are lonely have some sort of theory for how community is formed. This is definitely a case of "those who can, do; those who can't, teach". This entire field is full of immeasurable guru-bullshit without anything of any value in it. It's just pseudo-science dressed up in the language of science with some pithy lines of how "there's more to it than numbers" and garbage like that. It's just made up bullshit from people who really shouldn't have received a college degree.
Communities also evolve and devolve with time even without large external event. Maybe you don't feel the same belonging in the friend group after ten years or community grows to become something it wasn't in the beginning.
Maybe you have to accept that communities are here and now, but they can dissolve at any time.
It’d be helpful to cite which kind of economists / intellectuals make such claims. There are different incompatible schools.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
That would imply that 96-97% of population growth in your city immediately becomes homeless. Obviously, that is not the case.
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.
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.
This is why open source for communication platforms is so important.
Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.
These are the exact same arguments people make against immigration and diversity. I do not want this far-right drivel on HN, flagged.
Sure all the people who somehow find themselves unable to find community, are neurotic as fuck, and who are lonely have some sort of theory for how community is formed. This is definitely a case of "those who can, do; those who can't, teach". This entire field is full of immeasurable guru-bullshit without anything of any value in it. It's just pseudo-science dressed up in the language of science with some pithy lines of how "there's more to it than numbers" and garbage like that. It's just made up bullshit from people who really shouldn't have received a college degree.
Out with this garbage. Defund the bullies.