There are few recurring discussions on Hacker News that frustrate me more than this. There is so much mean-spirited and disinterested in truth stereotyping of the kinds of people who become NIMBYs and why.

Let's be clear right off the bat. I'm NOT a NIMBY. I live in a rapidly growing neighborhood adjacent to downtown Dallas. It's been continually under construction virtually everywhere for as long as I've lived here, which has now been about 13 years. I support it 100%. We need the housing. There's an enormous homelessness problem. Anything that can contribute to a solution is worth doing. But it isn't costless and I understand the other side. Off the top of my head, all the things I've seen over the years:

Single-family homes condemned for bullshit reasons to force the previous occupants out even when they didn't want to sell.

Lots all turned into condos that no one wanted to live, which invariably become short-term rentals, which mostly end up being party houses.

Renters who come in and ignore neighborhood rules, doing things like letting their dogs shit all over the place and not cleaning it up, throwing parties at 3 in the morning in units with shared walls, starting fights with strippers, getting the cops called our all hours of the night.

A Halloween party that went until 6 in the morning 20 feet from the downstairs bedroom my wife sleeps in, while she was in the middle of IVF hormone therapy and already couldn't sleep, with the people doing it completely ignoring us telling them to quiet down, in a neighbood where the legal noise ordinance is to quit that shit at 1130 PM on weekdays, 130 AM on weekends. They don't give a shit because it's a short-term rental.

Construction nails spilled all over the street, leading to every single one of my wife's tires going flat in the span of three weeks.

The gas company digging up bedrock and leaving it piled 8 feet high, never removing it, which eventually washed out after rain into the entire block. We now have thin yellow films over our houses and everything else kept outdoors, which reconstitutes itself within 10 minutes of cleaning something, because of this dirt getting blown into the air by Texas winds.

Sidewalks constantly dug into, unusable, closed for years at a time, even when projects halt or finish.

Everyone and their mother believing they could become a builder during the ZIRP era, invariably going out of business and leaving empty lots and half-finished buildings sitting for years waiting for a new builder to buy them out.

Above-ground power lines constantly being knocked down onto the roads by constuctions crews.

All of my power tools being stolen by a construction crew across the street, because our dumbass builder gave a unit two doors down the same radio channel for the garage door opener as me, so I couldn't keep my garage shut until I realized and disconnected the opener.

Construction crews cutting the locks to our gates.

Cable Internet contractors cutting corners and putting new residents on shared lines instead of running a new line to new units, leaking signal and getting our Internet perpetually cut to solve complaints down the block.

Completely unmaintained lots owned by builders who weren't actually building becoming overgrown by six foot tall weeds and constantly getting cited by the city.

Construction truck rock haulers dropping rocks all over the road, breaking windshields, shaking the whole neighborhood at 5 in the morning.

A crane dropping onto a building and killing five people 9 years ago.

Hacker News constantly wants to act like the only possible reason anyone might oppose construction is "but ma property value." Believe me, it isn't just that. In spite of all that, our property values have still more than doubled in the past decade. Believe it or not, having your neighborhood torn down and rebuilt while you're still living there can actually be incredibly disruptive and unpleasant. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose it or at least want to regulate it, other than "I hate black people" and "I'm concerned by property value will go down." Until you can meet those objections and honest grounds, or even just acknowledge that there are other reasons to object, we're never going to make headway on coming to agreement about this.

Why ugly buildings create NIMBYism