Thread by @nzsd

Not liking other people and not wanting to be around other people and thus wanting to live in a low-density area is a perfectly reasonable personal preference that the government should accommodate - in the 99% of the country that isn't the main area of existing major cities.

The thing that made me not bother quite finishing that SSC post was the idea that people who want to live in a big city should leave San Francisco and set up a new city somewhere else. This is a level of stupidity that's not worth talking with, but is still worth talking *about*.

Different people have different desires for how they want to live, and it's reasonable to accommodate that, but it's not reasonable to try to shield people from the inherent consequences of their preferences at the expense of others. Big city living comes with big city issues.

Wanting to live in a low-density suburban area while still in the heart of a big city is incoherent. It's something that can only be achieved with a wildly unfair distribution of wealth or a wildly unfair distribution of political power.

You can still trade off these desires: the fringes of the city can offer options somewhere between a shoebox in Manhattan, and having a thousand hectares of forest to yourself, 50km from the nearest one-horse town.

That's the point of planning, if and where it's politically possible to do planning well and sympathetically, and if it's not just captured by saboteurs, fanatics, and the incredibly dim.

The only point in the SSC post that's worth engaging with, rather than just dumping on, is the idea that there's people who feel forced to live in the Bay Area or wherever, even though they hate big cities (and it's clear Alexander himself is one).

Things like fitting in with your niche tribe or working in a specialised field. That's fair. But even if your very specific reason could be moved to a small country town, you've now just changed *who* is being forced to live somewhere they hate. Now the townies are miserable.

And often it's probably not possible for your specific niche or tribe to be in a small town anyway: niches and specialities are not binary, they need to let people put a toe in the water without necessarily committing to moving to Montana.

Niches can also depend on other niches, without being clearly separable. You could see in some sense a successful big city as being entirely composed of overlapping niche interests and industries.

If you hate big cities, but you have to suffer through living in one in order to achieve something you value more, well, that sucks. But it's no reason to make other people's lives harder in return.

All that said, some of NIMBYism is due to the unique shittiness of Anglophone New World big cities - which often try to be car-dependent well after they are too big for that to work, which often lack well-designed parks and public facilities, and offer few housing types.

The Bay Area is probably pretty typical for its level of urban shittiness, it's just, more than most ANW cities, full of extremely highly strung weirdos (those niche tribes!).

Big cities can be made noticeably nicer for enthusiastic and reluctant townies alike with the basics of being walkable, good public transport, taming cars, parks to escape to, a mix of lively and quieter districts, and a police presence that's reassuring but not oppressive.

And last but not least, making it still possible to completely escape easily enough, to get out to smaller towns or the countryside or the wilderness for an afternoon or a day or a weekend.

@threadreaderapp if you could unroll, please and thank you