It is not complicated. People buy a property because they like to live in that location. If you are going to drastically change that environment, you destroy the very reason they liked it so much they made it the biggest purchase of their life.
"Destroy" - see, that's the kind of rhetoric we hear when it turns out they're building like a small apartment building or something.
Change happens one way or another. If a place has 10 homes and 100 people want to live there, you can either 1) build more homes or 2) see the 10 wealthiest of those 100 people eventually get the housing in that place. Both are pretty significant change, just one is more visible because you can see the homes that got built, rather than the less wealthy people priced out.
Once again, you use the passive. Change is active. Someone is doing the changing, and then they are trying to insult the people that refuse to let them have their way.
I explained two kinds of change, one that is more visible, where housing is built to accommodate people moving in, and a second kind where supply does not meet demand so the people change.
Boulder, CO is an example of #2 - they put a bunch of restrictions on growth years ago , so what 'change' looked like there is wealthy people moving in, and the working class being pushed out to 'leapfrog development' like Longmont, where they then commute in the serve the landed gentry.
You can easily see the first kind, but you have to look at statistics to see the second - income averages, price of housing, vacancy rates, what kinds of jobs your kids' friends' parents have and so on.
There are different things that could create demand to live somewhere - jobs, and amenities are common ones though.
And then the current residents leave before their investments (their homes) lose value and the neighborhood as a whole loses value (or turns into a slum).
A whole lot of people in the comments who clearly didn't read the article, given the great lengths the author went to to distinguish NIMBYism (which most of the comments are about) from "NITBYism," i.e. historic conservationism which the article is actually about. Most of the objections being raised here are also points made in the article.
Of course all that's undermined by the choice to use NIMBY in the headline, which is perplexing.
A related article on NITBYism and the built environment, but from the perspective of modern finance and how financial instruments may increase the amount of ugly buildings.
Nothing turns me off wanting to hear somebody's opinion more than using the dumbass made-up word ‘stroad’. There is no stronger signal that the author has no actual original opinion on the subject and is just parroting what they've read online and internalized as The Opinion Good People Have. Luckily it was above the paywall fold.
The idea that people object to the removal of old structures because they're more attractive is easy to disprove. People have protested against the removal of structures that even they admit are ugly.
There have been protests against removing rusting oil storage tanks. Our "industrial heritage" apparently.
People just grow to accept the eyesores and start to think of them as part of the local identity. You can find complaints about how ugly the Eiffel tower was when it was built. Symbol of the city now.
Some people opposed removal of ugly structures because they had other significance does not prove no people opposed construction of ugly structures because they were ugly.
Feels like a stretch. What the author think are beautiful are probably being built somewhere in the world and I bet they have NIMBY as well (assuming they have free speech of course)
I’ve sat through enough city public hearings to know what the author claims isn’t true.
People don’t care if the building is gorgeous; they will still oppose it simply because they hate new homes in their neighborhood. If making the building beautiful significantly helped getting through zoning reviews, developers would have figured this out long ago.
Aside: the reasons new buildings are bland is because no two people agree on what is ‘beautiful’; second, delays due to zoning and endless regulations already make it difficult for a project to pencil even before spending much money on the facade.
> I’ve sat through enough city public hearings to know what the author claims isn’t true.
> People don’t care if the building is gorgeous; they will still oppose it simply because they hate new homes in their neighborhood.
I read enough of the article to know what you claimed they claimed was not what they claimed. The 2nd paragraph said Ugliness is probably not a major driver of opposition to development by local people. But there is strong circumstantial evidence that ugliness is sometimes a major driver of opposition among people who live nowhere near the development in question.
Many buildings are not ugly and not gorgeous.
> Aside: the reasons new buildings are bland is because no two people agree on what is ‘beautiful’; second, delays due to zoning and endless regulations already make it difficult for a project to pencil even before spending much money on the facade.
New buildings are bland or ugly because this costs less. Everyone's lists of beautiful buildings would differ by 1 at least could be true but is not relevant. It is impossible to design a building most people would not say is ugly would be relevant but is not true.
It's pretty frustrating to see the downvotes for someone who has actually been to housing hearings, something I doubt most people on this site have taken the time to do.
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.
I'm skeptical. People seem to complain most of all because 1) they view the function of a city as moving and storing automobiles and anything that might hypothetically get in the way of that is bad ("we should only build these homes if they come with a massive amount of parking and generate no traffic!") or 2) just plain aversion to change, which is more understandable.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't push for things like single stair reform that could lead to more fine-grained, incremental urbanism.
I've been to a number of housing hearings and listened to what people actually say on the public record, and "I'd support this if it were more broken up" is not a thing I've heard. On the other hand "this is a NICE neighborhood and we do not want apartments here" is pretty common.
Well, yeah. Transient residents (and that's AirBnBs, too) raises the likelihood of more criminal behavior and lowers property values. Most places are not NYC where renting is the common model and only the rich own.
Now condos, sure. Much better way to increase density without distorting the nature of a neighborhood.
Fair enough, just adding development of new housing in places I know is strongly opposed with the reasons given are things such as strains on existing local services, environmental impacts (e.g. on endangered or protected species), and lots of other things.
I do not think this is all NIMBYism, as I think some reasons are valid. it is also true that you cannot add a lot of population to some places without changing its character, and I do personally like living somewhere where I get recognised in local shops and third spaces and people say hello and/or smile at you on the streets quite often.
If you are building outwards, 'sprawl', the environmental concerns have some validity, I think. But most of the NIMBYism I see is people opposing, say, an apartment building right in the middle of town. That's actual a big win for the environment ( https://www.sightline.org/apartments-are-the-climate-solutio... ) - they can be more walkable/less car dependant, require less resources, don't pave over farms or forests, and so on.
As to change, that happens when demand to live somewhere changes, one way or another. See my other comment where I discuss an increase in the demand:
> 1) they view the function of a city as moving and storing automobiles and anything that might hypothetically get in the way of that is bad ("we should only build these homes if they come with a massive amount of parking and generate no traffic!")
Imagine it's a thousand years ago and some cardinal is hearing a dispute between some guild representative and some local lord or something.
The parties will invariably appeal to religion because that's that the listener cares about. But they don't "really" care. They care about their dispute. And they care about religion insofar as it lets them convince, often actively misleading along the way, the audience into agreeing with their framing.
That's essentially what 1) is. People are screeching about traffic because the municipality invariable has rules that make they the municipality have to care about that.
People can, and do, do the same thing with other pretexts like safety and the environment, whatever the audience cares about.
I think their concerns about automobiles are actually genuine if overblown. People freak out about car stuff.
I do see 'concern trolling' as well. For instance I live in a place that doesn't see a lot of rain, so people will come out and "what about the WATER for those apartments?!" thinking they've found a gotcha, even while they themselves have a big green lawn and even if municipal use of water is a tiny fraction of the area's water
I think NIMBYism around the world is often "to keep out the poors", they don't have to be black. Slots in my theory that a lot of racism is just classism.
My understanding of racism in the US is that it is more like caste in India than like class in Britain, for example.
The big difference is that you are defined by your ancestry so there is little to no mobility.
This seems to be confirmed by the way Americans seem to regard someone's race as a fundamental and immutable characteristic, even while intellectually accepting race is just defined by social convention.
Well yeah, thats kind of what race is. It’s something you’re born with, and it’s not fuzzy. It can be nuanced, thats different. How it’s regarded is a separate issue, and that has generally improved over time.
Depends what you mean by fuzzy. it is culturally defined and people in different cultures use different definitions. Americans have whole categories not used in, for example, the UK (a very similar culture otherwise) such as "hispanic" which seems to include people I would call "white"? The same with people who are classified as "black" who look white. Americans now seem to use "caucasian" as a synonym for "white" which contradicts definitions used historically.
British people use definitions that are different from those of South Asians, and westerners in general are entirely unaware of caste which is a whole racial hierarchy that affects a lot of the world. Sri Lankans define race as whatever your father was, but Jewishness is inherited from your mother.
It might not be fuzzy within a particular culture at a particular point is time, but it is not consistent between cultures or over time.
When I wrote that I had in mind the idea of “mixed race” people. In the US it is very common for someone to identify as half black and half white, or one quarter Irish and three quarters Mexican, and so on. So, nuanced but not fuzzy, in that sense at least. But that is closer to ethnicity than race on second thought.
How do you define ethnicity and race? Apart from the ambiguous areas I do not think we all use the same definitions.
> In the US it is very common for someone to identify as half black and half white, or one quarter Irish and three quarters Mexican, and so on.
That is one of the things I find hardest to understand about American definitions. I would just think of someone like that as American (unless they are significantly culturally not American in some way). I just describe myself as mixed, or as from one of the two countries I am a citizen of (I have lived in both for significant chunks of my life and am influenced by both cultures but have little ancestry from either).
That's classism. Indirectly associated with racism in this country, sure. But naming the thing accurately communicates the full breadth of it's effect.
It is not complicated. People buy a property because they like to live in that location. If you are going to drastically change that environment, you destroy the very reason they liked it so much they made it the biggest purchase of their life.
"Destroy" - see, that's the kind of rhetoric we hear when it turns out they're building like a small apartment building or something.
Change happens one way or another. If a place has 10 homes and 100 people want to live there, you can either 1) build more homes or 2) see the 10 wealthiest of those 100 people eventually get the housing in that place. Both are pretty significant change, just one is more visible because you can see the homes that got built, rather than the less wealthy people priced out.
What about "I bought this property because I like this environment to live here" is difficult to understand?
You bought a property, not the entire neighborhood or city. Those do not belong to you.
Cities change and adapt over time.
Once again, you use the passive. Change is active. Someone is doing the changing, and then they are trying to insult the people that refuse to let them have their way.
I explained two kinds of change, one that is more visible, where housing is built to accommodate people moving in, and a second kind where supply does not meet demand so the people change.
Boulder, CO is an example of #2 - they put a bunch of restrictions on growth years ago , so what 'change' looked like there is wealthy people moving in, and the working class being pushed out to 'leapfrog development' like Longmont, where they then commute in the serve the landed gentry.
You can easily see the first kind, but you have to look at statistics to see the second - income averages, price of housing, vacancy rates, what kinds of jobs your kids' friends' parents have and so on.
There are different things that could create demand to live somewhere - jobs, and amenities are common ones though.
"I want a free Lamborgini in your garage. You're just a NIMBY denying my need"
And then the current residents leave before their investments (their homes) lose value and the neighborhood as a whole loses value (or turns into a slum).
People vote with their feet and their wallets.
I love all of those examples of cities where the housing prices dropped because people moved out due to building more housing.
This is not actually a thing that happens because 'someone built an apartment building'.
Never heard of white flight, huh?
Might want to look into why white flight even happened in the first place. It wasn't because apartments were built.
Like when they put up a datacenter next door and suddenly you're living in cyberpunk 2077
A whole lot of people in the comments who clearly didn't read the article, given the great lengths the author went to to distinguish NIMBYism (which most of the comments are about) from "NITBYism," i.e. historic conservationism which the article is actually about. Most of the objections being raised here are also points made in the article.
Of course all that's undermined by the choice to use NIMBY in the headline, which is perplexing.
A related article on NITBYism and the built environment, but from the perspective of modern finance and how financial instruments may increase the amount of ugly buildings.
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/you-probably-own...
The article required a subscription. And archives did not have it.
Nothing turns me off wanting to hear somebody's opinion more than using the dumbass made-up word ‘stroad’. There is no stronger signal that the author has no actual original opinion on the subject and is just parroting what they've read online and internalized as The Opinion Good People Have. Luckily it was above the paywall fold.
The idea that people object to the removal of old structures because they're more attractive is easy to disprove. People have protested against the removal of structures that even they admit are ugly.
There have been protests against removing rusting oil storage tanks. Our "industrial heritage" apparently.
People just grow to accept the eyesores and start to think of them as part of the local identity. You can find complaints about how ugly the Eiffel tower was when it was built. Symbol of the city now.
Some people opposed removal of ugly structures because they had other significance does not prove no people opposed construction of ugly structures because they were ugly.
Feels like a stretch. What the author think are beautiful are probably being built somewhere in the world and I bet they have NIMBY as well (assuming they have free speech of course)
I’ve sat through enough city public hearings to know what the author claims isn’t true.
People don’t care if the building is gorgeous; they will still oppose it simply because they hate new homes in their neighborhood. If making the building beautiful significantly helped getting through zoning reviews, developers would have figured this out long ago.
Aside: the reasons new buildings are bland is because no two people agree on what is ‘beautiful’; second, delays due to zoning and endless regulations already make it difficult for a project to pencil even before spending much money on the facade.
> I’ve sat through enough city public hearings to know what the author claims isn’t true.
> People don’t care if the building is gorgeous; they will still oppose it simply because they hate new homes in their neighborhood.
I read enough of the article to know what you claimed they claimed was not what they claimed. The 2nd paragraph said Ugliness is probably not a major driver of opposition to development by local people. But there is strong circumstantial evidence that ugliness is sometimes a major driver of opposition among people who live nowhere near the development in question.
Many buildings are not ugly and not gorgeous.
> Aside: the reasons new buildings are bland is because no two people agree on what is ‘beautiful’; second, delays due to zoning and endless regulations already make it difficult for a project to pencil even before spending much money on the facade.
New buildings are bland or ugly because this costs less. Everyone's lists of beautiful buildings would differ by 1 at least could be true but is not relevant. It is impossible to design a building most people would not say is ugly would be relevant but is not true.
It's pretty frustrating to see the downvotes for someone who has actually been to housing hearings, something I doubt most people on this site have taken the time to do.
This statement is accurate, too.
You find NIMBYs on Hacker News as well unfortunately.
Also a greater proportion of introverts and misanthropes.
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.
I'm skeptical. People seem to complain most of all because 1) they view the function of a city as moving and storing automobiles and anything that might hypothetically get in the way of that is bad ("we should only build these homes if they come with a massive amount of parking and generate no traffic!") or 2) just plain aversion to change, which is more understandable.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't push for things like single stair reform that could lead to more fine-grained, incremental urbanism.
I've been to a number of housing hearings and listened to what people actually say on the public record, and "I'd support this if it were more broken up" is not a thing I've heard. On the other hand "this is a NICE neighborhood and we do not want apartments here" is pretty common.
Well, yeah. Transient residents (and that's AirBnBs, too) raises the likelihood of more criminal behavior and lowers property values. Most places are not NYC where renting is the common model and only the rich own.
Now condos, sure. Much better way to increase density without distorting the nature of a neighborhood.
NIMBYism happens in all sorts of places. Not just car oriented cities, or even just cities.
My experience is mostly with the car-oriented city I live in; I can't speak as much to what it might look like elsewhere.
Fair enough, just adding development of new housing in places I know is strongly opposed with the reasons given are things such as strains on existing local services, environmental impacts (e.g. on endangered or protected species), and lots of other things.
I do not think this is all NIMBYism, as I think some reasons are valid. it is also true that you cannot add a lot of population to some places without changing its character, and I do personally like living somewhere where I get recognised in local shops and third spaces and people say hello and/or smile at you on the streets quite often.
If you are building outwards, 'sprawl', the environmental concerns have some validity, I think. But most of the NIMBYism I see is people opposing, say, an apartment building right in the middle of town. That's actual a big win for the environment ( https://www.sightline.org/apartments-are-the-climate-solutio... ) - they can be more walkable/less car dependant, require less resources, don't pave over farms or forests, and so on.
As to change, that happens when demand to live somewhere changes, one way or another. See my other comment where I discuss an increase in the demand:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126990
> 1) they view the function of a city as moving and storing automobiles and anything that might hypothetically get in the way of that is bad ("we should only build these homes if they come with a massive amount of parking and generate no traffic!")
Imagine it's a thousand years ago and some cardinal is hearing a dispute between some guild representative and some local lord or something.
The parties will invariably appeal to religion because that's that the listener cares about. But they don't "really" care. They care about their dispute. And they care about religion insofar as it lets them convince, often actively misleading along the way, the audience into agreeing with their framing.
That's essentially what 1) is. People are screeching about traffic because the municipality invariable has rules that make they the municipality have to care about that.
People can, and do, do the same thing with other pretexts like safety and the environment, whatever the audience cares about.
I think their concerns about automobiles are actually genuine if overblown. People freak out about car stuff.
I do see 'concern trolling' as well. For instance I live in a place that doesn't see a lot of rain, so people will come out and "what about the WATER for those apartments?!" thinking they've found a gotcha, even while they themselves have a big green lawn and even if municipal use of water is a tiny fraction of the area's water
https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/update/2021/5/5/droug...
They want to keep out the poors (read: blacks.)
American racism, same as it ever was.
You have it everywhere in the world where people living somewhere has a say (of course no one in North Korea would ever NIMBY)
I think NIMBYism around the world is often "to keep out the poors", they don't have to be black. Slots in my theory that a lot of racism is just classism.
My understanding of racism in the US is that it is more like caste in India than like class in Britain, for example.
The big difference is that you are defined by your ancestry so there is little to no mobility.
This seems to be confirmed by the way Americans seem to regard someone's race as a fundamental and immutable characteristic, even while intellectually accepting race is just defined by social convention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame... is an excellent reference.
Well yeah, thats kind of what race is. It’s something you’re born with, and it’s not fuzzy. It can be nuanced, thats different. How it’s regarded is a separate issue, and that has generally improved over time.
Edit: I might be conflating race with ethnicity.
Depends what you mean by fuzzy. it is culturally defined and people in different cultures use different definitions. Americans have whole categories not used in, for example, the UK (a very similar culture otherwise) such as "hispanic" which seems to include people I would call "white"? The same with people who are classified as "black" who look white. Americans now seem to use "caucasian" as a synonym for "white" which contradicts definitions used historically.
British people use definitions that are different from those of South Asians, and westerners in general are entirely unaware of caste which is a whole racial hierarchy that affects a lot of the world. Sri Lankans define race as whatever your father was, but Jewishness is inherited from your mother.
It might not be fuzzy within a particular culture at a particular point is time, but it is not consistent between cultures or over time.
Edit: initially omitted because I keep sharing it and might look spammy, but decided to add a link to my blog post on the topic: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
When I wrote that I had in mind the idea of “mixed race” people. In the US it is very common for someone to identify as half black and half white, or one quarter Irish and three quarters Mexican, and so on. So, nuanced but not fuzzy, in that sense at least. But that is closer to ethnicity than race on second thought.
How do you define ethnicity and race? Apart from the ambiguous areas I do not think we all use the same definitions.
> In the US it is very common for someone to identify as half black and half white, or one quarter Irish and three quarters Mexican, and so on.
That is one of the things I find hardest to understand about American definitions. I would just think of someone like that as American (unless they are significantly culturally not American in some way). I just describe myself as mixed, or as from one of the two countries I am a citizen of (I have lived in both for significant chunks of my life and am influenced by both cultures but have little ancestry from either).
Meanwhile, someone elsewhere in this thread is talking explicitly about 'white flight'. For the record I think it's both racism and classism.
> They want to keep out the poors
That's classism. Indirectly associated with racism in this country, sure. But naming the thing accurately communicates the full breadth of it's effect.
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