Still a lot of really weird arguments here about what certain people “ought” to believe. People are free to believe whatever they want! Kane and Co. need to find ways to change people’s minds, and politicians have to work within the constraints of what their constituents believe is a good idea or not. Here’s a typical strawman argument:
This is true! But if I got priced out of a neighborhood, or worried that I might soon, and I thought that the choices that my local representative had made were responsible for that state of affairs, I probably wouldn’t vote to re-elect that politician. I could probably quote a dozen different examples of that happening on this thread, but you get the point.
There’s also a really good lesson here about the power of political organizing. While we were all on the internet talking to ourselves, OneWake did the actual legwork of political organizing, and that’s why they have a lot of political power right now. If the leaders of the opposition can come to the table and say, “We have hundreds of people in our group, and if you don’t address our concerns, they’re going to spend next year trying to make sure you don’t get re-elected,” then, given the size of the electorate for a Raleigh city council election, the councilors have to take that group very, very seriously.
Anyway, sometimes people who live in the same city you live in have different political ideas than you do. If you want to pretend like that’s unreasonable or something, that’s fine, but elected officials don’t have that luxury if they want to get re-elected again. For instance, I’m a leading proponent of the idea that landowners should be pretty free to develop their land however they see fit, regardless of what the neighbors think about it, but that’s very clearly not the world we live in, so we’ve got to operate in the world we find ourselves in.
@John Yeah, I’m very worried about this potential for ping-ponging city councils. And while it’s true that YIMBYs have an inherent advantage in that once you approve a denser development, the next council can’t tear it down and they’re just stuck with it, the flip side is that once land gets turned into low-density single family housing, it’s really tough to get it upzoned into anything else. So I’d really, really like to keep the YIMBYs on the next city council as much as possible.