The reverse side of the incumbent and established having unlimited rights to protect their quality of life is that the young have none.
The young are also feeling overwhelmed by the cost of living, and are starting to question whether tenure really confers a special moral status that makes the most superficial elements of your quality of life (perception of crowding, architectural taste, ease of parking) more important than the fundamentals of ours (access to employment, housing cost burden, ability to start families).
Socioeconomic vulnerability justifies additional protection, sure, but any community against any change? Come on.
I know, I know, kids these days are entitled. It would be fine to arrange housing as a delayed-gratification, wait-your-turn sort of thing. But the economic cards are stacked in my favor about as well as they can be, and I don't see any such path. So excuse me, but I'm going to fight for a world in which my generation plausibly gets jobs and shelter at the same time.
This isn't about age, and I'm not sure why you're even framing it that way.
The crowding, costs, and congestion in Seattle have increased very significantly with Amazon. There have been very ugly social side effects as well.
Amazon's employees, most of whom are out-of-towners, don't need to live in Seattle as much as the people whom they're displacing. Basically, a lot of the Amazon transplants could work remotely or find jobs in other cities.
The reasons this sort of thing happens are the reasons humans organize themselves into cities at all. Turning off the growth spigot while maintaining everything else in working order isn't a lever that policymakers have.
What they do have are ways of dealing with population growth that lead to drastically less displacement.
Sure, no out-of-towner needs to live in Seattle specifically. New entrants to the workforce do need to live in a city with job growth in their industries, and all of those (for software development) are having this conversation. Could change if remote work becomes more available.
The young are also feeling overwhelmed by the cost of living, and are starting to question whether tenure really confers a special moral status that makes the most superficial elements of your quality of life (perception of crowding, architectural taste, ease of parking) more important than the fundamentals of ours (access to employment, housing cost burden, ability to start families).
Socioeconomic vulnerability justifies additional protection, sure, but any community against any change? Come on.
I know, I know, kids these days are entitled. It would be fine to arrange housing as a delayed-gratification, wait-your-turn sort of thing. But the economic cards are stacked in my favor about as well as they can be, and I don't see any such path. So excuse me, but I'm going to fight for a world in which my generation plausibly gets jobs and shelter at the same time.