Against construction
I think YIMBYs and advocates of “building” have a missing mood on construction: there are several disadvantages of construction that tend to be pretty palpable in daily life if you encounter construction. In this case, I’m often thinking of large buildings, like 10-story dorms or academic buildings, but even smaller projects can pose many of the same problems (e.g., remodeling of an apartment can be extremely disruptive to others in the same building—imagine trying to work, study, or relax, let alone sleep, when an extremely loud machine is running behind the adjacent wall for multiple weeks).
See also Scott Alexander with a bigger-picture angle at “Steelmanning the NIMBYs”.
Here are the underdiscussed disadvantages of construction that stand out to me:
- Construction noise is much worse than people tend to acknowledge (in my experience, people, especially YIMBY types, barely acknowledge it at all). In many places, construction work is allowed to start much earlier than other types of noise. I think noise is bad for several reasons—for example, it can interfere with focus and work—but the biggest concern is sleep. I think sleep is very important (a post on this will perhaps be posted later) and effects on sleep are probably neglected. Construction often starts at 7am or 8am, and I know seemingly well-adjusted adults who go to bed after 0100; someone with this reasonable bedtime and typical sleep needs (~8h + sleep latency) wouldn’t get enough sleep if ey were awoken by construction at 8am every day (and that’s without my even defending people who go to sleep later or need >>8 hours of sleep, which includes such groups as children, teenagers, and some people with certain illnesses). Therefore, I think construction noise needs to be considered / taken into account when thinking of the benefits and harms of construction.
- What are you supposed to do if an extremely loud construction site pops up next to you? Move? This is annoying even if you are almost maximally rootless, e.g., a college student with well-off supportive parents and few physical possessions, and is a rather aggressive suggestion to make to a family who’s selected and bought what they intended to be their forever home and has relatively few financial resources, let alone to many of them at scale.
- You can argue (I’ve never seen anyone argue this with any attempt at tabulation or calculation, though I have also not really gotten into any online arguments about YIMBYism that I can recall) that the benefits of construction are so great in magnitude that they eclipse the noise, or that “we” (i.e., people living in an area now) need to tolerate noise as we build a ton of new sound-insulating buildings where you won’t be able to hear construction from inside them. I question the extent to which existing new buildings block construction noise from adjacent buildings (I can think of at least one case where I think they don’t), but most construction will not be adjacent to every building (hopefully). Also, in many places we like old buildings, e.g., in many European city centers. At any rate, though I have not sought to get into any in-depth arguments on YIMBY/NIMBY/related topics, I have seen a decent number of arguments for building lots of stuff (apartment buildings and the like), and I do not recall ever seeing discussion of construction noise, i.e., it is TOTALLY NEGLECTED.
- A lot of construction (e.g., new non-housing buildings on a university campus) is not ideologically YIMBY, and I think construction noise is an underappreciated concern in general, including for such construction. If the campus is a big square and the construction is happening in the middle, near which mostly no one sleeps, this is less of a problem, but between that and people coughing/sniffling every second or three, it might be reasonable to carry earplugs for use during exams, to the extent that they work, which (n=1) is less than fully when it comes to the coughing.
- I felt pretty vindicated reading Andrej Karpathy’s take on this after spending half my conscious life arguing that noise and sleep interruption and particularly the combination of the two are hugely underrecognized as problems.
- It is inconvenient when short routes, sidewalks, &c. are blocked (this is potentially a bit of an accessibility concern). There has been a lot of construction in my area recently and it really gets my goat when my favored path uphill gets blocked off for a year and I have to take a substantially longer path (times this has happened: at least 2?). Crossing the street because a construction zone is taking up the whole sidewalk is also inconvenient (more so if the lights are slow!). These situations waste people’s time.
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