Funny. But also, I feel like the video kind of oversimplified, and paints the world into the nefarious and the dumb. Per the video, new housing is blocked by homeowners who want to keep poor people out of their neighborhoods (and they're also racist). They then get existing poor residents on board by promising that they will soon be rich if they keep the other poors out.

Reason is a libertarian rag, and I generally find their reporting to be decently fair, if a bit ideological at times. This video is clearly a joke - but still, the armchair economist in me balks at the given explanation. Did wealthier homeowners just now start hating poor people? If so, why? If not, then there must be some other cause.

I think this video provides a better explaination (I linked to the most relevant timestamp). People could be swayed to have a more positive view of building new, denser housing when it was discussed in the context of improving public health or reducing homelessness. They became more negative when crime was discussed. But the biggest influencing factor was architecture - when people were reminded that modern architecture is ugly, they hated building new housing. Which should raise an eyebrow. People are more open to having a shithead smash their car window and steal their laptop than they are to looking at modern architecture in a city on the other side of the country.

This now explains a lot about the nimbys showing up to every planning meeting and the historic preservation boards blocking development in every possible context. The public has entirely lost trust in developers' ability to build things that look nice, so they compulsively shut down any construction they can. Of course, suburban sprawl is ugly in its own right. And anti-sprawl advocates are a thing. But it is a lot harder to get people to go to the city council meeting to complain about developing a cornfield on the outskirts of town, versus a development that will happen in the neighborhood they live in.

But why to people hate modern architecture so much? Well.... kind of because it is designed to be ugly.

Lets diverge for a moment and talk about social status. Most Lemmings won't understand this because they are too autistic - but most people spend a lot of their time trying to gain social status: esteem and influence in their communities. You can gain social status by being a good friend to others, creating things others enjoy, achieving titles and recognition, being put in positions of power, etc. But social status also has a lot to do with perception - when a stranger meets you, do they immediately recognize you as someone with high social status? And social status is in large part determined by what other high-status people think of you. So as much as possible, you want to present yourself as part of the highest status group possible, so others in that group will recognize you as their own. But at the same time, those who are already in the high status groups are trying to move into even higher status groups, while identifying lower-status hangers-on so they don't suffer the potential embarassment of deferring to them or being too friendly. Hence, the elites adopt several strategies in presenting themselves as as high status as possible.

First, buying expensive things. This is the most classic example of elite status signalling - gold, diamonds, country estates, penthouse suites, luxury cars, etc. However, this runs into two problems. First, over time luxury goods tend to get cheaper. A medieval king might invite his guests to dine with him on new world turkey, spiced with imported tumeric, while wearing silk robes dyed with indigo. But these days, any pleb can get any of these things from a grocery store or the internet for a few dollars. And meanwhile, status does not always corrolate with wealth - so how do you keep putting yourself above some pleb who happened to get a shit ton of money?

Answer: by zigging when the plebs zag. Hence the appeal of something like caviar. It is expensive, yes, but it also, importantly, is not appealing unless you've acquired a taste for it. If Billy Bob from the trailer park won the lottery and now has more money than you, then you can still show you are better than him by ordering the caviar to show your refined palate, while he orders the biggest steak in the restaurant like an uncultured cave man.

But this won't work for long. Billy Bob might be uncultured, but he isn't a total idiot - so soon he'll start eating caviar, too. Not to worry, though, because as soon as he has wised up, you and your friends will be ordering bubbled sea cucumber mucous. This is the cycle of elite fashion - always staying up to date on the latest in clothing, food, art, etc - knowledge that is passed along in your elite circles by word of mouth, in order to stay one step ahead of the plebs. And this explains the historic artist-patron relationship we see throughout history. Elites fund artists to create the art they can display as proof of their superiority in the social pecking order, and the artists they hire are very often elites themselves - and these elite artists then create their own heirarchies of merit based as much on social pedigree as artistic talent or originality.

This sort of artistic competition exists in basically every artistic field. If you wish to be a painter in the fine arts, you must be knowledgeable and build off of the work of others who came before you - if you make a painting that is simply good and enjoyable to look at, then your art is pedestrian - suitible only for the lower classes. But simultanelously, you must draw something completely new out of the depths of your mind, challenging the art establishment with your originality, lest you be labelled "derivative" - aka, Billy Bob already knows about this.

And so we see the history of architecture. First mud huts, with the elites living in the biggest mud hut. Then the elites live and work in buildings that are both large and well constructed - made with great timbers, durable roofing, and heavy stone. As materials become more available and construction techniques more well known, the buildings gain labor-intensive ornimentation and advanced architectural techniques - vaulted ceilings, flying buttresses, onion domes, stained glass, and intricate sculptures.

And then around the middle of the 20th century, we stopped doing all of that. Why? Because architecture-as-an-art shifted beyond showcasing raw wealth to showcasing artistic taste. An architect of elite breeding could hardly hold their head high simply by creating a plebian building that was bigger and more expensive - they must prove their artistic merit by breaking new ground, and create Art that will only be understood by those with a refined palate. Ever since, great architectural works have been trying to usurp each other in being beyond the understanding of those with "poor taste". And since artistic taste flows down the social ladder, the same trends appear in apartments and offices and shops as well - while simultaneously losing any of its potential artistic merit by being constrained by tight budgets.

Hence, these days it is almost impossible to get an architectural firm to design something that just looks nice. The architects were never taught to make nice things in school. The heads of their firms would be embarrassed to talk about such unfashionable projects at cocktail parties. And besides that, it has been so long since we built nice things that the skilled labor required to build it has dried up, making adding eye-pleasing ornimentation prohibitively expensive. Single family homes have largely been spared here, for the important reason that typically the people who buy them are going to be ordinary people who live in them, so developers had to make them look nice enough to not suffer a hit in their profits.

And I think the underlying reason that people hate this architecture so much is that they know all this already, intiutively, even if they don't know it factually. When they see an apartment building constructed with lime green stucco, they hate it not just because it is ugly, but because it is the physical manifestation of a culturally foreign ruling class holding all the power in their city, and choosing to make it look cheap and ugly.