The order of: announce train station, wait a bit, start building project and change zoning (with that "wait a bit" gap being critical) makes things work a lot better. Property value skyrockets for a while, and people who arent happy with it can sell and go live somewhere else with the money if they don't like it.
The worse situations is when a zoning change happens and goes into effects quickly and construction projects start without people having had time to get the hell out. Selling near those projects is hard (no one wants to deal with it), and the people who live there are stuck.
I bought a place near a construction project that was almost done, and right around the time it ended, the city issued special permits for other big projects across the street that no one really expected, and now we're a bit stuck (People in our building cant find buyers without losing large amounts of money, and until they do, have to deal with the unexpected construction).
That doesn't work so well either. You have to commit to spend a lot of money to build the transit line, and then when you try to make the zoning changes, NIMBYs will still find a way of blocking them.
Where I live, the transit agency has been building a $2B light rail extension with the understanding that areas around the stations would be rezoned for high density.
But so far, it looks like the city will cave in to pressure from homeowners for lower-density zoning, leaving a very expensive transit investment with far fewer people riding it than anticipated.
>Property value skyrockets for a while, and people who arent happy with it can sell and go live somewhere else with the money if they don't like it.
This attitude is exactly why people are uncomfortable with processes like this. It ignores existing inequities of property ownership that have impacted wealth distribution.
If where you decide to build the station is like most of the bay, the people living in these homes aren't the owners. Especially if they're presently black or latino-majority neighborhoods, American housing policy over the last 50 years has purposefully kept these communities from gaining ownership equity by explicitly redlining them or locking them out of the credit market.
They won't profit from selling the property, they will simply be displaced.
When talking about NIMBYs who block these initiatives, what everyone tells me is that they're rich affluent white majorities, so my post was very much about how to handle those. No one ever talks about ethnic to minorities pushing back and being NIMBYs.
But yes, if you're trying to dump a subway station in the middle an area as you describe, your point is totally correct.
My thought is why I wouldn't want a skyscrapper popping in my backyard: because I can't easily get the hell out once the news drop.
The worse situations is when a zoning change happens and goes into effects quickly and construction projects start without people having had time to get the hell out. Selling near those projects is hard (no one wants to deal with it), and the people who live there are stuck.
I bought a place near a construction project that was almost done, and right around the time it ended, the city issued special permits for other big projects across the street that no one really expected, and now we're a bit stuck (People in our building cant find buyers without losing large amounts of money, and until they do, have to deal with the unexpected construction).