system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
It's simply self interest. I'll paint the picture: It's easy to think about the spoiled rich guy. But imagine you and your SO are lower-middle class, and have been saving for a house for a decade, foregoing vacations and other things to do so. You finally buy it, after putting down tens of thousands and move in. Your happy and going about your life just getting by due to the high mortgage, but look dorward to refinancing in the future and lowering that expensive mortgage (and get rid of the PMI). A few months later a developer comes in to build section 8 housing, which is great but it will reduce home values in the immediate area. Now that same house is now worth much less, but that mortgage remains the same. With section 8 housing, unfortunately along comes an increase in crime, increases in drug use, and a dozen other things that get impacted. These are the bulk of your NIMBYs

One would think (especially if we're talking CA where I grew up), maybe we could take some of that train money (or from a dozen other things), and use it to purchase that poor couples home (imminent domain type thing) and get rid of NIMBYs. Definitely not an easy issue to solve - seems like there are always casualties no matter what you do
gpt
This. When I was 26 and single I bought an $80k house in the city after saving for closing costs (it was an FHA loan so I didn’t need a down payment) because my rent kept going up and it was going to be cheaper to just pay a mortgage and utilities. When I sold that house 6.5 years later, the market was crazy, I had gotten married and my husband had done a lot of updates to the house, and so I got a return of 104% on it. And this was with an abandoned POS home next door that the owner refused to do anything with (ironically he was a landlord with multiple homes and a drug addiction so once he evicted the people who had lived there he just let it sit empty for 3 years and all apart). 

So, when my husband and I bought our current house, we moved to an HOA in the suburbs to get away from abandoned homes and the rising crime rates because to us, our home is an investment. We aren’t rich and we both work our asses off and it’s important to us to have this home so at some point we can sell it and move to a warmer state where we’re near a beach. Although with the way the prices are rising down south that may always be a pipe dream.