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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

If you're property owner you want things to improve around you as it increases value. Problem is there an older class of people who vote and attend city council meetings that don't want things to move forward. They squash things like building high density housing right next to a metro stop. They fight things like extending metro lines and almost killed the purple line extension. In our case, they fought fiber(FIOS) in our neighborhood and won because they didn't want the streets dug up.

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Its so bad that some wealthy municipalities spend a significant fraction of their budgets lobbying or fighting development in court. The government of South Pasadena, for example, a town of about 25,000, spends millions of dollars a year in legal fees to block the 710 freeway expansion. This expansion would break a huge bottleneck in the area and LA county went as far as coming up with an underground freeway plan costing a billion dollars a mile (paid for by the state and TARP!) but even that was shot down. I think they finally gave up after decades of court battles and all of the houses bought along the planned expansion are being sold by the state.

Meanwhile, the school district cuts millions from its budget every few years (from five schools), road and other infrastructure maintenance is years behind at best (roads are crumbling and El Nino took it up another level), and the emergency services have turned to donations to meet their stagnant budgets.

Hmm .. Mountain View is an interesting example. The area near whishman park has no grocery stores or restaurants. I ran into an old timer in an Uber recently and he mentioned people did some of this zoning on purpose .. I.e. the need for a car to survive. As a young person, it seems weird that I bike home from work, and then take uber to get groceries. But yeah .. things are messed up in zoning big time.

And here I have the reverse problem in Willow Glen. The commute to Mountain View is terrible, but once I get to neighborhood streets near my house there is 0 traffic and all the local services I need within about a 2 mile radius. I can't bike to work, but I think the tradeoff is personally worth it for all the benefits of living in a walkable/bikeable neighborhood.

I've been told (including by current members of the Mtn View city council) that the lack of a grocery store in this neighborhood stems from city staff who are convinced that the neighborhood can't support one. Many people in the neighborhood are skeptical of this, and expressed a desire for a grocery store (along with restaurants and more retail) at a neighborhood planning meeting this past summer:

http://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activeproj...

I believe there will be future community meetings, so if you live in the area, get involved!

The need to explicitly allow retail spaces is one of the great absurdities of US zoning standards.

Why not let grocery store execs or entrepreneurs determine if the neighborhood can support a grocery store? I don't see why government would be concerned if a private entity is successful or not (and I'm about as far opposite of libertarian as one can go). Would they prohibit say a Senegalese restaurant for opening for fear there wasn't a large enough makrket?

I live in the suburbs of south bay, and near my house used to be a Mervyns -- a clothing store that had a relatively large building but went out of business nearly 10 years ago. A few stores came and went, but for the majority of those 10 years, it has been sitting vacant. It's too big for the average brick and mortar entrepreneur, but too small for a big chain. Someone should section it off into smaller units, but maybe the construction is not profitable. There's not that much foot traffic in the shopping center for most retail stores to stay in business either.

Makes sense for the government to intervene if the free market can't identify a sustainable business to utilize the space.

Or make them pay extra taxes for abandoned properties. If they can't afford the taxes the government gets the land and building, and can then auction it off to someone who can put it towards a better use.

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