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Comment by jcater | Hacker News Reader

I live on St Simons.

You're conflating two islands here -- Sea Island is a separate island that has been privately owned since at least the 1920s. You have to drive across St Simons to get to Sea Island. For sure, Sea Island is a high end, gated resort community of a few hundred people.

St Simons is home to about 12k people. It has been an expensive place to live since at least the 80s. I, too, share your concerns about the current development going on -- I'm not sure the developers are in fact being careful about killing the golden goose. Developers are cutting down our historic oak trees and indiscriminately putting up cheaply built condos as fast as the corrupt planning commission will let them.

This is the perfect opportunity to plug the St Simons Land Trust: https://www.sslt.org/

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It's a great opportunity to plug all local land trusts.

Unlike national conservation organizations (which are great and have their place), local land trusts can really take on the priorities of the local area.

For example, the land trust I'm involved with here in the Inland Northwest does a lot of work to make sure that land used for agriculture and forestry is preserved for those uses, doesn't turn into housing developments and can even be passed down from generation-to-generation of family farmers without a prohibitive tax burden.

In Montana where there's been tons issues over access to public lands blocked by private landowners, they're playing a key role in preserving that access.

The Land Trust Alliance is a great place to find your local land trust: https://www.findalandtrust.org/

I expect you'll be surprised at the amount of "good for your community" work they're doing.

Feels inevitable though. As soon as some developer gets it in their head that they have found the next retirement community, hundreds of condos spring up overnight.

What's worse is when things don't pan out, and you are left with hundreds of half finished condos.

I worried that the oral history I'd always gotten about Sea Island was off. I should have checked into that. Are my memories of riding bikes to it as a kid off base?

You're right developers are destroying trees. I guess what I was alluding to was the historical restrictions on building sizes and things like that.

If you look at it on a map, it's pretty ambiguous where to draw the lines to make islands. I think in a geographical sense, Sea Island could very well be considered part of St Simons.

This same attitude is why SF has a housing crisis.

Because currently profitable industries have consolidated themselves within a few nearby localities, leading to a population explosion that may not be sustainable should those industries not 'continue on an ever-upwards growth trajectory'?

Perhaps what's happening in the bay is the result of responsible, long sighted policies designed to mitigate or forestall a population collapse during a proverbial gold rush in what could become a future Rust Belt.

I'm curious to hear your views. Where should we meet to talk about it? Galveston, Atlantic City, Detroit, Buffalo, New Orleans...?

What you're neglecting in your argument is the weather of central coastal CA. Not only is it far more temperate, it also lacks the constant threat of hurricanes or blizzards. Small earthquake chance, but nothing serious so far. There's a reason the deep south is so cheap - no one wants to summer in our heat and humidity! And very few people enjoy surviving the winters of Detroit.

> Small earthquake chance, but nothing serious so far

You're forgetting the great quake of 1906 which destroyed nearly 80% of San Francisco, and the continuing threat of the San Andreas fault.

You forgot Asian Tiger mosquitoes. Think you're safe busting your ass doing yard work at noon on a sweltering day? Think again!

Cities expand, there's no such thing as non-sustainable growth for a city. Cities can easily go vertical. If cities didn't expand during our parents and grandparents generation they'd just be the farms. It would be quite different landscape if the NIMBY group had clout back then.

Society moves forwards, people who want to "preserve" really don't want us to move forward. Whether they are killing mass transit plans because they want to "preserve" their small city culture or not allowing the building of high-density housing to meet the demands to our ever growing population.

Preserve is even more sinister as it uses justify racism and oppression or south likes to refer to as "preserving their southern culture" as they fly confederate flags and put up statues of Confederate leaders.

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