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Comment by i_haz_rabies | Hacker News Reader

Alerting people when proposals are put before municipal councils to develop natural land. I found out too late that a huge, beautiful forest where I live is going to be ripped up and turned into investment condos. So in the interest of giving natural land a fighting chance, I'm setting up a system that will notify users when an address they've submitted is being rezoned.

The challenge is obviously scaling, since every municipality is different. For now it's going to cover my region and we'll see from there.

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Sounds challenging..and agree that adapting this to each municipal area would suck big time of effort.

I tried something similar but mostly to figure where the land is being purchased recently in a region. But then land/parcels/addresses system is all over the place and, even that info is not consistent across cities.

have you looked at data providers who may have this data?

Agreed, the differences between municipalities makes this really hard to scale. If data providers like the ones you mention don't exist, the two ideas that immediately come to mind are a) becoming that data provider (obviously), or b) building a platform for municipalities to store their land ownership data on.

Both sound like interesting problems, and it would be awesome if municipal-level land data was available at scale.

How do you become that data provider? You need some scalable way to get all that data, right?

Ultimately someone has to do the hard to scale 'last mile' dirty work I suppose.

I'm not sure how to do it scalably, other than by becoming the host for that data, which is why I included my second option. It seems much easier (and much more profitable) than figuring out how to access the data in its existing format.

Exactly —- while the alert system is interesting and does have value, if they are putting in the tough, long, and grindingly harsh effort to compile these disparate data sources, that itself is the moat and becomes the product. Definitely worth doing!

Do you know of or recommend land trust organizations that collect money from donors to simply buy this type of land to protect it?

To suggest another axis you could expand along, there is a broader issue with notifications about planning. You could have a system that covered all things and you could ask it to notify you about applications involving:

"Forests within 100 miles"

"High rises within 10 miles"

"Anything within 0.5 miles"

What's the format of this going to look like? If it's closer to open sourced, I'm sure some people would spend a weekend getting it up and running in their area if the infrastructure is built.

I'm hoping they will!! For most municipalities, it should be very easy... just submit a url and the site will pull the markup and search it for an address string. More complicated municipal setups, or municipalities with actual data feeds, will be tougher.

That's a big challenge, kudos!

In my one county alone there are 90+ municipalities, each with it's own Planning and Zoning Commission, and most with their own (varying level of) website. I'd say 5-10% don't have a website either.

In your situation, how are you getting data for when land is up for sale/zoning etc.?

That's a really worthwhile problem to be working on. Kudos to you. I'd be gutted if something like that happened in my area, although I'm lucky enough to live in an area that's mostly trees.

I can't wait to use nimbyism as a service

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