Ask HN: So what’s the outcome of NIMBY discussions in your town? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: So what’s the outcome of NIMBY discussions in your town?

16 pointstrifit29 comments

Which camp do you belong to? Are your local leaders doing right by all parties involved?

Here's a fun, small scale one.

A family friend runs a trailer park in a small town. He asks the city council to annex the property so he can hook up to the city sewer and add more units. One of the council members opposes because he thinks a trailer park in the city limits would "cheapen" the town and doesn't want to be associated with it. (Keep in mind, the actual trailer park wouldn't move or change size in this scenario).

So he threatens the trailer park with a city ordinance he dug up that says people cannot live in a trailer for more than 30 days at a time, and draws the city boundary around the trailer park.

But as a bit of schadenfreude, it turns out that two of the other city council members have family members permanently living in trailers on their property. So by digging out this ordinance, this city councilor inadvertently created a rash of zoning violations that everyone is mad at each other about.

The quickest way to get rid of an unpopular law is to enforce it 100%.

My city's NIMBYs shut down a 19 story building proposal to preserve the cultural heritage of a... parking lot

https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/2022/08/23/co...

That sounds more like a family heritage, though maybe most of the city councillors were conceived there?

A corner of a nice city park we live by contains a permanently closed Sizzler and an empty parking lot. It’s at a busy intersection, also be a freeway exit, in a desirable area. A developer came in and proposed building an apartment building with a restaurant or café on the ground floor. Seemed like a good idea and a nice use of the corner.

Residents poured in complaints. They wanted the city to buy the corner and turn it into a green patch of grass.

The developer warned that the space was too valuable ($7 mil for .8 acres), the city wouldn’t want to purchase it, and the only other financially viable options would be a drive-thru, bank or a gas station.

Well, the developer pulled out given the community opposition, and the corner of the park was purchased and will now be a Kum & Go gas station.

https://buildingsaltlake.com/sugar-house-residents-fought-ho...

NIMBY is why we can't have nice things - it takes SF 3 years to build a public toilet for $1.7 million dollars and is considered a political victory [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33268748

Currently that seems to be the situation. I hope the input from our dollars will go to constructing green spaces and playgrounds.

Not necessarily in my town, but where my employer is located.

The town sees a ton of car traffic each day due to providing +20k jobs. However, the town has no proper connection to public transit. The only somewhat reliable connection is the limited services ran by the companies in said town as a benefit for their employees. But due to limited service times it sees relatively little utilization.

For 30+ years now there has been the intend to connect this city to the existing light rail systems of the other two major population centers in close proximity. During the last vote by the locals, they still opposed the plan. That was three years ago, now they are demanding the construction of another bypass road (the city already has one) to get rid of the cars passing through their town.

Another example from my town: the city recently announced a shift towards more eco friendly transportation infrastructure (despite a conservative mayor) and focus more on cycling and trams. This includes the reactivation of some abandoned tram tracks as well as the removal of some parking spaces on public ground to get more space for properly secured cycling lanes. Unsurprisingly the locals protested the decision and the ambition to remove parking spaces, citing the fees they pay for it. This is a dense urban area with >600k people and they pay 30€ in parking annually

The evergreen conflict: opposing light rail or other transit expansion while complaining about commute times. Demanding freeway expansion but opposing building a new bridge across a major river if the plans for the bridge include light rail or dedicated transit space.

Who in their right mind opposes rail?

Build a comprehensive grid of light rail already, and everyone get on the damn thing, so I have an open freeway ahead of me!

Accessible light rail is the best thing that could happen to me, via everyone else taking it.

If it's the one I am thinking of, this is a connection to the Portland Oregon metro. To which locals have an air of "ew, Portland." Which is still a bit ridiculous that they then want Portland to pay for the bridge that would let them jump in and out of town easily to escape taxes but not let locals over.

(Although, to give them a bit of credit, Portland's light rail sucks. They made a ton of bad design choices so it's slower and not much higher capacity than an equivalent bus route. )

I used to live at one end of the Portland Streetcar and work at the other. On days when I just missed it, I could almost, but never quite, out-walk it.

And now I know why it makes sense to put your subway underground.

You should oppose rail because it allows the lower class an avenue for entry into your community. Georgetown, I think, in DC has been opposing metro expansion for decades because of this reason.

Is this satire, or are you serious? This is exactly the nonsensical reason communities everywhere oppose light rail and mass transit, aka the CrimeTrain™.

Crime on trains and in and around train stations is well documented. It doesn't add up to a reason not to have transportation. Criminals can use cars too.

Those who don't want criminals from poor areas coming into their neighborhoods should oppose all means of entry: close the highways too, and put up a gated wall.

> Those who don't want criminals from poor areas coming into their neighborhoods should oppose all means of entry: close the highways too, and put up a gated wall.

As a matter of fact... https://www.npr.org/2020/07/05/887386869/how-transportation-...

It’s DC, they only want rich criminals.

Does this happen to be on the I5 corridor per chance?

I didn't really expect my vague description of a common conflict to make it so easy to narrow down the location. Apparently the news of the region's struggles has reached far and wide.

Haha. I wouldn't say that. I live in the same area.

But I think the light-rail was more of a symptom of the general funding problems being across state lines.

Housing prices in Boise are at the highest they've ever been, people are being priced out of the area where they've lived for their entire lives, and we have large swaths of empty land. When a developer proposes building an apartment complex, people nearby lose their minds ("too much traffic", "too much crime", "i don't wanna see apartment complexes - they should build real houses for people", etc). Those same people complain endlessly about rising home prices and how they'd have to move far away if they ever sold their house.

It's incredibly frustrating.

Our little town has built a 50 unit apartment/townhome complex near me, and replaced an old hotel with a senior living center (still under construction).

The only NIMBY activity I know of in the area was a small explosion trying to stop a rail yard from being built, but that fizzled out when the railroad politely explained that they're federally regulated. They did build a berm around it and use directional downlighting, and so far it hasn't seemed to be an issue.

Perhaps we're too poor to be really effective NIMBYs.

I used to live near a helicopter manufacturer that primarily did defense contracts, part of their site was a grass airfield that was owned by the MoD.

I think it was part of the MoDs (or CAA maybe) requirements that the runway be tarmacked, I don't remember why but it was a legal requirement that it be done before 2030 or something.

In the local Facebook group people (and a lot of them) were worried it would turn our town (40-50k population) into a international airport.

The runway probably isn't long enough for large commercial turboprop aircraft. Definitely won't have 737s using it any time soon. That an the airfield had a main road at one end and a house estate at the other, way to close to be safe for a commercial airport I imagine.

My town might grow by as much as 30,000 new residents just this year. We didn’t want all the apartment complexes because the infrastructure already couldn’t handle the growth, but alas there are several dozen new incredibly large apartment complexes that have sprung up close to my house.

That’s actually a good thing. If there were no new developments then there wouldn’t be a place to house these new residents. The discussion here is about how people oppose these new developments to increase house pricing or “keep things the way they are”.

It's not good if so many people move in that it overwhelms the streets, hospitals, schools, etc.

Nobody here sees the apartments as a good thing and it has nothing to do with house prices.

Perhaps you could lobby for BRT and bike infrastructure? Seems like transport is your main worry, and I'm just going to assume you are a car-dependent town.

We are a car dependent town craving better transportation options. Other problems include power brownouts and school over crowding (they can’t build schools fast enough).

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