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Comment by cycrutchfield | Hacker News Reader

I never understand this mentality. Keep undeveloped land undeveloped for what? People would rather have unemployment and opiate addicts instead of development and progress.

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I don't think GP is advocating to keep the land undeveloped. They even go so far as the point out how the area makes a lot of sense for developers. The problems they identify seem to be 1) the reckless abandon to which developers are damaging ecosystems 2) an economic situation that allows developers to benefit significantly without these benefits necessarily passing into the community 3) the significant challenges of rapid population growth and 4) the fact that this development threatens their home. These are worth discussing and balancing against any benefits.

I also object your false dichotomy, and the idea that employment and "progress" (I doubt we can ever objectively make such a declaration) are zero-sum here.

> an economic situation that allows developers to benefit significantly without these benefits necessarily passing into the community

Does the development of that land not result in increased property taxes to fund local services?

Almost all of these deals come with asinine property tax abatements gifted by the local jurisdictions to the wealthiest companies on earth.

Sure enough - Intel's package there is worth a few hundred million: https://www.dispatch.com/story/business/2022/09/23/ohio-pois....

It's a game all of these firms play - have locales compete against each other (In some cases literally like the HQ2 debacle from Amazon) to see who can provide the largest package of tax incentives and subsidies and then hope nobody follows up on the absolute fantasy financial / Economic impact projections that were made.

The opposite. It is those of us who live here who are paying for the new water and sewer lines and roads and street lights and law enforcement. Not the developers nor the big corporations who are getting abatements.

You said "The Intel project is paying for highway development the power and sewer extensions and more."?

The Project, not Intel. It is Intel Project motivating the improvements which are making it possible for AWS, the box stores, the fast food joints, Google, and others to move in too. Intel the focal point for the money from the local governments, the state government, and the federal government to help make this happen.

Keep it undeveloped for what, you ask? Interestingly this featureless wasted space is likely the home of a rich ecosystem evolved and evolving right here. And this very ecosystem may well support human thriving too in ways that people whooshing past won’t begin to understand.

> People would rather have unemployment and opiate addicts instead of development and progress.

So that’s our choice - big box stores and Amazon warehouses or opiate addicts and unemployment? In this formulation, the more progress, the fewer opiate addicts. So if we roll the clock back to, say, the mid 1500’s the whole continent would have been full of opiate addicts. Or possibly the directionality of the relationship is wrong. Or opiate addiction and unemployment are a little more complicated than that there’s “unused” land around.

People always forget that there's plenty of land and you don't need to engage in greenfield really. You just need to build up. Keeping the ecosystems intact is much more important than keeping around a poorly insulated tinderbox of a home that was built in 3 weeks by unskilled laborers in 1935 around until the end of time. Ecosystems take thousands of years sometimes to develop all of their organic connectivity that we routinely destroy in no time at all.

If you're in the US, find your nearest national forest and take a scenic drive through it.

When you get back, let us know how many opiate addicts you saw.

don't come crying to me about the rising cost of canned air

Yeah, these people have the decision to sell or hold. Yet people blather on asif some anon-gov't agent "stole land" or something

Maybe, but that's not always the case. In the US, powers of eminent domain have at times been delegated to private entities. If there's a clear public benefit for seizure of land, sometimes the landowners don't have much of a choice.

In Ohio your property taxes get reassessed periodically. So as the local market goes up so does you tax burden. People really do get priced out of their home, sometimes priced out of the area entirely, especially if they are living on a fixed income.

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