Hacker News Reader

Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

>"There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better."

I used to think this as well, until I started sitting in on HOA and city council meetings. Good lord, even the most seemingly simple proposals are drenched in red tape and artificial barriers imposed by busybodies. I'm not sure how to get around this, sadly.

View on HN

Easy: drop the public commentary portion of development. Random old people with nothing to do all day shouldn't be allowed to delay a project by months because they want to complain about the orientation of a window on a project. If you don't own the land, weren't democratically elected, and aren't funding the property you shouldn't get a say in local land use. Ridiculous that we've even set up these systems.

That's ridiculous to prohibit residents from having a say about the area development, whether they are old or not.

Matt Yglesias had a good piece about this a few days ago.

https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/community-me...

They wouldn't be prohibited from having a say, they get to vote.

They have a say when they vote for the city council members or whoever.

What if that window is looking straight into your bedroom or bathroom? I'd want to at least voice some concern over that. It's then up to officials to ignore that complaint or not. Having no way to express such concerns is faster of course, but there's downsides too

Move out of the city, or put a blind over your window

Being able to see other people's windows from your windows is an inescapable consequence of living in a city. If that's not acceptable to you, then you buy an acreage in the woods somewhere. It's not a reasonable thing to be protesting a development approval over.

Of course, in this case. It's up to the official to dismiss such constraints if unreasonable.

But we got such laws and processes for a reason.

The law and process is a zoning bylaw. If a development conforms to the zoning bylaw, there should be no need for public engagement.

In no other scenario do we have a process of public meetings to decide whether or not to follow the law.

Months is incredibly generous

Reply on news.ycombinator.com