A Vancouver neighbourhood fought, and defeated, a daycare | Hacker News Reader

A Vancouver neighbourhood fought, and defeated, a daycare

vancouversun.com

22 pointsversion_five26 comments

As an American who has lived in Europe (UK and now Germany) for the last 6 years, this sort of thing now blows my mind. Mixed residential and light commercial zoning? Who cares! I have a modest grocery store just up my thoroughly residential neighborhood and it's great. My kids large-ish daycare is a 10 minute walk away and it's wonderful. We have single family homes and small apartment buildings intermixed and you wouldn't even know.

We seriously need to get over this NIMBY problem.

A scattering of small 8-kid daycares (like how the one in the article already is), is good for mixed residential use.

An 8-kid daycare expanding to a 16-kid daycare is what the neighborhood fought against, and sounds like a reasonable to fight to me.

Why does that sound like a reasonable thing to you?

To me, a 16 kid daycare also seems tiny.

Its not about the 16 kids, its about the traffic from drops off and picks ups clogging up the streets during busy times. Unloading and loading a kid takes time.

Worst case, that's just 16 cars, twice a day. That doesn't seem like a thing to make a big stink about.

There are plenty of annoyances that come with living near other people. Putting up with a reasonable level of annoyance is an important part of having a civil society. I put up with my neighbor's bullshit and they put up with mine.

I agree, it's the perception of there will be a problem the neighbors were sold on. But none of us live on that street, so they can do as they wish.

Oh, certainly they can. It's just that the whole thing sounds very petty to me. I suspect that I'd hate living in that neighborhood.

It really doesn't take that much time. On most roads you'd be hard pressed to notice 16 cars. What kind of road are they on where this would be material?

And one reason people choose daycares is because they are close. Where I live anyway many of us walk our kids to daycare.

My guess is they either don't like the woman or the idea of daycare. The car excuse is extremely flimsy.

There's between 500 and a thousand homes within a short ten minute, quarter mile walk of this daycare. There should be no traffic impacts whatsoever from this business, because nobody should be driving to drop off their kid at daycare. If their neighborhood is suffering from car traffic, then that's due to poor street design not supporting alternatives, not any single business attracting customers.

Nobody likes cars driving through their neighborhood. If these were good faith concerns, then these folks would be agitating for traffic calming measures instead of trying to quash the exact kind of business that belongs in a "residential area."

As a German, this deeply inculcated car-centric view presented by Americans, Canadians and Australians shocks me every time.

As an American, it frequently shocks me as well.

So once again cars are the problem. Get rid of cars and suddenly so many things are possible.

I strongly suspect that cars are the excuse, not the actual problem.

Even 16 kids doesn't sound like much of a nuisance. I guess the main objection would be to the cars dropping them off/picking them up, but that's only twice a day, and presumably some of the kids share the same parents.

It's contained in a single home which, presumably, the owners still live in. In terms of traffic, you're looking at an extra ~32 cars/day which is likely a rounding error in terms of total traffic.

I have no idea what the current parking situation looks like but daycares definitely aren't known for drawing continuous traffic.

I’m familiar with the pricing and the books behind such 8 kid daycares and it’s not so great.

Considering how few kids Vancouver already has, a 16 kid daycare just brings things up to around a normal density of children.

I was wondering if part of this is more people working from home and feeling entitled to have a work-conducive residential area during the day.

Certainly things like construction and gas powered yard maintenance bother the hell out of me now that I work from home and live in a residential neighborhood (ironically none of this stuff is a problem in condos). I'd like to see noise restrictions on "cosmetic" work like leaf blowing and lawn mowing. Disallowing daycares seems pretty pretty hard into entitled nimbyism though.

California was planning to ban gas powered garden tools such as leaf blowers in 2024. I don't know what happened to that effort but I would welcome it.

Sounds like Vancouver, this is why I live in South America. Good bye million dollar houses (which would actually be a steal now), hello, 50 cent cervezas.

Sounds nice, mind saying which part? How has the winter been?

Asuncion, winter has been great, it's 36C/96F today.

Wow! Sounds terrific. I really need to visit that part of the world one of these days. I’ve never been but I’d love to see it.

Once again, Ken Sim's municipal government has made an anti-human decision.

It will be interesting to see how "but won't someone think of the children?" works here.

This is classic Vancouver. Is dancing still banned on the Drive? Sadly he's not the Bukele the far left sold me on.

What far left source was pushing Ken Sim?

They weren't supporting him, they were saying he was like Bukele, and I was hoping Sim was going to clean up the streets like Bukele.

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