Hacker News Reader

Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

I would be pretty upset if all of a sudden my house was under the flight path of a new airport (and the associated economic consequences) but I always find it surprising how annoyed people get that put a house near an airport and then complain about it, where one of my parents lives there is a small but fairly busy private airport that has been there close to a hundred years, so almost no one that lives by it now can claim to have been surprised by its existence when they moved into (or built) their houses, yet their is perpetual noise complaints and a surprisingly vociferous group that wants it shut down. Similar thing happened where I went to college (house prices were lower near campus - because you had to put up with being near several thousand college kids) and then people move in and complain about the college kids!

View on HN

This is not surprising if you think about it.

You understand a new airport generating complaints based on loss of value.

Have you considered what successfully getting an airport shut down might do for the nearby property owners?

It's not uncommon for people to try to (often successfully) tell other people what they can and cannot do with their own land, simply for the benefit of the one trying.

Its akin to shortsellers actively campaigning against weak companies. Sure Theresa small burn of interest but if you can leverage and move the needle, profirs'

One can be surprised by the traffic increase. "When I moved here 25 years ago, there was one flight in the morning and one in the afternoon. Now it's every 5 minutes from 6 am to 10 pm and they're trying to extend it post 10 pm!"

There is also contemporary research, i.e. chronic noise exposure having subtle effects on health, that are accepted as true that would have been laughed at 2-3 decades ago.

Who expects a city and its economy to shrink though?

This is what happened in my childhood home. We lived within a couple miles of a mid-sized airport. We could always hear the planes to some extent, but over time they expanded their cargo operations, which typically fly at night. They also added a new flight path that went directly over our house, so it became common for 747s to fly 2000 feet above us every 15-20 minutes through the night. I was fortunate to be a heavy sleeper.

Why wouldn’t you? It’s a land arb. You get cheaper land then use political power to raise its desirability. Common trick.

You can do it a few ways. Get a place near a nightclub then force the club to shut down. Almost certainly they have some regulation they’re not following.

Same with schools etc. Or sometimes the city will be planning an affordable housing thing on a lot. No one likes that so you’ll get the homes next door for cheaper. Then you can lobby for the place to become a park. Boom! Your home is now more valuable than it would be.

It’s just political arbitrage.

This shouldn't be down voted, this type of arbitrage is common and the parties engaging in it know the baked in risks. It is no different from the common gambit of buying land outside of cities zoned as industrial or agricultural and then waging politics to have it rezoned as residential to dramatically increase its value.

The cool solution I've seen to this problem is to have some process for identifying the class of people who are affected by [locally burdensome thing] and then allowing the proponents (a business, the government, etc.) to negotiate some settlement with that affected class directly, with a majority vote used to accept the settlement.

For example, everyone near the airport could get some property tax relief or share of an annual payment that would go away if the airport went away.

This way a small minority of vocal opponents cannot effectively oppose something that would be good for everyone, but if something is irredeemably terrible and unfair locally affected people can block it.

This is absolutely how it should work. Negative externalities should be paid for by the source of them. It can be difficult of course to find where that price lies, but this is what all those lawsuits were about. It’s a shame they didn’t just bake that cost in from the beginning, instead of failing to take responsibility and then having to be forced to do so.

This is Coase's Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

Yes and no. If someone buy land at scale, and tries waging zoning politics...yeah, okay, arbitrage.

Vs. if John Doe buys a house near a substantial airport, then claims he didn't know? No, sorry, nothing's gonna change in his favor. Maybe he imagined it would, and planned...but that's just the difference between ignoramus and fool.

That’s just a matter of ability. A few guys can easily stall things. It didn’t take many to force Sonoma to change. All these attempts have risks. You can always try. Sometimes you’re powerful enough to get change in your favour. Other times you’re not and it was a good bet. Other times you’re not and it was a bad bet.

Besides, this is quite refined now. I just put nana in the house. People can’t resist old people. She’ll have medical issues that need quiet etc etc.

My landlord did something like that with a few buildings for the big London sewer project. London actually paid him for new windows and things like that.

You just apply the force. Most taxpayers don’t notice this stuff so you can get hundreds of thousands out of it.

Many government projects are slow, too, so you can do this for ones where they’re announced but no work has been done. Bam, free upgrades, earthquake retrofit, etc.

This is so so how the world works in reality.

I would say it is short sighted land arb. Density and land prices go hand-in-hand [1]. The causality is less clear. Higher land prices necessitates more units and being able to build more units increases land prices. Cities build airports because the expected economic impacts and increased tax revenue growth justifies the large expense. That's the long view. Your same reasoning should mean some entity is willing to lobby to open up construction and reduce height limits so they can build more. The reason this does not happen is because it is easier to block things than it is to change things. I'd say this is some type of societal second law of thermodynamics.

[1] - https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/uploads/content/Bertaud_-_Th...

This is not "arbitrage" though. It's not risk free, etc.

Rent-seeking is a better term for what the OP is describing.

Portland, OR has a similar problem with the raceway.

People buy houses near Portland International Raceway and then complain about the noise of race cars. Just doesn't make sense to me.

You don't say? I know more than one bar that was shut down after someone moved in above it with the explicit warning that it is a bar.

Noise is killer, even if you don't think it is. A well rested adult will not have any problems stomaching a single noisy night. But if every night is noisy you are going to fall apart after a while. Dosis making poisons etc. On a related note, sexism is bad for a similar reason. It is not about one asshole making one comment, once. What makws it bad is getting those constantly and from all kind of directions.

I once lived next to a main road and when I moved after a few years, the first night in a silent room felt like someone had lifted a sack of bricks from my chest. And I play in a rock band, so not the noise averse type.

Reminds me of that person protesting a Beer Festival in Golden Colorado. On their sign they stated they wanted to keep alcohol activities out of Golden but the city is home to Coors Brewing Company.

https://kdvr.com/news/trending/golden-residents-anti-beer-fe...

Jack Daniels distillery is famously in a dry county in Tennessee. It's legal to distill it there, but illegal to purchase it in county.

https://thesterlingtraveler.com/jack-daniels-distillery-tour...

Same people that buy a house next to Disneyland then complain about the fireworks and traffic. They just don’t consider it and the disclosures about it if any are often buried in documents they’re rushed to sign.

That's similar to people who move to the countryside then complain that the farms nearby stink.

That's happened to my area.

It used to be the countryside; now's it's the suburbs.

But now the suburbs complain about the smells from the few farms that are left.

Yes, property values IS local politics.

Race tensions is fundamentally about property values.

Policing is about property values.

Road construction and transport infrastructure is about property values.

Bike paths and parks are about property values.

That's a massive oversimplification.

A lot of that viewpoint is informed by the Detroit white flight phenomenon.

I find it hard to believe that every single white person in a neighborhood would be so racist that the mirror arrival of a single black family would trigger the mass migration of all white people from that neighborhood

No, it really was the property values. Of course, the property values exist under those rules because of inherent racism. There's no denying that.

Perhaps all the white people were just covering themselves by saying oh, we are leaving because of other people's racism, not because of ours. We are leaving because our property values are decreasing from other people's racism.

I used to live above a Japanese bar in the centre of Melbourne, Australia. It was a busy street in a busy part of town. (Robot, for the locals.)

Of course this place was sold, both to renters and buyers, as ‘hip’, it was ‘the inner-city lifestyle’, it was ‘everything on your doorstep’.

And yet the neighbours. My god what cretins. Noise! On a weekend! They couldn’t bear it.

I think it should be flat-out forbidden to complain about noise if the thing you’re complaining about existed when you arrived.

What did they say about it, if you asked them?

You never know: Maybe the bar owner has been a jerk to them, maybe it could be quieter. Also, a transient resident can have a much different perspective than someone who is there permanently.

I wonder if landlords should be required to disclose noise sources.

As a renter there's no easy way for you to know that every Friday night the bar a block away has music so loud you can hear it in your apartment til 2am or that a band practices at the school down the street etc...

You generally have about 5 minutes too look around a apartment and a few more to look around the neighborhood and then sign a contract for $60k not knowing the place will be unacceptable once you actually spend a week there.

maybe this is only a problem in expensive cities like SF/NYC/LA where when you find a place you have to take it immediately nor lose it to the line of people ready to rent

To be fair to the GP, that part of Melbourne is very, very busy. But Melbourne is very expensive and you do have to compete with other renters. It’s a nightmare to find a good spot especially if you’re in a hurry.

I think another aspect is that to someone who lives in the area - like a real estate agent - it’s obvious that it would be noisy at night. Why else would you want live there? There are multiple bars in every laneway. Many of them are open until the wee hours.

So while I agree with the sentiment I think it’s difficult in practice.

"maybe this is only a problem in expensive cities like SF/NYC/LA where when you find a place you have to take it immediately nor lose it to the line of people ready to rent"

This. Everywhere else people usually can and do take the time to explore the area of the potential new home.

"I wonder if landlords should be required to disclose noise sources."

Maybe, but maybe they also don't know about those school band practices, so how to enforce it, but in general there are noise maps.

Robot is a great bar! I used to work in Flinders Lane, it’s the best part of Melbourne. Still grab lunch from Yen Sushi Noodles in Centre Place when I visit.

But yeah it would be noisy. Great spot to live for a while if you’re young. A lot of my favourite places didn’t make it post Covid tho.

Ha! I bet I've seen you in there. Yeah we were in our 30s, absolutely loved it. This was from 2007-2010~ish.

I can't believe Robot survived. Yoshi's done well there.

Some counterpoints:

'I was there first' doesn't give you more property rights than the other person.

The amount of or location of the noise could change over time.

If the airport has been careless about noise for 20 years, that doesn't make it ok for them to continue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com