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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I think you have to actually do local politics (I'm assuming you do) to really get just how fucked public comment is as a process, and I think this is an important and useful thing to talk about that just won't be possible to talk about in a data center thread, because of the political valence data centers have taken on.

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I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.

A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.

Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.

I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.

(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)

I don't know, this sure sounds like NIMBYism to me. Public comment was used to organize against multifamily housing units. That's approximately the whole story; I think you pretty much just have to add "organizing against new renewable and grid upgrades" to complete it.

They weren't multifamily units.

"5-over-1 or over-1s, also known as a one-plus-five or a podium building,[1] is a type of multi-family residential building commonly found in urban areas of North America", so either you're wrong about them wanting to build a 5 over 1 or wrong about them being multi-family.

Then maybe I used to wrong term. It was a building full of singles, built to look almost exactly like the classic 5-over-1.

Yes, that's a multifamily development.

NIMBYism isn't always wrong.

We can agree to disagree, so long as we can at least recognize NIMBYism when we see it. "Public comment works great because it enabled us to organize to keep a multifamily development out of our vicinity" is like the archetypical NIMBY project.

When it's a data center, maybe, but these people got housing densification shot down, keeping home prices and rent high for everybody.

You clarified it wasn’t “never change NIMBYism” - was it a case of just changes I don’t like NIMBYism?

As I understand it, NIMBYism is "don't ever build anything anywhere in the neighborhood/town", not "don't build in this one spot we all really like". As I said, there are tons of other buildings going up over town.

It's literally "don't build on this one spot I really like". It's in the name!

I didn't know that the acronym was NITOSIRL. Sure seems like a weird way to spell NIMBY, but who am I to judge?

Exactly. The "my" in "my backyard" can apply to everyone therefore nothing gets built. The alternative is everything gets built. There has to be a middle ground, which is what zoning laws are meant to accomplish. We have buildings and multi-family housing going up in our town too, but we also have historically-protected buildings on the main street that require some more work if you want to do stuff with them. This is a good balance.

Zoning laws accomplished what they were intended to do, which was to enforce economic and racial segregation by preventing new affordable housing from being built near areas of opportunity. I don't think anybody working on housing affordability thinks this is a good balance, and the trend is sharply towards rolling these rules back. Apropos this particular thread I think it's notable that the most popular way of accomplishing that is to remove home rule authority for municipalities on zoning minimums and re-vesting that power exclusively in the state, which can't be mugged by local special interest groups spawn camping public comment opportunities.

Well, and also preventing things like slaughterhouses being built in residential areas, as they were often in the 19th century. I rather suspect that the real power behind wanting to repeal zoning laws aren't altruistic people wanting to provide people with affordable housing but people who just want to make as much money as possible, regardless of the effects on people in the neighborhood.

In the campaign I'm a part of to end exclusionary zoning ("Yes Oak Park"), housing reform opponents claimed to residents that we were advocating for the construction of rock quarries next to people's houses. It's like there's a playbook of bad arguments NIMBYs are drawing from. Thanks for sharing this! It was a useful cite in a local politics discussion.

Heck, put the slaughterhouse in my back yard. I'll never have to worry about someone throwing up luxury condos full of Karenns, ever.

An odious commercial use is the next best thing to no change whatsoever.

If you have your own private back yard you're not allowed to refer to condominiums as "luxury".

>If you have your own private back yard you're not allowed to refer to condominiums as "luxury".

I live on .1ac in a post-industrial shithole that remains a post-industrial shithole largely because the politics of snooty people mostly a hundred miles away.

The last thing I, or anyone else here, needs is "those people" in our midst telling us how to live. Our lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible.

If it's everyone's favorite part of town why not just codify it at the city level?

That's what they're working on next.

So what will likely follow is a 'takings clause' case by the owner, who can no longer use their property the way they want.

The fact you're using this as an example of public review being a good thing shows how fucked up the process is.

You're cheering for the prevention of building new housing in the most valuable, most useful part of the town. I bet it would have kept all the same retail and restaurants in the bottom too, so there would have been zero downside for anyone who actually uses the street.

Instead a bunch of people with no stake except an aesthetic preference blocked it. How on earth is that a good thing?

Is your opinion that the denizens of a locale ought to have no say in what happens to it?

They should have exactly the same say as everybody else in that electorate who votes. They should not get an extra say.

If you don't own the land and can't demonstrate a direct, severe impact to you and yours from the actions of someone else, you shouldn't have a say.

"More traffic" is not sufficient. I can actually sort of believe shade from an apartment building could count, but the impression I get is that is rarely a good-faith argument (and in any case it should only severely affect a few people in any new development, so you could easily justify just compensating them in some way rather than outright blocking a development.

> several stories higher than any of the other buildings

If the highest other building was 2 stories then it would have been 4 taller. More likely 3? Not several.

I appreciate your complaint about generic design but damn putting apartments downtown sounds amazing actually, not ruining. Would you have been happy if they had a better design and it was 3 over 1?

"5 over 1" refers to the section of the building code, wooden (part 5) over concrete (part 1) or something like that. Coincidentally it's also the number of floors allowed, but a 3 over 1 would be built of something else.

Interesting claim. Wikipedia is unsure but uses the floor count meaning in the article.

> The name derives from the maximum permissible five floors of combustible construction (Type III or Type V) over a fire-resistive Type I podium of one floor for "5-over-1" or two floors for "5-over-2", as defined in the United States–based International Building Code (IBC) Section 510.2.[1][4] Some sources instead attribute the name to the wood framing of the upper construction; the IBC uses "Type V" to refer to non-fireproof structures, including those framed with dimensional lumber.[5][6]

In most US jurisdictions if you pick reasonable ceiling heights plus a little margin for un-level ground making the building effectively taller on one side 6-floors is also about the maximum number of floors you can build before you get kicked in the dick by all the highrise regulatory compliance so that probably has a bit to do with it.

Hey Boaty McBoatface wants their time to shine!

At least in this instance it's a counterbalance against the psychopathic tech CEOs

That's literally what NIMBYs exploiting public comment say: whatever else is happening, at least they're striking back against the psychopathic Private Equity firms who are building all this evil housing.

These aren't private equity firms building housing. Did you read the article?

I did and was not referring to the article. Also:

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

Blocking datacenter builds is the right thing to do right now. Whether the general public has the right vocabulary to explain why is not so important when the people in charge are actively evil and tasked with the exact opposite of their claimed job title.

We don't agree, but either way, the only thing I'm here to say is that public comment distorts democratic process and entrenches concentrated local interest groups. You're happy about it (in the abstract, apparently) because it's achieving an outcome you support, but mostly what it supports is preventing housing and renewable energy from being built.

Data centers aren't housing and don't always make use of renewable energy. Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them. There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.

I'm really not sure how I can be clearer about the fact that I don't agree with the prevailing sentiment on these threads about data centers† but that my reason for commenting here is that public comment processes are a nightmare for democratic policymaking.

† (I think they're fine and moreover I think they're a huge missed opportunity for blue states to get more sustainable and regulated power delivered and data centers running under those regulations, rather that what's going to happen, which is data centers all being located in red states that aren't going to regulate them at all).

> what's going to happen, which is data centers all being located in red states that aren't going to regulate them at all

The data center backlash is bipartisan though? Even Texas froze all data center buildouts recently [1].

[1]: https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/03/texas-data-center-pr...

Texas is a weird case because they're the fastest growing state in the country and they run their own independent power grid --- badly (see: the winter outage a couple years back). And even then: data centers are going to get built in Texas. Gov. Abbott is doing a performative audit thing, but they're ultimately going to clear projects.

Did you not use public comments to help stop flock in your community? Why is that different?

No, I did not! I've written at length about how I engaged with my local municipality on Flock cameras. The search bar will avail. None of it involved public comment.

> but that my reason for commenting here is that public comment processes are a nightmare for democratic policymaking.

The public comment process has stopped a lot, a LOT, of shitty things from happening at the federal and state government level. I've seen it happen time and time again, because I've been part of it time and time again. Over decades.

So I see this, and to be honest? I'm going to move on! Because this clashes with a lot of extremely personal experiences to me that have shaped public policy and legislation in positive ways. Sometimes people will get it wrong and it can be corrupted by Big Money like anything else, but it's one of the few levers the public has until they start moving to the different boxes of Democracy.

Mostly it's stopped the construction of housing.

> Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them.

People get really irrational about things built near them and their say causes problems finding anywhere to build reasonable things.

> There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.

Give it a residential noise limit and I'm happy to live near a data center. (I am worried about power prices but that's a matter of total number rather than specific location, and utilities charging them enough to cover expansion.)

Given the scale of the buildout, I think it would be sensible to mandate that, for every data center built, the companies doing that must also subsidize a new green power plant somewhere (not necessarily the same region, but where it makes the most sense), proportionally to consumption. Basically each kWh of power has to be compensated. No gas or any other fossil fuels even if there's pre-existing supply.

Separately there's a problem with the lack of enforcement, most notoriously Musk's infamous gas-powered data center that apparently violates a bunch of regulations including noise. Musk does this because he believes that he can get away with it in a sense that the eventual fines, if any, will be dwarfed by the profit extracted. The penalties need to be hefty enough that this computation doesn't work out.

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