Hacker News Reader

Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like Mountain View is being a huge pain in the ass... Maybe it's because I grew up in a redneck area that had no zoning or building codes, but the idea that the government can tell you that you can't build what you want on property that you own is infuriating.

View on HN

It's infuriating until it prevents your neighbour from building a chemical factory right next to your house.

Like it or not, what you build often substantially impacts your neighbours.

That doesn't tend to be what happens though. Factories need a lot of land, and they don't want to pay residential market rates for it, and current owners will want to maintain their property values. In a free market, the self-interest of current property owners and developers tends to self-regulate. The government then operates as more of an enforcer of private covenants and restrictions.

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/archives/...

It doesn't tend to be what happens any more because pretty much every developed country in the world, and many underdeveloped countries, have planning and zoning frameworks that creates severe obstacles to it.

The idea that cost prevents it is a fantasy. It may prevent it in your neighbourhood, and it may prevent some of the most extreme situations, but there are plenty of areas where I live (London suburb) where factories etc. and residential neighbourhood are right next door to each other, and where the land costs are equivalent and it would not at all be a cost problem for many "objectionable" businesses to set up shop right next door to your house if zoning allowed it.

True, factories generally get quickly squeezed out of the inner cores of large cities, but residential and industrial areas often collide in the poorer parts of towns.

The example of Houston is interesting, but not that relevant in the overall scheme of things, given that Houston is very low density for a city, and low density and according reduced competition for space certainly makes it less attractive for people to fight battles over land use.

Despite that, let me quote the addendum:

>Right after I posted the above item I got an email from Nancy Sarnoff, a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, pointing out that land use remains a very live issue in Houston. Mayor Bill White, for one, is trying to stop construction of a 23-story high-rise in a neighborhood of single-family houses.

Ok, something with noxious elements, yes. (Although I think it should be private neighborhood organizations to prevent this, not government).

All they wanted to build was a couple of office building and bike path.

> Although I think it should be private neighborhood organizations to prevent this

How? Here's a way for me to speculate in this:

- Buy properties around the edge of said private neighborhood, set up all kinds of highly offensive things all surrounding the neighbourhood.

- Buy up properties in said neighbourhood as the price drops until I can get effective control of said organization.

- Remove the aforementioned offensive things and wait for property prices to rice again.

> All they wanted to build was a couple of office building and bike path.

Which impacts policing needs, fire services, traffic, public transport, garbage collections, postal services, and many others. It is also likely to have indirect effects on the local housing market, and through that an effect on local schools, hospitals and others.

There's no such thing as just a couple of office buildings when it comes to urban planning.

I'm not proposing abolishing the courts, so presumably the highly hypothetical scheme you've just described world be litigated in court.

Your second argument, based on logistics, is much stronger and bears consideration.

The highly hypothetical scheme I just described would be legal absent government planning regulations so there'd be nothing to litigate.

Traffic impacts that are created by increasing occupancy faster than new infrastructure can be built have adverse impacts on everyone using the transport infrastructure just like a polluting industry has an adverse impact on the area (also, it has a pollution impact, whether or not infrastructure is adequate, but that's probably generally not as big of a concern.) So, scale can make new office space a noxious impact, and the article seems to clearly indicate that a preexisting overall scale limit was applied and Google, who had asked for most of it, got far less, and LinkedIn got the lion's share.

Well, it makes sense if you want to build, say, a gasifier or a chemical factory... but it doesn't seem to be the case. Are they worried about environmental impact, social impact, or just tax revenue

There's resistance for things you'd imagine should be no-brainers. For example, an expansion of the Stevens Creek bike path is encountering major resistance: http://www.cyclelicio.us/2015/sunnyvale-nimbys-threaten-stev...

Cooperation is hard work.

> For example, an expansion of the Stevens Creek bike path is encountering major resistance

But how could you not love that bike path!? It gets you practical places and it's beautiful!

My God, fucking NIMBYs.

In the context of the entire population, very few enjoy biking. Maybe they object to spending a ton of money on something that benefits a very small percentage of the population.

Given the hell that is morning traffic on the 101, the bicycle path is actually the easier and more pleasant commute alternative for a lot of people. Before claiming that only "a very small percentage of the population" benefit, we should look for numbers on how many people actually do use the bike path.

Obnoxious and cranky people, of the kind that often get banned from online forums, sit in planning meetings and have their way.

I bet that NIMBYKiller 3D would be a popular FPS in California.

Bonus points for realism in the burning hedges-- if you "New Game+" it and have the flame-thrower when you get to the Atherton level.

Let us not speak of things like expanding BART all the way to San Jose, and the traffic relief which that could bring.

The article implies that there is an in-total limit of new office space that has been adopted for some time period, which probably is based largely on ability to expand infrastructure to deal with added needs (e.g., commute traffic.)

Why the decision was made to alot the lion's share of that alotment to LinkedIn rather than Google, I don't know.

(Determining the actual cost to address the impacts and setting the cost of approval to recoup those costs, rather than setting hard limits, would seem a more efficient mechanism, if it could be done fairly and accurately, but that's not easier or less prone to political manipulation than setting limits and allocating within those limits.)

The government manages the externalities.

For example, the sheer volume of office build out between the Shoreline and Rengstorff exits from 101 essentially installed a plug on 101 between those exits (really from Embarcadero to Moffet). MV council prefers plans that address that more. (The same problem, in reverse, happened when RWC tried to allow wetlands to be replaced with housing without improving the freeway infrastructure, which would simply have led to a clog not only for the residents but for everyone passing through).

Another monoculture risk is to allow one company to use too high a percentage of the real estate...meaning if they go under or move there's suddenly a glut of office space with all its own trickle down problems as well. It's in the city's interest try to have a diversity of employers. It's good for the general infrastructure as well.

(BTW I suspect your redneck area nevertheless had building codes at least for electrical and fire codes).

Point #1 won't be fixed by trying to interfere with smart growth, instead, Google will end up leasing more office space spread around MV and traffic will continue to grow worse.

Those companies are going to continue to hire more and more employees. Either the politicians actually work with them to come up with smart plans for growth to relief traffic pressure, or they can stick their heads in the sand hoping it'll go away.

There have been proposals IIRC to improve freeway infrastructure around MV, but those were shot down by anti-growth members of the council. In fact, the council often votes to make traffic clogs worse: http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/06/19/cycle-track-to-repla...

You seem to believe that the government of Mountain View has no control over the number of employees commuting into Mountain View, but isn't restricting the total square footage of office space in MV is a fairly effective way of doing that?

(Google leasing more office space around MV would be cancelled out by other employer's leasing less office space.)

So, like what happened when SGI left (and Google eventually moved in)? Or Sun -> Facebook?

California seems like paradise for NIMBY:ers.

Parts of California, e.g., the Bay Area, have quite large concentrations of people who are secure enough in tgeir basic immediate needs to focus energy on more peripheral and/or longer-term concerns. NIMBY concerns are one of many such things.

Maybe, if you own a significant amount of property, which is extremely expensive. So, in other words, if you're rich AF; yes.

The Bay Area specifically is a NIMBY paradise.

The Bay Area has a lot of trophy spouses who cover up the shame of unemployability by "serving" on the sorts of boards and councils that have the power to go hard-core NIMBY and fight progress and make it impossible to develop a housing density appropriate to the demand and job market. They do this because the artificially low housing availability spikes prices. They don't actually care about their communities; they just want to keep their houses priced at 5 times what they're actually worth.

Of course, the breadwinners in those families (who finance the NIMBYs) get some karma when their trophy spouses (the ones pushing the NIMBY rules that prevent new development) give them stupid kids who'll require expensive and emotionally exhausting string-pulling in order to get them into schools. It's not enough, but it is something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com