HACKER Q&A
📣 trifit

So what’s the outcome of NIMBY discussions in your town?


Which camp do you belong to? Are your local leaders doing right by all parties involved?


  👤 legitster Accepted Answer ✓
Here's a fun, small scale one.

A family friend runs a trailer park in a small town. He asks the city council to annex the property so he can hook up to the city sewer and add more units. One of the council members opposes because he thinks a trailer park in the city limits would "cheapen" the town and doesn't want to be associated with it. (Keep in mind, the actual trailer park wouldn't move or change size in this scenario).

So he threatens the trailer park with a city ordinance he dug up that says people cannot live in a trailer for more than 30 days at a time, and draws the city boundary around the trailer park.

But as a bit of schadenfreude, it turns out that two of the other city council members have family members permanently living in trailers on their property. So by digging out this ordinance, this city councilor inadvertently created a rash of zoning violations that everyone is mad at each other about.


👤 trinovantes
My city's NIMBYs shut down a 19 story building proposal to preserve the cultural heritage of a... parking lot

https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-region/2022/08/23/co...


👤 rbliss
A corner of a nice city park we live by contains a permanently closed Sizzler and an empty parking lot. It’s at a busy intersection, also be a freeway exit, in a desirable area. A developer came in and proposed building an apartment building with a restaurant or café on the ground floor. Seemed like a good idea and a nice use of the corner.

Residents poured in complaints. They wanted the city to buy the corner and turn it into a green patch of grass.

The developer warned that the space was too valuable ($7 mil for .8 acres), the city wouldn’t want to purchase it, and the only other financially viable options would be a drive-thru, bank or a gas station.

Well, the developer pulled out given the community opposition, and the corner of the park was purchased and will now be a Kum & Go gas station.

https://buildingsaltlake.com/sugar-house-residents-fought-ho...


👤 FBISurveillance
NIMBY is why we can't have nice things - it takes SF 3 years to build a public toilet for $1.7 million dollars and is considered a political victory [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33268748


👤 moooo99
Not necessarily in my town, but where my employer is located.

The town sees a ton of car traffic each day due to providing +20k jobs. However, the town has no proper connection to public transit. The only somewhat reliable connection is the limited services ran by the companies in said town as a benefit for their employees. But due to limited service times it sees relatively little utilization.

For 30+ years now there has been the intend to connect this city to the existing light rail systems of the other two major population centers in close proximity. During the last vote by the locals, they still opposed the plan. That was three years ago, now they are demanding the construction of another bypass road (the city already has one) to get rid of the cars passing through their town.

Another example from my town: the city recently announced a shift towards more eco friendly transportation infrastructure (despite a conservative mayor) and focus more on cycling and trams. This includes the reactivation of some abandoned tram tracks as well as the removal of some parking spaces on public ground to get more space for properly secured cycling lanes. Unsurprisingly the locals protested the decision and the ambition to remove parking spaces, citing the fees they pay for it. This is a dense urban area with >600k people and they pay 30€ in parking annually


👤 cratermoon
The evergreen conflict: opposing light rail or other transit expansion while complaining about commute times. Demanding freeway expansion but opposing building a new bridge across a major river if the plans for the bridge include light rail or dedicated transit space.

👤 cweagans
Housing prices in Boise are at the highest they've ever been, people are being priced out of the area where they've lived for their entire lives, and we have large swaths of empty land. When a developer proposes building an apartment complex, people nearby lose their minds ("too much traffic", "too much crime", "i don't wanna see apartment complexes - they should build real houses for people", etc). Those same people complain endlessly about rising home prices and how they'd have to move far away if they ever sold their house.

It's incredibly frustrating.


👤 bombcar
Our little town has built a 50 unit apartment/townhome complex near me, and replaced an old hotel with a senior living center (still under construction).

The only NIMBY activity I know of in the area was a small explosion trying to stop a rail yard from being built, but that fizzled out when the railroad politely explained that they're federally regulated. They did build a berm around it and use directional downlighting, and so far it hasn't seemed to be an issue.

Perhaps we're too poor to be really effective NIMBYs.


👤 OliverGuy
I used to live near a helicopter manufacturer that primarily did defense contracts, part of their site was a grass airfield that was owned by the MoD.

I think it was part of the MoDs (or CAA maybe) requirements that the runway be tarmacked, I don't remember why but it was a legal requirement that it be done before 2030 or something.

In the local Facebook group people (and a lot of them) were worried it would turn our town (40-50k population) into a international airport.

The runway probably isn't long enough for large commercial turboprop aircraft. Definitely won't have 737s using it any time soon. That an the airfield had a main road at one end and a house estate at the other, way to close to be safe for a commercial airport I imagine.


👤 throwaway0asd
My town might grow by as much as 30,000 new residents just this year. We didn’t want all the apartment complexes because the infrastructure already couldn’t handle the growth, but alas there are several dozen new incredibly large apartment complexes that have sprung up close to my house.