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by sorcerer-mar 387 days ago
> Unfortunately when it comes to land use, we have a tendency to block overall uses rather than blocking the negative effects of those uses

Probably because history is full of developers promising to mitigate certain negative consequences and then failing to do so. I'm as YIMBY as anyone, so this history of developers being awful matters a lot to me: it galvanizes the opposition.
1 comments
epistasis 387 days ago
Do you have examples of this? Where has the negative effect been banned (presumably with suitable penalties) and then ignored?

I'm not that young but I have not seen examples of this.

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sorcerer-mar 387 days ago
What do you mean? It happens every day. Lots are upzoned based on VeryNiceIdea and then instead StupidBullshit gets built (so long as StupidBullshit fits into the same zoning scheme as VeryNiceIdea).
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epistasis 387 days ago
First, that's not an example of negative effects being banned and then developers getting around it.

Instead you are saying that some people wanted a particular land use on a parcel, bet then a different land use showed up. Lots of VeryNiceIdea have nobody around to execute the idea and actually make it happen. When an abandoned lumberyard next to lots of homes in my area had a proposal for condos, neighbors were livid at the homes, and refused the zoning change. Instead people asked for a music center for senior citizens, but nobody stepped up to raise the money to build something like that.

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sorcerer-mar 387 days ago
I guess it depends on your definition of "blocking" or "banned." If StupidBullshit had been proposed, it would've been blocked. Instead, they bait-and-switched with something else.

Yeah that's a frustrating and stupid example.

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epistasis 387 days ago
I still have no concrete idea of what you are talking about. You say it happens all the time, but I have not seen it. One person's "StupidBullshit" could be another person's "AmazingIdea" or it could be "StupidBullshit" to 99.999% of people, but without actually knowing what you're referring to it's impossible to know.

For example, there's tons of things that I love that others consider "StupidBullshit": book stores, game shops, live music venues, etc. In my town, a brewery in an industrially zoned area got exceptions to start allow serving beer and food, then a temporary one to allow live music. It's great. Then a shop owner next door shut down the extension that allowed live music because they thought that in the next 10 years there's a chance they might be allowed to build apartments, and that the live music permit should not be allowed because of that potential. 2 years of dragging out the permitting process continued, because a few people thought a beloved music venue was StupidBullshit.

That's the closest example to what you're talking about that I can think of, and it doesn't even involve developers. So I'm very skeptical about the public process of deciding "StupidBullshit," and have not once seen it turn out positively. Like, literally zero times. And I've been following land use in my city very closely for the past decade.

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sorcerer-mar 387 days ago
In your city, is every project that gets built pretty much identical to what was proposed during the rezoning process?
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