Comment by imgabe
1 day ago
For years in Washington DC there was one single crank who went to every community engagement meeting and prevented hundreds of units of housing from getting built.
1 day ago
For years in Washington DC there was one single crank who went to every community engagement meeting and prevented hundreds of units of housing from getting built.
I’ll be so interested to see what happens to this kind of thing.
I feel like we saw the absurd version of it over the past decade, where society at large had acted as though highly online reactionaries are quality signals of an underlying current.
It seems as though market share in that model is failing. I predict the pendulum will swing the other way across the board, and loud minorities in in-person forums will be given less credence… for good (by my estimation in this case) and bad.
Perhaps they have not been given the credence that you assume. It is typically not the NIMBY complainers who have the capacity to hire powerful experts to argue their cases in Councils and courtrooms ad nauseam. That is heavily weighted towards the developer side. I say that having worked for such developers, to further their cases in great detail.
Factors like failing or under-capacity infrastructure are coming to the fore a lot more in recent years. I've been in land development for about 25 years, and an increasingly common theme in my region is that a landowner wants a new suburb, but is not willing to upgrade all the necessary pipes and roads in order to not overwhelm existing upstream/downstream systems, and conversely the public are literally not able to subsidise that for them - public money is almost always stretched very thin already.
These people were only ever given credence as a pretext for whatever the entrenched interests wanted to do in the first place.
Every avenue of life has it’s weirdoes, but why have we as a society decided a single weirdo can stop a hundred homes from being built?
I don’t think a decision was made, we just fell down the slippery slope to Vetocracy.
It requires active energy to keep a thing alive and we haven’t been fighting hard for building things.