This thread can be used to post examples of NIMBY that you see in the news.
Prospect is a part of Louisville that is kind of where the old money lives. It’s also where a lot of wealthy professionals move to show there status. This neighborhood has a history of blocking things like affordable housing and basic progress. This linked article is just the latest blow. The most egregious example was in the early 2010’s Louisville was finally building a long awaited and needed east end bridge across the Ohio River into Indiana. This neighborhood bought an old Civil War era mansion donated $10 million to a preservation society and fought to have the road leading to the bridge be built underground instead of on the surface layer. This tunnel increased the cost of the project over $900 million. Of course during the entire 2 years it took to excavate the tunnel the entire area complained endlessly about vibrations and noise from blasting.
How affordable is the housing? There seem to be a lot of condo buildings that look like that popping up around me. I think the units are running like 300k for 1200sf in areas where the houses are closer to 0.6-1.0M for a 3500sf McMansion. I expect the monthly condo fee is probably $500 making them a lot less affordable than the the relative price might suggest.
My understanding is that “affordable housing” is a meme. i.e., if you want to build affordable housing, make sure to build it with a 10 year old roof and a few drug dealers outside.
But when you build fancy new condos for $300K + $6K a year in fees, you’re pulling the people who can afford that out of the apartment complexes built in 1980. So in aggregate, housing becomes more affordable.
Another non-NIMBY historical society shenanigan in Louisville revolved around the building of a new downtown arena for the University of Louisville basketball team. There was a perfect lot that was half owned by the city and it was right next to the 4th Street Live entertainment center the city had subsidized and right next to the $200 million convention center the city had just built. The problem? Rick Pitino thought it should be on the water front and thus U of L thought it should be on the waterfront.
The other half of the old water company block had a decrepit 100 year old parking garage on it that had not been used for over 40 years. This parking garage had to have been one of the first in the US and it was from a time when Louisville was the 4th biggest city in the US. It was an absolute rusted, dilapidated, eyesore. The historical society all of the sudden set up a preservation trust for the parking garage and got it turned into some kind of historic landmark. This kept the city from using that lot and they ended up choosing the waterfront lot. The waterfront lot cost an extra $120 million to build on because the electric company’s downtown substation was on that lot and had to be moved. The building also had to be built to withstand Ohio River spring flooding.
The worst part of these shenanigans however was still to come. Given the historical landmark the value of that lot downtown plummeted and an investor group composed of people who had been involved in it’s historical preservation ended up buying the old parking garage lot for next to nothing. A few years later after the arena was open they went through the legal process to remove the historic landmark designation and then tore down the garage and the lot ended up being sold to build a 60 story full block development that included an Omni hotel. So they got their way and made several million $'s on the backend.
I think it’s this. Lots of businesses will have no parking as a result, which honestly, is fair.
My city recently implemented a “road diet” (the city’s term) on a very busy road. They took a four lane road down to two and added a wide lane for bikes only. The purpose is to make driving more painful by making traffic worse, that’s the actual stated intent. Then people would choose to bike or take the bus, our only public transit. Only our city’s public transit is god awful.
People were outraged, not just the drivers, but the residents. They predicted, correctly, that people would begin cutting through the neighborhood at high speeds (the road is a 40mph road which means everyone went 50) to avoid using that particular road during rush hour. It made the neighborhoods less safe and ultimately did nothing to change driving habits.
I looked it up, and the proposed bike lane is stupid, the protesters are right. The TL;DR is that adding the bike lane would be nice for some people who live in Berkeley Hills (the wealthiest part of town), and bad for everyone else.
The street where they want to put a bike lane runs E-W from the base of Berkeley Hills in North Berkeley to a gentrifying area in west Berkeley. It is filled with shops and restaurants, and is the main commercial area in that part of town. Those stores would lose their street parking, which ticks them off, plus everyone who lives in the rest of Berkeley and likes driving there. If you live in most of Berkeley and want to bike to those stores, the area is easily accessible by side streets and adding the bike lane wouldn’t particularly help.
The argument in favor of the bike line is that it is factually a street that is hard to bike on and I wouldn’t be willing to do so. A bicyclist was killed there a couple years ago. But unless you are coming to or from the Berkeley Hills, I don’t know why you would be wanting to bike there.
Here’s an idea - maybe the cars can park on the easily accessible side streets. Works well for Church St, Burlington, VT and Pearl St Mall in Boulder, CO.
Why people want to persist with loud particulate-spewing traffic on a restaurant/shopping section has me mystified. If there absolutely has to be the traffic, make it one way. Heck, throw in a handful of delivery vehicle/handicap parking spaces every now and then. It’s not hard.
My hometown is building a bridge that will bypass an extremely congested area of downtown, allowing people to commute or otherwise get across town without going through a dozen stop-lights of slow traffic.
Lots of people are complaining that it’s going to make traffic worse because it will encourage more people to move there.
I believe it’s going to be excellent once it’s done. The city is expanding and is past its capacity. We just need to drag the NIMBYs kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Austin tried that argument for about 30 years starting in the 70s. People still moved there and now their infrastructure is at least 30 years behind where it should be so the traffic really sucks.
Adding roads or expanding lanes never resolves traffic congestion. Never. It only results in making private autos more desirable, which does not solve the problem.
And it means added expenses for road maintenance. Streets/roads are not an asset, they are liabilities. The solution lies elsewhere.
They opened a new section of freeway around Phoenix recently that made things much nicer. It mostly goes through desert right now. In 5 years it will probably go through a lot of new development and be less nice.
Granted, new development would have happened somewhere either way.
