Re:The Golden Girls Would Violate Zoning Laws
by Spooky23 on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @01:02PM
(#20566798)
I don't know, but I will say that it's easy to indignant about these things when they don't happen to you.
When I grew up, we lived in an unincorporated area with minimal noise and other ordinances. A new neighbor moves in next store and basically spends 20-40 hours a week shooting at a bell and fixed targets from 7AM-?. They would use everything from .22s ("ding, ding, ..., ding") to various pistols, AK-47/SKS rifles, to hunting rifles daily. After church on Sunday most summers consisted of watermelon demolition via shotgun. My mom worked nights, and it made her life miserable.
Fast forward to my recent past. I live in a city, in a mixed neighborhood of 1-4 family houses. Some asshole decides to illegally convert his 2-family flat into a 10 unit SRO. So now we're stuck with people who are willing to live in that kind of situation (ie. mostly drug addicts and drunks) hanging around yucking it up all night. We were only able to shut it down when the slumlord guy decided to illegally convert the front porches into two more units, and when cited by the code officer chose to assault him.
I get the pushback to zoning, but it exists because of substantial minority of the population are assholes. My dad ran subsidized housing programs for years and built personal relationships with many of the stakeholders that I got to be a small part of -- the narrative on HN is that poor people are fighting zoning, the reality is that poor people are often the biggest advocates for it, but are denied due process. Nobody wants to live around slumlord apartments, or have industrial activity in their backyard -- but the most vulnerable people have the worst ability to secure representation and demand attention.
When I grew up, we lived in an unincorporated area with minimal noise and other ordinances. A new neighbor moves in next store and basically spends 20-40 hours a week shooting at a bell and fixed targets from 7AM-?. They would use everything from .22s ("ding, ding, ..., ding") to various pistols, AK-47/SKS rifles, to hunting rifles daily. After church on Sunday most summers consisted of watermelon demolition via shotgun. My mom worked nights, and it made her life miserable.
Fast forward to my recent past. I live in a city, in a mixed neighborhood of 1-4 family houses. Some asshole decides to illegally convert his 2-family flat into a 10 unit SRO. So now we're stuck with people who are willing to live in that kind of situation (ie. mostly drug addicts and drunks) hanging around yucking it up all night. We were only able to shut it down when the slumlord guy decided to illegally convert the front porches into two more units, and when cited by the code officer chose to assault him.
I get the pushback to zoning, but it exists because of substantial minority of the population are assholes. My dad ran subsidized housing programs for years and built personal relationships with many of the stakeholders that I got to be a small part of -- the narrative on HN is that poor people are fighting zoning, the reality is that poor people are often the biggest advocates for it, but are denied due process. Nobody wants to live around slumlord apartments, or have industrial activity in their backyard -- but the most vulnerable people have the worst ability to secure representation and demand attention.