Can someone explain why is it such a crime to run a school? (illegal maybe, but I guess the purpose is still to teach to young people). Shouldn't we promote the creation of schools?

> Neighbors complained about noise, security guards, and hordes of traffic

> For almost a decade, the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, the intrusive presence of private security, and the hordes of staffers and business associates causing traffic and taking up street parking

The city, the neighborhood association(s), the county and the state likely have questions about the school, whether it is legal, licensed, and inspected as specified by all jurisdictions. What about any traffic impediments it causes? Fire hazards, who certified the school, the teachers, the equipment, is food served, is it a commercial or nonprofit concern, on and on. You get my drift.

He said a security guard approached him and asked what he was doing.

“I said, ‘I’m standing on the sidewalk looking at this project for review.’ He said, ‘Well, we’d appreciate it if you could move on,’” Mr. Baltay recalled. “I was pretty shocked by that. It’s a public sidewalk!”

Zuckerberg could have built a fancy house in Woodside or Atherton which is where billionaire CEOs live. Instead he bought property in the middle of regular people and disrupted their lives.

Reminds me of a guy near me who bought three already massive adjacent properties. Tore down two of them. One become a pond. The other one was rebuilt into a massive $30M mansion. The third was already a $15M mansion so he kept that as his guest house. The funny thing is that his guest house... has a guest house.

Really? Because it happens everywhere. I've seen it from Chicago to Seattle to South Carolina. Start going to the zoning board meetings of any town with enough people, and you'll run into it.

In London, they tend to expand down, rather than out, but it happens so often there's a term for it there: Iceberg homes.

The richest country in history of the world cannot afford healthcare or food banks, and has millions of homeless people living rough are absurd embarrassments, but can afford to bail out the austerity economic terrorist in Argentina, give bombs and missiles to a genocidal regime to flatten an indigenous population of millions into the Stone Age and man-made famine, bomb random boats claiming they're "narco-traffickers" without evidence, and maintain higher military expenditures than the next nine (9) countries combined.

a legacy of Soviet agit-prop used in a multi-pronged strategy, albeit one that has little traction compared to MAGA and the trad-right stuff.

it is easier and safer to have illegal school and other unpermitted things and all the noise and street blocking and all the other disruptions where regular people live than to piss off a billionaire neighbor.

why do you say that?

I would not call these "regular people"

As far as whether they're "regular people", depends on perspective. Relative to the US / world, a net worth that includes equity in a $3M+ house is an outlier but most of these people live what would have been considered a typical "upper middle class" lifestyle a couple of decades ago [source: me, ex Palo Alto resident, still have friends there]. Putting a couple of kids through college has become insanely expensive. They don't have compounds in Hawaii or fly around on private jets.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Zuckerberg-to-raze-4-hou...

There's an assumption that these homeowners are getting bought out above market, but what's the market rate for a multi-million dollar home next to the perpetual construction and noise of a billionaire's fife, on a street where an increasing number of homes are being bought out and lay vacant? And why would the property team not negotiate any sale somewhat aggressively?

Today, we all live under the watchful Eye of Mark as He targets ads to us from His compound in the Bay Area. Some say they feel a light itching at the nape of their neck even thousands of miles away as Mark turns His gaze to them, but it’s an illusion: He uses software so His gaze is everywhere.

I assume still pretty good, as the expectation is the billionair will rather pay a bit more, than be annoyed by the delay of his plans of grandeur.

At the individual level, I agree. Generally unfair to have some unzoned private school next to your house shuffling in people constantly. Though I doubt this would get much press if it weren't Zuck or the NIMBYs who can probably pull strings to get a story in the press about their harrowing plight and tormented lives (not saying that's what happened of course, and perhaps the neighbors aren't NIMBYs--who knows)

As a group though, I think Zuck and any NIMBYs deserve each other

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45839481

But it does illustrate a point: most people are enthusiastic supporters of rich NIMBYs. They'll complain about this and that but in the end they're enthusiastic supporters of rich NIMBYs.

[1]https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0807850-boulder-c...

Like, a lot of the town is just kids at CU. Also, a lot of the younger families are in what little apartments or condos there are in the city and aren't homeowners. Also, like, you probably should only look at adults anyways as under 18s are very unlikely to have their own houses.

Granted a lot of 80+ year olds are in care facilities.

And like, maybe we can relax this to 60+ years olds, in which case based on the raw data there, that's about 18% of the population.

I mean, just looking around Boulder, the homeowners are old people, that's pretty clear.

Sounds like a normal day in the city

If your next door neighbor opened a 30+ person school or other large business next to your property without any permits and against what your neighborhood was zoned for you might not be happy.

Industrial / High Rise is the only thing that should need permitting.

Fourplex / Duplex / Single Family / Small Offices / Schools should not.

You do not want to have that outside of zoning control because that is how you end up with a road designed to handle the need of a dozen homes (i.e. 24-30 cars a day) suddenly dealing with ten times that load - not just because of noise, smell and traffic jams but especially because road surfacing quality is usually "the cheapest you can get away with for the expected load", the road will go bad way faster than expected.

Zoning is not your enemy, zoning is your friend. Particularly if you value peace and roads you can drive on.

Let's all just be for real for one second please.

Yes it is, you explicitly said it would be illegal if you didn't get permission from the government. What you meant to say was that "The concept of a government-approved school wouldn't be illegal." which is very different from the concept of any school being legal, and also redundant because by definition a government-approved school is a legal school, since governments hold a monopoly on the legal system.

Sure it's not "fully illegal" in the same way that technically methadone can be bought and sold.

Like everything else you people get your grubby dick beaters on it winds up being regulated such that the only people who can justify going through the hoops other than governments that get preferential treatment are businesses specializing solely in doing whatever activity you're regulating.

It used to be possible for a man to have a side gig without violating the law, be it a school or something else, not anymore thanks to the likes of you.

Stop peddling government that sucks so much and people wouldn't hate it.

It's not even about the taxes and the regulation. It's about the de-facto inequality under the law masquerading as "regulation" that I can't stand.

I'm not attracted to power myself thank you very much. It's too much effort trying to help society and having people like you wreck it. As you can probably not tell, I don't work well with idiots.

Otherwise we get children who grow up into neanderthals and the country goes to shit. I quite like living somewhere with a decent literacy rate. Let's keep it that way.

You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Repeal the law. Then nobody is breaking it.

I lived right behind an elementary school (playgound was kitty-corner to my fence) two houses ago. During recess and lunch time, the kids were so loud I had to shout to hear people next to me inside my house.

...but forget all that: What you're advocating for is lawlessness. If you don't like the law, lobby to change it! Don't just violate it and screw over your neighbors in the mean time.

Now, the article claims MZ didn't file the proper permits. But this reads like a hit piece so take those claims about someone with a raft of lawyers not filing the proper permits with a grain of salt. What this isn't is some sort of political dispute that effects any of the rest of us. Its sort of rich people using PR as leverage in a dispute with someone who is really really rich. Nothing to see here, move along...

Neighborhoods will literally do their hardest to shut down newly formed schools on old school campuses. Yes, if a place had a school on it before but went out of business or was formerly a government one or whatever - it doesn’t matter - if it comes back then the neighbors will protest and try to shut it down.

This is how the Bay Area operates. People on HN (who are not from Silicon Valley and not involved in children’s upbringing) do not understand the level of NIMBYism that exists here. There is a reason why these homes are all so fucking expensive. Every neighborhood absolutely refuses to build due to NIMBYism.