In your world, everyone counts except the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes. You're shocked that outsiders come into a town with plans to build things that require special consideration and the people of the town demand it be put through a rigorous process?
I get it, there are real issues. But minimizing real concerns of people that are the stakeholders isn't fair. Construction means years of noise and dust, and traffic issues in many cases and people don't want that. People are wary of the character of their town being ruined - what makes the town a great place to be. I agree that there's usualy a middle ground that could be found. But importantly, to your last point...
> It's fine to not like the design of a particular building, but to enforce design aesthetic onto someone else is also a failing of zoning.
I disagree. Go to somewhere like the UK and you'll see in many places they not only restrict what you can do to existing structures, but they dictate which materials can be used to build new developments. They do this because it allows the area to develop while also hopefully maintaining the character of the place. The thing that makes the place nice today. If someone wanted to put up a house covered in vinyl siding, they wouldn't be allowed to.
I fully support enforcing new developments having to use certain materials and be restricted to certain sizes, styles, and layouts.
> In your world, everyone counts except the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes.
In my world, everyone counts including the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes...alongside the people who do not yet live there and thus have no voice.
I am vehemently opposed to ladder-pulling in all its forms.
> But minimizing real concerns of people that are the stakeholders isn't fair.
I do not believe I am minimizing their real concerns, I believe I am putting them on the same footing as other real concerns, concerns which people who want to act insular have no motivation to consider. Concerns like the state bill in question here attempts to balance.
Cities change or they die. The world is full of inconveniences and problems related to change but it is not fair to use the regulatory power of the state to insist that a hamlet remain as-is in perpetuity. There are strategies to mitigate those inconveniences instead of "nope, not here."
> I fully support enforcing new developments having to use certain materials and be restricted to certain sizes, styles, and layouts.
In a perfect world, I would be fine with this, but we do not live in a perfect world and these restrictions are more often used as a fig leaf to keep people out than they are to maintain a character. Hell, the phrase "neighborhood character" is very often used as a code phrase for keeping out "those people", whomever is the villain of the day (often renters or people who want to buy but who can't or don't want to buy a massive structure).
These sorts of rules can be useful--look at Leavenworth in Washington State, for example--but, in a lot of places in the United States and especially on the West Coast, they are impossible-to-meet predicates for exclusion.
> In my world, everyone counts including the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes...alongside the people who do not yet live there and thus have no voice.
It's difficult to understand how this makes sense. There are ~900K people who live in San Francisco. There are (roughly) 333 million people in the US who don't live in San Francisco. So you're saying those 333 million people should all have equal voice in deciding what happens in SF? Why?
Because his son is a developer who wants to disrupt existing communities without the community having a say in it. He disguises it in a mask of egalitarianism. But his argument is the same as a pro-lifer who claims they’re the voice of the unheard baby to be aborted without considering the existing person who’s voice we can actually verify.
You can’t possibly know what future people in the community may want and can only justify your own opinions about what ought to be by projecting them on these hypothetical people. If anything the evidence says differently as the people living in a community today were the hypothetical people in previous years.
I get it, there are real issues. But minimizing real concerns of people that are the stakeholders isn't fair. Construction means years of noise and dust, and traffic issues in many cases and people don't want that. People are wary of the character of their town being ruined - what makes the town a great place to be. I agree that there's usualy a middle ground that could be found. But importantly, to your last point...
> It's fine to not like the design of a particular building, but to enforce design aesthetic onto someone else is also a failing of zoning.
I disagree. Go to somewhere like the UK and you'll see in many places they not only restrict what you can do to existing structures, but they dictate which materials can be used to build new developments. They do this because it allows the area to develop while also hopefully maintaining the character of the place. The thing that makes the place nice today. If someone wanted to put up a house covered in vinyl siding, they wouldn't be allowed to.
I fully support enforcing new developments having to use certain materials and be restricted to certain sizes, styles, and layouts.