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Comment by danaliv | Hacker News Reader

Yes. As a survivor of one of these battles, when the neighbors don't want you to do something, they will throw every wrench they can find into the works. "Good faith" is nonexistent. I'm very, very sympathetic to environmental concerns, but the way I've seen this sort of thing used in real life is absolute nonsense.

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Do you have some examples, just to get an idea of the problem?

My high school was a bunch of trailers on a large tract of unused but school-owned land that would eventually become a full-blown high-school. It sat next to a Tractor museum and a small marsh-type thing the opposite side of its access road. The footprint of the planned construction was only maybe twice the size of the trailers, and didn't stretch across the access road, and the land it occupies now was mostly disused fields of dirt and shrubs.

We were promised that our senior year would be in the new facility. However the school got hit with environmental studies around a specific species of endangered frog that was known to inhabit the area, and construction did not complete until 5 years later

What's crazy, viewed from outside the US, is that this kind of roadblocks seems to only apply to public works but not to private developments, or less so at least.

In Europe, public works have less barriers of that type, as it's assumed they are for the general good, whereas private projects are required to demonstrate it.

My high school was a public charter school, so it was both public and private at the same time. But I think that the environmental studies would have come up even if it were a regular public school

I'm afraid I can't get any more specific than that. There's still a lot of bad blood, and it might not be over yet.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/09/25/sunnyvale-drive-throu...

Plenty of examples in this recent article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-...

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