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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Kurt posted this to troll me. Just know my audience here was, mostly, non-technical people involved in politics in my local Chicagoland municipality.

Permit me a PSA about local politics: engaging in national politics is bleak and dispiriting, like being a gnat bouncing off the glass plate window of a skyscraper. Local politics is, by contrast, extremely responsive. I've gotten things done --- including a law passed --- in my spare time and at practically no expense (drastically unlike national politics).

An amazing thing about local politics, at least in a lot of places, is that they revolve around message boards. The boards won't be in places you want to be (in particular: a lot of them are Facebook Groups) and you just have to suck it up. But if you enjoy participating in a community like HN, you can participate in politics, too, and message-board your way towards making things happen.

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> Local politics is, by contrast, extremely responsive. I've gotten things done --- including a law passed

You live in a country where local governments have the power to make laws… in a lot of other countries they don’t - or, to be more precise, their lawmaking power is extremely limited.

Actually, even in the US, that’s often true too - only local governments with “home rule” can enact laws on any topic (provided it doesn’t contradict state or federal law), those without it can only enact laws on specific topics authorised by the state legislature. Some states grant home rule to all counties and municipalities, others none, others to some but not others (e.g. in Texas a municipality can give itself home rule powers, with approval of its voters, but only once it reaches a population of 5000).

Even state legislators are, by their nature, pretty much locally driven given the relatively small size of their constituencies and thus the margin of victory.

Voters significantly underestimate their power even up to the House level; AOC’s first campaign was very scrappy and resulted in a bartender unseating the chair of the Congressional Democrat Caucus and likely successor to Nancy Pelosi, and that was the first campaign in which anyone bothered to primary him.

Would you care to elaborate which law you helped to pass?

Also, can you link to some good resources for someone who wants to get off the sidelines and get more involved in Chicago politics, whether the resources are on FB or elsewhere? I've previously tried Googling for some but with very limited success.

Thanks.

We're the first municipality in Illinois to draft and adopt an instance of ACLU's CCOPS model legislation, which requires board approval at a recorded public board meeting before any agency (most especially our police force) can adopt any form of surveillance technology, given a broad (ACLU-supplied) definition of "surveillance". Previous to that, our police force could acquire arbitrary surveillance products so long as they kept under a discretionary budget threshold; they used that latitude to acquire a pilot deployment of Flock ALPR cameras, and CCOPS was a response to that.

My real goal is zoning.

In Chicago itself, I have less clarity, but am optimistic that somewhere on Facebook is a message board where the staff at your alderman's office reads posts, and the most politically engaged people in your neighborhood argue with each other. That's your starting point (and maybe your ending point). Just go, listen, and chime in with high-effort comments. If you're used to clearing the bar for HN comments, you're way past the threshold of coding like a super-thoughtful person in local politics.

  My real goal is zoning.

God speed to you sir! What is your goal wrt zoning?

The categorical elimination of single-family zoning along with any building envelope restrictions that would make as-of-right 3-flats uneconomical.

It's might actually be easier to win the economics battle by chipping away at restrictions on taller buildings. The builders in my area are copy/pasting a 3-flat design all over the place but it requires bargain-basement land prices (literally building on former toxic waste dumps) or money from the township because 3-flats make you have to build wide.

The muni I live in is very constrained (we're just 4 square miles, right on the border of the west side of Chicago) and our land is overwhelmingly SFZ, so most of the ballgame is getting SFZ lots opened up. The emerging consensus is towards "missing middle" housing, which is 2-40 units (but really, a medium term sweet spot in the teens), where you're talking about buildings spanning multiple lots.

That very little can economically be built on existing SFZ lots even with relaxed zoning is actually a feature, not a bug, for getting this done. People want change to be slow. At least to begin with, it's better strategically if it takes a couple years and gradual tweaking to make lots of building happen.

Kam Buckner is trying to get something passed at the state level (but wouldn't apply to Oak Park. https://ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=3288&GAID... )

Rather than the complete elimination of single family (and by extension even larger lots) I feel like it ought to follow something resembling an iterated 80/20 rule out to huge rural lots at the far end. Notice that this would imply a plurality of the land being zoned for the highest density at any given time.

The thing that really kills density in most cases is the height restrictions. A lot of the upzoning in my area has resulted in ugly, wall-to-wall low-single-digit floor count buildings with near zero setback. It's better than single family but it isn't particularly dense and it's a huge step backwards aesthetically.

A step in the right direction last week for the largest upzoning effort in the city! https://archive.is/QuOcJ

Of course the a vocal minority is fuming about higher density.

That would be an outstanding outcome! Is this just for Oak Park, or beyond?

You'd hope that Oak Park, Evanston, Wilmette, and then Berwyn and Schaumburg could get this done, and then your next step would be either Chicago (tough because of aldermanic structure) or statewide, the way California did. Either way: you start in one municipality and work from there.

It helps that zoning matters more in Oak Park (and Evanston) than almost anywhere else in Chicagoland.

There is no way you get Wilmette to change zoning. They've fought with Small Cheval about the size of their sign for like 9 months. I doubt you'd get any village in the NT district to rezone - the Optima project was pulling teeth, everyone is worried about overcrowding NT, which as a single HS is pretty packed now

The whole project is going to take many years. Even if we fix Oak Park zoning in the coming year, it'll still be years before anything significant gets built, and years past that for us to serve as a test case.

New Trier can just build another campus like they did for freshmen.

Where exactly? Land on the north shore isn’t empty nor is it cheap.

Why does zoning matter more in Oak Park and Evanston? High demand from being on the El and close to Chicago?

Yep. Historically both of these places basically exist to concentrate the interests of the upper middle class and to reinforce segregation. They're both basically Chicago but with a better funded school system (because lawyers and doctors get to funnel all their property taxes into the school down the street from them), which makes them highly desirable.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead

Like a hedge fund? Or are we including those committed to violence?

Probably not the intent of the attributed author [0] but literally speaking the statement doesn't specific "ethical" or "peaceful", no.

[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/12/change-world/

It's about that it's a small-dedicated group that brings change and not government or private institution. If it's still hard to grasp, then think about how national movements started.

Would would you ever exclude ones committed to violence? Violence consistently works.

That's what you'd think, but actually violence mostly pushes things to the extreme and sinks the effort permanently. Nonviolent movements are often defeated by one side goading the other into losing control and doing something violent, at which point they immediately cede the moral high ground and lose the support of the masses. (The masses are mostly useless in pushing a movement forward, but are critical for a movement to succeed.)

Violence can work if you have the biggest club, but it's mostly ineffective at grassroots change.

Snipers, patient 0's, drunk drivers...

>The boards won't be in places you want to be (in particular: a lot of them are Facebook Groups) and you just have to suck it up. But if you enjoy participating in a community like HN, you can participate in politics, too, and message-board your way towards making things happen.

How do you figure out where to go?

The way you'd expect: I bumbled through a bunch of different Facebook Groups, starting with the one simply labeled for my neighborhood, and followed cross-posts. Eventually I found the two really important ones in my area (one is an organizing group for local progressives --- I live in a very blue muni, and the other is the main high-signal political group for the area, in which all the village electeds participate).

> (drastically unlike national politics)

Man, I remember your & Maciej's effort to get FIDO keys to the campaign staffers, and how depressing that was

Aaaaaaa! I need to finish my post! :(

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