4 ms·

So you wouldn't mind if someone bought the property closest to wherever your house is on your 20 acres, cut down the undeveloped forest, and built an abattoir r

So you wouldn't mind if someone bought the property closest to wherever your house is on your 20 acres, cut down the undeveloped forest, and built an abattoir right on the property line?

yourapostasy 2y ago
The general rule of thumb I've personally observed (YMMV) with those who hold such absolutist externality related positions is they hold it right up to the minute that someone else much more powerful and deep-pocketed than they start unilaterally imposing externalities upon them. Your abbatoir example is a good one, and the other one I've seen in real life is when a Swift, Cargill or other similar mega-agribusiness setting up a CAFO feedlot next door. The odor externality from the manure piles/lakes usually riles such characters right up, but that is the least of it. Even when the manure management challenges are properly mitigated (and there are no such CAFO feedlots that can mitigate to only 2-3 incidents per year, it is more like 20-30 per year for the average one), neighboring properties like your parent commentator's are adversely impacted with sharply increased pathogen and contaminants control in their groundwater. As rural properties like your parent poster's usually rely upon well water, this becomes a pretty acute issue for neighbors. Fracking operations also are frequently very sloppy with their adverse impact upon groundwater, even though they are very diligent upon staying on their property. Redress that makes whole including judicial system interaction expenses is difficult, expensive even for single-digit liquid assets millionaires, and rare. At the end of the day, this has many characteristics of a classic engineering modeling problem, subject to unperceived historical biases. People who hold absolutist property rights interpretations like your parent poster are generally historically biased to a time period when such interpretations were couched in an energy-poor and population-sparse time of our civilization. Back then, as long as one was within approximately human- and animal-power scales of energy over the generational time span, and rural population densities, externalities from large scaling scenarios were rare for most people, and mostly theoretical. With our current access to energy and ability to rapidly densify neighboring properties, the available externalities to present materially change, and the interpretations (which are actually the mental models we work with) break down in the face of a engineering-like scaling step change that requires categorically different solution spaces. I'm personally very sympathetic to your parent poster's position, but realistically, my personal experience has informed me of the dynamic I've shared, and I've since substantially modified my position.
ekidd 2y ago
HOAs are not the only thing that controls where people can build abattoirs. In much of the US, this is controlled by zoning. And zoning is decided on via local politics, not via a HOA. I'll take a small town politics over an HOA any day, because the few local HOAs are far more likely to make weird and obnoxious requests. I live on a dirt road in the woods. I don't care whether my next-door neighbor cuts his lawn or what color he paints his house, or whether he decides to start keeping goats. The landowner across the street is running a tiny part-time farm, and I'm a fan. I know most of my 20 closest neighbors. I don't mind the occasional HOA for people who want that sort of heavy community control. For me, it was an automatic "no" when buying a house.
- fastball 2y ago
  HOAs are local politics. You're making a distinction without a difference. Some local politics sucks, some does its job with minimal fuss. The difference is not made by the label you put on the political entity.
  - ekidd 2y ago
    Small town politics is based on voting and laws. I can participate in Town Meeting, or call the town manager, or volunteer for a role in town government. And unless I make a spectacular nuisance of myself (or ruin the groundwater or dirt roads), the town doesn't much care what I do with my land.[1] HOAs are basically private pseudo-governments, and most of the ones around here seem to impose far more stringent rules about how people use their land than the towns do. [1] If I were operating on a scale beyond an individual homeowner or a small farm, the town would pay more attention. Want to keep a dozen goats or turn 5 acres into a truck farm? Go for it. Want to raise 1,500 pigs with a manure lagoon? You'll need to go through a permitting process.
forgetfreeman 2y ago
They couldn't if they tried, zoning laws, local labor costs, and the hyper-consolidation of the meat packing industry make that a complete non-starter. You're trying to goad me into admitting obnoxious neighbors are obnoxious which is self-evident. Generally there are ways to deal with obnoxious neighbors that don't require entitling the rest of the neighborhood to make decisions about one's property. Ironically I've taken the starch our of more than one asshat neighbor by threatening to build a hog pen next to their house, so there is that I suppose.
- fastball 2y ago
  What exactly do you think zoning laws are if not the wider community making decisions about one's property?
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Zoning laws are a combination of unelected civil servants, elected legislators, and the legal system establishing a minimum set of guardrails to prevent shit like building strip clubs and toxic waste incinerators in inappropriate places. They're far from foolproof, are frequently gimmicked to the benefit of wealthy political donors, and they're not something the public gets any kind of real say in. There's no relationship between zoning laws and HOA covenants around what color your mailbox can be or how many cars you can have in your driveway (for example). Some kind of minimal social contract is provably necessary to prevent society from devolving into some kind of libertarian Mad Max you-keep-what-you-kill hellscape, but that hardly requires granting the people around me authority to make arbitrary decisions around trivial aspects of how I choose to maintain my property.
- em-bee 2y ago
  seems someone actually did that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40255509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40255509
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Oh sure yeah. That's actually a very old strategy I learned from my (now 94) year old grandfather. My impression is that was one of the intermediate steps on the continuum between trying to sit down with a neighbor and work things out and exchanging sporadic small arms fire. Country life was wild back in the day.

So you wouldn't mind if someone bought the property closest to wherever your house is on your 20 acres, cut down the undeveloped forest, and built an abattoir right on the property line?

yourapostasy 2y ago

The general rule of thumb I've personally observed (YMMV) with those who hold such absolutist externality related positions is they hold it right up to the minute that someone else much more powerful and deep-pocketed than they start unilaterally imposing externalities upon them. Your abbatoir example is a good one, and the other one I've seen in real life is when a Swift, Cargill or other similar mega-agribusiness setting up a CAFO feedlot next door. The odor externality from the manure piles/lakes usually riles such characters right up, but that is the least of it. Even when the manure management challenges are properly mitigated (and there are no such CAFO feedlots that can mitigate to only 2-3 incidents per year, it is more like 20-30 per year for the average one), neighboring properties like your parent commentator's are adversely impacted with sharply increased pathogen and contaminants control in their groundwater. As rural properties like your parent poster's usually rely upon well water, this becomes a pretty acute issue for neighbors. Fracking operations also are frequently very sloppy with their adverse impact upon groundwater, even though they are very diligent upon staying on their property. Redress that makes whole including judicial system interaction expenses is difficult, expensive even for single-digit liquid assets millionaires, and rare. At the end of the day, this has many characteristics of a classic engineering modeling problem, subject to unperceived historical biases. People who hold absolutist property rights interpretations like your parent poster are generally historically biased to a time period when such interpretations were couched in an energy-poor and population-sparse time of our civilization. Back then, as long as one was within approximately human- and animal-power scales of energy over the generational time span, and rural population densities, externalities from large scaling scenarios were rare for most people, and mostly theoretical. With our current access to energy and ability to rapidly densify neighboring properties, the available externalities to present materially change, and the interpretations (which are actually the mental models we work with) break down in the face of a engineering-like scaling step change that requires categorically different solution spaces. I'm personally very sympathetic to your parent poster's position, but realistically, my personal experience has informed me of the dynamic I've shared, and I've since substantially modified my position.

ekidd 2y ago

HOAs are not the only thing that controls where people can build abattoirs. In much of the US, this is controlled by zoning. And zoning is decided on via local politics, not via a HOA. I'll take a small town politics over an HOA any day, because the few local HOAs are far more likely to make weird and obnoxious requests. I live on a dirt road in the woods. I don't care whether my next-door neighbor cuts his lawn or what color he paints his house, or whether he decides to start keeping goats. The landowner across the street is running a tiny part-time farm, and I'm a fan. I know most of my 20 closest neighbors. I don't mind the occasional HOA for people who want that sort of heavy community control. For me, it was an automatic "no" when buying a house.

fastball 2y ago
HOAs are local politics. You're making a distinction without a difference. Some local politics sucks, some does its job with minimal fuss. The difference is not made by the label you put on the political entity.
- ekidd 2y ago
  Small town politics is based on voting and laws. I can participate in Town Meeting, or call the town manager, or volunteer for a role in town government. And unless I make a spectacular nuisance of myself (or ruin the groundwater or dirt roads), the town doesn't much care what I do with my land.[1] HOAs are basically private pseudo-governments, and most of the ones around here seem to impose far more stringent rules about how people use their land than the towns do. [1] If I were operating on a scale beyond an individual homeowner or a small farm, the town would pay more attention. Want to keep a dozen goats or turn 5 acres into a truck farm? Go for it. Want to raise 1,500 pigs with a manure lagoon? You'll need to go through a permitting process.

forgetfreeman 2y ago

They couldn't if they tried, zoning laws, local labor costs, and the hyper-consolidation of the meat packing industry make that a complete non-starter. You're trying to goad me into admitting obnoxious neighbors are obnoxious which is self-evident. Generally there are ways to deal with obnoxious neighbors that don't require entitling the rest of the neighborhood to make decisions about one's property. Ironically I've taken the starch our of more than one asshat neighbor by threatening to build a hog pen next to their house, so there is that I suppose.

fastball 2y ago
What exactly do you think zoning laws are if not the wider community making decisions about one's property?
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Zoning laws are a combination of unelected civil servants, elected legislators, and the legal system establishing a minimum set of guardrails to prevent shit like building strip clubs and toxic waste incinerators in inappropriate places. They're far from foolproof, are frequently gimmicked to the benefit of wealthy political donors, and they're not something the public gets any kind of real say in. There's no relationship between zoning laws and HOA covenants around what color your mailbox can be or how many cars you can have in your driveway (for example). Some kind of minimal social contract is provably necessary to prevent society from devolving into some kind of libertarian Mad Max you-keep-what-you-kill hellscape, but that hardly requires granting the people around me authority to make arbitrary decisions around trivial aspects of how I choose to maintain my property.
em-bee 2y ago
seems someone actually did that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40255509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40255509
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Oh sure yeah. That's actually a very old strategy I learned from my (now 94) year old grandfather. My impression is that was one of the intermediate steps on the continuum between trying to sit down with a neighbor and work things out and exchanging sporadic small arms fire. Country life was wild back in the day.