NIMBYism is definitely a problem, especially in cases like this restaurant. Fighting it is silly.
Hell yea you can fight it and it's worth it! I got in on the ground floor action in San Francisco, where YIMBY Action was created as an actual political party. The article below correctly quotes Laura Clarke as the founder, however, a woman (who I got to know personally) named Sonja Trauss really did the most (in my opinion) to rally troops together to coalesce against NIMBYism. I've seen the fight firsthand, and I've seen it succeed. Sonja came from outside of the developer world and never thought in a thousand years this would be her purpose.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/yimby-groups-pro-development/532437/Sonja Trauss, who founded the Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF) in 2013, told me that her group’s most well attended meeting occurred right after the election. “Man, did we have a surge in interest for getting involved in politics after the election,” she said. Generally, she says she’s seeing more groups like hers in the Bay Area, and now some elected officials will disparage NIMBYism in a way they didn’t before. “It seems like the tide has turned,” she said. Laura Foote Clark formally started the group YIMBY Action six months before the November elections. Membership in the Bay Area group has doubled since the election, she told me. “We definitely got the initial Trump bump—people being like, ‘Oh my God, the world is ending, we have to do something,’” she told me.
Few places have seen more of a surge in pro-building sentiment than the Bay Area, where development has traditionally been hampered by objections from neighbors concerned with the downsides of density. Silicon Valley added about 344,000 residents between 2007 and 2016, according to Stephen Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, but only 69,503 units were issued building permits in that time. (Levy calculates that 130,094 units of new housing would have been needed to keep pace with population growth.)
Some people in the Bay Area are changing their minds about developers, Clark, of YIMBY Action, told me. More and more of them are affected by rising housing prices, and so are becoming aware of the problem of a lack of inventory. Others are increasingly realizing their children won’t be able to afford to live close by. “It is no longer just low-income folks who are housing-burdened—it’s now moved well up the ladder,” Levy said.
With a growing Bay Area pro-housing lobby have come victories for the movement. In May, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law called Home SF, which allows developers to build taller buildings and more units if they include affordable units in the project. (A prior version of the same housing law had died last year after an anti-development protest at which one housing activist decried the proposal as “ethnic cleansing.”)...
But NIMBYism isn't especially bad in Jacksonville compared to elsewhere, nor is it a major issue outside a few so-called "desirable" neighborhoods.
My point of reference is this: In my prior career, I did development deals in Boston, Atlanta, Nashville, Denver, up and down CA, and elsewhere and worked for firms doing deals in many places. Not only was I focused on my own deals, my firms had many meetings, weekly even, to discuss the wider deal pipeline and issues surrounding specific deals.
I have had A LOT of exposure around the country (not the least of which was living in multiple cities).
I have not personally witnessed or been affected by as much NIMBYism just about anywhere else as I have in this city and metro region. It is off the charts here and I sell land, so I work even now with lots of developers from elsewhere, and they also attest to unique levels of difficulty here. I will go out on a limb here and say you are just wrong. Jax is about as NIMBY as it gets, which is reflected ALL OVER town in various ways. The suburbs have also clammed up big time. They go through spurts, but St. Johns County is going to dry up quite a bit, relatively speaking, as political pressure has mounted in an unbelievable way down there. So it's not even just Riverside-Avondale, it really is practically everywhere now.
I am one of them, and lo and behold, I have an SMPS sign on my house.
Well and from your perspective there's not much of an added amount of NIMBYism in Jax, it's not that much of a problem. Nothing personal against you at all, but you're sort of proving my point. I think you've drunk a lot of the Koolaid of these groups and you probably think I greatly exaggerate the problem here and so we'll probably not see eye to eye on this one.
As Ennis says, many Urban Core neighborhoods are actively pushing for new development, as by far the biggest cause of declining housing stock has *not* been preservation, it's been the demolition of houses. In fact, preservation could help that by preventing more homes, especially missing-middle housing, from being demolished for empty lots. I wrote an article a while about on this very topic: https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/the-yimby-case-for-historic-preservation/
Wait, we've had a decline in housing stock in Jax? There's a rampant problem of demolition? Where are you talking about? Also, I'm FOR preservation, certainly, but at this point more focused on downtown commercial (or our truly great structures like the recently demolished Ford Assemble Plant) than average 1930s vinyl siding homes in Avondale that are in total disrepair and also a dime a dozen.
Oh, and Jacksonville is doing just fine with corporate relocations, not that office jobs are any better than any other jobs. Not sure where that critique is coming from: https://jaxusa.org/news/florida-jacksonville-see-most-corporate-relocation-growth-of-states-large-u-s-cities-respectively/
My veiled point earlier was that JaxUSA doesn't seem to be doing as good of a job, but they have great talking points! Maybe it's just because I know of what's happening in Raleigh, Salt Lake City, Nashville, Austin and the other cities in our own state, but we are not on the level.
JaxUSA also doubtfully played an important role in the only "big" news story office relos we had (Dunn & Bradstreet and Paysafe, both already firmly in the FIS ecosystem).
Look, I know office as a real estate category is really down right now. But there are other cities, even lesser than the ones I just mentioned above, that are still getting nice new office developments to accommodate growth in their various sectors (the upper margins undoubtedly) and corporate relocations. We are not getting crap compared to too many other cities we should be able to be comparing against. I think there are plenty of people who would back me up on this. All it takes is a quick weekend trip to some of these places to see the level of construction there to realize the quality of economic growth they are getting versus what we are getting.