alt Hacker News> The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
That’s the exact opposite of the experience I’ve had in my town.
It seems that money is the primary driver of turnout at town council meetings. I live at the top of a mountain with 1 real road and 2 smaller frequently closed roads down to the city below. Developers really want to build up here, but there’s no way to widen the road, and no realistic way to build more. There’s not enough flat land to build enough jobs, shopping, dining etc… up here, so increasing density just means more cars making the trip 30 minutes into the city.
Every single time there’s an issue about development, you get dozens of real estate agents, developers, and people who work in construction showing up because their bank account depends on it. Every local election, you have candidates bankrolled by out of town developers.
“No” is much less well organized and will only occasionally turn out in larger numbers than “Yes” despite dominating in elections.
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Are there any public meetings with the developer stepping up and saying “I need to make money, please approve!”. That seems… counter productive
People say the same things here, where I know them not to be true, but I don’t know anything about your municipality. I know what the social science says about this, and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in, but does occur to people who want to stop it. Your mileage obviously varies.