My favorite part of that story:

He said a security guard approached him and asked what he was doing.

“I said, ‘I’m standing on the sidewalk looking at this project for review.’ He said, ‘Well, we’d appreciate it if you could move on,’” Mr. Baltay recalled. “I was pretty shocked by that. It’s a public sidewalk!”

Zuckerberg could have built a fancy house in Woodside or Atherton which is where billionaire CEOs live. Instead he bought property in the middle of regular people and disrupted their lives.

Do you actually consider this neighborhood in Palo Alto a city?

Not my city.

Why not both? ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

It's OK to care about what's going on around your home and in your community. "NIMBY" is usually meant to imply that they are being unreasonable in their complaints.

Or just get a secret tropical island.

So his kids will have the best of the best and won't have to interact with gen pop.

JIC you've not also heard about...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45839481

Not a US resident either but there are zoning laws to ensure comfort for everyone. The article mentions the sorts of discomfort suddenly opening a school in a quiet neighborhood can cause. It causes upset especially when it's an elite private school that the neighborhood can't even benefit from at all.

> Neighbors complained about noise, security guards, and hordes of traffic

> For almost a decade, the Zuckerbergs’ neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, the intrusive presence of private security, and the hordes of staffers and business associates causing traffic and taking up street parking

Selection bias. Live and let live people don't wind up living in Palo Alto.

It's more that he moved into a dense residential neighborhood of single family homes and started buying up all the neighboring houses (11 so far, and he's offered on even more!) to create a massive walled off compound for himself, on which he then opened a private school for his family and his friend's kids. If he wanted to build some billionaire private compound why not go do that somewhere more remote where he could just have a ton of land enjoy doing whatever he wants with privacy and not bothering everyone instead of greedily hoovering up all family homes in a dense metro neighborhood. Not only is he decreasing housing in an area where it is desperately needed but he's bothering his neighbors with construction and noise with neverending renovations, increased traffic for all his staff, and his security team now harasses the neighbors when they're walking around on public sidewalks in front of their own houses.

Doing so in a residential neighborhood is fraught with possible legal problems:

The city, the neighborhood association(s), the county and the state likely have questions about the school, whether it is legal, licensed, and inspected as specified by all jurisdictions. What about any traffic impediments it causes? Fire hazards, who certified the school, the teachers, the equipment, is food served, is it a commercial or nonprofit concern, on and on. You get my drift.