NYT on Cell Phone Tower Controversy

prostoalex writes "The New York Times discusses the controversy of placing cell phone towers on top of hills, a practice to which many people object. According to the article, people frequently complain about the visual impediment and are afraid that property values will decline or some health damage will be done with radio waves. At the same time, people get quite irritated when proper phone service is not provided by the operators, and the calls keep dropping or coverage is poor outside of densely populated areas. Phone companies also lease the land to place the cell phone tower for $30,000-$50,000, which is attractive to many landowners, but some, like Sammy Barsa from NYT article, find themselves persona non grata in the community."

Comments

It's actually a pretty sweet deal

[Ahkorishaan]

As someone who has had a cell phone tower on their property, I think it's a pretty sweet deal. And they aren't really that intrusive anymore, some designs are actually rather low profile, of course those are only meant for rural town coverage, but it's still not so bad.

And the 28,000 we recieve a year is as much as the income of a low-income family.

Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal

[eUdudx]

In passing, I mention my kin in NH who declined the (approx) $10k/year becaue of previous experience with property owners who allowed the addition of 7/24 blinking lights on their horixon. It was as if they didn't want to be remembered as the ones who "were the beginning of the end" in their rural area.

Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, what I find hilarious....is that while complaining about sparsely located hilltop towers, these people somehow managed to overlook the residential power lines, telephone lines and cable TV lines strung haphazardly from pole to pole every 100 feet at varying heights all throughout their countryside. I think I'd rather see a couple of towers than a mess of wires hanging every which way through my neighborhood.

Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal

[anagama]

In my town, there is a cell tower that looks like a Douglas Fir tree. If you know it is a cell tower, you can tell that it's false, but people usually don't notice it until being told it is a cell tower. Something like -- "do you see something odd on that hill over there?" isn't usually enough. Something like "see that tree next to the _____ and up from the _____, that's a cell tower." That's usually enough to help people pick it out.

Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal

[Anonymous Coward]

The fake tree cell towers I've seen are 1) much taller than the surrounding trees, 2) not shaped like the nearby trees, and 3) regular in shape, unlike real trees.
For instance:
http://campus.champlain.edu/faculty/whitmore/img/w ireless/Cell-Tower-Tree.jpg

or

http://danbricklin.com/log/0f010790.jpg

or

http://www.80acres.com/Stupid%20things/stupid_thin gs.htm

Re:It's actually a pretty sweet deal

[pete6677]

What people don't like is change in the landscape. Once the change happens and they get used to it, nobody complains anymore. A perfect example of this is the giant Citgo sign on the Boston skyline. When it was first put up (1960s, I think), people complained that the skyline was being altered by some corporate monstrosity. Eventually people quit complaining and got used to it, and it was just another part of the city. Years later, Citgo decided they no longer needed the huge sign and announced it was going to be taken down. Once again, people complained. They said the sign had become part of the Boston skyline that everyone recognized and that taking it down would be causing the area to lose a landmark. Change is what people object to, not the objects themselves.

Not just cell towers

[LiquidCoooled]

Wind farms are seen the same.
Its an expansion of the technological lifestyle, and a shift away from the purity of nature.

I'm all for people reusing industrial/hidden rundown areas for these eyesores, and prefer to keep the countryside views clear.

Re:Not just cell towers

[rxmd]

I find the negative view of windfarms odd. They're beautiful things.

I have a friend who lives north of a large wind farm here in Northern Germany. What drives him crazy (besides the sometimes rather considerable noise) is that the shadow from the rotor blades passes through his living room every couple seconds.

I do like the idea of wind farms in gerneral, but I also see that there might be a problem with having one in your back yard.

Sweet Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a sweet deal if you happen to own a piece of land that a phone company wants to use for a tower. For whatever reason, they prefer to lease land rather than buy, and they pay pretty well for the priveledge of doing this. My mother has such a piece of land, and it nets her around $1000/month last I heard.

What really makes the deal sweet though is that the amount of land taken up by the tower is really small, and you're free to do anything else on the land that you want. I suppose what they're really leasing from you is the privlege to put a tower on your property.

In my mother's case it's a rental property with a fair amount of land, and the tower sits back far from the house. So it doesn't really interfere with the tennants lives, and it basically gives her money-for-nothing every month.

New ebay auction.

[mctk]

For $50k a month, I'd be happy to host a cell tower on my head.

NIMBY is what's going to screw us...

[PornMaster]

Not In My Back Yard for...

Cell phone towers
Windmill farms
Nuclear power plants

People would love the benefits of all three, but only if they're nowhere to be seen, or in the case of the nuke plants, just far, far away.

I hope for karmic retribution for these people.

IMO Cel towers better than phone poles

[Anonymous Coward]

The visual blight caused by regular phone poles and electrical poles is far worse than for cel towers. Why do people accept regular phone poles but make such a fuss over cel towers? Regular phone poles are much more dangerous as well - consider the number of people who are hurt or killed when they hit them with cars...

Re:A Little Creativity Please ...

[BrowserCapsGuy]

Here in Coral Gables, Florida (The City Beautiful) there are quite a few cellphone towers disguised as trees. http://www.fraudfrond.com/

Church steeples are a good spot

[_merlin]

In Australia, they've started renting space in church steeples. They make the antennae very unobtrusive, and their RF and SONET gear doesn't take up much space. Pumps quite a bit of money into churches that can be used for community projects, aid, missions, etc.

Re:Church steeples are a good spot

[F13]

Improves ones reception to God too.

Re:Damage via cell phone rad

[Easy2RememberNick]

Yes and people strap magnets to every part of their body thinking it affects their "magnetic blood" (which it isn't) in some way. Lord help you if you put a 300 foot high cell tower ten miles away from them...they're gonna die!!

Meanwhile they get an MRI which is 50,000 times stronger than the entire Earth's magnetic field.

I can see how dictators do it, it's so easy.

It's an Engineering Issue.

[SoupIsGood Food]

As Apple has shown time and again, style is a key objective of engineering in creating a desireable product. Building an aesthetically pleasing cell tower would do an end-run around most (tho by no means all) of the objections.

A huge metal eyesore makes it harder for the product to be deployed. Disguising, blending or beautifying the towers to compliment their surroundings would make them easier to deploy. For example, in New England, many cell towers are hidden atop the towering smokestacks of 18th and 19th century mills (no longer used, but are pleasing brickwork architecture the building owners usually left in place.) They also lease space in tall church steeples... another commodity New England has in abundance.

Where no steeples or smokestacks are available, companies should design a nice cladding that compliments the surroundings.

Hire a real architecht with serious artistic chops to oversee the design and implementation of cell towers, and you spend a lot less money fighting hostile communities. Not hard to figure out.

SoupIsGood Food