What If Wind Turbines Got a Makeover?

A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines. [Curbed]( MONDAY, AUGUST 28 climate change [What If Wind Turbines Got a Makeover?]( From western New York to Ocean City, New Jersey, fights against wind farms often begin with how they look. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Getty Images Jim Simon, the grizzled town supervisor of Yates, New York, thinks of himself as a “reluctant warrior” in the wind-turbine fight. Raised in Buffalo, Simon spent over 20 years in the Air Force before settling down in Yates in 2005 and taking up work at Genesee Community College, where he taught history and later became a dean. As Simon tells it, he never had any political ambitions until early 2015, shortly after the Virginia-based wind developer Apex Clean Energy came to town with a proposal for the Lighthouse Wind Project — at least 47 turbines near Lake Ontario, [enough to potentially power 53,000 homes](. To Simon, it seemed more like an ambush: By the time he’d heard the details, Apex had already begun buying up leases from individual landowners in and around Yates and Somerset, small farming towns with a combined population of about 5,000. Some locals formed an opposition group, Save Ontario Shores (SOS), that quickly accrued so much support that, by year’s end, it managed to get Simon elected through an almost single-issue write-in campaign. (“Simon wouldn’t go away,” an editor at a local news outlet [wrote]( of his rise.) [Continue reading »]( [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( The Latest [Is There a Serial Killer Stalking the Brooklyn Mirage? Or maybe this EDM club is just too big and messy.]( By Brock Colyar [Is $5,000 Really the Going Rate for a Floor in a Brownstone? “I get applications and people are making half a million a year in income. One person.”]( By Kim Velsey [The Menace of the Megamansion Buyers who are turning multiunit buildings into single-family palaces have taken away hundreds of thousands of housing units.]( By Kim Velsey [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Read More From Curbed]( Introducing The City Desk, a weekly newsletter about New York. [Sign up to get it every Thursday](. [GET THE NEWSLETTER]( [logo]( [facebook logo]( [instagram logo]( [twitter logo]( [unsubscribe]( | [privacy notice]( | [update preferences]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Was this email forwarded to you? [Sign up now]( to get this newsletter in your inbox. [View this email in your browser.]( You received this email because you have a subscription to New York. Reach the right online audience with us For advertising information on email newsletters, please contact AdOps@nymag.com Vox Media, LLC 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, 12th Floor Washington, DC 20036 Copyright © 2023, All rights reserved