I really thought where you were going here was not about zoning, but was going to be "We have to decide, as a society, if we want to undo a couple centuries' worth of public health regulations because it makes some guy with an app money... "
1) Nobody's working on this kind of stuff just for the money, and if they are then they've lied to a lot of people and are fucking up. If you're a strong engineer with good quantitative skills, the expected value of working on wall street, working at googazonsoft, or even becoming a realtor in the bay (if you have the soft skills) is much higher than striking out on your own to create something new. A technical founder I met from one of these companies could have easily done one of these other things but felt really passionate about improving our relationship to food. I really doubt there's a money grubbing evil genius working on food sharing apps in order to amass great wealth and power.
2) You can't really manipulate society with $50M of facebook ads and no product (and I think that's more than any of these companies have raised). If you're making a consumer app and it's not something people want, there's no "marketing, combined with PR, government relations, and legal" that's going to get them to use it and "conform to the goals of the business".
IDK, maybe I'm just a dumb optimist but I'm excited about what the future holds for this stuff.
With an essentially zero chance of becoming a billionaire.
If you're driven by the desire to become a billionaire, startups it is.
Without those advantages, it's almost laughable to replicate that career path
That said, I disagree completely and vehemently with most of what you said. Allow me to respond to what I believe the salient pieces were. I'll rephrase for brevity, but please let me know if I've mis-represented your position in doing so:
1 - "Sharing economy doesn't undo regulations, they just demand new types." To date, we haven't seen the sharing economy demand "new types" of regulations; we've seen it completely ignore existing regulations and lobby against any replacement, even where those regulations are reasonable (e.g., requiring commercial drivers to have commercial auto insurance, w/r/t Uber).
2 - "Don't fit well ... not a reason to dismiss them entirely." That is a strawman. I did not advocate for dismissing them entirely. I don't generally advocate for eliminating viable business models out of bureaucratic laziness. The current situation, however, is "ignore public health regulations until we kill enough people to draw attention to ourselves." That is not an acceptable road forward under any circumstance, and being adamantly opposed to it is not the same as being entirely opposed to the existence of an "uber for chefs", or whatever we're calling it.
3- I disagree about the "order of magnitude" argument. It's rather like dismissing an Uber approach to user safety on the argument that each driver is just one driver. We must address it as the entire service, which collectively - if it scales, and let's be fair, scaling is the point - would end up serving enormous numbers of people.
4- "Imagine if healthy, home-cooked dinner was cheap and convenient." An appeal to pathos. Largely irrelevant to the discussion, and also to the services as they exist(which generally involve sit-down meals for groups of people at fairly immodest prices).
Here's one from the OP that's starting with affordable stuff (users price, kind of like sidecar): https://josephine.com/
I think what they're doing is pretty cool and I've heard it's mostly busy parents buying the meals. Hope they come to LA soon as I'd love to try some of the yummy smells I pick up walking around Echo Park in the evening! (sorry for the pathos?)
In other words, new startups pushing the envelope should be expected, and there's nothing wrong with that. We just have to decide as a society how far they should be able to code and adapt the regulation accordingly.
Really, a huge numbers of modern laws and restrictions are as far removed from utility as possible.
And unlike in "Chesterton's fence" case, it's not like they are old and we don't know why they come up with them back in the day.
Quite the opposite. We DO know why the come with them, and for a lot of them, we witnessed lobby groups and special interests, concerned citizens "think of the children", etc press for them -- and it has been mostly BS.
https://mises.org/library/zoning-laws-destroy-communities
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/zoning-l...
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2010/12/17/best-of-blog-t...
Though the situation and intent of lots of these is much worse, "City of Quartz" (book on LA's development) is quite illuminating for example.
But lots of bad food laws too, e.g:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2013/apr...
We have a share of BS laws in Europe too, that killed small producers with "safety regulations" and requirements designed so that only big buck corps can afford them -- despite having no issues whatsoever with said producers' products for centuries up until the 1990s or so when the laws got drafted...
Well, that's not an example of a lobbyist-sponsored food law. The FDA has old regs on the books about the maximum number of mites/cheese sample, apparently written for "cheeses at large," to limit the dissemination of contaminated food, rather than one specific type of intentionally mite-ridden cheese. A single instance of a border check resulted in an imported shipment was recorded. In that article, the border control "wouldn't specify what the safe level was." It took 30 seconds to find that the regulatory level is 6 mites / cc, and that the samples they examined exceeded that, some by up to ~660x. This was not part of a broader law or effort on the behalf of the FDA, and future shipments of the cheese got through import checks just fine. Literally, the media and the media alone made up a storm in a teacup over an "attack" on small oversea dairies.
Do you have any other bad food laws in mind?
Except for that in practice the only way you can get the law changed is if you can get enough people to break it.
Both Uber and AirBnB have followed this arc. Uber even gives preference to drivers who work full-time.
Zoning is related to building codes. All the rules around waste disposal, fire codes, and so forth are dramatically different between a restaurant and a private home. And the financial incentives with a “dine-sharing” business will be to ignore safety until forced to comply, as they have been historically with almost all businesses.
Who is going to check that there are even working smoke detectors and a fire extinguisher? For that matter, who will even check that there is a cooker hood removing grease?
We don’t enforce these things for private homes because when you cook for yourself, your family, and people you know, there are social incentives in place to control safety. There’s no such incentive in place when you’re cooking for strangers.
And of course, this is a dramatically different story when you compare to ride-sharing. Private cars have the same safety features as the taxis already on the road, and drive on the same roads. Private kitchens do not have the same safety features as restaurant kitchens, and are not housed in the same buildings.
Private cars operate in public, with some expectation that the police will intervene if the car appears to be driven improperly, like speeding. Not perfectly, but there is enough oversight to provide incentives to drive safely. There is no such oversight for private kitchens.
Ride-sharing apps have a high degree of tracking: They monitor the car’s location and speed continuously. Location is shared with the passenger’s app. Will dining apps monitor the food being cooked? Do they know if the eggs are past their best-before date?
Dine-sharing is unlike ride-sharing or home-sharing in a number of substantial ways that are at relevant to zoning and the concept of what is and isn’t a fit establishment for cooking for strangers.