Comment by jbangert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbangert | Hacker News Reader

It always surprises me that a country that supposedly is one of the most "free-market" economies in the world and has a political rhethoric based on ridiculing overzealous regulation has zoning regulation that covers minutiae (which I haven't discovered in that level of detail anywhere).

Sure, you don't want someone to open a chemical factory next to your backyard. You don't want heave transport moving through your side street. You don't want the nice house with a mountain view to suddenly have twenty story high rises obstructing that view, it makes sense that most places have restrictions on this. However, when did people think it is a good idea to make one office job different from another office job? In Germany(the ultimate bureaucrat heaven), there is as far as I'm aware no zoning issue preventing office work in residential buildings ( residential areas might have limits as to how big buildings might be, so the apple spaceship probably wouldn't be allowed in a historic residential area, but opening a doctors office, law firm or software consulting company in a residential building is fine as far as zoning goes -- and tech/engineering companies routinely trade buildings with insurance companies and the like).

Also a key principle of America is that self-governance is pushed out to the smallest units. It's perfectly reasonable for a the residents of a town to want to and be able to influence its character.

Yes, but that exists in other places as well (usually zoning is done locally -- in Germany it's on the city or county level). However, the different categories and what zoning can do vs. what it can't do (preserve 'character' / quality of life/ etc. yes. Discriminate against specific industries/groups/etc not so much.) are decided on a more global level (which also makes the process somewhat more transparent). I believe there are still facilities for local exceptions etc ( e.g. All houses in this street are a certain brick colour, and that has to be preserved), but these are more an exception than a norm.

It's not really a "free-market" issue. It's more about good regulation versus bad regulation.

Sure, we could just complain about how NIMBYism hurts us all, but as long as there isn't a more powerful government unit intervening to control local regulations then we are always going to have overly restrictive zoning.

This is an example where the libertarian arguments come up short. Paradoxically, what's needed is more regulation, specifically, regulations restricting excessive zoning regulations. Yep, that seems bureaucratic and confusing, but is there another serious alternative? Local governments love to meddle and will do so unless a more powerful authority prevents them.

It's weird, but really the only way out of this mess is more regulations at the state or federal level.

guidelines on what rules can do (e.g. That restrict rules on other actions) act to increase agency, not decrease it so I'd say they reduce the amount of bureaucratic hassle (they also decrease the total complexity of rules)

"but is there another serious alternative?"

Certainly. Enforcing constitutional limits on government action.

The problem is that when it comes to local government, there basically are no constitutional limits. American government is constructed under the assumption that local government ought to be able to vary enough to support everything from communes to monasteries, rather than state or county governments enforcing a uniform notion of "normal life" with "normal" civil rights overriding local notions of morality.

If you live in a dry town and you're a drinker, you're supposed to GTFO, not complain about human rights.

"local government, there basically are no constitutional limits"

They certainly get a lot of leeway, but "incorporation" applies many federal protections against municipal governments too.

> country

The zoning laws are local to Palo Alto.

It is free market. You're free to find another town to set up shop in.

This argument doesn't make sense. The original argument was "this town isn't as free a market". Your argument can be used similarly by a non-free market spokesperson too: "Is not free market. (But) You're free to find other place to set up shop in".

  It always surprises me that a country...

Palo Alto is representative of regulation in the USA at large?

Probably not, but housing and construction are regulated pretty severely in general, and seem to attract a pedantic, bureaucratic mindset that has little to do with being the land of freedom par excellance. Buying a house is a mess of paperwork dedicated to distorting market realities; owning one can be similar. The very idea of homeowners' associations, with various bad-tempered members who have nothing better to do than look for violations, is a frightening one...

Homeowner's association exist to protect the common shared ownership of condominiums. If you don't want to deal with an HOA, buy a single family home instead or a large plot of land and then you're free to do whatever you'd like. There are definitely more nitpicky HOAs but generally you should do your research and find a community that shares your values when you invest in a multi-tenant property with shared common area ownership.

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about -- how, in many housing-related areas, the US is profoundly un-cowboy-ish.

Neighborhoods of single family homes can also establish HOAs, and they can become hotbeds of covert aggression. I believe that the parent comment was referring to this scenario since it is easy to spy on neighborly behavior.

In the other places in the US that I've visited or lived in, similar situations happened (e.g. University owned housing vs private student housing in the exact same building treated very differently).

Perhaps one of the causes is that every place gets to make its own regulations, classifications etc. -- not just how to zone, but what zoning means, what categories there are, etc.

because they have no true Scotsman there?

Overwhelmingly, modern Americans favor regulation and this is deeply reflected in our politics and culture. Only a tiny minority opposes the regulatory state and they are broadly denounced as haters of the poor/women/minorities/powerless/children/babies/education/environment/health/happiness/etc.

According to one conservative think tank, the US doesn't even make it into the top 10 of most economically free nations: http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

The whole hating women/minorities is spiel to shut people out. So that no one will question the "Generational Theft".

No, not really. You're trying to make this about political correctness and libertarianism. It's just not.

It's about NIMBYism and NIMBYism has been used to hurt the poor/women/minorities. It's also been used to hurt wealthy developers. NIMBYism is a problem all around, but has little to do with libertarianism or political correctness.

These lines of argument by ideologically driven libertarians are getting boring. I don't think the anti-PC rhetoric even pisses anybody off any more, we all just roll our eyes like we do when the unpopular creepy kid shows up at the party.

Your counter-argument started very nice with the NIMBYism part and then you fizzled everything by saying irrelevant stuff like it's getting boring and nobody gets pissed off anymore.

Do you really think that your last sentence adds anything useful to further the discussion?

If someone brings up blaming zoning laws on PC culture is it not appropriate to address the cutting of an excessively wide cloth to pin onto "PC" behavior?

NIMBYism isn't regulation?

It's not the kind of regulation that libertarianism actually opposes in principle, even if many libertarians do oppose it in practice.

In libertarian system you can sell your "mountain view" to a developer.

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