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Comment by finnh | Hacker News Reader

> aren't zoning rights just as real as property rights, that The Market respects?

No. "zoning rights" are not rights, they are rules applying to property that people own _and are subject to change_ much more fluidly than the ownership itself.

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As I understand, by buying property, people get a vote on if the zoning should change, much like buying shares in a company gives you a vote on its decisions. So why are zoning rights, or rules, not part of the Market?

Zoning rules are defined by the city council.

And the ability to do so is granted by the state. Thus efforts like SB 50 or Oregon's HB 2001 to take away some of the right to exclude different types of housing.

Only if it changes. I think the point is that if people are buying under current zoning, the market has already spoken. As such it becomes weird when people want the market to handle things, but not if they don't like what the market is saying.

Quite frankly, saying “The Market™ has spoken,” is a bullshit answer. The Market™ is merely the outcome of the rules we’ve setup. We decided as a society to establish certain regulations. People intentionally shaped it. To then turn around and act like this is some sort of natural occurrence and that the outcome is now somehow sacrosanct, is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened. If we picked different rules, a different outcome would have happened. And if the outcome isn’t what we want, then we can change the rules, and a get a different outcome.

That's a fine point but would you please stop arguing aggressively in the flamewar style on HN? I feel like we've had to ask you this a lot. It isn't necessary to vent toxic fumes when making your substantive points: it makes your comments and this forum worse, and it isn't fair to your fellow HN users who restrain themselves from doing the same. You may not owe better to The Market, but you do owe better to the community you're part of here.

There is nothing wrong with my comment.

I don't disagree. I think the point "deogeo" was trying to make was that YIMBY often say that zoning should be removed so the market can take care of housing. But in effect the market already says that it doesn't value affordable housing. We might not like that, and want to change zoning, but that is still intervening in the market and should be recognized as such. But then you would also have to recognize other ways of intervening in the market as legitimate, like rent control. Which is something people usually don't want to do.

The market != the set of people who vote in a jurisdiction.

The former is much, much larger. The latter is more like 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who's for dinner.

And never, never forget that a lot of zoning and land use regulation was basically created to replace outright racist policies like redlining.

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