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Comment by throwawaycert | Hacker News Reader

None of these things are actually true.

Zoning laws are defaults. By default, you have to provide a certain amount of parking, or are only allowed to put up one additional unit, without additional planning authority. That's an important phrase. If you start building a bunch of houses on your land, you may overload available transportation, utility, and public service capacity. That is why you must first go to a planning commission.

You know what happens 90% of the time when someone with a hundred thousand sqft lot wants to add another house? You fill out some paperwork requesting a zoning variance and get your answer in a few weeks.

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FWIW I tried going to the zoning board for the parking issue mentioned above, and I got different answers from different people (which is a big problem in and of itself), but basically the answer I got from city officials was "you have to do this if you want to build a duplex." The lot is already zoned/approved for duplex, and whether there are 2 or 4 parking spots won't affect things like utility capacity.

This isn't the sort of thing you talk to "city officicals" about. There is almost certainly a political entity in your city/county made up of appointed or elected citizens called something like a planning commission. You do not talk to the city employees, they implement policy. You need to talk to the politicians who make policy, and have the policy modified for your project, if it will serve the community's interest.

> If you start building a bunch of houses on your land, you may overload available transportation, utility, and public service capacity.

If you build a bunch of houses then you have a larger customer base and tax base and have the money to provide more services.

The real issue is that if you get a bunch of new lower income residents who consume more in services than they pay in taxes then it raises costs on the existing residents who have to make up the difference. But if that's the concern then better to use flat-rate service fees so that new lower income residents are at least paying for what they consume than to do something even more regressive with zoning by effectively excluding them from the community entirely.

I am living through the effects of allowing excessively fast growth right now. For most of this year and possibly into the next, my driveway is almost unusable while the road is ripped up and utilities completely overhauled because there was just no choice anymore. The whole neighborhood had shit water pressure and constant sewer issues because the city council 20 years ago approved a few too many apartment buildings. It's not about income levels, it's about planning.

Planning shouldn't require approvals. If people are building a bunch of apartment buildings, the city can be aware of that without being able to prohibit it. And if the city planning office then chooses to wait until there is low water pressure before upgrading the infrastructure instead of doing it at the same time as the new buildings they're aware of are going up, whose fault is that?

They didn't know they went too far at the time, and it didn't become obvious for years. But they knew they were getting close at least, and stopped. We'd be worse off if they hadn't denied subsequent projects.

> They didn't know they went too far at the time, and it didn't become obvious for years.

That's just bad engineering. You should know how many pipes and pumps you have of what kind and where, and from that know how many residents it can support. Then you can predict when the infrastructure will become insufficient and start the upgrade in time to finish it before that happens. With enough margin of safety that you're still in the clear even if your estimates are off within the typical range that estimates have been off for similar past projects.

It's no surprise that some places get that wrong from time to time, but the solution is to do better next time. If you're at the point that you have to halt housing construction because your infrastructure can't keep up with it, the point where you screwed up was several years in the past.

The practical effect of what you suggest is that I have to suffer from overtaxed infrastructure because individuals around me made poor judgements. Which is exactly why these rules exist. The planning process is how society manages its infrastructure.

> You fill out some paperwork requesting a zoning variance and get your answer in a few weeks.

That may be true in some (many?) locales, but it's not for places like California, where the housing shortages are hurting most.

Here, even if you don't need a variance, and your plans are exactly up to code as-is, you should expect to spend 1-2 years fighting NIMBY landowners who don't want anything to change, and use various laws and community comment periods as blunt instruments to delay your building plans to the point that you run out of money while fighting and give up.

I have a question. If these painful, legalistic processes of local government didn't exist, do you think your bad neighbors would just stop bothering you, or do you think maybe they'd just shoot you to get rid of the problem?

All these things you make sound "bad" are exactly how we solve interpersonal problems without violence.

Hey! Stop using logic and real world experience! Stop! People here don't deal with municipalities to any real caliber. They don't know. Thus, you can't use real world experiences to explain to them that they need to shut their mouths about things they don't understand.

Yea, out of doing contracting work in 4 states (WA, OR, CO and FL), it's not too difficult (depending on what) to overturn some zoning laws. As long as you are being smart about it. My personal experience, zoning laws are mostly there to make sure idiots are least capable of accomplishing extreme stupidity. If you're careful and smart, you typically hate code enforcement because it's a waste of time for you. But holy shit, are they needed for a lot of contractors.

Fun joke, how do you know if someone has never been on a construction site?

They're a libertarian.

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