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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

The regulatory capture happens from landowners restricting both the number of dwelling units that are allowed under zoning, and by landowners using political planning process to stop even those dwelling units that fit the zoning.

Massive chunks of our cities are restricted to a single or two dwelling unit per parcel, which creates a huge bubble in land prices.

So in summary, landowners use law to inflate land values by restricting the number of dwelling units that are allowed. (And ironically, by unfairly capping the population density, they force overcrowding of people into existing units, which is what studies are finding to be the true factor the geographic distribution of COVID19 cases in places like NYC, rather than density... but I digress)

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I've come to the view that local zoning should be abolished. We should have standardized zoning at at least the state level patterned after Japan. Local zoning is nothing more than a property owners' cartel that restricts supply to extract rent.

Critics will see this as un-democratic when in reality it's much more democratic. Most local zoning is controlled by tiny opaque cabals of land owners who use all kinds of tactics to prevent participation by anyone beyond other sympathetic land owners with a vested interest in raising prices.

These cartels have sat around while an entire generation has been ruined by their practices. It's time to take their little fiefdoms away.

Three books that dive into the problems of our "local control" system, including how it can be anti-democratic:

Neighborhood Defenders by Katherine Einstein et al

Segregation By Design by Jessica Trounstine (recently won a planning book of the year award)

And though it's not about loca control, as much, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is an essential for looking at the federal policies that forced segregation in housing.

I think we should keep the industrial vs. residential zoning, there is a baby in that bath water. But I largely agree, zoning laws to enforce density norms appear to do much more harm than they prevent.

I agree, but I don't think that any of the "end zoning" people mean to end industrial/residential zoning; at least I've never seen that aspect of it criticized. But it's also such a tiny proportion of zoning, that if it were kept and the rest of the bad zoning policies were removed, that "end zoning" would probably be a good way to describe that result.

> Most local zoning is controlled by tiny opaque cabals of land owners who use all kinds of tactics to prevent participation by anyone beyond other sympathetic land owners with a vested interest in raising prices

What tactics do they use and why would that not apply at the state level? We already saw huge influence of big interest groups at the state level for many decades now, e.g. with the most recent passage of the rent control legislation in CA (benefiting developers). State-level legislation results in a much more damage than any local legislation could.

On a different topic, I'm surprised people keep bringing up the notion that restrictive zoning benefits landowners. If anything, upzoning always increases land prices as it allows more economic value to be extracted from it (think how big the cash flow would be from a 20 unit apartment building developed on a 10000 sq ft lot compared do a duplex even assuming that per-unit rent goes down). I know plenty of landowners and landlords, and none of them favor restrictive zoning.

The only people supporting low-density zoning are homeowners living in these neighborhoods as they extract value from the neighborhood character and scenery and could not care less what they real estate is worth (until they are selling). These are not the people you whose voice in the matter of town governance you'd want to take away. That would be a textbook definition of tyranny of majority.

These views are those of an older homeowner that doesn't consider themselves a land owner, but as more of California becomes renters and are locked our of owning land by that cabal, the contradictions of these viewpoints will become increasingly untenable as their inherent unfairness continues to exploit people with less wealth.

For example:

> with the most recent passage of the rent control legislation in CA (benefiting developers).

This doesn't benefit or harm developers at all, it just limited the economic rents that wealthy people can extract from the less wealthy. Demonization of developers may be able to persist for a while, but landowners and homeowners are clearly the culprits of wealth inequality here and the developer blame game won't last much longer. For example, take a look at this recent NYT opinion article, which shows the sea-change of opinion about who is to blame for housing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/opinion/coronavirus-us-ci...

> If anything, upzoning always increases land prices as it allows more economic value to be extracted from it (think how big the cash flow would be from a 20 unit apartment building developed on a 10000 sq ft lot compared do a duplex even assuming that per-unit rent goes down).

That "always" is completely wrong, which is evidenced by basically everywhere else in the world that has enacted fairer zoning schemes and achieved far better housing results.

Upzoning only vastly increases land values where there has been massive downzoning, which creates massive market pressures in the few places that allow tiny amounts of upzoning. This combination of downzoning wealthy neighborhoods then doing targeted upzoning of lower income neighborhoods has resulted in massive destruction of the few places that were affordable. But policy makers are getting wise to the wealthy people saying NIMBY; future upzonings will increasingly require affordable housing in wealthy neighborhoods, or there will be massive city- or state-wide upzonings as in Oregon or Minneapolis.

The playbook of the wealthy white suburbs has been shown to be disastrous for society, and the next generation of planners, seeing an entire generation locked out of the chance at building homes, is increasingly rejecting the disastrous arguments you put forward. Society can not survive another 20 years of what has happened to housing, which is the disastrous effects of homeowners saying NIMBY to any newcomers. Exclusion of that sort is creating both economic inequality and massive societal disruption (except for the homevoters who directly benefit from this while slyly claiming that they don't care about property values, just about excluding any new people and preventing change.)

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