I'm all for increasing density, go ahead and build your buildings higher.
But don't do it at the expense of people who are willing to pay high premiums to have a small piece of land to avoid the noise, smell, polution, and crowding of apartments.
I think the biggest issue in zoning is the lack of a path to unzone something. If I convince all my immediate neighbors to let me build up (perhaps by giving them some equity in the new building) I should be allowed by the law to build. Today, even if my whole block wants to build up, we cannot.
Personally, I don't think you should have to get universal agreement either. Maybe a simple majority? Life does chance, cities grow to new borders, single family zoning that made sense a generation ago can be absurd later.
As for zoning vs private contract... well, for historical reasons, that's just how it works in older urban neighborhoods. That's the mechanism by which these property rights are decided. It's not ideal. But at my core, I do think the right to live in areas with certain building restrictions is a kind of personal property right just as real as the right to build whatever you want.
There are a lot of factors here - property taxes are also sky high for new buyers, so it's a little difficult to consider this one question purely in isolation.
This is still available as a covenant, which encumbers the property deed with restrictions on use. If a bunch of neighbors on a block decide to do encumber their own deeds, they can.
This is an excellent point.
Zoning ensures you can buy a nice quite house which is surrounded by other nice quiet houses and they won't be suddenly replaced by high-rise buildings. For most people housing is their single largest asset and asking them to "just move" is not a particularly nice solution
Without legislated zoning this would still be possible but only in gated communities or similar. I'm not particularly familiar with US law in this area but local regulation seems to be a reasonable way to accomplish this.
Where I live a lot of people are complaining about the opposite problem: developers are constructing 7-story buildings in quiet areas, sometimes just outright replacing green spaces.
I personally live in a very crowded central area but still believe that suburban areas should be accommodated.
Some thoughts: - 12story building next to 1story bungalow
- no mandate on 12story building to create parking per unit, so the entire block is flooded with cars trying to find places to park (also, this is the city, so many homes have no garage, you rely on street parking)
- tons of circling cars looking for parking all the time
- school not planned for the neighborhood. Sure, you built a 12story x 4unit = 48unit apartment, but there are no places in the school for the ~50 additional kids who suddenly appear. Yes you are guaranteed a seat in a school, but that could be 8 schools away and your kids can be in different schools depending on grade overflow levels
- giant garbage trucks (building-sized) coming and going into your otherwise quiet neighborhod
- giant A/C units pumping air for the whole building next to a 1story home
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5783519,-73.9617788,3a,75y,3...
Parking on the street is not a right but a public good. Everyone share, this has nothing to do with land owned per citizen. Raise the price of street parking. Again Parking is not a right, it's a commodity, and people should pay a market price for it.
This map is from NYC. The neither the developer nor the permit increases the school size, the school is the same size it has been for decades.
Totally agree this is a city issue. I think the core problem is that everything needs to go in lockstep -- agreeing to, say, free-for-all zoning but handwaving all other problems as things the "market will solve" doesnt work because the solution doesnt come for years, or decades. For this to work, it all needs to happen synchronously. It clearly didn't, as evidenced by NYC's public school registration waiting lists.
A great solution I saw (same city) was when the developer built a public school for lease in the bottom floors of the high-rise to accommodate the influx of families. This is very, very rare in NYC though. Usually its a move-fast-and-break-things approach.
I also agree paid parking would solve the problem. But saying it "should" happen without joining it to zoning changes achieves nothing -- it just waves away the problem with a theoretically perfect solution. The zoning change would have been a great thing if it came with a long series of simultaneous changes in other policies from school size to paid parking.
This reminds me of a story from an acquaintance who was a dairy farmer. The jurisdiction passed a referendum mandating all eggs farmed would be free-range eggs. This tripled costs and raised the break-even price of eggs. The jurisdiction did not include on the referendum a restriction against importing non-free-range eggs. After the law went into effect, most voters who happily voted for the restriction continued to purchase inexpensive non-free-range imported eggs. My friend's egg farm went bankrupt. This could have been solved with a synchronous policy.
> Abolishing single family zoning does not imply abolishing all zoning.
One can concurrently believe that some zoning is reasonable (or at least that some zoning is much less likely to have unintended effects), and also that single-family is unnecessary. As an easy example, in most jurisdictions single-family excludes duplexes and triplexes. Those don't have any of the problems you described.
SFH zoning is unique because it's so prescriptive about the allowed uses, it covers a huge percentage of residential land (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-seatt...), and it has a 75 year head start (current zoning is not what anyone would create anew today). High impact and little room to adapt to the actual market.
(Parking is its own challenge: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/27/5849280/why-free-parking-is-ba.... The root cause is that it's dramatically underpriced, so people have started to treat an extreme subsidy like a right.)
Obviously, I wouldn't like it if someone built a mall next door to me, but in a philosophical framework that includes land as private property (which is how I can own the little bit of land that I have and plant trees and garden on it), I have to accept that other people have rights on the land they own.
Reducto ad absurdem -- A single crack-house can bring down the value of every house in the neighborhood by 100k or more.
Housing has huge externalities (traffic, parking, noise, crime, property values) and a lot of what makes a property a "good" property is having an area where those externalities are controlled so you can walk your dog safely at night.
It’s just allowing the option to build an in-law unit and rent it out, or split the house into a duplex, or build a townhouse (houses with shared walls).
What makes me nervous would be not knowing if my long term investment in a living space could be erased by some arbitrary use of the neighboring land. And individual homeowners would have no power against corporate owners of the land.
They are not. But they want people to invest, and people will not invest if they have no ability to predict the future circumstances. That's why governments try to create long-term systems and aren't running on mood swings.
Nobody will invest anywhere if all the parameters are up for redefinition every day. "Oh, you built your factory based on proximity to the high way and train line? Well guess what, those are lame, and we've decided to remove both because we want to be cool. We are not obligated to protect your investment."
We don't? Pretty much anything the state is involved is specifically designed to be long-term. We absolutely don't want volatile systems, we want stability.
I assure you, it may not be written down, but the level of protection of the stock market the government engages in Dr facto establishes the government is in the business of protecting long term private investment after a particular inflection point.
The guarantee by the Fed of asset prices will lead to more inequality as asset valuations are disconnected from their returns. Do we want this to happen? Same with the government interventions in zoning, is this what we want? It doesn't cost near as much to build a house or apartment as it is to find a place that you are allowed to. Do we want to continue to allow housing costs to be disconnected from what a house actually costs to produce?
> It might just prevent you from living in it, for instance if it happens to be in between a discotheque and a pig farm.
Abolishing single family zoning does not imply abolishing all zoning.
HK, Singapore, NYC, Paris, and London are slums? The numbers of US tourist flocking them might say otherwise.
I don't think anyone is talking about banning detached SFHs here; they merely want to remove the ban on building literally anything else. SFHs are quite popular, and whatever happens, I'm sure there will still be a market for them.
Build your McMansion out int the boonies, just don't expect me to subsidize it with my tax dollars
"Don't expect me to subsidize..." - said the Tax Cow
I think you may misunderstand what zoning does. Ending single family zoning doesn’t end single family houses, it just allows other housing types to be built as well. Many or most housing units would still be single family houses, with or without zoning.
This would remove the incentive to over-supply, not the incentive to supply.
Doesn’t mean you or they were wrong, but you’re most likely going to be plowed over by the machines of progress.
My problem with apartments is that they ain't "mine". Not once has an apartment in which I lived allowed its tenants (myself included) to even paint the walls, let alone hang pictures with nails (gotta use those adhesive strips that absolutely suck) or mount a TV to the wall. And no way in hell would they allow me to do crazier things like putting Ethernet jacks and speaker hookups in the walls or replacing the light switches/fixtures (hell, most get uppity even if I change a burnt-out bulb) or putting in those fancy outlets with the built-in USB ports¹. Even if I were to "own" my apartment (i.e. as a condo) there's no way in hell they'd be okay with me swapping out the windows, or putting in better insulation, or installing a solar power system (and they'd probably still object to me ripping apart the walls to put in those Ethernet jacks / speaker hookups).
And then on top of all that, there are countless other things I can't do by nature of not "owning" the outdoor space, either. Shed? Nope. Barbecue? Usually not. Workshop? Not unless I'm lucky enough to have an attached garage². That DIY smelter I wanna build³? Hell fuckin' nope.
I feel like a happy medium (for me at least) between "stuck in an apartment" and "suburbia" would be townhomes or something similar: still "detached", but thinner and much closer together, with an emphasis on building vertical. Could even be on the same square footage of land, just thin and long instead of fat and square.
More critically, though, I strongly believe the distinction between "residential" and "commercial" zoning should be significantly blurred. Both in the sense of mixed-use buildings⁴ and in the sense of small business owners living where they work / working where they live (e.g. shop or restaurant on the first floor, and the owner lives on the second floor, as was once traditional).
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¹: Though my previous apartment in Daly City did come with USB outlets, which was a pleasant surprise
²: Currently I am not so lucky, though the garage does have an outlet so as long as I don't draw too much down I might be able to get away with it
³: https://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Make-The-Mini-Metal-...
⁴: I'm a strong advocate for underground parking + ground floor(s) for shops/restaurants + additional floors for apartments/condos or offices; even if apartments/condos ain't my cup of tea, I'd rather live in that sort of place than a building that's just apartments
If you want to live in a SFH, perhaps a dense urban core is not ideal for you.