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.)
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.
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.
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.