If voting was mandatory in the USA this would've been fixed centuries ago.
If 1000 people live in California and 100 of those people live in Berkeley, even if all 100 people in Berkeley agree with something, if the majority of Californians disagree it would and should override what the Berkeleyians want.
If voting is mandatory there's no situation in which a majority decision is actually suboptimal, unless you believe that a minority should somehow be able to override a majority.
The way democracy is implemented in this country is effectively rule of the minority over the majority - the catch is the minority just has to draw arbitrary boundaries surrounding their decisions. You can already see this if you just look at the Bay Area - how can it be so difficult to build if polls show the majority of people support it? Turns out the minority (homeowners) have more power than the majority (renters) in the Bay Area.
To some extent this is already possible, but with gerrymandering and non-mandatory voting the obvious solution to this problem for the minority is just to suppress votes - hence mandatory voting.
This is orthogonal to the issue of whether voting should be mandatory or (pseudo-)voluntary[1]. Mandatory voting ensures higher participation at the expense of encouraging less informed voting on average. It also masks the absence of consent which would be implied by abstaining. (You can turn in a blank/voided ballot in protest under most mandatory systems but there is no record of who did that, whereas there must be a record of who did or did not vote.) "Voter suppression" is frankly not a very plausible explanation for why a majority of outsiders with no particular interest in the matter have thus failed to vote to set aside local planning rules (which for the most part don't affect them) and force cities to allow more high-density construction. Even if you made voting mandatory it's unlikely that this would change. And are you going to require everyone in the state (or country, or world) to take the time to vote yes or no on every trivial local ordinance? Besides being impractical, that would certainly generate a great deal of resentment regarding both the mandatory voting and the outside interference in local affairs.
[1] "Pseudo-voluntary" because to be actually voluntary the majority would need to respect the preexisting rights of those who didn't participate in the vote and the absence of their consent, and refrain from infringing on those rights as they attempt to carry out the majority's will. Since in practice you'll be made to conform to the result whether or not you participate, and others will insist that you accept the majority's will because "you had your chance to be represented" regardless of the degree of influence you did or (more likely) did not have on the outcome of the vote, it can't really be considered voluntary.
Sure, but this never happens in the real world - all people are connected.
> "Voter suppression" is frankly not a very plausible explanation for why a majority of outsiders with no particular interest in the matter have thus failed to vote to set aside local planning rules (which for the most part don't affect them) and force cities to allow more high-density construction.
I'm not sure you're from the USA but this is just not true at all. Blacks and women, for example being able to vote could and would have made a difference - which is exactly why they were not allowed to vote to begin with, e.g. suppression.
(To get away from Black people.)
2. Even if it were true, that would imply SFH are superior. There would be no need to make SFH-zoning mandatory then. The free market would show that SFH is the most cost-effective.
3. If there were folks living in an area that was previously SFH-only that's now becoming more and more filled with multi-families that would imply their SFH are now worth more and more. If they actually prefer SFH living they would cash-out and move to an unpopular area where SFHs are the norm. In practice what a lot of these people want is to live in a popular area, but not have any neighbors. In effect this is at odds with a democracy - the will of the minority must not override the majority.
Got a counterexample?
I think that decisions should be as locally as is feasible, whether that's individual, family, neighborhood, town/city, county, state, or federally only as a last resort.
What if the majority make a law saying "anyone gay or black is to be executed"?
Or "anyone with more than $1 million in assets should pay a 90% tax rate"?
Or "wildfire prevention, nuclear power plant inspection, SEC regulation, should all be defunded in favor of a federal football team with free bread at the stadium"? Maybe it takes 10-20 years for huge-impact consequences to be felt, and in the meantime you get free bread.
What you're saying has already happened. The majority realized that was a terrible idea and undid that law.
> Or "anyone with more than $1 million in assets should pay a 90% tax rate"?
What's wrong with that? If it ends up being a bad idea the majority will undo the decision.
> Or "wildfire prevention, nuclear power plant inspection, SEC regulation, should all be defunded in favor of a federal football team with free bread at the stadium"? Maybe it takes 10-20 years for huge-impact consequences to be felt, and in the meantime you get free bread.
Yes, and once the realize the consequences the majority will undo their decision.
There are no problems with any of your examples. What's the alternative? The minority of the population makes all of the decisions?
That some decisions are based on evidence and expert-knowledge. Of course, this can be gamed, but it's not clear at all that this risk is greater than the risk of damage by the short-term thinking or false reasoning of an uninformed majority.
> and if they're wrong the majority will undo it as the majority will feel the effects.
This assumes the majority will correctly identify the root cause. Whereas, in fact, they cannot do this even in simple cases, let alone a case where the root cause was an innocuous-seeming policy enacted 10+ years ago. Especially while the current politicians du jour are providing dramatic, simple, alternative narratives of the cause to suit their own goals.
I agree, but it's still no worse (and in practice much better) than trying to let the minority figure it out, whom are no more likely to figure out the root cause either.
We can probably agree that governance is complicated though.
Yes. I don't think there is an obviously correct solution either way. I'm really only arguing that "trust the majority" is not something I trust. Not that "trust experts" is without its own (possibly equally fraught) set of problems.
The main reason the Supreme Court appears to have so much power is because our Legislative Branch has been slow to actually pass new laws, meaning the interpretation of existing laws to new scenarios is becoming more and more important.
Now, as a practical matter, the Supreme Court is a political creature and tends not to stray too far from popular opinion. Thus, the decision above was possible in 2015. It's likely not a right they'd have "discovered" in 1980.
However, the Supreme Court has certainly made decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education that were almost certainly not majority opinion even in many relatively liberal locations.
Now, as for the rest of your post - I completely agree.
Supreme Court's role is to be a stabilizing factor, because majority can switch from Democrats to Republicans every four years. Supreme Court's partisan composition is basically a moving average of the last 5-6 presidential election's results, thus smoothing out temporary whims of the society.
Two years, actually, assuming only regular elections and ignoring other changes in office-holding.
This comment is facile. Your stance is much more broad and encompassing than "mandatory voting" if you're saying that higher levels of government have unilateral authority to override local authority.
If majoritarianism defines optimality this is tautologically true, otherwise it is distinctly non-obvious.
> unless you believe that a minority should somehow be able to override a majority.
The belief in inalienable rights is exactly the belief that on some issues a hypermajority of all but one is suboptimal.
So, yes, it's true that majoritarianism is optimal unless one believes that sometimes it's not, but not believing that majoritarianism is sometimes suboptimal is equivalent to not believing in human, civil, or political rights beyond the right to an equal vote.
I do concede that for general governance what I'm talking about obviously requires more nuance.
Also, would the reverse scenario (40% deciding to kill the 60% majority) be more optimal? No, it wouldn't. Assuming people have to die, it would be more optimal for the 40% to die than the 60%. Obviously if this was actually happening a moderate stance would emerge and they (being the majority likely) would decide there shouldn't be any death at all and that would win out.
Your examples are ridiculous and make having a meaningful discussion difficult. A good example, if you can think of one, is one where the minority is right and the majority is wrong without stating the majority is somehow worse than the minority.
Sure, but why would that be the goal unless one believes that utility is a simple binary of “happy” vs. “not happy” and policy choices are also simple binaries?
If the amount of (un)happiness is more complex than 0/1 and you have a complex multidimensional policy space, majoritarianism may be the most tractable general approach, but it is delusional to think it is necessarily inherently optimal.
A lot of rules diverging from majoritarianism in otherwise majoritarian systems are designed in recognition of this and in the belief that the concentration of impacts of decisions in a particular domain make it particularly prone to the kind of things where majoritarianism is distinctly nonoptimal.
That's the part with the regulations, right?
(to the parallel discussion, further upthread ...)
Here is a very good example of the state of the current debate that I was referring to. Democratic processes that produce undesirable outcomes are rejected.
Or, as I said:
"Democracy for me but not for thee."
I did.
I hope you'll continue to forgive me if it seems, to me, that many people are very excited about local control when it produces results they agree with.
That is literally "Democracy for me but not for thee." - people who made it there early ("me") can vote, and do (effectively) vote to keep newcomers ("thee") out and therefore not voting on those "local" policies. Yet somehow you turn it on its head.
I think policies should be decided at the level at which they affect people. As an example that I think we can both agree on: Foreign policy -> federal. Noise ordinances -> county. Would you consider this "Democracy for me not thee" as well?
I don't care whether I convince you, but I would really like to understand how your viewpoint interacts with my argument. If I understand it right, the core of our disagreement seems to be that I consider everyone who wants to move somewhere a stakeholder who should be able to vote, and you only consider people who already are somewhere. The rest follows from that.
The bay area problem is easy to solve, though: tie the number of office space permits to the number of single family houses. With such a law, a big corp won't be able to build another tower and bring 5k more employees there. What prevents such a law from happening is greed: the SF city council understands that there's no room there for another 50k office workers, but it can't resist the payroll taxes those will bring.
I don't know if that's the core of our disagreement but I certainly do disagree with that.
I think that I need a new term - I continue to use the word "stakeholder" but I am open-minded to the idea that someone who works in a place or consumes services in a place ... or even vacations in a place could be considered a stakeholder, of sorts.
I, on the other hand, am trying to distinguish people who have skin in the game - who have dedicated their life energies and life savings to a particular community.
We need to draw that line somehow and I think the purchase of real property is a decent candidate.
I think in this context, it's fair to note that this situation is itself something that can be changed by a minority of voters nationwide + another minority in Georgia.
That said, I'm still pro growth as long as we plan accordingly.
Unwavering the weave takes some care if you want to do it right ... do it wrong and I suspect you get even more opposition / problems.
Certainly, R1 zoning is a scourge: low-intensity should never mean "large lot, huge setback, short house, one door". Certainly, also, a land value tax that is allowed to grow with actual value should charge folks based on what they're taking from society by living somewhere (or whatever other use), to make single-family homes and parking lots and the like pay their fair share if they are going to exist. But I still think you might be making too sweeping of a statement in this post.
You either believe majority rules, or not. I happen to believe the former, but I do see many comments or believe the latter.
Coming up with a procedure to translate the opinions of people into actions by the state is not a yes/no question. There's the nuance of direct vs. representative, appointees, how things are structured.
You can't boil down political philosophy to an "either/or" on democracy.
All the other things we see as benefits of zoning came later, in order to justify that original reason.
And most of the things we assume zoning is protecting us from are misunderstandings. "A rowhouse across the street from a high rise building or factory" is not something government has any constitutional basis to regulate on its own; all that comes from a court case that was pretty explicitly to keep black people away from white people.
This is NOT true.
The initial zoning was to separate incompatible industrial uses from urban uses. A long time ago, people built nasty factories across from housing, a quality of life and public health disaster.
US zoning is a disaster again, of course: we have very little mixing for compatible uses (for example low-intensity commercial use near residential) and huge swaths of inefficient low-intensity zoning.
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That being said, the story of American suburbanization is CERTAINLY a story about race, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. R1 was invented mostly to discriminate against Black people.
> "A rowhouse across the street from a high rise building or factory" is not something government has any constitutional basis to regulate on its own
Where in the California constitution are the relevant limits/enumerations on Berkeley's powers?
Factories have always been built across from housing, and we’ve never stopped that with zoning. We only stopped it from happening to white people.
My next door neighbor bought the property and had to go before the local neighborhood association to get their approval for building 4 houses on the acre of property. They were not happy with the idea of trading 1 for 4 until he showed them that one alternative was putting 28 townhomes on there instead. Then they got on board with his plan.
As I understand it, the city would not have allowed a single home to have been built on the property. 4 was the absolute minimum.
This is Portland, Oregon and things are pretty different here compared to a lot of other places.
I live in an apartment, but if I had a house I'd hate for an apartment building to be built next door overlooking my yard.
In most of the country private gated communities with HOAs are getting a big percentage of new housing. Keeping neighborhoods consistent is one of the reasons. I can't find a good link easily but wikipedia says 40% of all new housing in California is gated communities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_community#United_States
See also: the "freeway revolts"
OOH, interest groups exist and restrictive zoning can cause illogical cityscapes with way too little housing. OOH, no planning, no zoning and laissez faire dynamics don't really get you to a logical metropolis either. Both tend to fail at density.
High density cities need as much investment in difficult infrastructure as they do in real estate. A lot of successful examples in the world at large are pretty highly planned. I'd also note that most are guided to some extent by national-level agendas. A purely local agenda isn't generally going to select fast change. All sorts of vested interest to the contrary. Property scarcity, but also other things. More people usually want their towns to stay the same.
IMO, there really is no way around the need for competent, well intentioned decision making... on average. There's also now way around a need for intention. What's the actual goal for Berkeley? Where do they want to be in 30 years.
Your post assume the density is a positive goal. I disagree, I think it's a miserable way to live.
Let people live how they want, and keep voting very local. Each city can have different density levels and housing styles. You want density? Move somewhere dense, and vote that way, I have no issue with it.
I'll move to low density areas and vote that way, and I expect you not to have an issue with that either.
I don't think totally planned or totally laissez faire are optimal for most settings, but if there's plenty of land and the goal is suburbanized clusters then you'll probably lean more laissez faire.
If the goal is to keep things as they are, you have lots of options... most western cities are good at this.
This conversation (I'm contending) is context dependent. I think the/a current issue and the topic of this article (besides Berkely) is extremely high demand cities and their problems growing. It's a similar set of issues in Munich, London, NY, SF, etc. Housing availability is terrible. There are overcrowding & transport related problems. Looking at them, it seems like they're mice grown to elephant sized. The body plan doesn't suite the scale.
It gets philosophical, and you can definitely lean too far into creative destruction as well... I tend to favour evolution. Things will change. They need to.
Besides that, I think there is plenty of choice. Especially in the US, different locals are different. If you can and want to move, choice exists. I don't think that's the friction. The friction is from people who stay put and aren't comfortable with change. Those two things also go together. We all have a more conservative disposition about the things we've known the longest.
Don't pretend you didn't want this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26252258
> If voting was mandatory in the USA this would've been fixed centuries ago.
Those negatively affected by policies like this have only been able to vote for about 50 years.
Also, ultimately, the history of single family zoning is definitely all about race.
I'm not saying that everyone who lives in the burbs is making a choice about race, but that is 100% how we got here.
In highly developed urban/suburban areas today all over the country (not bucolic hamlets that people imagine), this zoning policy (along with others like large minimum lot sizes) effectively function as a demographic and economic sieve.
It's easy to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It takes effort to throw away the bad and keep the good.
As stated in another thread: it's not a bad idea to prevent apartments from being built such that they overlook a single-family dwelling's back-yard.
EDIT: in all fairness, I should point out that others seem to know something about the historical origins of zoning policy that I do not. It's possible that I'm underestimating the degree to which racism played a role in shaping the legal landscape. Nevertheless, I can imagine a handful of legitimate reasons for single-family zoning...
It's totally a bad idea to say that once someone has built a dwelling on a plot of land, they have forever banned increased density near them.
This is more severe when we're in our current situation, where we punish high-value uses of land and subsidize low-value uses of land, like single-family homes and parking lots.
Obviously the core observation -- that there are harmful ways to mix intensity -- is certainly true. The thing Berkeley, Sacramento, Oregon, etc. are doing are not to allow apartment complexes built in R1 zone, but ADUs, duplexes, and other low-intensity suburban housing.
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The history of American suburbanism is a story of race. There are other players (cars, telephones, pollution), but race was a major pillar, and is why you didn't see US-style suburbs pop up in other countries without similar race relations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
Race-restrictive covenants are still on the books for many older HOAs (obviously illegal/unenforceable) -- this isn't a conspiracy theory, these covenants were in black and white https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/3-...
That needs to be argued, not stated (ideally without the 'forever' part, which is very much a strawman).
>The history of American suburbanism is a story of race. There are other players (cars, telephones, pollution), but race was a major pillar
I think the question for most people is (1) how much of an influence is race today and (2) does racist motivation yesterday make the policy bad today.
In all the discussions I see on HN and elsewhere, discussion of these questions is conspicuously absent. What we have instead is a doxa such that anything contaminated by racism -- in any quantity or at any stage of history -- is to be rooted out. Such arguments are not terribly convincing, even though we both agree that racism is a bad thing.
Beyond that, so much evidence points to continued rampant housing discrimination today and we don't even try to enforce anti-discrimination law anymore like we did in the 70s and 80s. Compare [0] with [1].
[0]: https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-agents-... [1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/no-sting-feds-wont-go-und...
But instead I do want to highlight that a key aspect of our legal segregation regime was enacting policies that did not appear to be explicitly racist, so that they could achieve buy-in from moderates who might not share the racist aims. (The secondary benefit is that they were more resilient to legal challenges.)
So your response makes absolute sense: there are reasons for wanting to live in a less-developed SFH community. But there are also valid-sounding reasons that we might want voters to have to put a few dollars up as skin in the game before casting votes. Or why we might want to make sure voters meet some literacy requirements before voting. Et cetera.
This is about a 100-year-old policy. It's not crazy to raise aspects from the history of US housing policy in this discussion.
Mandatory single-family home zoning means that you are required to rent or own a sizable amount of land in order to live in a neighborhood. This has the obvious impact of creating invisibly gated communities where the less affluent are unable to live there, even if they were willing to live in smaller accommodations, which also means their children may not go to the same schools.
It's literally economic segregation, because it's the government forcibly segregating where people live through their finances.
Is the argument that, as a developer, I should be able to construct a large building with 1-person apartments the size of prison cells, say, if there is a market for that? Should the only limit be restrictions imposed by fire safety policy or similar?
Although at the limit such standards can be effectively the same as simply banning apartments outright, so there is crossover.