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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

> I am curious why the government would need to punish people because they are living as they wish, in land they bought and own.

Think of this as more like an area permanently deeded for a certain kind of activity, with the existing belief (encoded into law) being that permanent living there is in conflict with that activity.

I think it's fine to argue that this belief is wrong, and that living permanently in the structure that is permitted to be on the allotment is just fine. I might even agree with you.

But in general, it also seems fine to me that communities can mark out certain places as being for only a specific set of activities, and exclude others from taking place there.

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But in general, it also seems fine to me that communities can mark out certain places as being for only a specific set of activities, and exclude others from taking place there.

It does seem fine, at first, but the end result is the housing crisis, because people, having been given this power, will work very hard to ensure that expensive single-family homes with multiple parking spots and generous setbacks are the only living arrangement that's legal. (Let's not forget that people also marked out racial boundaries, when they were allowed to do that, too. When you let homeowners set housing-use policy, you get...bad results.)

It doesn't need to directly be homeowners. In the UK it would generally be a planning committee which is a branch of local government. And I believe it consists of a mix of elected officials and professional experts. I definitely think planning is an area that could do with a lot of reform but done right it can be an extremely powerful for good.

I don't think that the issue is who makes the decisions (and it's rarely directly homeowners anywhere in the USA). The question is what interests are represented or accounted for by the decision making process. In well-off middle class neighborhoods of most US cities and suburbs, zoning processes cater almost exclusively to the interests of those who already live there, rather than those who don't but might want to. I don't think the UK process is significantly different in that respect.

Well, that is what they paid for. They chose a place to live based on the neighborhood, and they want it to stay that way. There are plenty of places people for people to live and build.

There are, in fact, not plenty of places for people to live and build where there are actually jobs available. And in the places where there are jobs available, homeowners have systematically blocked building enough new housing. Hence the housing shortage we find ourselves in now: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

There's land out on the periphery that hasn't yet been used for housing, but look: we urgently need to get our emissions under control because the course we're on will be catastrophic for the planet. Urban sprawl is massively inefficient.

Buying a house cannot entitle you to the neighborhood around you never changing if we are to have any hope of dealing with this mess. Change is part of life.

Sure, I think YIMBYs are mistaken when they wax hyperbolic about evil NIMBYs and their nefarious motives. It's actually pretty simple. People don't want their neighborhoods to change. It's an earnest objection.

But I don't care what they want.

It's not up to them. It's illegitimate to tell a property owner that they can't build a duplex on their own property. It's an illegal taking. It's not up to a vote. My neighbor's opinion is irrelevant.

> There are plenty of places people for people to live and build.

Indeed, there are plenty of places to live and build and the burden is on those who don't want anyone to build near them to move to some place new if they don't like what their neighbors are doing. You have the burden exactly backwards. If you don't like what people are choosing to do on their own private property, then you can move. You shouldn't be allowed to tell everyone else to stop building.

Very few of the US cities worst hit by the housing crisis are exclusively single-family. They're actually some of the densest places in the US.

Seems like the blame for the housing crisis lies a lot more with landlords who'd rather kick out a tenant paying X for a new tenant able to pay out X*y - if you have more people moving in than moving out, and existing landlords can simply choose to serve the new, wealthier ones, you're going to have a problem. If you couldn't take advantage of the migration simply by choosing to rent to the higher-income and kick out your existing tenants, maybe the politically-connected multiple-property-owners would figure out a way to get more construction going. We used to have both rent control and more densification than we have today.

The US cities hit by the housing crisis—with the notable exception of New York—are disproportionately dominated by single-family homes, enforced through explicit zoning laws. Being "some of the densest places in the US" does not mean much when the entire country outside NYC is so sparsely populated!

SF is the second-densest "large" city in the US. I haven't found specific numbers, but looking at zoning maps at least 50% of the residential space is zoned for single-family homes only, with the majority of the remainder explicitly zoned for low-density residences. A big chunk of the city is basically a suburb! The rest of the Bay Area, of course, is more like 90% single-family housing. This year Berkeley passed a resolution removing single-family zoning throughout the entire city so perhaps the tides are shifting, but even if zoning laws and politics change, it'll take decades for this to meaningfully affect the housing supply.

Two objections, one factual and one more philosophical. First, it's actually not true that most major U.S. cities are bereft of single-family homes. It's the dominant form of zoning. See here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities...

But, second, any objection that places the blame on "greedy landlords" is a total nonstarter. Everybody is responding to their incentives. Landlords aren't greedier than anybody else. If widget makers could set higher prices, they would. They don't because they can't, not because they're "less greedy."

Wrong. The US cities hit hardest by the housing crisis have some of the strongest rent control laws.

I can assure you that the allotment areas in Sweden are in no significant way contributing to the housing crisis. That has many other reasons, of which these relatively small areas is definitely not a major one (if one at all).

Sure, some would be prime real estate but I’d rather have a few of these co-ops mixed into the cities than just private housing projects everywhere.

Yes, absolutely. I very much do not agree with the way that zoning has been used in the US (at least) for racist and classist purposes, typically in the way you describe above.

That said, I think that a concept similar to zoning is probably a good one to have on hand, particularly for uses like greenspace of various sorts. It's use does need to carefully controlled/moderated.

The issue I take with laws are that laws are usually slower to change, and even changing areas from one designated type to another.

As you can see, the land and real state market changes. Things used to be accessible, today many people flee to barely legal situations just because it is too expensive otherwise. What used to be desirable in one area might change over time, and punishing the first ones to try seem too harsh to me.

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