Abolish Zoning | Hacker News Reader

Abolish Zoning

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111 pointsjseliger223 comments

I think minimal zoning is much more viable than no zoning. It makes a lot of sense to preserve the hard line between industrial and residential zoning while blurring the line between residential and commercial zoning. No one wants factories and power plants springing up in residential areas and having insufficient zoning to prevent that would be a bad idea.

But I live in a city where 70% of the city is zoned SFH. It's literally impossible for people to build 4-plexes, 6-plexes or low-rises in these residential neighborhoods. Montreal, allows for this while Toronto doesn't and it's a large part of the reason that housing in Montreal costs roughly half of housing in Toronto. Housing in Toronto costs over 10.5 years of average income in Toronto, which makes it only slightly more affordable than San Francisco where housing is around 11.5 years of average income. A large part of this is the city government does everything in their power to not build new housing while 300,000 new immigrants to come the city a year. Housing affordability is unbelievably poor and a sizeable percentage of residents pay for rent with money they need for food. Food bank usage is large and growing and the city is getting dramatically harder to live in for many of its residents. Surely there has to be something better.

> A large part of this is the city government does everything in their power to not build new housing while 300,000 new immigrants to come the city a year.

Why do immigrants keep going to the city when it is so expensive?

Because the big city is where both existing communities from their country are and where the best jobs are.

The _Life Where I'm From_ episode on zoning in Japan is useful, I think, as a point of comparison. Zoning in Japan can still be pretty complex (limits on floorspace, setback, and angles), but allows for environments that many people like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk

Zoning is a good idea. The biggest problem in the USA is the complete separation of residential and commercial areas and residential usually means single family homes.

> The biggest problem in the USA is the complete separation of residential and commercial areas and residential usually means single family homes.

In fact those are two, or even three, different points:

1. american zoning is exclusionary, meaning you can't have residences, small offices or commerces, schools, ... in the same zone, each must be in its own zone, even if they have similar levels of "maximum nuisance"

2. american zoning has a fucked up amount of micromanagement, specifically in order to forbid multi-family dwellings (aka "poor people" aka "minorities")

There's also (3): car-supremacy, with lots of places having insane minimum-parking requirements and many US municipalities having more marking spaces than people, which necessarily craters density, and thus increases distances significantly.

I don't think it's true. I've lived in different cities in America and have seen plenty of retail in the middle of residential neighborhoods. There are even multi-unit residential buildings with retail on the first floor so the retail shares the very same building with residents. Same is for schools (unless you meant big universities), they are located in the residential neighborhoods to serve residents.

> I don't think it's true.

And yet it is.

> I've lived in different cities in America and have seen plenty of retail in the middle of residential neighborhoods.

Urban cores predate the invention and widespread use of Euclidean zoning (and of cars). They are generally “grandfathered in” mixed-use zoning, even more so as they were basically abandoned during the post-war white flight, for which exclusionary zoning was a feature.

I don't think we agree on the meaning of "is" then. How can it be true when you yourself admit there is mixed use zoning?

As a European, I have trouble understanding why people in the USA, do not feel the need to be able to just walk to get a few missing groceries, a drink or a bite.

I used to get upset when I lived in a place where the nearest 24/7 was more than 5 minutes walking distance, proper wasteland!

I'm not saying I don't get into a car and do big shopping runs, but sometimes all I need is a loaf of bread or to have a drink or two with a friend.

Just get an Uber!

Wait 15m, pay 30$, and reject a high amount of CO2 just for a quick run to what should be proximity commerce?

I feel like you are stating the problem, not the solution

That is a solution, but pretty much the only solution in the USA.

In a European city you usually get multiple choices, be it walking, cycling, a bus or some sort of rapid transit system.

What I hate about being in the USA is all the time spent sitting in a car. The day really runs away from you.

Abolish arbitrary zoning, reinvest in smart zoning & pollution laws. Reset residential zoning to be a pretty much blanket zone type for any safely engineered residential building type.

No one should have significant pollution introduced next door by a factory or power plant replacing a mall or shopping center in their neighborhood. Solve the problem by having real rules, end the ability for some local council person to essentially gate keep what is allowed and what isn’t. It’s probably a massive bribery center too.

This is such a "magic wand" sort of response though. "Get rid of bad laws and replace them with smart laws" is impossible to argue against.

The real problems with zoning is often that incremental change is really hard. If you could suddenly rebuild a city or neighborhood overnight, most people may not mind, but when it's all iterative, you suddenly have a poorly sound-insulated group of houses or condos next to a popular or busy sports bar or concert venue. Or you add high-density housing to a single-lane road, now the city may need to adjust speed limits or sidewalks to accommodate the new demand.

more pointedly, focus on structural integrity and mass pollution, not "safety" or "the environment", otherwise nimby's will use it as a cudgel, as they do with CEQA now. specify the forces a building must withstand (i.e., provide engineering specs and give examples), not brainless stipulations like strapping lengths. pass effective pollution laws that target key areas like water, air, and ground, not "noise" or "traffic".

A great example of tossing the baby out with the bath water. The grocery store chain across the street from my house went bankrupt and closed all of their stores. A truck assembly company tried to get a variance to take over the vacant building they left. Zoning can definitely be improved but I see no advantage, for the average person at least, in discarding it completely

Americans haven't heard about hierarchical zoning. For them zoning means you can only do one thing and nothing else. This means you have a dedicated residential zone, dedicated commercial zone and dedicated industrial zone.

Everything is far apart because the zones aren't mixed use. In most sane countries you can build low impact buildings in every zone, medium impact buildings (commercial real estate) in medium impact zones and above and high impact (industrial real estate) buildings in high impact zones.

Yes, you can build your house near a factory but the factory can't be built near your house.

This is not the case. We have mixed zoning in most communities.

Industrial zones are usually reserved for industry. There are good reasons for that, primarily to keep noise, dust, and heavy traffic separated from residential areas. It's best not to allow residential use in an industrial zone, because it tends to promote very low quality housing.

The zone I live in is residential-agricultural with a manufactured home overlay district. Permitted uses include farms, home businesses, and professional offices in homes. The major limitations are density, height, and setback restrictions. There's a moderate amount of conservation land due to wetlands and streams, and the local residents are pretty active about protecting the watersheds and quality of life. You can't open a restaurant, grocery store, or auto repair business, but there are a few grandfathered uses like that near me.

As population in an area increases, the normal course is for zoning to change to permit increased density. I think most communities are best served by having areas of higher density surrounded by lower density, rather than making a uniform sprawl. Around here, the higher density, low setback zones are about three miles apart. That's where the stores are.

Speaking as someone who served on a planning board for a decade: you shouldn't try to stop development - you should ease it in. If you don't it, it tends to catch up with you all at once, which is very disruptive.

It's best not to allow residential use in an industrial zone, because it tends to promote very low quality housing.

Presumably nobody wants to live in "low quality housing", and no developer wants to build housing which they can't sell; so this reads to me like a policy statement of "we'd rather that people are homeless".

Historically this has definitely been as thing -- American cities have prohibited low-income housing as a covert effort to enforce racial segregation, and in the early days of Victoria, Canada, free land grants were available to anyone who brought at least six servants with them -- but I'm not sure that such a policy has any place in modern society.

In that paragraph, I was only referring to industrial zones.

While the overall point is good, For more pollution prone industries it would be very risky not to prohibit housing next to it, otherwise it’s dooming poor people and their kids to health issues and early death. For example, battery recycler in the past have lead to massive heavy metal pollution in the vicinity.

So for the most risky industrial facilities housing should be prohibited, but for all others yeah it should be mostly hierarchical.

in Many EU contries a house has to meet sone limits on noise and other pollution or it will not be allowed to be sold as a residential property.

rather than arbitrary zoning rules and an implicit pass for such obvious and wanton pollution, those businesses should be regulated and heavily punished (too bad the supreme court made things like this harder not easier recently). that's a literal externality. it's the kind of thing where the corporate veil should be pierced mercilessly, and the executives and owners all held personally culpable.

then it wouldn't matter who lived next door.

Theoretically and on paper that would be a nice proposition. Unfortunately we are humans. That will not work

I was born and raised in farm county. You wouldn't want a pig farmer to move in next door. Yes too much zoning is a bad thing; too little is bad as well.

In the state where I live, every community within a large region has received an application to build and operate a pig farm with upwards of 10k pigs, plus multiple satellite farms with 999 pigs each. These applications have been traced through murky chains of ownership to one or two businesses, notably Smithfield.

So a "pig farmer next door" is the Peoples Republic of China, and the "farm" is 20000 pigs. Also, every business that proposes moving into the state lobbies the state government for relaxation of environmental regulations, and files lawsuits to challenge regulatory jurisdictions, especially regarding water pollution. The small communities are totally out-lawyered, and out-lobbied.

Look up "the Highland Clearances." That was what happened when someone figured out that sheep were more valuable than people. Now someone has figured out that pigs are.

https://www.space.com/pig-poop-lagoons-landsat-5-satellite

Arguably a pig farmer isn’t going to want to raise pigs on a suburban lot either. And many places already allow backyard chickens, bees etc.

I don’t like how much my neighbour’s dog barks, but can you imagine if zoning prevented dog ownership? Why allow yappy dogs but not pigs? Is it just the number of animals or is it truly the type?

you are missing the forest for the trees. zoning does not prohibit you from owning a pig as a pet. have you ever seen the kind of nutrient rich runoff a pig farm produces?

Ok, I agree with this, but in this case there is a direct impact to the adjacent landowner receiving this runoff. So regulate that.

For some reason we craft all these laws to avoid the possibility of bad things happening, creating these broad dragnets that impact so many things unintentionally, rather than just regulating the thing we don’t want directly.

Runoff isn't the only concern. There's noise, big-rig traffic, odor, unappealing landscape (important to some). At some point it's a lot cheaper and easier to just regulate with zoning than to regulate each individual component of a site[0]. And frankly both sides -- residential and farmer -- should be happy to be away from each other.

0: Which, of course, developers would also object to and would lead to a lot of patchwork regulation due to grandfathering.

What you're describing is a recipe for a convoluted and incomprehensible zoning code that tries to predict every possible consequence instead of simply stating what people don't want.

And yet this is how cities developed for the vast majority of human existence and created the cities that people flock to as tourists.

Don't know where the pig farms are around my town--New England, so a lot of farms are fairly small--but there's a dairy farm down the street alongside houses, people have goats and chickens, there's some light industry including a junkyard just down the road. (With respect to farming specifically, like many Massachusetts towns, it's a "right to farm" community, which means with some restrictions farming activities are generally allowed.)

Now you certainly can't walk places for the most part if that's why you want mixed zoning.

There are way better ways than zoning to regulate negative externalities. For example, rather than blindly saying 'no commercial', a rule could regulate the bad parts of commercial, such as noise. Zoning is a blunt tool and pretty much fails at it's entire point.

That sounds great on paper, but you would almost definitely get people squeezing around the letter of the law.

I mean, take noise. It seems easy to regulate because you just put a decibel limit on it, but that doesn't take the nature of the sound into account. So, you could have a business making crying baby sounds for dolls putting that out all day. It's really hard to define something like "no overly annoying sounds", and that's just one aspect of this kind of thing.

There needs to be a relaxation of the tight zoning rules we have these days, but trying to define limits on externalities has lots of problems too.

The question is, at what level are those zoning decisions happening upon? Until that's being done at a planetary scale, anything else is forcing participants into a zero sum game in which everyone loves.

This sounds a lot more expensive and time consuming than broadly regulating by category, and for what is probably marginal gain. Why bother?

How is “no noise” implemented if not ultimately through zoning? Sounds like you are arguing for higher resolution, not a new paradigm.

It also puts the onus on policing. This is exactly the issue that people have with Airbnb and short term rentals. It's "evil" because it bypasses zoning because people "don't want to live next to a hotel or party".

If you're not going to push for zoning, then you're asking for one-off governmental agents to decide when something has gone too far.

Noise rules could be quiet hours between certain times, rules about measured decibels, etc.

Sure but the rules can’t be the same everywhere. They vary based on your zone, literally. That’s the entire point.

What you are describing is just zoning.

Most places already have that, pretty much. It doesn't work, generally.

Offices are not very noisy

Offices have a lot of noisy traffic.

There are levels of industrial zones, with specific businesses and industries allowed in each zone.

could you quantify the "betterness"?

Zoning is almost all bath water. We can regulate where industrial use can exist as separate laws and get rid of the 97% of zoning that has been a disaster for the US socially, economically, and environmentally.

> We can regulate where industrial use can exist as separate laws

That's called zoning...

e.g. maximum-nuisance (or maximum-use) zoning: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sV5ETXDs_8M/Ux-axBTuF2I/AAAAAAAAAs...

> and get rid of the 97% of zoning that has been horrible for land use in the US

It's not like the zoning policy which causes those issues is a huge amount of stuff, the issue with american zoning is that it's exclusionary: each zone can only have one use, and municipalities micromanage zones.

It isn’t just that it is exclusionary. It also micromanaged setbacks, heights, parking ratios, amount of green space, etc etc etc. All of this adds costs and decreases diversity that you see in dense European/Asian cities that have stood for Thousands of years.

There’s a pretence of knowledge that modern planners are smarter than all who have come before, and the result has been an abject failure that planners won’t admit to.

> It isn’t just that it is exclusionary.

Oh no, far from it, but it’s the root.

> There’s a pretence of knowledge that modern planners are smarter than all who have come before, and the result has been an abject failure that planners won’t admit to.

They’re only a failure if you assume planning in the US is about sustainable, equitable, liveable spaces.

> They’re only a failure if you assume planning in the US is about sustainable, equitable, liveable spaces.

100%. Which is why I favour abolishing zoning bylaws. If it was truly about sustainability, equity, or creating living spaces designed for human flourishing, then I would support them, but it isn’t now and it never was.

It is a huge amount of stuff: parking minimums, minimum setbacks, minimum lot sizes, height limits, maximums on number of units, density, architectural style, etc., etc., etc.

Zoning codes are massive and complex documents that require hugely specialized knowledge. And they are different in each municipality, so housing developers can't easily work across different municipalities. This also increases costs by making it harder to standardize building plans and use cheaper, more automated building techniques.

Compare this with Japan which has a small set of zoning uses set at the national level.

And they're packed in like sardines. People who want to live like that can go live in city centers.

Zoning allows people to choose the type of neighborhood they want to live in. How are you going to accomplish that without it?

So, if we allow people to live closer together there will somehow be less space?

There will always be suburbs in America. If people want to live in the suburbs it will always be possible here. Zoning actually prevents people from living where they want to because only single family homes are allowed to be built.

That doesn't follow at all. How will there "always be suburbs" if they're not protected from wholesale buyout and replacement with high-density housing blocks by developers and corporations?

Your last statement doesn't make sense either. If you want to live in a single-family-zoned area... you want to live there. If you don't like it, don't live there. WTF is the confusion?

There will always be suburbs because a lot of Americans want suburbs (see this thread). America has plenty of land and so if people want suburbs and there is plenty of land to build them I don’t see them going extinct. In other places in this thread people point to places like Japan lacking suburbs, but the difference is that America is huge. If we allow denser zoning there will come a point at which enough dense housing has been built for the people that want it, right now that isn’t possible because it isn’t allowed.

You said “if you don’t like it don’t live there”, I’m saying that I would love to live somewhere besides the suburbs, but as others have identified most nice areas that are dense walkable are very expensive because they are no longer legal to build

"America has plenty of land and so if people want suburbs and there is plenty of land to build them"

Are you just floating nonsense to get attention? THEY'RE ALREADY BUILT. Why destroy them and then rebuild other ones elsewhere, instead of simply building the high-density communities in the "plenty of land" that you admit is available? That's just stupid.

"most nice areas that are dense walkable are very expensive because they are no longer legal to build"

That is bullshit. What dense area is "no longer legal to build?" Look at downtown L.A. It's not "illegal" to build there, and it's largely a shithole that could only benefit from a remake. Likewise for Koreatown and a lot of Hollywood. There's endless fake caterwauling about "the housing shortage," and California has just passed a monumentally corrupt bill that allows developers to construct 10 units where ONE house stands today... with no permits or review.

This allows the destruction of ALREADY-RESIDENTIAL areas, while doing nothing to provide "affordable" housing or to help the homeless... despite lies to the contrary being used to excuse its passage.

Meanwhile, huge buildings like former Macy's sit boarded-up in dying malls... areas that have already paid the price of super-high density, in the form of paved-over ground and tree removal. Why aren't THESE areas being turned residential, and offered to those who favor high-density living?

Because this entire movement is a lie, that's why. It's a sellout to developers.

> Zoning allows people to choose the type of neighborhood they want to live in.

Considering the massive shortage of housing in overly-micromanaged zoning areas, it has monumentally failed at this.

Fixed it:

> Zoning allows people _with enough money_ to choose the type of neighbourhood they want to live in.

That's right. You're not ENTITLED to beachfront property or a penthouse in Manhattan.

Ruining neighborhoods for developers' profits isn't going to change that. The "abolish zoning" fraud WORSENS the economic divide by turning the entire country into renters.

Think it through.

I love the caterwauling about a "shortage," as if everyone is entitled to move into an area and live on top of the people who are already there... who chose to live there because of the type of neighborhood it is.

Manhattan is full. The USA as a whole is not. Go live somewhere else.

Zoning specifically outlaws certain kinds of neighbourhoods. That is the main purpose of zoning

> 97% of zoning that has been horrible for land use in the US

If it's so horrible, why do so few people want to get rid of it? The truth is that most Americans are pretty happy with their neighborhoods and communities. Sure, suburban single-family homes may offend the aesthetic of the elites, but most other people like them just fine.

The fact that the few dense cities in the US where you don't need to drive everywhere are ridiculously expensive would indicate there's more demand for these kinds of places than we're supplying.

Your cause and effect is backwards. They're dense because they're expensive.

They're dense and expensive because they're desirable.

Desirable for reasons independent of their density. You can't, as an example, replicate Manhattan in Upstate NY and expect people to flock there.

I'm not sure I follow. Could you perhaps explain?

You could make an argument that people like traveling packed like sardines because airlines flight most people this way and it's also an expensive way to travel. However it does not follow, it's likely that people like convenience of air travel and value it more than the abysmal accommodations. To wit, the richest people travel in roomy private planes with plenty of room and the less rich go with business/1st class, also allowing more room.

Likewise, even the most expensive cities still have mansions in the middle of micro-apartments. If these cities really were valued for their density, the mansions would either be gone or would be cheaper than the surrounding dense dwellings.

It's not the density directly though that people desire, it's what the density makes possible. Having a large home close to this hub of activity is what many consider the best of both worlds, and you have to be very rich to have that combination.

If people do not desire density per se, they might not be desiring "not having to drive everywhere" either and that is just a side-effect of dense dwelling. E.g. the rich people living in the said mansions usually don't walk everywhere, do they now?

As I remarked earlier, I still feel that the analysis undertaken here is too simple and doesn't take into account, e.g., artificial constraints on supply that create perversions in consumer choice and demand.

We are in agreement, I too think that "we don't have enough high density accomodations because their prices are too high" is a rather simplistic implication that is very likely false.

This is part of what I'm not following.

The implication you've stated, which is itself a more informal restatement of what originally started this thread, hinges on whether the conclusion "we don't have enough high density accomodations (sic)" is true. The premise "prices are too high" has no bearing on the proposition's reasoning. (At least, if you take it to be true, which I feel is the case for most people.)

Is the competitiveness of the housing market overall not an indication that we lack accommodations, let alone high-density ones?

This all said, if it actually were a converse error, taking "prices are too high" as the consequent means that the premise "we don't have enough high density accomodations (sic)" has no bearing, which seems off because, surely, there's some connection between the supply-demand model and price.

I am doubting the argument from the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31886280 which is a variant of the argument repeated in every thread about housing on HN. Namely: people do want dense housing because dense housing in the areas like Manhattan is very expensive. "Prices are too high" is the "proof" part of this argument.

My doubt is based on two facts: rich people don't go for the dense living even in these areas and nobody is building residential high raises in the cheap areas, which would have been a huge missed opportunity if there had been a genuine demand for the dense living conditions.

Aha! Yeah, I can agree with that.

I think the thing that people on HN don't think about or make explicit in this kind of argumentation is that there are certain amenities that folks prefer to have nearby, and they kind of miss the neighborhood for the houses, as it were.

It isn't necessarily the density itself driving the demand; it's often the reasonableness of, e.g., being able to send a child off to the post office or supermarket to run an errand. Therein lies the rub: Density tends to be a sufficient condition for enabling that.

That said, beyond a certain wealth stratum, none of this really winds up applying anyway, so it's less useful to talk about those folks would do.

>It isn't necessarily the density itself driving the demand; it's often the reasonableness of, e.g., being able to send a child off to the post office or supermarket to run an errand. Therein lies the rub: Density tends to be a sufficient condition for enabling that.

Which is exactly what I said:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31891305

Saying "Well if people love their density so much, why don't rich people cram themselves in the tightest possible density" is a strawman.

It is prudent to analyze behavior that is not constrained by affordability when arguing about desirability. Otherwise you can easily deduce that people (en masse) genuinely like renting, flying couch, industrially processed food, malt liquor, cars that are at least ten years old etc.

What's the economic model you're applying?

I am applying the same reasoning the GGP post applies: the high price indicates desirability of dense accommodations. And I am explaining the GP's critique of this model.

I feel like there's some disagreement somewhere that's preventing reconciliation of what's going on here.

Does density imply micro-apartments? What's a micro-apartment? What's considered dense development?

Are we looking at this through a macroeconomic model or a microeconomic model? If microeconomic, have we accounted for everything that confounds consumer choice and consumer demand?

Given strict regulations on land use—the status quo today—is it reasonable to assume that mansions or villas within the city limits will be granted permits for denser development, whether that means interior renovations to convert them into multi-unit dwellings or razing the building and starting anew?

The analyses so far plainly seem too simple.

Sorry, if "micro" is bothering you. /s/micro/reasonable-sized/ it's not the point I am making.

if they were undesirable they woupd be cheaper than suburban properties. obviously the demand is there

Like land locked Manhattan? Or land locked SF?

> Sure, suburban single-family homes may offend the aesthetic of the elites, but most other people like them just fine.

Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

No, they're not. Even if something bad is somewhere in an origin story, that doesn't taint the existence of a thing. Most of the complaining about suburbs comes from people who want people to live bunched together, ant-like lives. Should there be more room for small businesses in and around suburbs? You bet. Encouraging walkability, not having to drive forever to get groceries, etc., is useful. But this push to take away the freedom of people to not live on top of each other is another form of classism, one oriented toward the imposition of suffering rather than toward encouraging freedom.

> But this push to take away the freedom of people to not live on top of each other is another form of classism

This sounds like a ridiculous straw-man; who's pushing to take away freedom of people to not live on top of each other?

People advocating for suburbs to pay their fair share of taxes, and for less car subsidy, and for less restrictive zoning are not restricting freedom but increasing it.

This is so absurd. Zoning involves so much central planning that it would put the Soviet Union to shame.

Suppose you want to add an extra room to your house on your land that you ""own"" in this system. You would need to go prostrate yourself before some bureaucrat in city hall. Who then inevitably declines that variance because some busybody somewhere thought that it interferes with the ""neighborhood character"".

How can we even say that you own your own land if you are not allowed to build on it as you please? Where is the freedom in any of this?

No, they're not. They're a style of living that people can choose, and work to achieve. If you want to choose a different style, then do so; they're available.

If you want high density, go live in a city center. But there's no reason to allow developers and corporations to destroy other types of neighborhoods that are ALREADY residential.

This pro-developer/pro-corporate-ownership shilling is way past tired.

> Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

Prior to the widespread development of suburban single family homes post WWII, most Americans outside of those in rural areas could not afford to home their own home. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy, and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans, including a majority of immigrants, live in the suburbs.

> . . . post WWII[1], most Americans outside of those in rural areas[2] could not afford to home their own home[3]. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy[4], and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans . . . live in the suburbs[5].

[1] Note that home prices wobbled a bit but were relatively even from the recovery after WWI and the flu through the early 60s. Income over that time increased significantly (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/16-05intax.pdf). Things change rapidly after that. I think it suggests a more complicated situation than "it all changed post WWII."

https://voxeu.org/article/home-prices-1870

[2] About half of the country. Nothing like today.

https://getrawmilk.com/content/urbanization-usa-rural-vs-urb...

[3] Affordable because of VA and FHA loans after the war. And increasing wages. And flat housing prices.

[4] Actually, the FHA (#3) mainstreamed redlining. That's pretty darned elitist.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mapmaker-r...

[5] We're mostly suburban in the same way we're all middle class, smart, and attractive: self-description, but not any objective measure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/u-s-is-ma...

Part of the attraction of the suburbs is that most US cities aren't very compelling. Its not like the choice is a Cleveland suburb vs Barcelona; its a Cleveland suburb vs Cleveland. Neither choice is all that great.

That's fair.

An anecdote from Nazi Germany from the town I grew up in.

The Nazis did exactly the same! As part of their program - similar to what Putin wants to do now? - to become self-sufficient, among many other projects, they built a very large chemical fiber factory into the middle of underdeveloped Thuringia. That's the German state just above Bavaria.

https://www.all-neumann.de/rud-zellwolle.html

For the thousands of new workers, only some of which could be sourced from the local population, they build the equivalent to American suburbs, in 1935.

A few pictures, old black and white:

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/H5NXR6CAX2M...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/2GD55POKL3R...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/UNFBR42B35M...

The factory, by the way, even back in the 1930s included two olympic-size swimming pools, one heated (by the next door factory coal power plant) and one with waves:

https://www.all-neumann.de/images3/Schwarza_119674.jpg

That suburb still exists, with a lot of kind of equal double-houses surrounded by a lot of garden.

Google maps, you can see how all houses and plots are similar: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.6840376,11.3145743,413m/data...

Until after reunification they could still walk for shopping in little stores, Schwarza, a tiny place at the edge of which the new houses were built, even had a butcher shop. To get to the factory could be done by bike leisurely within ten minutes.

However, in my old hometown (Rudolstadt) industry and houses often were right next to one another. There were quite a few of those, and they were in the city or at the edges, next to houses and villas. There's an x-ray tube factory (https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/about/history/stor...) and quite a few other industries, beginning early 20th century. I don't know if those various factories were at the edge of town in the 1920s, but even if they were, it can't have been very long that it all got a bit mixed. Today we have zoning too, kind of, "Gewerbegebiet" (industrial park) is where you have to go with your manufacturing business these days.

We now have very similar discussions about more mixing, example (German): "Architect recommends more mixed use areas" -- https://www.nw.de/lokal/bielefeld/mitte/21979129_Architekt-e... But also the opposite, "Please don't mix" -- https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article518393/Bitte-nicht-mis...

>Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

How so?

The origins of zoning were to exclude black, Chinese, and jewish workers and residents from white neighborhoods. https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...

Today, they continue to be used to exclude poorer residents from richer neighborhoods through mechanisms like minimum lot sizes (housing is much more expensive if you require 10000 sqft lots, etc.) and prohibitions of multi-family dwellings (which make housing cheaper by allowing multiple households to split the cost of land).

That doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to be a suburb to exclude non-whites. It could be an apartment building.

He didn't say zoning, he said homes so I was asking them why a single family home was elitist.

The single family home zoning has the stuff like the minumum lot size and prohibitions on lot splitting or multiple homes on the same lot, which essentially sets a floor price to qualify for living there. And a minimum price will lead to minimum salary requirements for a mortgage, effectively locking out those below that income, hence elitism.

its clearly more expensive than the alternative.

it excluded poorer people from the area

My city is holding public hearings about a new apartment development. People are outraged because it might bring in poor people.

False constrain on housing supply despite population boom causes housing prices to rise incredibly, an increase entirely subsidized by the desperation of the working poor to find somewhere affordable to live.

And additional costs of means of transportation in order to be able to live there, because of exclusionary single-family zoning, residential areas are wastelands of nothing, essentially requiring a car per adult individual. This also significantly constrains people with mobility issues.

Ever seen a zoning consultation meeting to build multi-family residences in a single family detached neighborhood?

The objections are wholly classist worries about What Kind of People are going to be living there.

Build a car centric life and then wonder why everyone is so stressed and obese. But the people are happy with it!

Many of those people are conditioned to expect these things because it was considered progress and increasingly it's all that they can get, and I think have some blind spots that probably keep them from living their best life.

Surely pointing this out is elitist.

There’s waaaay more reasons to why Americans are obese and stressed, than single family houses zoning.

Of course but requiring a car to do 95% of tasks surely doesn't help.

More precisely, nearly all the people who can afford to live there like them just fine.

This is an intentionally poor & misleading question.

So few people want to get rid of it because so few people are even aware of what it is, why it’s bad, and how it affects their community.

> So few people want to get rid of it because so few people are even aware of what it is, why it’s bad, and how it affects their community.

So you're going to convince us to abandon zoning using the the argument that it's bad but we're all just too stupid to know better? Good luck with that. A great many suburbanites lived in cities at one point in their life and decided to move out.

Nobody is too stupid to understand zoning, and I never suggested that was the case. I am saying that most people are entirely unaware how/why zoning occurs around them at all.

Is this true? This fact isn't obvious to me.

I don't think there is much evidence, since voters don't directly vote on this, but some points to no: - Houston voted against zoning on a public vote - Many people report wanting to live in more walkable neighborhoods - The few cities that have walkable, dense neighborhoods in the US are much more expensive than other cities and walkable neighborhoods are more expensive than non-walkable. This suggests that there is something limiting the supply of walkable neighborhoods (zoning).

> If it's so horrible, why do so few people want to get rid of it?

People fear change? And media reinforces that.

Things suck now . . . but how much worse is the unknown? [cue scary music]

I’ve seen one Bay Area use of zoning that I like. In Palo Alto, there are areas zoned for retail (which I think means retail or restaurant, but must be things that interact with customers who walk in). This helps for a somewhat odd reason: retail space is quite a bit less expensive than office space or housing, and property owners would often like to convert to office space. But doing so at scale would introduce a tragedy of the commons: office space is desirable in part because of the presence of retail!

(I’m not saying the economics have to work this way — I can easily imagine that more relaxed zoning and development rules would equalize the values of different types of space. But in the mean time, this policy at least appears to benefit people who live or work in the area.)

I'm not a zoning expert but this rings true to me, I recently spent some time back in europe and boy do I miss having a grocery store and a tram station 3 minutes walk away from my commie block in the suburbs. USA urban design is absolute trash.

I live in a commie block — well, fashy block since it's Spain — and although the zone is something that in the US would be seen as "the projects", the zone is nicer than the surrounding neighbourhood: well oriented blocks with plenty of light, no inner courtyards, surrounded by parks, minimal walls with neighbours, etc. Something is failing in city planning when the absolute cheapest houses that were built in a post war economy to house poor families were more thoughtfully designed than the rest of the area under city hall code.

I'm not falling for "think of the babies."

There's a lot of bath water. Drain it. We'll be better off than now.

We can talk about adding whatever zoning laws we actually need after this mess is cleaned up.

I completely disagree, zoning is a negative in every sense, and the world would be a better place without it.

I can't read the article, but it's about California, and in California, zoning isn't the issue. The issue is abusive planning departments.

It routinely takes over a year to get through permitting. During that time owners have to pay interest on the new place, insurance, and are also paying to retain architects, engineers, etc.

Homeowners are randomly bankrupted by nonsensical environmental restrictions (examples: banning modern septic technologies, and tightening requirements for old style installs. Once a plot is subdivided and sold, declare it unbuildable. Demanding trenches being dug to test soil suitability for leachfields, then denying applications because the trench disturbed the soil.

Some of this crap was recently banned, but just for accessory dwelling units (aka. mother in law cottages), so it's possible to reform the system, and there are even laws on the books that provide a blueprint.

I can't speak for Cali, butt in Toronto the reason planning departments can be abusive is because of zoning. Every building is de jure illegal because of zoning, so every build requires a variance from the zoning and the official plan, resulting in a multi-year process of negotiations, public consultation, horse trading, adjudications, and delays. This means endless years of legal fees, filing fees, and carrying costs before they can build.

The zoning and plan are what enables this sandbagging. Nothing is allowed as of right. Housing is only legal in the same way that murder is legal: it isn't but there's a process for getting a pardon.

>The issue is abusive planning departments

Why are cities being "planned" anyways? So much hubris in thinking that you can plan better than the free market

Transaction costs in city development are very high and change takes forever. I doubt the "free market" (how free exactly?) would converge in reasonable time. I also find it plausible that the price of anarchy in city planning is very high. For example I doubt that the free market would ever build public transport.

Living in a city like Houston without conventional zoning means lots of great and interesting buildings, but it also means that the worst apartments get put right next to the highway, industrial facilities can be co-located with your residence, and transport and sidewalks are a nightmare.

Zoning can and should be used for things like ensuring efficient highways and walking areas, and keeping people safe from pollutants. Too often though, it's used as an instrument of class warfare, keeping the overlap of affordable and nice as small as possible.

All of these things: "the worst apartments get put right next to the highway, industrial facilities can be co-located with your residence, and transport and sidewalks are a nightmare" happen in places with zoning. Houston is not perfect and certainly their transportation policy is not great, but zoning doesn't solve any of those. Lines on a map designating an industrial area and such seems so orderly, but in practice those zones have to butt against each other. Meaning it happens often that 'incompatible uses' go near each other. Zoning solves nothing about the real problems that zoning is supposed to solve, which is negative externalities like noise, traffic, etc. Those are best fixed with purpose built rules such as noise ordinances. Someone in a 'residential' neighborhood can have a car louder than an industrial plant. Zoning doesn't address that at all.

This is an inflammatory title, meant for clickbait: if building a home from decades of savings in which to nurture a family, would one want to find an industrial factory subsequently next door, because some article in the Pasadena Star News decreed zoning must be abolished?

The problem with zoning is that at some point we realized that it was harmful to have industrial land use like factories and dumps right next to residential neighborhoods. And then we assumed that there must be a spectrum with landfill on one end and single family homes in the other, with every other possible land use being some level of bad. When in fact, we need to zone industry that creates sounds, smells, chemicals, or other environmental hazards into its own non-residential areas, but everything else should be allowed to self-organize.

Commercial (retail, office space, professional, services) is not industrial-light. It is not something to quarantine. It is integral to a healthy, functioning, tax-revenue-generating neighborhood. The more commercial and retail are mixed into neighborhoods, the more desirable those neighborhoods are.

Of course it almost goes without saying that most of the rest of what we mean when we say zoning is also counterproductive if your goal is a functioning, financially solvent, culturally cohesive city: single-family-only, parking minimums, setbacks, etc.

We can regulate where industrial use can exist as separate laws and get rid of the 97% of zoning that has been horrible for land use in the US

There are actually much more reasons for zoning.

For instance, commercial real estate pays much more per square meter than residential, so without zoning you'd end up with no resident in many popular areas. In a similar way, if you just let anybody open hotels you have the same problem as what came in with AirBNB except worse, which is why hotels have been zoned in most cities for a long time. You also have other reasons such as organizing public transports, infrastructure, avoiding tax competing between cities and much more.

Contrary to some belief in here cities in Europe are often heavily zoned. It can go as far as encouraging or forbidding some special kinds of shops / restaurants (ex: limiting number of fast food restaurants in touristic places to maintain a certain "standing", having special tax for luxury shops to have them focus on a few streets to create an exclusive areas growing in the city and controlling the special delinquency that can come with...).

Many of the first zoning ordinances were just there to keep poor people or other races out. Most places already had rules about industrial and dangerous uses before zoning.

People clearly shouldn’t put tanneries, steel mills, and chemical processing plants in residential neighborhoods right next to primary schools. But massively simplified and less restricted zoning standardized across broader geographical regions (vs. every town for itself) would be very helpful, and in cities there’s really no good reason to have areas zoned to only allow single family detached houses with no multi-unit buildings or commercial activity allowed whatsoever. And the parking requirements, height limits, mandatory setbacks, etc. make North American cities remarkably space-inefficient and infrastructure-expensive.

The zoning requirements in Japan seem like a good model.

It’s that way because the folks there with control (in this system, the voters, though often ‘influenced’ by local politicians and power players) want it that way.

If someone has a setup they consider nice, or even just wants to not get stepped on by a bunch of other changes, they’re going to work hard to protect it. It’s human nature.

The solution is to decrease the power of hyper-local interests whose incentives do not align with those of the broader polity. Small cities and even neighborhoods benefit from regional economic growth but would rather their distant neighbors pay the cost for it in terms of density. That's a recipe for dysfunction.

Or increase the power of hyper local--down to the individual property ;)

“Hyper-local interests” (your neighborhood) face all the direct negative consequences of the policies that “broader polity” attempts to force upon them.

Removing the ability to have ‘hyper local interests’ means everywhere within the given ‘zone’ this is being done in is going to be similar, or at least under the same set of rules. Which pretty much means similar, eventually.

When rules have real concrete impacts that help or hurt one group over another (which is impossible to not happen), of course different groups are going to fight for or against it based on how they’re currently benefiting or not from it.

The push for removing zoning laws in broad strokes seems to be between the established current residents vs folks who WANT to be residents/or get established.

Which is cool and all, though if the desired area is currently ‘exclusive’ (which most nice areas are, the exclusivity is what allows them to push out what they don’t want, even if it offends someone), it’s hard to not see that this will destroy that exclusivity. Which will often destroy or largely alter the character of that place.

Atherton isn’t going to be Atherton (or why folks who like Atherton consider Atherton so nice), if every lot could be subdivided to high density condos, for instance.

Removing the ability to stop that would certainly allow a lot more people to live in Atherton, but it’s not like we have a shortage of actually livable space anywhere in California, or the US.

We do have a shortage of space where people want to live/be right now, but that is inevitable no matter what we do - and a lot of the high demand areas are because of the existing exclusive rules

More people want to be in the ‘place to be’ more than the ‘middle of nowhere’ (or close to jobs not in a place with no jobs, or in a place with beautiful views instead of the middle of a wasteland, etc!) and that creates a demand gradient where the most in demand places are always more in demand than they have supply, assuming supply is less than infinite, which is almost always is for real estate.

If it’s ‘exclusive’, that generally means even more restricted supply.

Harvard only allows so many students, for instance, and it’s not because they could not actually teach more to some standard. Making it so Harvard has to admit anyone who applies means Harvard isn’t going to be exclusive anymore, and that’s going to change what Harvard is and means a huge amount pretty quick.

The argument may make sense at a 'hyper local' level but be bad overall. Everywhere is trying to prevent the next level down from getting into their area. At a high level this means economic segregation enforced by the government. A very working class suburb near me has a bunch of neighbors trying to prevent an apartment complex on the site of a former K-Mart. It is not an exclusive area, but the same arguments are being applied.

Demand for housing in Atherton isn't high because Atherton's rules made Atherton nice. If Atherton allowed high-density condos to be built, demand for housing in Atherton would not decline at all, because Atherton's "character" has very little impact on its desirability. Demand for housing in Atherton is high because of its location, full stop, and its location is attractive because Bay Area residents started businesses in cities adjacent to Atherton, and because Bay Area taxpayers built a Caltrain stop in Atherton. People who own property in Atherton have massively benefitted from their proximity to the tech world, while refusing to contribute to housing its workers. Atherton houses 13x fewer people per unit area than San Francisco. Its landowners are like Hacienda ranchers, or feudal lords given exclusive rights by the government to manage profitable land to their own benefit, at the expense of the peasants who actually make that land valuable. Fuck their exclusivity.

Have you ever been to Atherton? Or East Palo Alto?

Because what you are saying does not match the reality I've seen on the ground, or what appears to be the emotional content of the reaction you posted.

In what sense does it not match? The emotional content of my reaction is anger at the obscene hording of space by a privileged minority who benefit from the productive behavior of their neighbors and contribute nothing in return. The average home price in Atherton is $8.1M. There are 7,000 people there, benefitting enormously from the wealth generated by tech. But they won't build more homes. And they will sue to stop the Caltrain from being electrified because they don't think converting a diesel train to electric is "environmentally safe." I lived nearby Atherton for some time, and it made my life, and the lives of my friends and family worse. I think it's a selfish municipality and I don't respect its ethic.

In order for the market to price the average home to be worth $8.1m instead of $1m, a whole lot of people are willing to pay a whole lot of cash to be there. Which goes against the core thesis of your earlier statement.

A friend of mine rented a room from a owner in Atherton, and a few doors down was Marc Andreesen and next door was a Saudi prince. I don’t think either of them were ‘benefitting from proximity to tech’ in a passive way and getting rich off it. They were already rich and were looking for a nice house in the area.

That it sucks to not be able to do it, yourself, obviously. Personally I found it kinda interesting and wasn’t bothered, but I’m not a jealous person. I’m not sure I’d want to deal with the risks of being that high profile frankly.

Plenty of jobs and economic activity from the people living there though, and while they are taking up more space than most, near as I can tell they’re paying more than most in on everything from taxes to generated economic activity too.

And it’s not like they’re displacing artists from the Tenderloin while doing it either.

If someone gets a billion dollars from something, they’ll spend at least some of it on stuff. A nice, quiet house in a nice area (albeit too oversized for me to want to manage or deal with staffing) wasn’t the weirdest or most wasteful thing i’ve seen.

It's amazing to me that you go from "Marc Andreesen lives there" to "it's not like Atherton's residents are financially benefitting from their proximity to the tech industry." Very, very dumb.

Someone who moved to Atherton after helping form the tech industry isn't benefitting from living nearby and passively getting rich from proximity.

Or did you mean something else?

I didn't add the qualifier "passively." You did. I think it's great if people are contributing to the region's wealth via their work, but it doesn't affect my argument. The fact is that the locality of Atherton is full of people whose home values are high because of their homes' proximity of the tech industry (this includes Marc Andreesen), and they're not willing to liberalize their zoning ordinances because, as a housing cartel, town landowners benefit from restricted supply. You were acting like the reason there's high demand for housing in Atherton is that it has low density, but what distinguishes Atherton from a random, low-cost town like Muskeegon, Michigan is its location smack-dab in the center of Silicon Valley. You could replace all the mansions in Atherton with high-density condos and they'd get snapped up by tech workers in a short period of time. You'd end up with way more property taxes paid to the state, way more people housed, way more economic growth for the region, and way less pollution as people lived closer to their place of work. Not to mention, the locality wouldn't be suing the caltrain to prevent electrification, because its residents would actually depend on public transport.

Ah, you're angry because people who made a lot of money are spending it? And in a place that offends you?

Even in Manhattan, the folks with the money are rarely spending much time on the subway.

It seems like you'd rather there not be rich people?

What? Where are you getting this? I have no problem with rich people. My problem is with cartels of homeowners passing laws making it illegal for individuals to build higher-density housing on the land that they own. The city of Atherton is a legal entity granted certain limited legislative purview by the California constitution, and it uses that purview to impede the economic flourishing of the state of California. The California consistution gives the state every right to overrule Atherton's dumb zoning rules, and the state legislature should do so.

The current setup is (indirectly) a massive subsidy from poor neighborhoods -> rich neighborhoods.

I'm increasingly leaning towards algorithmic zoning based on pre-existing use.

For example, allow adding x% of floors above the average of the surrounding buildings, rounded down, might be a rule to consider. Similarly apply classifications and allow one step "further" in the classification system than the average of your neighbours. Allow more if all neighbours consent. Allow more if e.g. adjacent to transport hubs.

So e.g. if your neighbours are all single floor bungalows, you might be automatically allowed to put up a two floor building, and you might be automatically allowed to change use from purely residential to, say, run a shop on the ground floor without late opening (just to take an example of a minor low impact step up from purely residential), but you'd need to apply for an exception if you want to build higher or do something higher impact. If there are automatic permitted developments with reasonable limits, the threshold for exceptions can be fairly high.

Most of the time a model like that would allow a neighbourhood to change gradually and dynamically as people move in who want it to change, while not so fast that it ought to drive out people who like it roughly the way it is.

Neighbours on both sides adding a floor more than you presently have? Suddenly you might have an automatic right to add 2 if you like, but your neighbours might not be allowed to match you unless neighbours on other sides also gets with the program. So done carefully, changes are contained in pockets, and as a bonus you get neighbourhoods that are not all cookie cutter but can still retain a distinct character. Density would naturally "radiate" out from existing high density areas and transport as people take advantage of the more lenient limits of high averages of surrounding buildings, and you "automatically" get gradually declining heights rather than huge abrupt steps (e.g. near me there's been recent planning conflicts over a number of new 20-30 floor buildings almost directly adjacent to two-floor terraced single family homes. But the building pattern is like that in the first place only because planning for decades resisted gradual increases).

Getting the patterns right to e.g. protect pockets for parks and essential services would take a lot of work, but you'd also have the benefit of being able to program visualisations to show immediate impacts on rights for neighbours etc. of allowing exceptions or when tweaking rules. And it'd allow streamlining approvals if more of the planning process is fully predictable.

There is definitely a middle ground and I agree with you that the public health concerns should be one of the things that keep some sort of coarser zoning in place.

Now, the reason for the ridiculous zoning based on housing type and commercial activity are really really simple: to separate the rich from the middle class and the middle class from the poor. It's extremely prejudiced and wrong. Yet here we are.

It also seems designed to stop anyone walking to a bar, yet be able to walk to a church.

> in which to nurture a family

Over the years I've noticed basically every zoning argument turns emotional like this, you can't have logical, considered debate. It's always about the home rather than the land it sits on.

> Over the years I've noticed basically every zoning argument turns emotional like this

That's because it is an emotional issue for most of us. We put our wealth, our time, and our energy into buying a house and finding/creating a community to raise our kids in. We're happy with with we live, then someone comes in, waves their credentials and says, "You losers are doing it all wrong, let me 'fix' your town". We don't want our towns fixed. If we thought they were bad, we wouldn't have moved their in the first place.

The challenge is allowing communities to grow. You have or want kids, which means that, without imparting a value judgment, you've contributed to some increase in the population. Likewise, your neighbors surely have had kids of their own, or they're planning to, which means that they're similarly contributing to population growth.

All of this means that there will need to be more places to live.

My question is: Where will your kids and your neighbors' kids live? As you advance in age, how does this play out when you'll want (or perhaps even need) them nearby to help? If/when your kids move away, will they be able to afford to move back?

It's probably best that you don't have the answers to those right now, but they're worth thinking about in a climate where the law of supply matters more.

As is always the answer in these sort of discussions, "somewhere else" or "not in my backyard"

The birth rate in most developed countries is below replacement and only decreasing, so this argument doesn't really hold much weight. It may have in the 1980's but times have changed.

Forgive me. I'm unsure what this has to do with the fact that you, your wife, and n kids makes n+2 people. Is that not population growth?

These aren't towns at issue. The housing problem principally occurs in metropolitan areas with more than 3 million people that have existed for more than half a century, and in most cases longer. Many of those areas have a high incidence of homelessness, regular evictions and a trend of housing prices such that the per-unit cost to live there has grown much faster than inflation for the past several decades.

Therefore, people are trying to address the real, visible problems in these major cities. A major city is a complex system, and in order to manage it, you need people with credentials, and not incurious dismissals like "stop moving to California".

Today I learned that nurturing my family is "emotional." Thanks; I had no idea.

"Abolish zoning", like "end car ownership" and "ban sprawl" are the result of the extremism treadmill of the modern media environment applied to the United States's ossified real estate market. Regardless of whether they'd be possible, these ideas just aren't necessary — a much milder package of reforms, broadly applied, would do plenty to address the supra-inflationary housing price trend.

Sounds like an expensive place to build an industrial factory.

sounds like an amazingly cheap place to build one to me

A factory would not out compete a 40 storey building.

Saying this as someone who lives where 40 storey buildings and high tech export factories both vie for land.

not when there's no zoning?

Strikes me as orthogonal, really.

It’s always interesting to hear this stuff argued out because the effect of too little zoning is much more visceral than the effect of too restrictive zoning.

One (correctly) cringes at the thought of a factory being placed in their residential neighborhood. But the converse, and the reality we find ourselves in, is that millions of families don’t have stable housing at all. It’s a clearly worse outcome. Unpleasant housing is obviously better than no housing. but there’s no cringe factor, it’s all in the abstract.

How does zoning prevent an industrial factory right next door? It doesn't. Zones must exist on a plane and naturally butt against each other. Go look at a map of a major city. The industrial areas often butt right against residential.

And you think that there is nothing between US zoning laws and "industrial factory subsequently next door"?

I guess it's a rhetorical tool, what would be better, no zoning laws or the current zooming laws?

You don't need zoning to control pollution.

Factories are not built overnight. You could offer to sell your lot to the factory builders and buy elsewhere.

In this world, houses would be affordable.

"If you don't like it leave" is a solution to many problems. Just not one that people find acceptable or sometimes even possible.

Don't worry about climate change causing the sea level to rise. If your land is at risk you can always sell it and move, right?

have you seen dark waters? the farmer's neighbour sold his land, and a toxic dump was built there.

the farmer couldn't sell his land to the company - they didnt need any more. he could sell his land to anyone - noone wants a poisoned land next to a toxic dump. So his livehood was destroyed, and he had to recourse.

I don't get why that should require zoning laws.

In the end, no factory builds itself. It takes actual persons out there pouring concrete. Real, fellow humans choosing to ignore the well-being of all the people living around them, enter their neighbourhood and in effect destroy their homes.

The fact that society is so bureaucratised we don't think of it that way freaks me out a little.

The solution is not more bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is how we ended up in this situation in the first place, where I could walk into a neighbourhood and ruin it, as long as I have the right official permits, and then sleep well at night thinking that I have done a good job.

How about we try to collectively drop this idea that "I'm an X therefore I pour concrete where they tell me to without thinking more about it?" Make people personally responsible for their actions!

> Real, fellow humans choosing to ignore the well-being of all the people living around them, enter their neighbourhood and in effect destroy their homes.

Except the people making these decisions or pouring the concrete often don't live in the neighborhood or care, they're "just doing their job".

>Make people personally responsible for their actions!

They can easily hide behind corporate bureaucracy and limited liability. If you want laissez-faire zoning, please beef up corporate civil/criminal liability and punitive damages, so offenders learn their lesson or are taken out of business.

> please beef up corporate civil/criminal liability and punitive damage

That's not enough. Liability is a concept in civil law. Civil suits are inadequate not only because they can only address harms after the fact, but also because they can't even do that when the harm is delayed or diffuse. Also, replacing regulation with litigation would not reduce any of the associated burdens. It would still be necessary to set standards by which cases can be decided, to have judges and clerks and lawyers (and juries?) to measure cases against those standards, and somebody to enforce those decisions. Since the actions would have to come later, the resulting bureaucracy would probably be even larger and more intrusive than is already the case.

"Just make people responsible" ignores how people actually are held responsible in the real world. For all practical purposes "just make it easier for people to evade responsibility" is the real meaning.

> Except the people making these decisions or pouring the concrete often don't live in the neighborhood

Sure, but would you feel okay about ruining someone else's home as long as it's not in your neighbourhood?

> or care, they're "just doing their job".

This is the problem I want to address. When you are knowingly doing harm, you are never "just doing your job". You are intentionally taking the role of acting harmfully.

As a species, we already know this. When a war crime is committed, it is private first class John Baluzki holding the rifle who will be dragged to the Hague. "I was just following orders, please go after my superiors" is not a defense.

Individuals perform actions, corporations or dictators are powerless without individuals willing to go along with their crap. Those individuals are responsible for what they did.

>Sure, but would you feel okay about ruining someone else's home as long as it's not in your neighbourhood?

Personally, no. Can we extrapolate that while also reviewing history and come to the determination that no one would ever build or do something to the detriment of others? Absolutely not.

>When a war crime is committed, it is private first class John Baluzki holding the rifle who will be dragged to the Hague

That's not really how it works. There's a ton of bureaucracy when it comes to actually bringing someone in front of ICC/The Hague, and plenty of countries shield perpetrators from ever seeing justice. War Crimes seems non-sequitar to this conversation, and it seems you have a naive understanding of them.

>Individuals perform actions, corporations or dictators are powerless without individuals willing to go along with their crap. Those individuals are responsible for what they did.

Corporations and dictators often hold sway by threat, either of livelihood or life. I think you underestimate how much power this gives them. Whistleblowers often find themselves ostracized/blackballed/murdered. There's often a lot of downside to speaking up. Also really how culpable is someone pouring concrete or running electrical at a plant that eventually starts polluting the neighborhood? Even if neighbors tell this worker "this place will pollute our neighborhood" and they ask their boss or someone higher up "is this place going to pollute the neighborhood?" they'd probably get a non-answer or a denial.

So jail the guy pouring concrete or hanging drywall instead of focusing on policies that would prevent the issue? It's bad enough that the rich often view the poor as disposable. This just makes it literally true.

> Real, fellow humans choosing to ignore the well-being of all the people

because that never happens, from selling people into slavery to dumping toxic financial products on unsuspecting citizens to knowingly poisoning them with toxic chemicals for profit.

Doesn't the city of Houston famously lack zoning, to some degree? It seems like analyzing Houston could show whether the problems of zoning are fixed or not.

Minimal zoning has made Houston fantastic. Whatever mild downsides of mixed-use there has been, development, diversity, growth, opportunity, home value, and quality of life here is phenomenal.

https://unherd.com/2022/04/texas-is-the-future/

https://www.governing.com/community/houston-is-the-nations-m...

https://marketurbanism.com/2022/03/14/houston-impressions/

https://houston.culturemap.com/news/real-estate/02-22-22-hou...

https://youtu.be/Z0k7M_Xwx4k

If I understand correctly, they have a lot of agreements on title between Private owners preventing each other from doing certain things, like somewhat informal, market-based zoning. I’ve heard it can be difficult to develop there despite the lack of zoning because the negotiations between private parties don’t have clear and objective processes.

They don’t have zoning, but do have minimum parking requirements.

Police is racist in USA. Let's abolish the police. That will surely make things great.

Zoning sucks in USA. Let's abolish zoning, then everything will be great.

What's wrong with you people? Just fix what's broken. You don't throw away your home when a window is broken.

Police have no obvious replacement. Getting rid of zoning has obvious replacement, which is rules to regulate the negative externalities that zoning was supposed to address, but has failed miserably. I don't think anyone seriously advocating for getting rid of zoning doesn't have an idea for a replacement.

> rules to regulate the negative externalities that zoning was supposed to address, but has failed miserably

But that's zoning? Zoning doesn't need to be "only suburbs allowed here" or "only factories allowed here". In fact zoning in Europe usually is the opposite: "if you want to build 1000 houses here you have to also build a school, a library, park, healthcare and a nursery within 3 km".

“Defund the police” is not the same as “abolish the police”; it means that the piece dedicated to police departments in a lot of places is overblown, taking away other options, like social workers. That sounds like “fixing what’s broken” to me.

> What’s wrong with you people? just fix what’s broken.

The process for fixing is significantly more complicated than the process for starting fresh. Trying to make even minor changes gets bogged down in essentially the same magnitude of bureaucracy as starting from scratch. Endless public consultation, money interest lobbying, etc. the effort is almost never worth it for minor changes.

Your attitude of incrementalism is, IMHO, why we can’t have nice things today. When something’s obviously broken, sometimes it is best to admit it was a failed experiment and try again.

> The process for fixing is significantly more complicated than the process for starting fresh.

That's usually the opinion of people who didn't actually thought through the whole process of starting fresh.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Agree, no one I've ever met who actually accomplished serious work would ever say something like that.

police is a relatively recent invention, 2-3 centuries ago many countries didn't have it.

Now they are getting involved in more and more interpersonal issues, and I am not clear that the same people should be dealing with murderers and get called into schools when kids do something nasty

The main problem with police in USA is that everybody can have a gun so police carries guns and are quick to shoot.

The solution isn't to abolish/defund/whatever the police. It's to introduce gun control.

Police in my country uses guns against people less than 20 times a year. About 100 times if you include shooting into air or against animals.

Because nobody has guns - criminals don't have guns (it just increases stakes for no benefit). So police don't carry guns and aren't in hurry to shoot. So there's almost no gun deaths. So everybody is much more chill when a crime happens.

People will still be racist but at least it doesn't convert into deaths so easily.

In the town I am from a developer bought land to put up a tower. The zoning law was set in the 80s and allowed for added density in this particular area. The proposed development complied with that zoning and so the application process was straightforward and didn’t require a long drawn out combative process, and still there have been numerous articles and handwringing by politicians that it was unconscionable that this development could be approved by city staff without having to go through public commentary and consultation and a shakedown by politicians demanding a tithe for parks or public art.

This world is insane. It never ceases to amazing me.

Maximum use zoning seems a lot better than no zoning. Most don’t want industrial or dirty/loud commercial mixed in with residential. At least not without seriously onerous emissions requirements.

Abolish and replace with what? How do you ensure that the outcome doesn't resemble post-soviet privatisations that are impossible to get undone within 100 years, if even that. It looks great on paper, until it doesn't in practice when it turns out there are bazillion ways to game an anarchic system which some "architect" assumed will self-govern.

Discarding zoning, I can already see public parks getting converted to smelly pig farms and for profit cemeteries. Land is leased for infinite time durations, so very very hard to undo.

Olde world towns generally have more zoning (AKA "planning permission" in the UK), not less. America certainly has some zoning problems but abolishing it isn't the answer.

Source? in what way are the planning permissions in the UK “more zoning” in the US? What else is regulated that is not in the US?

They're much more strict. If e.g. you want to add a room to your house you have to apply for permission, and then post a notice detailing what you're going to do in the street in front of your house to give your neighbors an opportunity to object.

Source: I live here LOL

Add a room as in add an addition to your house? Or change the interior configuration? If the former, it is no different in the US if the zoning does not already allow for the expansion (I.e. as in the case of most suburban houses, the house is already built to the maximum size on the lot and the home owner needs a variance)

If you overlay maps of traffic accidents with age of buildings, you will see that post-war North American urban planning up until modern suburbia has had an atrocious effect on traffic safety.

I can't think of any other profession that has collectively failed us as badly as urban planning, having simultaneously created a housing crisis, a climate change crisis, and a public health crisis. It's like medicine before Semmelweis.

But without zoning and roads simcity would just be waiting.

One reason England is so beautiful, most of the country is zoned for agriculture and can’t be built up:

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-cover-atlas-uk-1.74...

What could go wrong?

https://www.propertycasualty360.com/2013/04/18/massive-texas...

This is a good one[1] - URL says it all. Developers built houses inside of designated flood water storage reservoirs. No one appears to have informed owners during the purchase, and they inevitably flooded when a big enough storm hit (Harvey).

It looks like Houston doesn't have zoning that specifies land use? [2]

[1] https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2017/10/12/...

[2] https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/#:~:text=The%....

I assume this is the West, TX fertilizer plant explosion, which is more detailed here. [1] Why people immediately jump to discarding regulations that are being managed ineffectively rather than improve them is beyond me. Lack of zoning is obviously a non-starter, given the complete lack of commercial regulation that often occurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_explos...

The article is paywalled for me but it seems like this happened in spite of zoning[1]? So it’s hardly an example of what can go wrong without zoning.

[1] https://www.waco-texas.com/planning.asp#gsc.tab=0

If Waco’s ludicrous zoning permitted an explosive fertilizer plant to be built near residential areas, no zoning will be much worse. Obviously.

Waco has zoning.

Let me tell you: Zoning in itself is not a bad thing per se! Quite the contrary. I guess nearly all countries belonging to the "Global North" have them. And they do so for a reason.

Tossing out zoning laws alltogether is just another nail in the ethically bankrupt city plannings coffin. Instead the zoning laws have to get better by revising their underlying premises. E.g. why the hell do you guys outlaw condos? In Germany we have a gradient on whats allowed and what not. The "BauNVO" (Baunutzungsverordnung) regulates that on a broad level. Then you will go to a more granular level, the "B-Plan" (Bebauungsplan). There it will have more regulations which have to be followed. E.g. it is very often the case that the ground level is reserved for commercial use, but on the other levels must be condos.

So much clickbait. Pasadena isn't even able to incorporate the california state-wide relaxations of zoning like building ADUs/in-law units.

you'll need to elaborate or restate that to be clearer, because pasadena was the first southern california city (or at least one of) to allow ADUs. that came around a year before the state statute, iirc.

edit: i remember because i was cynical about the move. the statute only gives wealth to property owners and doesn't allow new entrants to establish themselves. what would have been better is 4+1 by right (fourplex plus ADU on any residential property without requiring a variance).

Do you know why it is unable to? (Serious question)

Probably something to do with homeowners that oppose any marginal incremental density in their neighborhoods. No idea how they are able to effectively disregard the state laws (if they are, I haven't verified parent..) though, that's a good question.

> Probably something to do with homeowners that oppose any marginal incremental density in their neighborhoods.

This is my biggest problem with zoning and public consultation. Why do people feel they have the right to tell someone else what to do with the land they bought and paid for? Where does that “right to control others” arise from? If it isn’t actually directly impacting your enjoyment of your own property, then why is it even your business?

Lack of enforcement/consequences, sometimes due to somewhat transparent payoffs/sops to activists, combined with a lot of tarpitting by local gov’t usually. At least that is what I saw play out in places like Palo Alto, anyway.

Isn’t the mass sprawl of Houston directly connected to its lack of zoning regulations?

Go and vote - if the majority want it to happen it will

Ugh. It's paywalled, but you can see the fallacies impending in the first paragraph, citing the past where corporations weren't buying up entire neighborhoods at once.

The country is not "full." The bellyaching about zoning is really just shilling for developers.

Yes, mod facts you don't like down, Redditors. Or... inform yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEwxYvQVU5g

lol no thanks. The author has obviously never been to Houston.

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