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.
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...).
The zoning requirements in Japan seem like a good model.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or did you mean something else?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Saying this as someone who lives where 40 storey buildings and high tech export factories both vie for land.
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.
In this world, houses would be affordable.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.