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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

“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.

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

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.

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