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.
So for the most risky industrial facilities housing should be prohibited, but for all others yeah it should be mostly hierarchical.
then it wouldn't matter who lived next door.
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.
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.
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?
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.
0: Which, of course, developers would also object to and would lead to a lot of patchwork regulation due to grandfathering.
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.
Now you certainly can't walk places for the most part if that's why you want mixed zoning.
What you are describing is just zoning.
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.
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.
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.
Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.
How so?
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).
it excluded poorer people from the area
The objections are wholly classist worries about What Kind of People are going to be living there.
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.
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...
[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...
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?
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.
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.
People fear change? And media reinforces that.
Things suck now . . . but how much worse is the unknown? [cue scary music]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zoning allows people to choose the type of neighborhood they want to live in. How are you going to accomplish that without it?
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.
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?
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
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.
Considering the massive shortage of housing in overly-micromanaged zoning areas, it has monumentally failed at this.
> Zoning allows people _with enough money_ to choose the type of neighbourhood they want to live in.
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.
Manhattan is full. The USA as a whole is not. Go live somewhere else.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.