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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This isn't a "nitty-gritty" issue. Wealthy suburbs forbid the construction of any kind of multi-family dwelling through single-family zoning rules. The "disagreement" is simple: everyone says they want more housing, as long as it's least 30 minutes away from them. There's a simple fix: stop dignifying those objections, and mandate relaxation of zoning rules statewide.

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Exactly this. This is a cultural issue, more than anything else.

Countries like Japan have taken a profoundly different approach to urban development, and have more mixed-use zones (single-family, multi-family, high-rise, etc).

https://youtu.be/wfm2xCKOCNk

Communities are allowed to decide how they are composed.

This is obviously not true in a variety of ways, and it inevitably won't be true in the way we're talking about here either, because the status quo doesn't work: it guarantees that every viable suburb is overwhelmingly SFZ, almost mathematically.

Why should they if their preferences negatively impacts everyone else?

In the same way San Francisco allows ice cream shops (or any business) to object to new competitors in their area, yes many “communities” also write rules that monopolize land in order to keep their property values high.

See: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...

No, they obviously are not allowed to decide that at all, unless you think communities can decide that no Asians may buy houses within their borders.

That's disingenuous, race is a protected class. High density housing isn't.

Sometimes we seem to like the idea of democracy, sometimes we don't. That's the tension here.

High density housing isn't protected because we choose not to protect it. But that's changing, thankfully.

How is it disingenuous? OP asserted that communities are "allowed to decide how they are composed," and they obviously are not. Which decisions we allow communities to make is the entire question.

Protected classes are already protected, so it is absolutely disingenuous to try and suggest that if we allow communities to have a say in their own composition we would have to allow them to discriminate based on race.

They aren't allowed to decide that in other countries, just here, and almost everything that happened as a result of that was bad.

Been to Japan? France? Pretty nice places.

Aren't those some of the most expensive countries on Earth for housing?

No, housing isn't expensive in Japan, certainly nowhere near how bad it is in US cities. Housing prices are more or less flat in Tokyo over decades, even, because they constantly build more of it. (It's cheap in the rest of the country, but that doesn't mean much because nobody wants to live there and there aren't jobs.)

Not saying it's great; Japanese wages are too low and their landlords are abusive (moving is expensive, you have to pay a lot of "key money", and they're free to discriminate against foreigners). But the housing crisis is an Anglo problem - it's bad in the US/UK/Canada/Australia.

Not sure about France specifically, I was just saying Paris is a nice city.

The state of California is a community. The United States is a community.

Sadly, no. If you're a community of people who want to develop your land in Atherton you won't be allowed to because a whole bunch of others (including Andreessen) want to stop you.

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