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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

> But building enough housing won't happen because people rationally conclude it's in their best interests. It will happen when the decision-making levers are removed from local government.

> More on why community input is bad.

This honestly strikes me as kind of insane. Community voice in community matters is bad? Local community decision-making should be removed from local governments?

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Several things:

- "we need to take community input into account" gets transformed to "a small handful of people acting in bad faith can stop any process"

- homeowners tend to have more access to these, but are not the only people affected by these decisions (you think the teachers or cops having to live 90 minutes away cuz they can't afford to rent in these areas are showing up here?)

- Home ownership in particular just generates a perverse incentive to try and profit off of your home. That might be great for homeowners, but there's a reason rentseeking is its own economic term.

I believe that the specific thing here is that community input on planning as it exists in the US is bad, for the same reason that deciding everything by referendum is bad. If you put every part of urban development up for line item veto, then you can't make much of a great plan!

I personally think that public comment and the like is ... fine and good. But I do think it should be possible for a city government to lay out requirements for building a thing, and for people who meet those requirements to be able to do the thing, no matter how much others whine. If there are issues, change the requirements for future projects!

We already deny communities "community voice" in all sorts of issues. The list of issues communities aren't allowed to determine for themselves is called "state law", and there's a lot of it. Demsas (Twitter has stripped some of this context off, which is probably part of why it seems insane to you) is advocating for blanket SFH zoning to be added to the list of things communities can no longer decide for themselves, because when you let communities do that, they naturally and with near-mathematical inevitability (literally, as in the forces that lead to this are almost mathematically inevitable and have nothing to do with equity or justice or privilege or anything like that) work to exclude multi-family housing.

That's blatantly tyranny and you're asking for more of it. No thanks.

That's funny, because it's usually the anti-tyranny types decrying the tyranny of zoning rules.

The blatant tyranny of people being allowed to build things on their property.

Yes, local communities across the United States have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with control over local zoning, so the power should be moved to a regional political body. Voters will of course vote in their own best interest, and everyone wants their property values to increase, resulting in every local government restricting housing construction and a general lack of construction across the board. This creates regional-level economic problems that should be addressed by regional-level government bodies.

>Community voice in community matters is bad? Local community decision-making should be removed from local governments?

Yes, pretty much every country that has sane housing policies and gets shit done, like Japan has elevated this to the national level with the power to break down obstructionism. Local decision making is notoriously corrupt. Be it the police, school boards, some union run rampart, the mob, homeowner associations or some business cartel, it's always local.

In fact if you want to pinpoint the central issue that paralyzes development in America it's the parochialism.

> parochialism

Thanks for the new word!

Spend 4 hours in any town hall in the Bay Area and you’ll be convinced that housing and infrastructure should not be left to those absolute idiots.

What California is moving towards strikes me as eminently sensible: the local community may decide where to place the housing, but it must zone for enough housing somehow. This preserves "community voice in community matters" and "local community decision-making" while eliminating the ability to be exclusionary.

Community input is a product of 60s anti-development protests; the idea is essentially that anyone can stop anything from happening, but nobody can make it go faster.

As a result, nothing ever happens, except in suburbs where not enough people care to stop you from building SFHs, so we get sprawl.

Other countries don't do this stuff. It's fine to not do it.

This puts outsized power in the hands of incumbent homeowners. What about people who work in Atherton or nearby towns and need to commute hours to get to their jobs? They sure would like to live nearer to their workplace. They generally aren't considered "community" and have no voice.

Zoning has to be done citywide if not nationally, because otherwise it's a tragedy of the commons: everyone in a city benefits from increased density, while the costs fall disproportionately on those neighbourhoods that do densify. We need to set fixed standards just like we don't let each neighbourhood set its own tax rate.

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