Arbitrary Lines: The way restrctive zoning costs all of us | Hacker News Reader

Arbitrary Lines: The way restrctive zoning costs all of us

cato.org

63 pointsjseliger62 comments

The Japanese have an excellent method for zoning that prevents the worst cases (industrial next-door to residential, for instance) but doesn't limit things like corner stores below an apartment.

https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...

Yes, every time zoning comes up, someone mentions this.

The thing is, in order for mixed uses not to be a nuiscance to each other you need to import the Japanese culture with the Japanese upbringing of individuals together with the Japanese zoning system.

So what you're saying is, our culture makes nice living impossible, and we should work on that.

For an outsider like myself, that seems obvious. I think a great example of this is that driving kids to school is the norm now.

Yea, it “saves money”. For the school district; parents now have to spend gas to sit in traffic. I guess 40 cars is more efficient than one diesel electric bus, if you’re a penny pinching administrator.

I mean, Japanese kids walk/bike/metro to school, I think it's free for the school districts

Let's do it the Japanese way. Kids should pass an exam to get into a good high school, and spend an hour on several trains.

Another thing that someone brings up most time zoning is brought up: there used to be a time when Americans did it right, and they tore it (almost) all down for what it is now. Culture is shaped and can be changed, it took a wrong turn and is now in a bad state for zoning, but it shouldn’t be impossible for work it back to a state that works well for zoning.

When was that exactly? In the century since Amber v Euclid was ruled, someone somewhere has had their personal property rights violated by the state or its proxies, whether on account of race, religion, political affiliation, or economic standing.

Zoning, if it works, only does so in monocultures, especially ones that incentivize not complaining.

> When was that exactly

... and what was the population of the USA at that time, and of New York and Los Angeles?

You have to start somewhere! Culture affects zoning but zoning also affects culture.

Mixed uses are normal worldwide. It is not something special for Japan that requires special conditions to exists.

I've designed a few homes and while zoning can be very constraining, it's not all bad.

When I do a daylight study, its usability in and around the home along with the impacts on energy efficiency are the top concerns when it comes to the design, but considering the neighbours is important too: In city lots at higher latitudes it's easy to cast a patio next door into permanent shade for large parts of the year.

For just this reason, I wouldn't throw away all zoning. Setbacks and height restrictions can really constrain me, but prevents me from being a jerk.

Density limits and a lot of occupancy type restrictions, on the other hand, can go to Hell. They prevent communities from having diverse properties (and the self sufficiency that comes with it) or evolving to meet local needs.

More variants allowed would help a lot - if a setback is because of neighbors, allow it to be varianced with cooperation from the neighbors.

For some reason, planners argue that “neighbours change over time” and this is meant to be a reason why this kind of variance can’t be allowed. Makes no sense to me, as future neighbours would know what they are getting into when they buy. Perhaps there needs to be a notice period preventing someone from agreeing to a variance and then selling their house before the variance activity has been completed.

This process is available where I am, but spending thousands of dollars to consultants, meeting with City Planners, attending hearings, and months of waiting with no guarantee scare away a lot of folks.

How about neighbors buy insurance against such a development?

Houston is incredibly zoned. They dont call it zoning, but most of the city is designated as mandatory parking lot.

This makes some sense, since its too unpleasant outside to walk or bike, for the most part, but it does mean that all commercial is functionally zoned as strip mall. There is a large effort to increase bus transportation in houston, but this is a losing battle because of the aforementioned fundamental restrictions on density.

Those laws are zoning laws.

Which hints at a fundamental question:

Which one is better: A dense city with lots of interesting stuff in one square mile or a sprawl with just a few interesting things in one square mile?

One of those has more parking than it would ever need. And parking lots don't produce tax revenue, they burn it, because these spaces could all have been other things that being money and support the cost of the actual public roads and infrastructure in that square.

Trick question, the answer is don't live in Houston.

It's really incredible: https://www.munistandards.com/texas/houston/parking-requirem...

Note that the table has a lot of pages, requirements go up to 14 parking spaces per 1000 sqft GFA for "bars, clubs, or lounges"

Absolutely wild. In my city, 5 per thousand is the maximum and even that creates oceans of under-utilized parking lots. 14 is absurd.

In another city I lived in, developers were required to have traffic studies that would show the theoretical parking demand on the 20th busiest day of the year, and that was the parking requirement. You can imagine the garbage-in, garbage-out assumptions that became standard.

> since its too unpleasant outside to walk or bike, for the most part,

Why not make mandatory dense tree cover along all sidewalks and walkways?

Because shade does nothing in 90F with 90% humidity.

LV/PHX would be better candidates, but trees don’t like to grow there.

>The activist asked, “How much more burden can we put on our environment?”

I think activists deliberately talk past each other on this. It seems clear that the apartment tower puts a larger burden on the very local environment, and having people spread out in single family homes puts a larger burden on the global environment. Both seem like important considerations, and you can't make informed policy decisions if you refuse to acknowledge 50% of the argument.

I suspect the idea is to convince people there isn't another 50% of the argument. If you can do that, you're most of the way to winning the argument because you've manage to discredit so much as the idea of disagreement.

People have to live somewhere. And the per-capita environmental burden is obviously in favor of density, no? I'm not sure I understand this distinction you're trying to draw.

The word 'environment' has strong emotions attached to it, and there's not universal agreement to it's meaning.

Environmental impact doesn't just mean CO2 emissions, or water usage. For those things, I think most people agree that higher density is preferable.

Our environment can also refer to the things that have a direct and immediate impact on our experiences, and density often comes with noise, crowding, diminished sense of community with the people you see near your home... Maybe we all need to get used to the inconveniences that come with higher density, but refusing to admit that there are inconveniences seems dishonest. It's that refusal to admit inconveniences that I meant to point out.

> diminished sense of community with the people you see near your home

FWIW, I think most “New Urbanists” would argue that density increases sense of community. Rather than living in a soulless suburb where everyone stays indoors or in their backyards, and ventures out for literally every activity (unlikely to be interacting with the same community in many contexts), everyone lives, works, and plays in a densely built city, likely doing all of the above in a few city blocks and interacting with the same people in many contexts.

In my experience, having lived in incredibly dense cities and incredibly sparse rural areas, I agree with New Urbanists (but I do certainly see the pros and cons of each style of living).

I disagree, zoning is very much needed. No human should be forced to live in an industrial area, for noise and pollution reasons if nothing else, those two uses (residential and industrial) should be well separated. There also a few other common sense zoning logics like keeping buildings at a somewhat similar size (e.g. not have skyscrapers next to a single story house, but have mostly houses, mostly midrize buildings, mostly skyscrapers, with the appropriate infrastructure/greenery needed), having appropriate park to density ratios, etc.

In the US zoning is abused to hell due to (sometimes historic, sometimes still ongoing) racism and NIMBYism, but that doesn't invalidate the whole concept.

You can have anti-nuisance laws that accomplish these exact things, and in fact we had those things before we had the modern zoning regime. The book goes into this subject in great detail! You can also have building codes and safety standards without modern euclidean zoning.

I strongly recommend you read the book.

The zoning laws are easier to work with, they’re basically summarizing a large number of anti-nuisance laws. In practice, it shouldn’t really matter if you have one or the other for the resulting city.

> In practice, it shouldn’t really matter if you have one or the other for the resulting city.

Oh but it absolutely does. If you live next to a park and your teenage kid want to put an ice cream shop in your garage to operate on summer afternoons, zoning laws prevent it. Anti nuisance laws would not. If you want to run a single-seat hair salon in your neighbourhood, so that the old folks who can't drive could still get their hair cut locally, zoning laws prohibit it.

Obviously if you want to open a commercial shipping and receiving warehouse in your garage, both regimes would prevent it.

A potential difference is which one minimizes the number of lawsuits. The status quo, at least in my locale, is that you have to get prior approval for a project, and in some cases, it has to be open for public comment. On the other hand, if you have to wait until something is built, and then require the neighbors to prove that it's a nuisance, then every single issue becomes a lawsuit.

What would be the difference between an anti-nuisance law and a zoning law if both prohibit industry in residential areas?

One prohibits industry and the other prohibits obnoxious behaviour.

No matter what, zoning won't let me have a machine shop in my garage. The thing is that machine shops aren't all the same:

If I'm servicing heavy equipment there will be low-beds delivering equipment, a driveway full of grit, disassembled machines and oil stains along with welding and arc-air gouging, etc. Not something you want next door; nuisance laws stop this.

If I'm making parts for medical instruments, everything is inside, you can't see or hear any of it when I close the door, and traffic consists of me making weekly trips to buy bar stock and the occasional courrier van. What nuisance is that?

Both are machine shops but they are far from having the same impact on a street.

I grew up next to a small factory / machine shop. By small I mean a factory the size of 3 acres and maybe 30 employees. There was essentially zero nuisance, I couldn't hear the machine shop running unless I was within 10 feet of the wall. This would fall under light industrial most likely, essentially no pollution. I see no reason why this small factory, or similarly a small coffee shop would be banned from being in a residential neighborhood. The "nuisance" argument is exaggerated to absurd levels when you can barely notice them.

Right on.

It would be safe to assume a business with 30 employees would bring nearly 30 cars into the street and a coffee shop could increase foot traffic.

These things aren't necessarily true, but those assumptions aren't necessarily unreasonable. I think this is where things break down.

Out my way, when zoning does allow home-based business, restrictions are mainly about yard/accessory building usage, customer traffic/parking, and number of non-resident employees(I assume because of parking).

I see it as an honest attempt to prevent nuisance activity while allowing some flexibility but it also seems lazy and too restrictive. My hypothetical garage based machine shop could be non-conforming and be one complaint away from being shut down no matter how unobtrusive it is.

Zoning is preventative. It can stop a nuisance neighbor before they ever start. When a neighbor creates a nuisance the existence of an anti-nuisance law does nothing except provide a potential basis for a potential reprieve several months or years down the line if you have the resources and resolve to see it through.

Do you want to live in a home where your neighbor definitely won’t open a night club next door? Or do you want to live in a home where, in the event your neighbor opens a night club next door, you have a solid argument to make when asking for a restraining order. Keep in mind actually enforcing the restraining order is another matter entirely.

Anti nuisance law allow shops and other small businesses to scattered through area. Zoning does not.

Unless the zone is 'mid-rize residential with small shops and offices', like is the norm in many European cities.

Scope. Anti nuisance laws are specific and targeted whereas zoning laws are overly broad and tend towards central planning of the built environment.

> e.g. not have skyscrapers next to a single story house, but have mostly houses, mostly midrize buildings, mostly skyscrapers,

Yes, but these are ones forcing low density and therefore high housing prices.

I remember being in mexico city where dense residential was near "las minas" ... the mines.

and some people seemed to be pulling their water out of the ground.

what could go wrong?

and the converse is largely true. light and certainly heavy industry needs to be able to make noise, handle hazardous materials and potentially vent noxious substances. children and heavy machinery don't mix.

we can reasonably argue that retail is different, or that other restriction on height or parking availability are counterproductive - but there seem to be really good reasons for not wanting to mix living and production

yes, one should always remember when reading shit from cato that its an evil PR firm.

Is a good point being made or not?

Not. The problem is not with the existence of zoning.

The effect a new structure has on its surroundings is an extremely important externality to measure and regulate. I want to be able to not only buy or rent land, but also be able to buy or rent land with restrictions on what can be allowed around it.

The most obvious example of when i have this right is when a major polluter pops up in my backyard, but light, noise, traffic, smell, and even view are all thing that should be protected to some extent. Or at least protectable.

Developers do not natively care about these externalities, and zoning is a coarse way of preventing that disconnect from completely destroying cities. It is a very complicated problem, and the cato institute is suggesting that we let investors make as much money as they can at the cost of those externalities, and because they are an evil PR firm, they dress that claim up as being good for the health of cities

Moreover, the fact that the cato institute is an evil PR firm is absolutely a general aegumwnt that the things that they say are bad faith, bad arguments. If you cannot come up with why they are wrong on your own, you should trust the dont trust cato heuristic, because the entire purpose of PR is to dress up evil as good.

Now you're talking.

I agree that zoning shouldn't be done away with entirely.

I think you're mostly right about developers not caring. Even the ones that care on a personal level are still in business to make money, but I really think the word evil is overused and hyperbolic in this situation.

I've done work for developers trying to squeeze every dollar out of a lot. They can be indifferent, greedy, and even antisocial but I haven't encountered evil.

I was surprised to hear that "single-room occupancy" is largely restricted in most residential areas that are meant for single-family dwellings.

What is the difference between "an SRO renter" and "a roommate"? If you share a kitchen and bathroom, aren't you really just roommates? That's how I've always described the other people living in my dwelling when we each have our own bedrooms but share the other areas of the house.

Even in single-family-zoned areas, it's common for two or more unrelated people to rent a property together as roommates, so what's the difference if one of them happens to own the building?

SROs are usually small rooms, like 150 sq ft, with not many common areas besides a hallway, laundry room, bathroom, and a single shared kitchen.

The big difference between SROs and roommates is that your lease is individual, you are sharing amenities with maybe 8-20 people instead of like 3, and you don’t necessarily have things like a shared living room. They’re cheaper than a roommate situation given the drawbacks.

Making them illegal is probably a way to try to keep poor people out of the community. Because they’re single occupancy with shared facilities they skew towards poorer, middle aged single men at least in SF, and are kind of a stepping stone for people getting out of homelessness. I think the concept is great but in practice they seem to often end up slummy

Hmm. The example given in the article is of a married couple who owned a house and had another person renting one room in their house. That's what made me me think it sounds like they took on a roommate, not that they did something that would run against the spirit of a single-family dwelling zone. I have friends now who are engaged and recently bought a house, and are renting out the other bedrooms to two of the (adult) younger siblings of one of the partners, which sounds similar too.

I can see the difference between "roommates" and "boarding houses," but the article's example sounded like something that should be fine in neighborhoods.

Some college towns have elaborate laws to prevent frats, and having adults living together who are not related by blood or marriage is basically outlawed. It’s weird.

These rules are all about keeping different “types” of people apart, for the benefit of one type and to the detriment of another type. It’s discriminatory at its core.

I come from a college town that had similar rules, and it was all about keeping students, most of whom are completely peaceful, from renting rooms in neighbourhoods that are meant for non-students. Even mature students pursing professions or graduate programs. The result? Increase the costs for students by decreasing the supply of housing.

Unobtrusive typo: there is an 'i' missing in restrictive.

No mention of cities' disincentive to do things that reduce property values because of potential litigation, bad press, or reducing their income from property tax.

At least in Toronto, it doesn't work that way. The amount of tax dollars the city wants to collect is set in advance. The value of each property only affects the share of that property's contribution to the tax base. If everyone's property price doubled, then the rate would be halved. https://torontoist.com/2014/01/everything-you-ever-wanted-to...

Yes, when I learned about this practice, that significantly changed my understanding of the NIMBY problem's solution space.

Although high property taxes incidentally constrain NIMBY behavior, they're a cure worse than the disease. It is appropriate for a city like Toronto to be proud of being able to operate with low property taxes. (I'm not going to defend the way CA Proposition 13 distributes the property tax burden between longtime residents and newcomers; but low property taxes on longtime residents should not be considered a problem, ceteris paribus.)

Very cool. I never thought about this approach and seems very fair and would prevent local governments experiencing a lifestyle creep of sorts.

The only nuance is that the city can push more or less of the tax burden onto commercial properties vs residential properties, and they often push a disproportionate amount onto commercial because commercial doesn’t vote.

That’s how it works here - is it not the case everywhere!

Interesting that they start out citing Houston Texas as "the one major city in America that has avoided zoning, was doing well. "

The lack of zoning puts people in houses literally adjacent to industrial hazardous waste and Superfund sites. Kids and dogs literally end up playing in hazardous waste, and when the regular hurricanes come, the zone is flooded, spreading the industrial waste directly into residential areas, e.g., [0,1].

But no, because they can cite evidence from a century ago that zoning was used in some cases for exclusionary purposes, it must all be bad.

I've lived in towns that abandoned zoning, and the only ones it benefits are the fly-by-night land developers, and it is not many years later that it is restored. But that only happens AFTER the abominations that everyone hates are now set it stone, and all they can do is try to prevent more.

[0] https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/harvey-toxic-waste...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/floods-health-hurricane-harvey-to...

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