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Comment by nlavezzo | Hacker News Reader

> If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.

The reverse could also be said - if you don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country. You can do pretty much whatever you want in rural areas without significantly impacting your neighbors.

People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason. Creating some guidelines to create a desirable, pleasant and safe environment for them and their families is totally reasonable and has been the historical norm for most of the history of civilization.

Of course things can get out of hand and over-reaching. If the people decide together to change it though, they can. I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.

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> I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.

It has to be, because the in-group, i.e. the people already living there don't accrue the cost as that falls on the out-group, the people who need to live there (job etc) but cannot. Its the essence of a "f** you i got mine attitude"

Same thing with building codes. Make them more onerous to increase construction costs. Then lol all the way to the bank when you grandfather your own house in, increasing your own property value as it is now impossible to build a house as economically as your own. Sprinkle in some "think of the safety of the children" for good measure, no matter the fact your own house is justified as safe enough to stand.

San Francisco is 2/3rds renters, all of whom can vote. You shouldn't pretend that they have no say in how their city is run.

If they want more rentals and more density, they have the power to vote for people who can make it happen. Instead they vote for people who talk a lot about preserving the character of San Francisco.

Everyone can vote? American Samoans, green card holders, various non-citizen immigrants? I thought SF was unusually immigrant rich.

There are a ton of people in SF who are paying sizeable taxes and rents with no vote in these matters. It's quite likely they are disproportionately renters.

These renters mostly live in rent-controlled apartments, so they don't have the same interests as people who might want to move there.

To be clear, my comment was more a reaction to what I perceived as the idea that any zoning of residential areas by the community that lives there is unacceptable and that you should be able to do literally anything that's not actively endangering your neighbors. That would result in most neighborhoods being much less pleasant due to a few owners deciding to do things against the interests of the many.

I think the "community" can also extend to something as large as California. If California as a community decides it's in the best interest of that community to loosen some zoning restrictions in particularly high demand areas, fine. Do it with thoughtfulness and as much respect for existing owners' interests as possible while still accomplishing the desired objective. That's similar to a smaller community deciding to change the rules to account for some new undesirable behavior of certain community members.

In-group/out-group aren't great terms to use to make that point.

I and many others who don't live in the Bay Area see ourselves as an in-group relative our out-group -- the people who have to live there.

This is America, land of the free, home of the property rights. It's a weird imposition to say that I can't build exactly what I want on my property (assuming it's safe). It's a totally fair thing to say that if you want full control over what can be built adjacent to your house buy a ranch in Montana.

Don't want a skyscraper in downtown SF? Buy the plot. Can't afford it? Sorry, you're getting neighbors. You shouldn't try and bog them down with a nightmare bureaucratic process of shade measurement and bird counting.

It's a good thing.

What’s wrong with the alternative of sane zoning instead of “just buy the plot”?

All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.

Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?

> What’s wrong with the alternative of sane zoning instead of “just buy the plot”?

Honestly, this is sane zoning. The Japanese model is very effective. They saw roughly 0% growth in housing prices from 1990 to present. Housing in downtown Tokyo is affordable. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Tokyo is an abomination, it's a top-10 world city is basically every ranking.

> All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.

Some of them! Not all of them. Some of them want a place to live within an hour of work, and for them that's more important.

For those that want that they can (a) buy the land around them necessary to make that happen (b) lobby the city around them to buy the land necessary to make that happen (a 'park') or (c) move somewhere like-minded people live.

> Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?

Why should the person who got there first decide what other people get to do? That's not even democracy, that's just gerontocracy.

I think many people would consider Tokyo an overbuilt hellscape and never want to live there. I much prefer Santa Monica.

Obviously not the 14M people who live in Tokyo. Those buildings aren't empty! Population of Santa Monica is 91,000, which is what the population of Tokyo would be if nobody wanted to live there :)

If the density becomes problematic, buy the land, or mosey on.

This to me is the least compelling counter-argument. "Nobody wants to live in a big dense city" is like saying "nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic!" You personally don't, but obviously, we can tell by inspection that's simply not a true statement in general.

Which brings us back to "but I got here first!" which is to me, the second-least compelling argument.

If you don't own stock in a company, you don't vote in its governance decisions.

If you don't own a car, you don't determine when to wash it.

If you don't own a property, you totally still get to determine what to do with it by being a whiny neighbor. Why is this OK?

I'm very-much onboard with the "put up or shut up" model of zoning. If you want the place to be empty, you should own it and keep it empty.

Exactly. These people dont want to actually pay the costs to keep things as they are because really it's about property prices.

>All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.

People want all sorts of things. Walkability, transit, cafes, restaurants, recreation, jobs. Some do prefer the particular brand of quiet offered by the suburban form, but because it's the only thing you're allowed to build, lots of us who do not want it are forced into it.

> don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country

Shouldn’t this be the message to a suburban homeowner clinging to the past? Move to the country. Buy land around you. Don’t tell others what they can and cannot do on property you don’t own.

Devil’s advocate: they did. 50+ years ago they moved to a sleepy suburban town that through no fault of their own became a center of a worldwide tech revolution. Things change, sometimes dramatically. A place in the country you move to today can also transform 50 years in the future if you’re unlucky.

There's no right to be free from change. You may need to keep moving around if you're after a specific ethos or aesthetic on the land you don't own. Your early arrival shouldn't have permanent supremacy over your neighbors plot of land. Don't want a building there? Buy the land. Can't afford it? Prepare some welcome gifts for your new neighbors.

> they did

They didn’t. If they bought the block, or easements on it, they would have. But they bought a plot. Others bought adjacent plots. Now they’re arguing they get to tell the adjacent plots what they can and cannot do.

That was the deal at the time they bought it, and priced in.

That may have been the purchaser's expectation, but their deal was with the seller (and bank), not the community in general. In none of the legal papers I signed when purchasing my home was any arrangement with the city constraining future construction nearby. That's done with my vote (so without much effect) and any political action I can spur.

Devil's devil's advocate: The world is not static. No one can reasonably expect nothing to change over the course of half a century. The only constant is change itself, and you have to deal with changing situations. Maybe it made sense as farmland 50 years ago, but if it makes sense as apartment blocks now, by God put apartment blocks on it then. The collective value to all those new tenants massively outweighs the downside to the single existing landowner (who stands to make a huge payday anyway!).

Not sure if I'd consider an unprecedented explosion in property-based generational wealth unlucky...

And at the cost of the character of their neighborhood changing, their property valuation rose to the point that they can now live almost wherever they would like to. Countless people have to see their neighborhood change without the financial windfall they got.

I mean… there's a balance, right? People should be able to mostly do what they want with their own property. At the same time, they should be able to come together to make collective decisions about their towns/cities/neighborhoods. Each of those has a bad outcome if taken to the extreme.

> At the same time, they should be able to come together to make collective decisions about their towns/cities/neighborhoods.

That's exactly what's happening here. Californians have collectively decided that zoning laws need to change. If the current actions by the state are somehow unreasonable, how could the original zoning provisions ever have been considered reasonable in the first place?

Sure, but we should apply 'strict scrutiny' to that. Strict scrutiny is a legal term meaning in general that isn't a right the community should have, but we will make exceptions for really bad things only. (you have free speech, but you can't just yell fire in a crowded area. There are things you cannot do on your land, but they should be very limited.

Again this is where we are getting into what it means to own something. Do I own the property or not? If my neighbors want to get together and buy my house from me because they want to do something with it, then they are by all means allowed to do so.

Nobody in the US, and indeed most of the world, "owns" their property. Try not paying your property taxes, and see where that gets you. You lease the right to usus, mostly fructus, and to some extent abusus from the state.

Even if you consider property tax that is legally false.

I'm not sure if you even understood what you're replying to, since this is pointlessly contrarian.

"legally" is an acknowledgement that the ownership is conditional on someone else who has authority about the ownership (ie the practical owner).

This is a reasonable point of view, in theory.

Even then that would mean that the state would have a voice, not the neighbors.

False, much of Alaska has no property tax.

Fair enough. I have looked into this before and that exception has not come up before. Let's say roughly 99.7%+ of people, then.

Where does title revert if you die intestate and with no next of kin?

It goes to probate like any other property.

I feel that this is a misleading. Property taxes are not leases on property but simply a disincentive to hoarding unused land.

Maybe in theory, but functionally it is the same. You don't pay your property taxes, you get a lien, and can eventually, in extreme circumstances, be foreclosed on.

I do not understand your point, really. Obviously, from a legal standpoint, ownership exists. But you say, no, no, no, that's not _reaaaal_ ownership, since I have to pay property taxes.

When most people talk about ownership, when the law talks about ownership, it exists, and I think that is enough for it to exist.

That's okay, it requires some knowledge of rather niche economic philosophies. I'd suggest reading into some philosophy of property, labor, and ownership. Specifically in the right-libertarian and left-anarchist traditions. Start with John Locke and Adam Smith, then move into thinkers such as Marx, Proudhon, George (Henry, of Georgism fame), Nozick, Rothbard, and writers on similar topics.

LVT is a disincentive to hoarding land. Property taxes are incentive to tear buildings on used land down.

This is a great example of how framing makes a big difference.

If I used the same framing, I would say LVT are an incentive to tear down the land (introduce toxic waste, endangered species that can't legally be disturbed, etc).

Or I could say Property taxes are a disincentive to hoarding buildings.

No, you don't own the property. Under what coherent system of thought could you possibly own something that was there before humans existed and will be there after humans are gone, and which you did nothing to create or maintain? Property ownership is a societal construct that we agree to use to improve our lives together. If it's not serving our needs we can change it.

Sure, the name of the social construct is ownership. Therefore, you own it. Because of the social construct.

That is no different from ownership of anything else, including one’s own body. The government has an interest in property and may tax it, but how is that different from auto registration, income tax, or any other tax liability? Someone can be imprisoned for daily to pay income tax, but the government doesn’t own their job or work.

I don't know how it works where you live but I spend an insane amount of my time maintaining my property.

You maintain the property to make it suitable for your needs. But if you didn't "maintain" it, nothing would actually happen to it. It would still be completely usable in 1 million years.

Sure, I don't expect to still own it in one million years.

>Do I own the property or not?

Yes, for the duration that you (and your crew) can defend it.

You will own nothing and be happy /s

An important caveat here is that these small groups are only "nuked from orbit" for the time period that they're out of compliance with a law that has existed for 50 years.

I totally agree that "people living together in a small area" can pretty much do what they want. The only issue is when that starts to screw over other folks, and when all the other small areas get together to do the same.

Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision

> Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision

Totally agree. The state or larger city, etc. is also a community that should be able to make rules that promote the welfare of the great majority over the objections of a small minority, as long as they take care to not harm the small minority unnecessarily. I just think the solution is thoughtful modification of existing codes, possibly forced by larger jurisdictions, and not just a free for all where almost anything goes as was proposed by the parent commenter.

>People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason.

This argument ignores 100 years of research in game theory and development economics. No community is an island, okay except Alameda, but even they are a component of a wider metropolis. The way you set zoning laws and transportation infrastructure influences who comes into and passes through your community — no municipality in the core of a metropolitan area can ever truly behave like a single community organizing its residents' lifestyles.

So you see, for example, an attempt to increase the total property value per resident because it leads to a better school district. You see attempts to block new developments and transit stops because relative popularity may transiently increase the local cost of living, even if it benefits the affordability of the metro as a whole. You see militarized police departments who realize they can't outrun crime but they can certainly outrun Emeryville.

None of these are the products of a community of people democratically deciding what kind of lifestyle fits their particular interests. They are the choices of a faction jockeying for status in the desperate power struggle that characterizes the great modern balkanized American Combined Statistical Area.

>If the people decide together to change it though, they can.

And they did. The decision by the people was to "nuke" current zoning regulations.

Which sounds well and good until you learn that the zoning laws we have are mostly a result of attempting to keep neighborhoods white.

Is this a question of jurisdiction? I mean the people living together in a slightly larger area get to decide together what they want the collective area to be like as well right? Surely local politics can be overruled when the policies start having a material effect on individuals outside of the local jurisdiction.

So you can live in the actual countryside, or the population center curated to be like countryside. So many choices!

What about those of us who actually want to live in cities? The only way cities come to be is incrementally; if an already-settled place cannot intensify then cities cannot exist.

Where this breaks down is cities that do not even have space for their own offspring. Again sticking with my own city of Berkeley, demographic processes, birth rate combined with increasing longevity, means that Berkeley has been exporting young people for 50 years, causing housing crises in those places, too. In what way is that equitable to either the offspring in question or the people who already lived in the other places?

All developed countries have negative demographic growth, if people want to get into very few places this does not make it right. At the opposite end you find the example of hundreds of villages in Italy that are deserted (and many more in less famous countries), do you say they are also exporting population?

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