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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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