I don't know exactly how to feel about this. On one hand, I'm in complete agreement that property owners should get to decide how much (if any) parking they build. On the other hand, I don't like this is codified at the federal level.
Local control of zoning leads to weird incentives where multiple bordering municipalities in the same metro area both want the other ones to upzone, bring in more people and business (lifting up the whole metro area) while they themselves stay downzoned. The result of this game of chicken is that nobody upzones.
CA and WA have had some recent wins with state-level zoning reform. It's unclear to me that it's needed at the Federal level -- state level seems like it should be enough in almost all cases.
This is also true in other countries. When a city grows everybody agrees that we need to expand the city and build new city districts. But it's always the other neighbouring municipalities who is better suited.
Dense places do not have the tools to correct the problem themselves due to the coordination problems mentioned in the parent comment. It's a pure game theory situation where nobody wants to act first.
One could imagine a more targeted law that only applied to municipalities within X distance of a Y population density municipality, so you try to sharp-shoot the satellite suburbs that want the benefits of big-city density without the costs. But such targeted laws are also pretty hard to get right.
Nobody wanting to act first doesn't mean they can't correct the problem. It means they don't. The federal government doesn't need to be involved in this.
It's too early to call this a win. In my personal experience, giving decision making power to those without intimate knowledge of an area generally leads to poor results. There is a total mismatch incentives. Local residents are heavily invested in their town and want to keep it nice. Non-local officials, however, have no ties to the community and are willing to damage communities to meet some political objectives. Two personal examples:
1. The state government constructed a bridge over a small creek by my condo on the outskirts of NYC. They performed a traffic study saying this would have no impact on traffic, but locals knew this to be a lie and no one wanted this completed. When there's no traffic, this bridge saves you 5 minutes from driving to the next crossing. Now that this crossing has been completed, it's basically become an additional lane of the highway during rush hour. It's extremely dangerous to walk around as frustrated motorists speed through red lights. If you need to run an errand with your car in the morning, you need to leave at least an hour for a trip that used to take 15 minutes.
2. In the town I live now, there are certain roads maintained by the county. You can tell which ones are which because crossing the county roads as a pedestrian is extremely dangerous. Multiple kids have been hit by cars this year. The county doesn't care and the town is powerless to change the county roads.
I really believe that it's important that locals have the power to influence their environment that impacts their day-to-day life.
Also, I hate how every issue in the U.S. is framed in a way that conveniently leaves out the capitalist class. Like yea, our housing issues are definitely caused by those damn NIMBYs who like their homes, not the investor class who owns 50 million housing units and are heavily subsidized by the federal government.
"An originalist understanding of the Constitution would consider parking mandates a taking of property in violation of the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause protections, incorporated against state and local governments by the 14th Amendment. Congress would therefore be empowered to pass legislation to protect individuals' rights from these parking mandates."
It seems internally inconsistent to apply originalism to parking at all in the sense that there is no original thought on cars at the time of the drafting of the constitution simply because cars had not been invented yet.
See Bruen where a lack of laws regulating guns indicates public carry is a right rooted in historical tradition vs. Dobbs where a lack of laws regulating abortion before quickening does not. [1]
The conservative legal movement has turned constitutional interpretation into a shell game where choice of framing and selective use of historical examples can yield whatever result the justices already want.
All of that said, the argument is that parking minimums constitute a restriction on your property rights for public use without compensation and a similar argument could be made with things that did exist at the time such as carriages. Again see Bruen where Thomas "refutes" a weapon ban by arguing handguns are more analogous to daggers than to lances.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4187143
There is no taking, because the restriction is already voluntary, and in consideration of mutual benefit of like-zoned neighboring property being similarly restricted.
It's obviously evolved into something else, especially as seen by the public, but that philosophy remains the legal foundation for it.
Even if zoning changes require approval, only the property owner can determine the original zone, and only he can request changes.
Buying zoned property, knowing the extant restrictions, is essentially opting-in "voluntarily". It's the same reasoning for why "grandfather" exemptions exist (no original consent).
What this federal argument is actually for, possibly without realizing it, is a method/mechanism for contractural/ municipal/ jurisdictional succession and/or nullification.
Those are the terms that need to be thought of in context of this discussion.
I have no idea where you live, but I assure you that in many places the authority have jurisdiction can in fact just change the zoning of property you already own.
That's not really true. The various states are (and always have been) unitary states from a political governance perspective. As expressed in modern jurisprudence, the majority of states are Dillon Rule states: states where local governments are purely creatures of the state government, and whose powers (or even existence) can be expanded or abrogated at the sole pleasure of the state.
> and the federal government exists solely to pass laws that affect the entire country, about matters that the states can't handle themselves the way they want, and it's supposed to still be kept as minimal/small as possible.
This is somewhat more true, but it's still a pretty poor reflection. Recall that the US Constitution was not the first form of government the US had: it was a response to the issues with the Articles of Confederation, which had the "federal" government as much, much weaker. It's not even fair to call the US a federal government at that point; the notion of a federal state--two levels of government, each with their own, independent locus of power not derived from the pleasure of the other--was more or less created from scratch for the Constitution.
The Constitution does limit the powers of the federal government to, broadly speaking, two areas, with a third later being developed via amendments. These are international affairs (both in treaty making and military developments) and commercial regulation, with enforcement of civil rights later coming into play. Now, it's the case that things like the EPA or FDA aren't mentioned by the Constitution, but that kind of regulatory authority just didn't exist when it was written, and the existing grants of commercial regulation strongly suggest that it is intended for the federal government to have that regulatory authority to provide a single, integrated market among the several states of the union.
That said, this zoning bill seems constitutional, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35875405
Explain this. Feds aren't taking money from states, the federal income tax for example is in addition to state tax (if any). There is no federal sales tax.
Any serious consideration of the sovereign state died in the civil war (Texas constiution included).
So? That support is guaranteed to them by the constitution, and is the justification for federal taxes. Still taking the taxes, but discriminating how they distribute them based on constitutionally-protected state activity, is illegitimate and counter to the spirit (and I believe letter) of the constitution.
It's like an employer withholding part of your wage because he doesn't like your conduct outside of work, despite your contract not placing any limits on that behavior. And when you complain, he replies with "well you couldn't earn this much money on your own".
Or perhaps a better example is being denied Medicaid or police protection, because of some otherwise legal conduct.
When the federal government gets two-thirds of all tax revenue and use it as a cudgel to circumvent its prescribed limits, it's a mandate. "States can refuse the mandate and the money" is possible only when state and federal tax receipts are at similar levels.