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Comment by fosk | Hacker News Reader

The US needs to build more, not cancel zoning. With one of the lowest density in the world (36/km²) this should be a NON issue.

I don’t understand why we are stuck in this loophole of zones, affordable housing and so on. There is plenty of space!

The government could build those homes too if they really cared about it. Heck! Soviet Russia built a bunch of complexes for people to live in, sure they won’t be pretty, but better than sleeping outside. But somehow we can’t build them here in the US and we’d rather spend years and decades discussing existing zoning laws when new ones could be established pretty much all over the nation.

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> The US needs to build more, not cancel zoning. With one of the lowest density in the world (36/km²) this should be a NON issue.

The reason more isn’t being built is zoning.

The subtext of the comment you're replying to is that the cities people want to live in are all full up, and people who want to live there should just go make new cities somewhere else.

Zoning keeps every city from being denser than it could be. Zoning is the problem. There’s no such thing as a city that is full up.

They really aren’t though. Even New York is filled with tons of somewhat wasted space and excessive car infrastructure. Especially in the outer burrows.

It is not just zoning, it's also permits and building codes

No project has ever been cancelled due to building codes.

Permitting can be time consuming (though largely this is a function of zoning and what variances the developer is looking for in order to get to an economic density - which is nearly never “as of right - and what level of community involvement exists in approving these variances) but rarely would permitting on its own be a barrier (it would be the underlying zoning and the NIMBYism that prevents the variances).

> I don’t understand why we are stuck in this loophole of zones, affordable housing and so on. There is plenty of space!

Sounds like you’re in favour of cancelling zoning. Cancelling just means a reevaluation of how and where we allow housing developments on existing space. It means cancelling that ineffective structure system and replacing it with something more appropriate. It means getting to actually build housing on space that didn’t allow it for reasons we’re now questioning and challenging.

The problem isn’t lack of space for housing, the problem is lack of housing in places people actually want to live.

I do wonder why the work from home revolution hasn't produced a big population of people willing to live in the middle of nowhere. Is it because the people able to WFH were already urbanites not willing to live anywhere they can't walk to a Starbucks?

To work from home, you still need quality internet. The further out you get from the city, the worse the quality tend to be.

No sane ISP is going to invest in fiber connections to "middle of nowhere". ISPs invest in areas where the money is likely to be in.

That's not even including the other challenges that the other person wrote; sparse areas tend to have less investments in their infrastructure as well.

People live closer to the city for all sorts of reasons; health cares systems are better, more public infrastructure in place (think cops, libraries, public transportation, etc).

Have you been to the middle of nowhere? It's not glamorous and has a lot of downsides including regressive politics, shitty health care, crappy food options, no nightlife other than the bar that all the local townies drink in before going home to drunkenly beat and abuse their wives etc.

So yea, not surprised folks are signing up in droves to go live in Middle of Nowhere America.

New homes, apartments, etc need to be built where people need the, not wherever there is open space. Building a giant apartment building in the middle of nowhere serves no purpose if there are no jobs there.

And the reason we can't build where people need them is mostly zoning.

If you build an apartment in the middle of Wyoming. Who would move there?

> With one of the lowest density in the world (36/km²) this should be a NON issue.

The issue is traditional working practices. People are forced to cluster in large cities, as opposed to spreading around, particularly where jobs can be done remotely. There's literarly no need to have software engineers, marketing and sales people, customer support, accountants, etc in city offices. This is an issue all over the world where work hasn't adopted modern practices.

So far on this thread as solutions to the housing crisis we've seen:

* Building houses on federally-owned land in the middle of rural Oregon

* Switching everybody to a plant-based diet

* Allowing all the white-collar knowledge workers to work remotely so they'll migrate out of the cities.

I'm sure we'll get other creative ideas too. But eliminating single-family zoning seems a lot simpler.

I get where you’re coming from here, but outside of a few major metro areas most people are spread around, which is precisely the problem. Driving 20 miles (or 30 minutes) to your place of work is not clustering and is causing us all sorts of economic problems. Just Wednesday my dental hygienist told me she drives around an hour to get to the office. That’s an anecdote of course, but that’s a normal thing for Americans. That’s a huge problem.

To your point about big single offices where all of these workers are “in the city” which mostly are spread out suburban office parks, I would agree, which is why we need less sprawl and more people living closer together and clustering around the cities that they are residing in.

Soviet Russia isn’t the example to follow.

Follow Japan then https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danchi

Seriously, this problem doesn’t exist in other places. It has been solved 70 years ago in rest of the civilized world.

Japan is an excellent example to follow, but that’s mostly because they a) don’t treat housing as an investment, Japanese homes basically get written off after 30-50 years and b) don’t have any local control over zoning: if the national or prefectural government says housing is going here, any locals who object can go pound sand.

Both of these would be excellent norms to import into America, but it would come with fierce resistance from the most-likely-to-vote segments of society. I don’t see it happening.

It already is happening. It happened in California, for instance.

I'll take Khrushchyovkas over tent cities any day.

How about we have neither? That sounds good to me.

The reason there isn't more building is because of zoning. In my neighborhood alone multiple requests for re-zoning for higher density was rejected and building didn't happen because of that.

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