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Comment by ponector | Hacker News Reader

I have a great idea how to solve housing shortage in US: ban single family houses inside and near the city borders. Make 25-mile zone where new construction could be multi family only.

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You don't even have to go that far, just ban single-family-only zoning. The economic pressure to add more units will take care of the rest.

And more generally move zoning to a nuisance basis (as in Japan or Europe), euclidian exclusionary zoning is a root cause of suburbian sprawl and dead areas.

That means local shops can pop up, and city centers are able to progressively transition upwards at the edges (and plots can be upzoned) instead of having a sea of low-density housing suddenly becoming a bunch of skyscrapers.

Zoning is already on the nuisance basis in many places in the US. It means local shops cannot pop up in residential neighborhoods if nobody wants to live near such a shop. If residents are fine with traffic, noise and pests they can vote for changing zoning on any lot to commercial. High density residential is almost the same, except there are also physical limitations of the infrastructure.

That's specifically not what nuisance basis means. That's exclusionary zoning, and the co-morbid NIMBY-ism.

In a nuisance basis zoning system, an area would not be zoned like that, a business would only be forbidden if it exceeded the nuisance level for the zone.

So in most areas, small stores and restaurants are allowed, because they are low-nuisance businesses. Even in very low nuisance areas, businesses traditionally run out of homes (e.g. very small offices, some forms of medical services, small shops, very small convenience stores / corner shops) could not be forbidden.

Commercial zoning would be for "disruptive" commerces due to traffic, noise, space requirements, sight, ...

So correct me if I get you incorrectly.

1. "NIMBY" is a Redditism for people who are apparently obsessed with the value of their property and do not allow dense residential construction only because the value of their property will plummet due to increased supply (no nuisance concerns are accepted).

2. The very same "NIMBY" do not allow commercial construction because it decreases residential supply and increases value of their property (which they are obsessed with, see #1), no nuisance concerns are accepted.

Did I get it right?

> So correct me if I get you incorrectly.

You do.

> Did I get it right?

No. Neither of your assertions is relevant to a nuisance-based zoning system. That is the point. They're only possible in an exclusionary zoning system, where plots have to be rezoned in order to have any sort of varied activity.

I don't see where am I. Your opinion is that retail is not nuisance is, you know, just your opinion. American zoning is literally based on nuisance - SFH zoning excludes nuisance sources such as multi-family housing and retail, multi-family zoning excludes retail because it's even bigger sources of nuisance than multi-family housing itself and then there is commercial zoning that is free for all.

A more realistic solution is just to remove restrictions that discourage MFH in the first place (zoning height limits parking requirements lot size requirements height requirements regressive fees/taxes)

How to ruin existing suburban neighborhoods in one easy step!

Of course it is not realistic. To reduce housing crisis mean to decrease demand, to decrease prices of already built houses. No one will vote for that. Housing situation will be only worse.

Which cities? Why 25?

This dovetails nicely with the push for WFH.

Hard disagree. With WFH, cities now have beautiful but empty office buildings near public transportation. Those should be turned into housing first.

Why? They could be used as really cheap offices eventually as demand falls.

With WFH, you’ll have unused offices no matter how cheap the rent. There are simply more offices than workers to occupy them. At some point it becomes immoral not to let people live there instead.

People can never live there, it’s not up to code.

You can rent the offices really really cheap.

Change the code and it becomes way cheaper to renovate them. Turn them into dormitory style buildings with communal bathrooms and interior apartments with no outward facing windows

Most married couples would still not prefer them. It would be stuffed by single people that would otherwise be homeless.

That's fine, the married couples can live elsewhere. If the only thing we accomplish is ending homelessness, then that's a major achievement

In practice, in much of the US, it's the commute that drives people into cities (or maybe being young). But I've never lived in a city after school and had no real interest in doing so. Maybe I would have at first but like most tech companies at the time the offices were well outside the city.

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