Zoning for singe-family residences is so bizarrely 1950's, it's ironic that a high-tech place like Silicon Valley would buy into such idiocy.
Increased density, for me, means that my commute is a 5-minute walk as opposed to an hour-long drive. There is a small grocer in the middle of the commute, where I can stop in and make a 2-minute effort to buy a fresh chicken breast and broccoli to cook for dinner.
Being able to live without owning a car is a plus. Owning a car is a pain in the ass, with regards to maintenance and expense. Between Zipcar and easy access to taxis, I have no problem getting from Point A to Point B, and I never have to get my oil changed or a tire fixed.
Having a yard can be a plus (beautiful, room for kids to play tag, etc.) or a minus (mowing the grass is either a chore or an expense).
It is disappointing, as another example, in that I can't call some friends, plug in some guitars and rock out.
Choosing a place to live is a series of tradeoffs. There's a reason why, even at the extreme high-end, there are still options. Given an 8-figure housing budget, one can still choose a farm with room for horses, a suburban mansion, or an urban penthouse. Growing up, I could drive a half hour and see all 3.
From a policy perspective, the US probably overly subsidizes suburban living, but there's no reason to declare one style of living as best for everybody.
The most maddening thing for me about this issue is that removing density restrictions in inner cities actually makes it easier to live in a detached single-family unit with two cars, since more people living downtown means fewer people competing to use space and freeways out in the suburbs.
You actually get that in the private sector as well, if a municipality doesn't set such rules. The neighborhood I grew up in in Houston had minimum lot sizes and restrictions on subdividing houses for rental, all implemented via contract law. When the subdivision was built, all buyers agreed to set up a homeowners' association and certain rules, which are now conditions attached to the deeds. In an alternate world where Palo Alto had been set up that way N years ago, with subdivision organizations and contract law mandating lot sizes, rather than municipal government setting them, the end effect seems like it would be largely the same, so it doesn't really seem like a government vs. market distinction (at least, unless you restrict freedom of contract enough to make this kind of private-sector zoning impossible).
Is the argument that people shouldn't be able to agree to a contract saying, "I will not subdivide this land, and will only sell it to someone who agrees to the same condition"? I'm not entirely averse to that, but it seems like it's a more complex issue than just allowing whatever the market demands, because there's market demand for these restrictive covenants (people really do sometimes want reciprocal agreements with their neighbors about what each will do with their land), which would have to be prohibited by restricting what kinds of contracts people are allowed to sign.
There is a proposition in the law of property that restraints on the alienation of land are to be avoided whenever possible. restrictions on alienation reduce the fungibility of property and increase transaction costs, reducing efficiency. In some states, e.g. NY, there are limits on what sorts of restrictions on alienation courts will enforce when written into deeds.
Edit: As an addendum, I'm not referring to the "wrong kind" of people. I'm referring to too many people, or a facility with drastically different traffic patterns. Ignoring the "wrong kind" of people thing entirely, I could knock down a few suburban houses, and replace them with super-luxury furnished condo-townhowse-type things that would sell for the exact same as the surrounding neighborhood. This still would be a major change to the community, both in appearance and lifestyle.
They don't have any power in the zoning boards. 100 people could want to buy and build high-density housing in Palo Alto, but 10 people who already own property there could defeat their intentions via the zoning board. There is no reason why the desires of the few should outweigh the demands of the market.
If you don't want to live around high rises, buy up the land around your house. You shouldn't get to achieve the same effect by preventing other land owners from developing their property as they see fit. The zoning laws that allow this sort of behavior just favor existing property owners over future property owners, and lead to globally non-sensical development choices.
> If you don't want to live around high rises, buy up the land around your house
How does this scale? Here's a scenario: 100 people who don't want to live next to high rises but are perfectly fine living next to other single-family dwellings buy up 100 acres of land in LibertarianUtopiaLand and chop it up. They then sign a contract amongst themselves requiring community consent if any of them are going to drastically change their property, and require that any transfer of the land be accompanied by the same provision. Sounds quite familiar.
There's no national regulation saying that every community must use the same planning methods. It just so happens that there's a pretty good model for how the process works so implementing it requires less lawyers.
In the past 10 years, I've lived in a suburban single-family home, a college dorm, a suburban "new urbanism project" apartment, two urban neighborhood houses-that-were-converted-into-apartments, two urban neighborhood apartment buildings built as such, and a downtown high rise.
All of these places have had their pluses and minuses. Depending on what I'm doing at the time, I may prefer one to the other, and I'm happy they all exist (and most certainly, are allowed to exist).
I could see replacing "single family" with some sort of density restriction (people per acre?). What a home entails is not simply a dwelling + piece of land to its borders, but the community in which it belongs. Communities have generally decided that a predictable nature here is desirable, and thus have enacted zoning restrictions.
If you look at Houston, the largest city with no zoning laws, the private sector has effectively re-implemented zoning via contract law in huge sections of the city, in the form of subdivisions where the initial developer set up a homeowner's association, empowered via deed restrictions, that implement similar rules about not only density, but even things like what color you can paint your windows. People clearly seem to like living in that kind of community-managed neighborhood. At least doing it via the actual government, rather than these weird quasi-governments, is more transparent and democratic.
I find that a ridiculous statement when dealing with a country with one of the lowest population densities in the developed world.
Perhaps it's not the best solution for the Bay Area, or perhaps it is (changing it would surely drastically change the character of the area), but that's a far cry from denouncing the very concept.
High property prices is not all that much of a problem unless your goal is the highest population density possible, or for you personally if you're dead set on living there. Rather, it is a market mechanism that if left to work will push the population further out, and benefit people in a much larger region that way.
Zoning is a problem mostly seen from the outside: Of people not living there who don't like that the locals believe the character of their neighbourhoods is more important than opening up for higher population density.
As much as I can sympathize with the desire to live somewhere that is "taken" at a price suitable to you, that's never something you will be able to do without some restriction or other. And the reality is that for a lot of people, those places would be ruined forever if there was nothing holding back rampant development.
Eh. Yes. That's the point. There's plenty of space. Somehow places with vastly higher population densities still manage just fine.
The problem is not lack of space, nor that zoning regulations prevents you from putting up highrises in someones backyard in Menlo Park, but the focus on concentrating more and more people in tiny little parts of it.
The more ridiculous part of it is that a lot of the reason why those specific locations are attractive to a lot of people is exactly the character that would be irreversibly altered if you were to massively increase the density.
Ah yes, as evidence by the endless subdivisions with idyllic countryside names: "Brookfield Estates", "Pinstream Brook", "Riverside Meadows" and the such. I don't see any brooks, meadows, fields, or pines. I just see row after row of cookie-cutter houses connected by meandering asphalt.
The modern suburb has never made much sense to me. You've taken out all the benefits of urban life, and the benefits of the rural lifestyle and what remains is the worst of both worlds.
Note that I'm not some hyper-urbanist who wishes everyone would just live in towering steel contraptions. There is plenty of room for redefining suburbs into something that actually makes sense and is substantially less awful than the subdivisions we have now.