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Comment by estearum | Hacker News Reader

It's not really.

If you have cheap, abundant land it makes no sense to build densely.

Look at Houston with ~zero zoning laws and ~infinite sprawl.

"A neighborhood" in a high-sprawl suburb wouldn't be able to support local mixed use amenities because even singular "neighborhoods" are gigantic enough to warrant driving across them. Once you're in the car, why would you go to the place 2min down the road instead of the far superior place 8min down the road.

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Houston doesn't have zoning laws, but it does have private deed covenants enforced by the city which effectively work as zoning laws. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Neighborhood/deed_restr.h...

These allegedly cover only ~25% of residential lots in HTX (mostly the wealthy ones). So sure that's a similar tool and probably distorts things, but I would be very shocked to hear this is anywhere near as important as the infinite supply of ultra-cheap land on the outskirts of town plus public subsidized roads (which will eventually bankrupt the city).

Houston has these, parking requirements, etc. I would argue if anything that mandatory parking requirements have a larger impact than zoning. Parking lots themselves push things farther apart and make not driving unpleasant.

I agree with you but I don't believe the marketplace does. If you get rid of parking requirements in Houston I doubt you'd see a significantly different development pattern because ultimately people there actually do need to park their cars.

If you remove parking requirements then the marketplace can discover the right amount of parking. Parking minimums keep the amount of parking artificially high.

That's kind of eliding the whole point of parking minimums (which I also hate, by the way). Parking is a classic tragedy of the commons issue where each individual developer would prefer not to build any parking and externalize that cost onto nearby lots/public streets/following developers.

In fact developers did do this, and "the market" responded by creating regulations that prevent it. Which are obviously causing their own set of serious problems.

It only makes sense to sprawl like in Houston if you never mind spending 3-4 hours commuting to work and back. Or if you can't afford anything better.

Ask well-paid people who keep renting apartments in Manhattan, or in downtown SF, to say nothing of Tokyo or Seoul.

I realize "makes no sense" carries a double meaning here. I am speaking of the system-level decisions which end up actually producing infrastructure. You're right that sprawl is absolutely inhumane – we should absolutely nudge processes/incentives such that it's discouraged, but doing so is not as simple as just "get rid of zoning."

Average commute time in Houston is just under half an hour (depend on which source you read, varies from 26-29 in my quick search). Sure you can do commutes more than an hour long, but people generally don't - if they get a new job more than about half an hour away they will move.

> It only makes sense to sprawl like in Houston if you never mind spending 3-4 hours commuting to work and back.

Much easier to do with self driving cars though. Remember the promise? “Take a nap in your car and arrive at your destination” or “be productive on your commute”.

I live well out of Boston/Cambridge. These days, I rarely drive in. (Mostly for flights or the occasional theater). I would absolutely go in more if someone/something were driving me for a reasonable cost. I'm actually fairly convenient to commuter rail but doesn't really work except for commuting during the day which I very rarely do.

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