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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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