Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> A developer could likely fit 3-4 nice cottage homes on that lot, sell them for $500-700k, and make a profit

Denver takes 264 days to approve "multi-family or industrial projects with a valuation in excess of $1.5 million, such as a new apartment or office building, large additions" [1]. Construction loans in Colorado cost "8% to 13%" [2]. For a project with $1.5mm up-front costs, from land purchases to permit fees and legal costs, that comes to $87 to 141 thousand per project.

This isn't as bad as San Francisco, where permiting delays alone add hundreds of thousands of dollars to housing costs. But in addition to upzoning, it's something to be considered, particularly since Denver seems to categorise practically all impactful residential development as "major commercial."

[1] https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Of...

[2] https://www.clearhouselending.com/commercial-loans/colorado/...

View on HN

>particularly since Denver seems to categorise practically all impactful residential development as "major commercial."

This isn't an accident. They know what they're doing.

Every municipality tries to do this to the extent they think they can get away with it because it's an end run around your property right. There's all sorts of residential exemptions and precedents and case law and courts and politicians tend not to be in a hurry to screw homeowners because there's tons of them.

By classifying you as commercial it gives them a) all sorts of capricious authority to micromanage the pettiest of details and/or force you to expend money with no recourse except "haha, sue us peasant".

It's absolutely vital to homeowners that no new housing be built, to keep Undesirables from moving in, but they need to do it in a way which leaves no blood on their hands so they can continue to have their In This House signs with no cognitive dissonance.

And this is how they get it: don't make it literally illegal to build housing, but make it economically impossible in practice. Then they can go "welp, nothing's getting built, I guess there's nothing we could've done", and as an added bonus they also get to say "looks like the free market can never fix our housing shortage!"

This is happening in large parts of the EU as well. It's pretty mind blowing. Since the mid 2010s, the new build construction rate has slowed down to alarmingly low levels. A few years before that, there was an oversupply, yet they kept building. It's totally intentional.

Unsurprisingly, affordability is so bad. In lots of major cities, a one-bed rental takes around 50% of a mid-career post-tax salary. You have become an indentured servant for whatever real estate fund owns your property. Lots of regulatory capture behind the scenes.

Ironically, some parts of the UK, including Home Counties, are now much better than most EU, including Scandinavia, with lots of shared ownership and affordable housing schemes. It's really easy. Increasing the supply of homes, in particular first homes, and preventing predatory tactics to constrain supply.

This is why we must overturn zoning - governments should not have the right to tell you how much you can build. Then we have a shot of forcing permitting to be faster. Make the delay a taking!

The delay is a taking

Want to see what no zoning looks like? Find your nearest organic strip mall development road, then imagine that in a neighborhood.

Strip malls exist specifically because the are the unit of commercial development that is incentivized by zoning v1.

In the 1970s-80s You People (TM) (as a group, not you personally because you're not that old, probably) decided you wanted to segregate commercial and residential and you wanted setbacks and min parking. So strip malls became because they became the minimum viable commercial development displacing the right on the street, maybe set back by ~20ft if you have parking (usually 90deg from the road) at the storefront multi tenant commercial buildings that dominated previously.

And so now you say that's ugly, that's not walkable, we want mixed use, we want parking in back, etc, etc.

The problem isn't that your rules were wrong. The problem is that anyone let you micromanage in the first place. So the solution isn't to adopt zoning v2, v3, etc. It's to stop letting you micromanage.

> minimum viable commercial development

This is fundamentally what we're talking about.

A business that requires a retail footprint in 2026 is going to want to do that in the cheapest, most controlled way possible.

If McDonalds could buy formerly-SFH/R lots and build stores with 2 parking spaces + street parking, that's exactly what they would do. There's too much money not to.

We can gripe about zoning's effectiveness in producing "good" cities, but I'm far less sympathetic to arguments against its existence.

Without zoning limits, you get nasty, brutish, and short city lives where sociopathic businesses are concerned.

I'm very very familiar with this topic. The other commenter nailed it - strip malls were caused by restrictive zoning. There's a reason they never happened before so-called "single family" (aka white) zoning started.

Wait, so they are simultaneously purposely not doing anything to help housing, but they are doing it as an evil scheme to let them bypass the free market and... help housing?

That seems like a contradiction.

I think it's unlikely that their motivation is just to torture home owners.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com