If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so.
Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.
Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.
I get the libertarian impulse to let people do what they want with their property, but it seems like part of that freedom should be the right to move into areas where there are zoning restrictions.
Growth has to happen in the long run. We have the same zoning as we did before the people looking for housing were born.
We can have incremental changes, or we can have sudden change. It's going to happen predictably or with a ton of political conflict. The better solution is always to allow a self-reinforcing pressure release on housing. I've long said that everyone should be allow, by right, to expand their housing by 2x the median building unit within a half mile radius, by units, sqft, and height.
Suburban neighborhoods then slowly turn into duplexes over one generation, then row houses over another, then finally start building up after a third generation. Predictable, fair, and sustainable.
It's insidious, but as long as you allow people to regulate how much housing their neighbors can produce, it always gets this bad eventually.
The pace is limited, but the URBAN output increases exponentially, which is exactly what we want.
The problem is that the most in demand areas get new buildings at 4-6 stories, and then you get locked up - the airspace above them becomes unavailable for 50-100 years, when there was market demand for some taller buildings from the beginning. It's the same "push down and spread out" that causes sprawl, just more localized.
People respond to incentives.
Yes, that’s the point. The policy only really changes things when prices become extreme, and the cost per unit of housing becomes completely detached from the cost of building that same unit.
This is trivially happening in much of San Francisco and New York City.
This is not sustainable. The good news is that, due to demographic shifts, we might have a glut of housing in 20 years.
These urban housing crises in every major western country have nothing to do with population growth and everything to do with population concentration.
We should expect this problem to accelerate during periods of population decline, because there will be even stronger economic incentives to move into concentrated population centers.
The Supreme Court upheld it a hundred years ago, in 1926, after batting down previous efforts by the same people to explicitly ban black people from neighborhoods. They realized that since black families couldn't afford houses by themselves (they needed to buy houses with two or three families together), they could get around it with single family zoning. Ever wondered why it isn't called "house" zoning? Because it was segregation.
The appellate court in the case threw out zoning, because it was so obvious that it was about race. The Supreme Court overturned it by ignoring the entire appellate court decision and defining a building itself (apartments) as a nuisance, instead of making the petitioners regulate actual behaviors. Because the behaviors weren't the problem, it was the black people they didn't want.
Sorry - this riles me up. :)
You should absolutely not be able to have a say over how much housing your neighbor builds. Sure, if they make noise, or bad smells, or bright lights, THAT you should be able to regulate. But the outcomes of having a say over how much housing your neighbor can build is the strongest root of a whole host of issues - from CO2 to obesity to high commute times and traffic to municipal budget bloat. It causes sprawl. Increasingly, parts of the left and right are starting to realize we need to overturn it.
I have heard of laws that prevent the construction of structures that shade other properties (skyscrapers) or block views of the ocean. If those are apparently legal, why not a law that says you can't build a big apartment complex that would greatly increase traffic, for example?
Higher courts are allowed to overturn lower courts. That's kind of the whole point of the hierarchy.
But regardless, that case was from 100 years ago. Are you saying that the reason people enact zoning laws now is the same? I love living in a suburb and would be equally displeased whether my neighborhood turned into apt complexes, regardless of the complexion of the residents.
I'm unclear how this applies to zoning rules voted on by the people who live in an area. There is not an intermediary "zoning regulator" who is capturing anyone. Similarly, there is not a constituency that is being "captured" inappropriately. It is literally just a group of people deciding how they want to live.
If this is regulatory capture, then so is having laws against automatic weapons and speeding.
I don't know why you think that the only reason someone might want their suburban neighborhood to stay suburban is the color of their neighbors' skin; perhaps that says more about you than anything else.
If you're open to some books about this, or study work, I'd be happy to cite. Are you open to changing your mind?
Similarly, a policy is not a racist policy if it disproportionately affects people of one race or another. If that were the case, any policy that increased the share of taxes paid by the poor, or the rich, would be racist (against black people or Indian people). But I believe that any change in tax rates is not intrinsically racist, which is what an outcome/correlation-based definition would require.
You're free to share links, but TBH I think we're speaking different languages here. You've also not answered my point about regulatory capture, which you seem to define in a novel way.
If you have any relevant documents, feel free to share. The one you shared does not seem to back your definition of racist/racism, let alone provide reasoning for why your preferred definition is superior to the one I use.
For the record, I find mine to be more apt because I find it useful to distinguish between policies that have disparate impact by race/age/wealth/sex/etc., rather than lumping such policies in with those that seek to discriminate against people based on their race/age/wealth/sex/etc. If we call all of those policies "racist" or "sexist" or whatever-ist, then we have to come up a new term like "intentionally racist" to describe the subset of policies where intent is present.
I generally prefer not to have to make up new terms if we have words that already (for many people) have that meaning. But hey, some people just love doing the euphemism treadmill and its equivalents, as here.
I assure you, I am very well-versed on the legal issues regarding disparate impact, race, and sex. I went into this conversation looking to understand what your perspective and motivations are, but little has been provided. I know when to cut my losses though, so I wish you good day.
Zoning has other reasons than racism.
Oversimplifying things down to single causes is an error of thinking.
Zoning and land use code in New Zealand is one of the better examples of structural racism.
In housing law in the United States, we've figured out that because people often use feelings rather than clear statements for their reasoning, we had to pay attention to disparate impact, rather than discriminatory intent.
What you'll find is that in nearly every country, zoning and similar laws originate in or were dramatically expanded to exclude wealth generation by minority groups.
My context is discriminatory urban zoning (à la exclusionary zoning or redlining in the US).
I am not sure there are any examples of that for urban zoning in New Zealand. Please enlighten me if you know better.
I agree there is plenty of history of terrible treatment of maori and their land in NZ, but that is a different topic and not relevant. I admit I am ignorant about the history of urban planning in NZ.
Most of the reason there were any problems there at all was that there was no legal jurisdiction over it, there are still buildings in Hong Kong that have nearly that density with none of the legal issues.
Hong Kong has density sure. But no one would call it cheap density.
There's been a website for the last 20 years called Strong Towns that talks about this a lot if you're interested in learning more.
Having lived this in China, the economics get wonky in dense cities. I’ve never seen the built up area with lots of 30 stories being cheaper than 4 story blocks. And that is in the most zone-agnostic build happy country on earth.
Until then, maybe we work to improve the places where most of us are required to live by our jobs. (And yes, in parallel we can work to reduce the employer-mandated dependence on those areas).
This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are.
The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."
The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely.
We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.
Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for.
And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum).
Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-la...
What? Yes, but you misunderstand.
When you (intentionally) make expanding the housing supply illegal or practically impossible, then you've turned housing into a zero-sum game.