If someone can make money by building a store, that's great, what's wrong with it?
Zoning should be about keeping truly noxious activities away from residential areas, not about keeping a corner store away from where people could possibly walk to it.
The net often gets cast too widely though - so that the corners stores can't be built either.
I live in a quiet mostly rural neighborhood. I wouldn't object to a corner store replacing the nearest house. I would object to the house and all of its land getting cleared to drop a home depot in.
Unfortunately, zoning regulations prohibit both - as if there were no difference between them.
There can be plenty of things wrong with it. I don't subscribe to the idea that whatever makes money is instantly the best thing.
And I never said that I want to keep corner stores away from where people could walk to it. I said that leaving everything up to the "free market" doesn't always yield the best solution for everyone. It only yields the most profitable solution for those with the money.
That's currently what we have; nothing at all resembling a free market where you can buy a piece of property and more or less do what you want with it. The rules and regulations in place are absolutely about enshrining the car-centric city.
With a more market-oriented solution, some people could have their "burbs" and others could have other kinds of housing and neighborhoods.
Developers generally aren't the ones pushing for restrictive zoning laws, residents are. For decades Americans have lived under the impression that businesses near homes is somehow a corrupting influence, and that putting businesses far from homes is somehow a feature and not a bug.
The current suburban landscape in America is the result of both overzealous urban planners, too eager to create a magnum opus of central planning, and the residents who eagerly bought into the concept believing that the best life is a carefully manicured, highly restrictive one.
This is also why I'm skeptical of YC's thing here - this smells lot like how these misadventures in central planning have begun in the past. Sam's thought elsewhere about relocating startups to help bootstrap the new city's economy is also a bit disconcerting - these exist, they're called company towns, and they tend to be economically fragile (all non-diverse economies are) and good examples of central planning run amok.
I sincerely hope anyone applying to this is very well versed in urban planning and its history world-wide, because there have been many misadventures in planning, and those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
I think this is one of the most insightful comments here vis a vis YC's plans, and it's one of the reasons I'm in the "markets" camp. I know I'd prefer to see more mixed-use, bike/pedestrian friendly cities, but ultimately I'm wary of even my own "plans" and think the freedom to have people doing different things, and let cities evolve naturally beats even the best of plans.
Very, very economically efficient with huge economic diversity and competition, but nonetheless unpleasant (and unsafe!) in many ways.
Complete freedom is likely not the right answer, but neither is the extremely prescriptive type of planning that has dominated American cities since the 50s, the type that Jane Jacobs rails against in her famous book.
Oddly enough we were really good at this between the late 1800s and early 1900s. The places in America that people continue to enjoy being (and now have become enormously unaffordable) have almost all come of age in that era. I'm still not entirely sure what the x-factor was, but part of it was probably a more "gardener/enabler" philosophy to urban planning than the "prescriptivist/masterpiece" thought that dominates now.
Planning in many places in that era was more about setting the foundations for the market to grow productively, rather than monumental projects designed to micromanage the conditions of every day life. See for example the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 in NYC.
I agree with you completely: I'm not a 'markets' guy because I think they're the answer to all problems all the time, but because I think in this case we could use more of them.
Back then there was no metro, there was a sea of private jitneys and buses fighting each other for bus stops. Traffic safety was utter shit.
The government had minimal involvement in food safety. Private "certifiers" sprung up to plug the gap, but piracy of food safety certification stamps was rampant, and the whole having to check the packaging to see if some product was certified safe by your preferred certification provider was a persistent stressor.
Building codes technically existed but enforcement was non-existent. Partial building collapses were common. The skies were a tangle of wires running overhead from competing TV, phone, and other companies, each of which needed their own set of last-mile infrastructure. A lot of it was poorly installed, accidental electrocutions weren't uncommon. It was all kind of Blade Runner-esque in hindsight.
The way I see it, I lived in the libertarian paradise some HNers dream of creating, and it wasn't really all it was cracked up to be.
Absolutely. I remember way back when there was discussion of what to do with the huge plot of land north of us. Corner store, maybe? The local paper quoted someone in the neighborhood, "who's going to walk to the store in the rain (which a suburban of Seattle gets a bit of)?" Umm, maybe all of the people I see out walking when I'm walking the dogs in the dead of December in the dark and the pouring rain? Back to California with you Mr. NIMBY, the rest of us deal with walking in the rain just fine.
But that's probably the guy that shows up to zoning meetings and I'm...not. Yes, I'm lazy and yes, I should fix that.