Changing conditions within an incredibly dense metro area are part of the terms and conditions into one moving there. If you want land, there's plenty of space for it -- outside the city as opposed to where people have a pressing need to work and live without spending hours commuting and are willing to put up with the density. It is unreasonable to expect things to stay static when so many lives depend on things changing.

Chances are that a 50 story building isn't going next to a single family home without serious changes to the entire block. More likely, people want to build multi-families which are not going to ruin your sunlight. Additionally, changing all of this takes a lot of time, just because zoning may be relaxed doesn't mean overnight its going to turn in to Manhattan or Hong Kong as opposed to Paris which largely is ~6 stories and not particularly known for being a hellhole.

It is immoral to always in favor of the people lucky enough to have bought at the right time. Surely it is a difficult balance, but chances are your home has appreciated enough to give you a lot of options too.

Who's going to buy the home at the original price, let alone an appreciated one, if it's now next to a paper mill?

It doesn't make any sense to assume that someone would want to buy Home A, tear it down, and build a paper mill there, but that nobody could ever want to buy Home B next door and build a profitable venture there as well. Often in these situations, housing values go up, because the opportunity exists to build something more valuable than a house.

Furthermore, when you buy a house, you are a taking a risk. You're making an investment. I don't see why the rest of the world should be bending over backwards and living in stasis to protect your investment. If you want absolute control over what happens on your block, buy your block.

I think if you look a little harder you can find entire neighborhoods of homes becoming worthless because of industrial ventures nearby but I guess your theory sounds nice on paper.

That doesn't contradict my point, as I never claimed that was impossible for housing values to depreciate, only that the alternative happens "often". Specifically:

You're treating all real estate as if it's the same, but the world is more complex than that. We're talking about dense metro areas, where development primarily happens to support growing populations and an influx of businesses. How many expensive homes in downtown SF have become worthless because of industrial ventures nearby? Far, far, far less than have become extremely valuable, if any. This isn't just some theory on paper.

Are we? I was responding to a claim that property owners should have absolute rights to build whatever they please on their property. Nobody builds big smoke stacks in the middle of major cities anymore but you could refer to some 19th-Century writing about London to see how that could be bad as well. Or you could read about the time the Thames stank so bad Parliament all had to leave and was finally compelled to do something about waterway pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink

In short there are a lot of reasons to want to regulate what people build.

As far as I can gather from jeffbax's comment, yes, that's what he was talking about. Not giving property owners absolute rights to build whatever they please. I don't know how many people would seriously support going to that extreme.

The exact question I was answering was "Why shouldn't land owners be able to build whatever they want on their own property?" I imagine he must be a hardcore libertarian because there are a bunch of them here and that is the question he asked and not some other one about mixed zoning.

Oh I see. Yes, he did say that further up, and I think your reply to that was correct. However when he got specific in his next comment and talked about dense metro areas, I don't think your reply was valid, and that's what I've been responding to.

I think, given the context, that what I said is equally true of dense metro areas and suburban neighborhoods that happen to be near shale gas.

As long as they follow the noise and disturbance ordinances, then sure.

Are you suggesting that nightclubs should be banned altogether? If not, then where do you suggest to put them since they are inherently noisy?

That's where zoning comes in. Residential, commercial and so forth. NYC has dozens of zoning codes (eg., R6, R2, https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/zoning/districts-tools/re... is just a link to R and there are links on the left to C and the rest), and re-zoning requires a complicated political process. There's no chance of a nightclub opening up next door, but there's plenty of chances a few blocks aware where light industrial is being rezoned.

It's more complicated than Sim City ever was.

Are we talking through each other because I feel like we are arguing the same point.

jzymbaluk said "Why shouldn't land owners be able to build whatever they want on their own property? It's not your backyard, it's your neighbors property" which screams "No zoning" to me.

Then "saagarjha" said "As long as they follow the noise and disturbance ordinances, then sure." which screams "the market will naturally balance homeowner satisfaction with factories/businesses".

I responded with "Are you suggesting that nightclubs should be banned altogether? If not, then where do you suggest to put them since they are inherently noisy?" as without zoning, homeowners, businesses, and factories could be right next to each other.

Overall the point I was trying to get at “if they follow the rules, then I don’t care if they’re next to my house”. Ideally there would be rules protecting me from annoyance such as noise pollution. Zoning rules would allow those that require more lenient regulations their own place to stay (note: this isn’t a NIMBY argument. It’s a “follow the rules” thing, which ideally should be constructed in a way to make it possible to build these while still not making it horrible for everyone else living there, and not putting any other restrictions just because I don’t want it next to my house).

I see the rules more as an instrument for guaranteeing a certain quality of life and less as an end unto themselves.

GP point, I believe, is not to ban them as long as the conform to zoning code. If zone code allows his neighbor to convert to a nightclub, good!

:/ I understand the reasoning for zoning and don't have a better solution. Thus I am generally for zoning.

I was responding to (middle OP?) "Why shouldn't land owners be able to build whatever they want on their own property? It's not your backyard, it's your neighbors property" and "As long as they follow the noise and disturbance ordinances, then sure."

Those former seems to suggest getting rid of zoning altogether which would cause horrible negative externalities IMO. The latter assumes noise disturbances would somehow balance the market which I highly doubt.

"It technically complies with the law"seems like cold comfort. Anyway you're just moving the locus of struggle from the approval process to the zoning regulations, since anyone with their head screwed on is going to demand that the city council use the law to block a development like this.

Yeah, I understand that zoning is often used as a way to discourage building things that people don’t want built. But my idea was that hopefully there’s a way to make zoning “work”. I have no inherent issues with a nightclub; I just think it would be better from a noise perspective to put it downtown where it’s not going to bother other people.

I don't really get what you mean; that's the whole point of zoning and an approval process. What's your objection to that way of doing things?

Nothing, as long as it's not abused to make sure that nothing ever gets built.

It could be a night-chess-club, after all?

If the area is zoned to permit such facilities then perhaps having a house their isn't the best idea. Areas zoned residential don't have such issues.

His exact words were "Why shouldn't land owners be able to build whatever they want on their own property?" Zoning also prevents this sort of absolute freedom.

The problem is that you are regulating a proxy rather than the externaility.

Having laws about quiet times and public smells prevents the nightclub and abbattoir from locating there without blocking usages.

So actually, Japan does something like this. Residences can be built pretty much anywhere (except near super heavy industry), because their zoning is all about how much of a nuisance something is. They also don’t have strict usage restrictions like Euclidean zoning in the states. So for example, if something is zoned for medium commercial (making that up), you can build everything from commercial “down” (so to residential), which allows mixed use too.

And let’s not be flippant. Nobody wants the ability to build anything anywhere, but it’s eaually absurd to not build much of anything at all. You can have density and affordable housing and a good quality of life; lots of cities do it already!

There was a fantastic post about how zoning in Japan works a couple months ago: http://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zonin...

I don't think I'm being flippant. The guy asked why you shouldn't have absolute freedom to build whatever you please on land you own.

Which cities are the best examples?