In a city there shouldn't be set backs at all. If you want light buy a bigger lot and set yourself back. If you want a garden move out to farm country or put it on the roof (wasted space to most, as it happens I'm installing solar on my roof today, but even then most of my roof is wasted space)

Fair enough. I was thinking about the typical single-use zoning in the US, where single-family home zone is different from row-house zone. I agree that we'd be better off with urban zones not making a distinction. However, I'll gladly take small changes in that direction (allowing duplexes and ADUs) over no progress at all.

Setbacks are required in cities, otherwise many buildings wouldn't receive any natural light at ground level. Two- and three-story buildings don't really need them, the sidewalk is enough.

Also setbacks help slow the spread of fire if one building catches on fire.

That brings to mind one crank concept for bureaucratic reform of explicitly embedded purpose formatted laws to slow the spread of fire and perhaps "generally accepted solutions" added after testing to skip design approval.

Thus you could use setbacks as firebreaks, firewalls, or say something exotic like aerogel barricades.

Yeah, that's what we did buying in the burbs. Now they want to change all the zoning.

You do own the views in numerous cities due to historical precedent, and cities cant change these laws as it would be considered unconstitutional taking.

I know some mountain and coastal areas actually do have view ordinances, but they're typically very limited (sometimes only to trees, not construction, etc). But, I don't believe that's the norm in most places.

City of Vancouver has a policy of protected public views.

The goal is to make it so that views of Vancouver's mountains are reasonably accessible by anyone, not just those that purchased a north facing suite in a tall condo tower.

It's pretty much the same underlying concept as why we create public parks.

The view cones are scattered around and are usually tied to areas of heavy public pedestrian activity, such as parks.

The policy is very popular.

https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/protecting-va...

That's super neat, thanks for sharing.

As a counter, Seattle doesn't have much comparable. You an buy "air rights" to protect your view, but there isn't a general protection for home-owners. It's fairly common for a small home to be replaced with a newer, much taller, structure, taking neighbor's views with it.

This goes a long way toward explaining the housing affordability disaster in Vancouver.

Not at all. You can look at the map of view cones and see that there's a handful centered around the downtown.

Meanwhile south of there there's about 50+ blocks of untouched single family homes.

The view cones has been no real barrier to development and unlike SF Vancouver is building constantly.

NYC has a very complicated system of buying and selling air rights which is what I was thinking of when I wrote this.