Yes, zoning is used to insulate and even inflate the local property market and preserve home values; no that doesn’t make it morally justifiable to tell your neighbors how they can use their property.
> The real prospects of the lack of zoning is something that nobody wants, which is why literally every civil place in the world has zoning.
Calling Houston uncivil is a subjective judgement I can’t objectively falsify, and so is calling its residents “nobody”, but the latter act strikes me as ironically uncivil, and IMO not in line with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments.
The real prospects of the lack of zoning is something that nobody wants, which is why literally every civil place in the world has zoning.
The failure in the 'property rights' argument is that what's built on one property affects the other - there are externalizations.
What is built on one plot, affects the materiality (and value) of the others.
These arguments exist only on HN and other boards, thankfully.