Because people love zoning! NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood. It's the main reason zoning exists! Particularly the wealthy people who have the influence to make it happen, but the casual racists of the past century, and middle class yuppies of the past half century, have plenty to answer for.

But it's also clear that bad zoning (like the 2-stack rule) is also an artifact of poor system maintenance. When you design a system, you may put in certain constraints for safety. Over time the system changes, but the entire design and its constraints are not re-evaluated for each change. So eventually you have constraints that are completely out of whack with the current state. Doesn't matter if it's zoning or a microservice architecture, you're going to end up with crappy legacy rules that only get re-evaluated when things break.

Yes some of prefer zoning to "mixed" and "diverse" neighborhoods. What's wrong with me not willing to see a laundromat or an office building next to my house? Or what's wrong with me willing to live in quiet family-oriented neighborhood, where I can let children go outside alone since age of 6-7?

If you’re okay with all of that as the price of you getting to live in an eternally quiet neighborhood (that your children will never have a similar opportunity to live in themselves due to zoning-driven real estate prices going far beyond what standard wages can afford), then sure. As long as you acknowledge what consequences your desires have on wider society, then you can say you think the price is worth it or that you don’t really care.

The problem with zoning, is that it isn't voluntary.

Zoning is assigned by democratically elected administrations. HOAs are restrictive covenants that are required for the purchase of a house. Every single thing identified as NIMBYism could be enforced by covenants, and keeping blacks and Jews out was literally their original purpose.

The first zoning law in the country was in Los Angeles in 1908. Part of the law was crafted to force certain businesses to relocate retroactively. It was crafted specifically to target the Chinese businesses, which were the laundromats. White people just did not want to live alongside Chinese people.

Redlining was a further practice of both bankers and zoning having restrictions which were explicitly racially motivated. Levittown, the first planned community in the United States, was very explicitly "not mixed" - it had racial covenants that restricted blacks or jews from moving in. The intent was to sell more homes, as they presumed white people would not want to live in "mixed" areas with neighbors of an undesireable race. That practice continued throughout planned communities and zoning laws all over the country. Many of those racial covenants are still in place today.

As an aside: you can let your children go outside in most cities. The moral panic over children getting kidnapped or abused if they step foot outside the house has been overblown for decades, and at this point is just a bizarre psychological trope of America.

https://youtu.be/wzBL85kTwwo

State govts have to appeal to a much wider demographic.

Rich people have the power to change the system but they want to maintain the status quo because they are rich and powerful.

It doesn't seem axiomatic to me that rich people will always exist (I'm not sure I even agree that poor people will always exist, despite believing that the guy who most famously said it was divine), and one of the things I have learned from working in an industry with very rich people is that merely being rich is enough to let you influence the rules of the game. If someone was able to argue for tiered zoning, you can pay people to argue for un-tiered zoning. If there's a law preventing you from influencing local zoning, and you're rich, you can go change that law just as easily as it got created. If there's a law requiring certain representation on zoning boards, you can go lobby that representation. If there's a law moving zoning to an "apolitical" government agency, you can fund candidates willing to politicize it. And so forth.

Making people not have that level of influence/leverage in the first place, hard as it might be, seems like the only viable solution.

Delegation of power to local authority is a central concept of American democracy. Do not throw that baby out with the zoning bathwater.

Zoning is extremely important. You should not be allowed to build a factory in the middle of a neighborhood next to a school.

There are certainly bad zoning laws but to say they are all bad is just ignorant nonsense.

I live in an area with occasional grandfathered-in exceptions to zoning rules. There’s a cafe run out of a house, and a butcher shop run on a residential street corner between houses. And its absolutely lovely!

I would have no problem with people making things (“a factory”) next to a school.

But replace cute cafe in your example with a landfill or a cement plant and see if it's still awesome.

This is why some zoning is good.

yes you would, if it were a large plastics manufacturer bringing large amounts of truck traffic and noise pollution and spewing carcinogenic PCB compounds into local atmosphere.

Gigantic factories don’t want to be on small residential streets anyway because they cant fit the trucks in, so I think that argument cuts the other way - there are natural forces that deter that stuff.

Make no mistake, the protection is more often than not for the local tax base. There more than enough examples of zoning changes approved because the change offers a multiple of new tax revenue.

if you're saying, "I was just arguing that one exact example, i didnt say natural forces help for all kinds of other problems that commercial zoning is meant to help", well OK, so I think commercial zoning is necessary for even a less-than-gigantic, but nevertheless distruptive, noisy, and polluting manufacturing facilities being built inappropriately close to schools and residential areas which may nevertheless still be on roads that are fairly or fully accessible by truck traffic". After all the truck traffic could enter in the front of the building's property and the back and sides of the building's property abut said schools and homes in any case. just go look at any commercial property with a lot of trucking and movement going on, it doesn't take much imagination to see how such a thing can and quite often does abut residential areas in any case.

Yeah, I was trying to say that factories specifically want good road access, so zones aren't necessary for that one exact example - your second paragraph. Sorry for being unclear with the phrase "that stuff," which seems to have sent us in the wrong direction.

You say they may be constructed in residential areas anyway - like, maybe the roads are good enough in a neighborhood. I agree with this, but then I'm not seeing what the problem with the factory is. If it's noisy, impose noise restrictions. If it's polluting, impose pollution restrictions. But I don't have any beef with people making stuff as a matter of course.

My position is mostly that zones are the wrong tool for the job. I wish we were more forgiving of mixed-use neighborhoods. If someone wants to run a 3D printing shop next door to a school, more power to 'em.

of course we don't want anything carcinogenic or that dangerous anywhere where people live.

that doesn't invalidate GP's main point that schools need safe and calm environments.

Zoning shouldn't be able to limit how high containers are stacked. If the facility operates in a safe way consistent with OHSA laws, the municipality should come in with a half baked zoning law that prohibits an otherwise reasonable operation from working effectively.

In my travels I have found that many communities across the US seem to generally fear use of height. I've always found this odd compared to rest of the world. Maybe it's just because land is cheap, but it does tend to mean that zoning laws, which try to codify standard practice, do end up overreaching on this particular issue.

A factory isn't just "making things", though. There might be semi's coming and going making traffic more dangerous, there could be materials left out that are dangerous to kids if they wander through the wrong fence, maybe there'll be loud noises that are detrimental to kids' concentration during tests.

There's plenty of reasons industry is usually put outside of towns.

They also need heavy transport, which wears out road infrastructure much more quickly than light vehicles. Keeping residential streets largely clear of heavy traffic means you can focus repairs and replacements of road surfaces in the industrial areas.

Zoning isnt the only way to solve these problems, but it's a good one

But "zoning" attempts to resolve those issues by carving territory up, not by requiring a particular physical distance. Zoning maps have boundaries which still have the problems you describe, right?

It seems a lot more reasonable to target the specific issues (noise, air pollution, etc - the stuff you descibed) rather than attack this via zones.

Of course, you said a similar thing too, so we probably 80% agree. But can you explain the remaining 20% - when is zoning ever a good way to solve these problems?

Further - is there a case to be made for zoning aside from moving really heavy industry away from really residential neighborhoods? My city has dozens of zones, carefully segregating walkable retail regions from single-family homes, which doesn't seem so defensible.

There are alternative mechanisms for getting peoples' local preferences. City- or county-wide zoning maps rarely change, and - at least in Seattle - don't seem to respond to individual citizens desires or concerns in the way you imply. Are zones really the right tool for the job?

Instead, we have zoning, where we can say "build your factory here if you don't want to worry about residential complaints" or "build your house here if you don't want a noxious odor, noise, and constant semi traffic bothering you."

If you think that there are situations where preventing some kinds of things (say, a toxic landfill) from being constructed next to other kinds of things (say, a preschool) is desirable, and that there should be rules around that, and that most people want an elected government to make and enforce those rules, that ought to explain why the commenter you responded to said zoning is important. Even if you disagree with any of those clauses, I think you'd understand why they felt that way.

Each area - typically a district, which is a sub-unit of a county or city - has a "local plan" which is decided democratically by the local government. "The plan does not provide specific guidance on what type of buildings will be allowed in a given location, rather it provides general principles for development and goals for the management of urban change."

All of this sits under a National Planning Policy Framework set by central Government.

Does a zoning law by any other name smell as sweet?

Instead the plans set out browser goals, such as designating a area as being primarily residential with an objective of reducing traffic and increasing walking.

If you can submit a plan that show what you want to build fits with outline, you can probably get permission. That means it’s perfectly possible to build a shop, or an office, or restaurant in the middle of a residential area. All of those things would increase the walk ability of the area, and reduce the need for residents to own cars.

Equally just because a plan doesn’t indicate you can build a specific type of building, doesn’t mean you can’t get permission for. But you would have an uphill battle to convince planners that deviating from the local plan is necessary.

The result is that pretty much all of the UK has mixed use development. You find residential area right next to light industrial districts. You find shops and restaurants scattered through neighbourhoods, and find flat in the centre of commercial districts (just don’t complain about the noise).

A default assumption that industrial processes are safe unless specifically regulated to say they're dangerous sounds like a shell game. The industry will chge between dangerous pollutants fast enough to be one step ahead of regulators, or pay regulators off to allow their pollutants.

It's right to assume all industrial work is dangerous

their smokestack blew over last year, and now i get headaches all the time since they haven't bothered to rebuild it.

even in san francisco, purported leftie paradise - there really isn't anything i can do about it.

assume that _every_ shop is cutting corners

Without this mindset, I doubt anyone would be so opposed to change zoning laws as cities grow/change

There is another root cause at work here. Temporarily suspending the zoning is just one of many short-term treatments to resolve a backlog.

So basically zoning but pretending it's not called zoning.

No one is suggesting heavy industry should be allowed in a residential area.

If that power is local, NIMBY always wins. These decisions must be made at the state level. Cities are way too fractured into myriad municipalities competing for jobs and "quality" housing.

I'd assume state power is with the same rich folks, so it's still NIMBY, but the state can force it on poor locals. Woooo

Then, you're turned into a renter against your will, and also, everyone else needs to find new housing at the same time, so even before the new luxury units go up, the rent skyrockets.

Poor people with expensive homes can't defend their ownership. That takes paying expensive lawyers

If they leave immediately, rather than struggling to pay their massively increased property taxes, then mortgaging their house to keep up...

> by limiting property tax increases, California’s prop 13 is like a wealth SUBSIDY

...which apparently is a good outcome?

If they can push people out of houses regardless, theyre still going to go for the houses.

It'd be better to redirect demand elsewhere, so the wealthy people can build their own infrastructure and community rather than co-opting an existing one

I'm not trying to argue in bad faith, but I genuinely don't see a solution where you allow people to move to areas of high opportunity without building more high rises (or just denser housing in general).

On the other hand, there's people without money who live in a neighborhood, who can no longer afford to live there. But they usually cannot simply "move somewhere else". Remember: they're poor (since they can't afford to even pay a property tax increase). They may not have good credit, not qualify for a loan, or even have any savings. They may already be stretched to the limit in terms of transportation to a job, or rely on their neighbors for child care. If they were a homeowner, it may have been the last vestige of generational wealth in their family, and they may simply have no money for rent or a new home. If they can rent, it'll certainly be much more than they were paying before, which may have just been their property tax. And if they are one of the millions of Americans whose parents brought them to this country in search of migrant work, they might not even have a birth certificate or social security number, or perhaps have difficulty speaking English.

For many disadvantaged Americans, being forced out of your home due to gentrification can leave you homeless, jobless, and broke, with no lifeline. No extended family to give you money or support, no savings to cushion rebooting your whole life. This has been a reality for decades, and I'm still surprised when people don't realize how much of a risk to human life there is here.

So.... if the question is "When will you let people build high rises and gentrify out poor people?", my answer would be: "When those same people who want to build high rises are forced to reconcile with the people whose lives they might destroy." If you want to gentrify a neighborhood, it should be a requirement that every single person who will be negatively affected by that move should be supported such that their lives won't end up in shambles just so a developer can get rich and some hipsters can have an expensive loft.

It's a choice between giving rich people a cozy pad, or letting poor people continue to have a livelihood and home. I just don't see that being much of a choice.

You also must have completely ignored my comment from above, if you don't build new housing those existing people are just going to get kicked out at an even faster rate if you don't build new housing. New housing acts as a sponge to soak up demand. The entire reason housing is expensive is because we don't build enough housing units in places people want to live. Your solution to not build anymore only makes it worse. Their rents will go up at an even faster pace. If you made building fast, cheap and easy then housing units at all price points would sprout up. Do you think if you don't build a high rise then wealthier people just go away? No they just look at the existing housing stock and buy up and renovate whatever is there. Houston has one of the most deregulated housing markets in the country and for this reason the average home hasn't gone up in price despite a fast growing population. You have to build to keep up with demand.

Renters and owners are different, in a gentrification scenario owners get very wealthy. Tons of poor families who own in poorer neighborhoods just received a massive cash infusion when a developer bought their parcels. Gentrification is one of the largest transfers of wealth from rich to poor in history. Your hypothetical of someone selling their house for a huge premium and then having nowhere to go doesn't bear out in reality, they've just become rich from selling. There are millions of stories of poor families buying cheap property on the outskirts of town decades ago only for that land to worth a fortune now due to development potential.

Renters on the other hand suffer the most from lack of building, you say when they get kicked out they'll have to pay more in rent. That's because housing isn't being built fast enough so prices are skyrocketing. When you have increasing demand and fixed supply, prices go up. The only way to keep rents stable is too build as much as possible. As for neighborhoods, places change. You can't keep them stuck in time for ever. Families move, economies grow, people age and we need to have solutions that adapt, not ones that pretend no changes are happening and try to keep everything in place.

So in short you still haven't provided a solution to people wanting to live in areas with jobs. These aren't rich people with vacation condos, these are people who come from areas without good jobs and want to live in areas with jobs. Please give me a solution that accommodates them or you're just plugging your ears. Trying to deny reality isn't a solution and will only make things worse.

Further, they unjustly accumulated that wealth by keeping people out of an area that is in huge demand. They are hoarding a scarce resource, to the detriment of sooooo many people. They didn't create that land, and they didn't create that wealth, and they are standing in the way of many many many times more people's right to take part in society.

This sort of person you are idolizing is actually a greedy villian, working to make the world a worse place merely so they can avoid looking at apartments or meeting new people.

The land became valuable because they are there and have done a good job maintaining their community. It's collective action of the community that has made it a good place to be.

Maintaining the community is what ensures that value remains. The rea question is why all these other people aren't willing to go build a valuable community

The GDP isn't a magical number that rises by making people suffer. It rises because NIMBYs are unable to force others to struggle by keeping them out of their economically advantageous land.

Similar land is all over the place

Eminent domain is another.

Why not worry about renters though? Are they not people?

Here in the U.K. taxes etc don’t increase with property value, and eminent domain isn’t frequently used. So I lack the context to understand why increasing property values mean people are forced to leave, especially when I look around London and see thousands of people who bought their council homes 50 years ago, and are now living in properties that are worth many orders of magnitude more than what they bought them for. Notably, none of them have been forced out.

As for renters, well the mechanism is obvious, I don’t need someone to explain that to me.

That is too far away. That may or may not happen

In the short term, the supply just increases significantly. Probably also the traffic and other infrastructure use.

Not that I disagree or agree with nimby. Just pointing it out because you only point out one side.

On the infrastructure side, its a much better deal for you as well, the combined value of all the property taxes from the apartment buildings will be way more than if that lot had remained a house. Since the road, water, sewer and electric lines are already in place nothing new has to be built. You benefit from all those property taxes coming in from the apartment building while the liabilities to the government have barely increased. The local government can use this new surplus of taxes to build new amenities for you.

For traffic, sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere. Once you have enough people in a place you could open small shops so they can hang out around the building rather than drive everywhere.

> someone would come in and buy it off your hands for a huge premium.

This is still a far future.

> If your house was rezoned for apartment buildings and the demand existed

It's still better for you that only demand exists, but not supply.

To be honest, I doubt nimbyists are even interested to move. They just want their neighborhood to stay relatively the same (quiet, fewer people, safe, less crowded).

Either way we look at it, this kind of points are likely cons, not pros.

> sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere.

I laughed a little, assuming this is a US city.

Again, I don't own a house, so it's not that I agree or disagree with nimby. But I can understand why nimby hates new buildings next to their houses. It's just a lot more cons than pros.

Extraordinarily wealthy people are going to be willing to pay a premium for a nice house in Manhattan, and extremely wealthy people are exponentially wealthier than moderately wealthy people, so you cant get that back in volume.

We can of course choose to say we want quality of life over economic comforts modern economy offers, until our holiday shopping is stuck in the ports because of viewshed(!) regulations.

The cold truth is if only very rich do that it won't affect much, if however everyone also starts, the economy will suffer and eventually as a result of that quality of life will also drop, everything becomes expensive and industry/jobs go to places that don't restrict as much.

Look at Healthcare in U.S. for stark example, insurance(tied to employment!) or proper care is a luxury is out of reach of for many people, that on average citizens here actually may be getting poorer care than many other countries with poorer per capita GDP . The best in world research or care is possible in the U.S. what is the use if people cannot afford it ?

or it could mean a developer was very stupid to overbuild somewhere, or more likely it's a shell building used as a money laundering scheme for organized crime (See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/17/trump-ocean-... for one such building built by Trump; such buildings are also often structurally unsafe such as the building in Florida that collapsed which was also started as a money laundering front). I'm not down with this "the free market will make sure everything is OK" idea.

As for structural safety, no one is arguing to reduce building codes or safety regulations so that's just a straw man argument. If an apartment building is built unsafe then the government should have done a better job inspecting and enforcing/expanding their regulations, it's not really an argument to not build.

Also it’s unfair to ask the outside world around your house to be frozen in time because you bought a house at a period of time and setting which you liked.

Then you're stuck with an apartment complex you cant afford, and people who live there still have to drive 20min to get to amenities.

Source: I spent a hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon every day on the school bus, because development of apartments outpaced development of schools in my community.

Also, 20min to drive out to parks, because development of apartments outpaced development of parks and play fields and gyms.

Its just as unfair to force people to move because you don't like the way their community already is

It's completely reasonable to believe that a given person should be capable of quiet enjoyment of their property without having to purchase everything remotely close to it.

Really?

If a ship sinks at sea, and there's a deserted island nearby, does the first passenger on the ship that arrives on the island get to claim it and prevent anybody else from stepping onto the island? Do all those other people on the ship get a vote on who can step onto the island even if they were not there first?

Does owning a piece of property give you the right to veto a particular person purchasing the neighboring property because you don't want then next door?

We as a society have set up a bunch of rules as for how much control people get when they "purchase" property. It's not a single thing, it's actually a bundle of rights, and we have chosen a particular bundle, and that bundle can be changed, and has changed, over time. Zoning is a century old invention.

The idea that a single land owner in an area can block the sale of land to others is considered ridiculous by most. But how much more ridiculous is it then saying that somebody else can't build apartments on their land, particularly in areas where lack of housing has caused massive homelessness and and skyrocketing of housing prices.

Your suggestion is much worse. It'd require millions of dollars.

Doing this might also get yelled at by another activist group for buying up all the lands in the city.

A better alternative: we could just join city council and vote to reject any new building.

Not that I agree or disagree with NIMBY, it's just that your suggestion is much worse than the alternative for NIMBY-ists.

Buy the land around you.

No need to restrict what others can do on their land or you on yours

I can't speak for everyone but in my case it is because I grew up in an impoverished community that had little to no zoning.

I experienced first-hand what the built environment is and the emergent behaviors of people are when there are no rules.

See, you live in a place that is nicely organized and, presumably, zoned and you think if we got rid of the zoning then everything would be just like it is now but with a few more housing units and maybe some delightful mixed light-commercial interspersed and wouldn't that be great!

In reality what you get is a welding shop next to your house. And llamas. And people disconnecting from city sewer because by god they're not paying for that when their home-built septic works just as well. And Grandma died and what do we do with her horse I know we'll keep it in the front yard.

If you had any exposure to anything other than nicely zoned locales you wouldn't romanticize the absence of rules.