I lived in the Museum District/Third Ward in Houston for almost 2 decades now. Houston definitely has zoning. We just don't call it zoning. In fact, in addition to stealth zoning, we have neighborhood based facility also where even people in a neighborhood can tell you to piss off.

I'm not familiar with the ordinances in Dallas, but I think this may not be as much of an apples to apples comparison as you imagine if the thesis of that comparison is that "Houston has no zoning".

You have to find an actual free city to do the comparison.

So, I've lived in both Dallas and Houston (and Austin). Zoning has nothing to do with the price delta. It has more to do with employment, jobs, income, etc. The market will charge what the customer can afford kind of thing. Same reason RE in Austin is much higher than Houston or Dallas. It's all about tech money and influx of wealth from coastal cities. This is not COVID, it's just Texas - although, the supply shock really threw things out of whack. Years prior, we always did good enough to keep supply coming online at a reasonable price. Shutdown, commodity prices, supply chain, etc destroyed that and prices.

Anecdotal, but Greater Houston differs from DFW as it's more blue collar and DFW tends to be fairly white collar/corp focused. Ironically, Houston also has much more wealth. So what this means is DFW feels like it IS middle class with some lower, some upper, and a few Mark Cuban's. Houston has a whole neighborhood of Mark Cuban's, you see lower income everywhere, and it's kind of unclear where the middle is. In the exurbs? Is exurb A a middle, upper middle, etc. it's not clear where those lines get drawn. Dallas in particular is more segregated on income (which is correlated with.. you know) with the southern part of town being almost exclusively lower income. Houston is more integrated in this regard, there are pockets of wealthy areas surrounded by lower income areas and the folks interact with each other.

I actually don't hear a ton about the big money buying here in Dallas (Zillow, etc). It's just people that sold their west coast house for $2M+ and move here cash rich. I see a lot of mid-lifers so school district & distance to office is the biggest draw for which areas are seeing the largest price gains.

Not only this, but clearly whatever zoning laws are in place are not hindering new home construction in and around Dallas. Uptown, Deep Ellum, Design District have all had enormous booms in the last few years near downtown, and Cedars is currently having a new home construction booms. That's effectively every neighborhood anywhere near the city center. So it's not like you can't build new housing inside the city limits. The biggest factor delaying the projects right now is it's too easy to become a homebuilder, so many of the people don't know what they're doing and are way behind schedule. There also seems to be a shortage of licensed tradespeople. But it isn't hard to get approval to build.

Agree, zoning laws here are not meant to hinder new construction just control it's use. However, permitting went from ~30 days to about 6-12 months in Dallas. Supply is still causing a shock and construction just takes longer now as materials get delayed, etc. and it messes everything up. The trades are less capacity. They stayed busy though lockdown, or moved back to their native country to ride it out. I know several that just never came back. There are a lot of contractors turning builders, some delay due to their inexperience, but I don't see that as a widespread issue. But all in all, you see a lot of construction around but it's actually probably less finished goods than what was occurring in 2019. The lack of property and prices means people are building on any dirt they can find. I've seen some insanely horrible tracts of land get developed because all of a sudden, prices being what they are, it now finally makes sense to invest $250K in dirt work. I've seen land that has been for sale for 10+ years due to nobody wanting a 100% flood zone get developed in the last year; again because there's nothing better available and people have the $ to fix invest in drainage.

Dallas itself is competing with it's suburbs, Plano/Frisco etc. The development you see was planned 2+ decades ago and really only a surprise to folks that don't keep up (most people, I know, but I tend to keep up with this stuff and like to buy and hold land ahead of development). Bishop Arts for example has been a 3 decade overnight success, similar story with other areas you mentioned. Many of those areas I felt like they took way longer than they should have to get developed, and it's because all money goes north to the burbs. Uptown is about as far south as most money is willing to go. Design District, Deep Ellum, Cedars are proximity plays after Uptown got kind of expensive.

I don't really do much nightlife stuff. But about 10-15 years ago, Uptown was like the young professional/college kid place to be. Many of those folks moved to the burbs after a certain age. But many stayed. Now the prices are high, it seems like it's more full of those same folks that never married, never had kids, etc and just happen to be 10-15 years older. I think it still has the reputation but realistically, younger crowds (<30 or so) don't seem to spend much time there anymore in favor of Deep Ellum, etc.

My understanding is that japan does have historically protected districts, they call them preservation districts. I think it would be really helpful to have someone actually dive on the details.

Houston does rely on a lot on developers being able to put "deed restrictions" in place, which seems like their free-market/libertarian/state enforced private contracts solution.

I'm not familiar with Japan but their property laws are not unregulated so I think it's worth sussing that out so people can properly back their assertions with arguments and maybe we can derive a defendable % cost impact from zoning laws.

Japan has serious zoning law, but the issue is that it's reasonably scoped zoning that doesn't do things like "only single family homes here, no commercial properties including ban on corner shops" - they define what could be termed maximum allowed nuisance level, and the defined categories create a spectrum with overlap at both ends of each category. Even category 1, low rise residential, permits low-rise multiple units, small offices and shops etc. as well as certain public utility buildings (schools and the like). Compare it with zoning (or zoning hidden under other bylaws) in USA where you can end with a big area that permits only single family houses - no shops, not even a small grocery store, etc.

Japan definitely has zoning as well, but that wasn’t what we were debating? Just more liberal zoning vs more conservative zoning.

The only areas free of zoning that I know of are slums, shanty towns, and favelas.

They don't have "zoning" just bylaws that require only certain kinds of structures to be built on certain parcels. They have zoning

Houston has zoning under a different name.

It is illegal to build in Houston properties that would be legal in Japan or Europe.

Do you have any examples of buildings like this, I've looked but can't find examples online? It seems zoning has a 15% overhead (all things being equal and as best as I could argue with the data I've found so far), maybe it's higher but I haven't found articulable/shareable evidence of that yet. IANAL, so hopefully an expert on HN can help chime in.

I've looked (links below) and have done more querying than a comment thread like this probably warrants but wasn't able to find your assertion articulated anywhere.

Neither Japan or Houston are unconstrained free-markets without land use control so I'm doing my best to roughly/quickly tease out zonings isolated impact on affordability. Neither locations have 0 laws so they are close to apples to apples and since we're just doing relative comparison I'd rather keep things data driven. Houston has deed restriction but that is a simple free-market/libertarian private contract solution. Does Japan ban deed restrictions? Both japan and houston have historical zones

I've linked these two jstore articles as well as a more digestible video.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/724839 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30238667 https://japanpropertycentral.com/real-estate-faq/building-re... https://www.planetizen.com/news/2021/04/113144-watch-debunki...

I'm not an expert by any means but there's a clip in another comment I made about some of Houston's zoning stuff, I'm curious what you think.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30376623

If there's enough bylaws that the only building you're allowed to build is in the shape of a SFH with a driveway, that's the only thing that will get built

This is a good summary of land use goods and bads in Houston - https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-regulates-...

Houston has a lot of other land use restrictions. I should have been more specific. Even without zoning, you have rules like floor-area-ratio, parking minimums, setback requirements, etc.