The reverse could also be said - if you don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country. You can do pretty much whatever you want in rural areas without significantly impacting your neighbors.

People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason. Creating some guidelines to create a desirable, pleasant and safe environment for them and their families is totally reasonable and has been the historical norm for most of the history of civilization.

Of course things can get out of hand and over-reaching. If the people decide together to change it though, they can. I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.

When most people talk about ownership, when the law talks about ownership, it exists, and I think that is enough for it to exist.

If I used the same framing, I would say LVT are an incentive to tear down the land (introduce toxic waste, endangered species that can't legally be disturbed, etc).

Or I could say Property taxes are a disincentive to hoarding buildings.

"legally" is an acknowledgement that the ownership is conditional on someone else who has authority about the ownership (ie the practical owner).

This is a reasonable point of view, in theory.

Yes, for the duration that you (and your crew) can defend it.

It has to be, because the in-group, i.e. the people already living there don't accrue the cost as that falls on the out-group, the people who need to live there (job etc) but cannot. Its the essence of a "f** you i got mine attitude"

If they want more rentals and more density, they have the power to vote for people who can make it happen. Instead they vote for people who talk a lot about preserving the character of San Francisco.

There are a ton of people in SF who are paying sizeable taxes and rents with no vote in these matters. It's quite likely they are disproportionately renters.

I think the "community" can also extend to something as large as California. If California as a community decides it's in the best interest of that community to loosen some zoning restrictions in particularly high demand areas, fine. Do it with thoughtfulness and as much respect for existing owners' interests as possible while still accomplishing the desired objective. That's similar to a smaller community deciding to change the rules to account for some new undesirable behavior of certain community members.

I and many others who don't live in the Bay Area see ourselves as an in-group relative our out-group -- the people who have to live there.

Shouldn’t this be the message to a suburban homeowner clinging to the past? Move to the country. Buy land around you. Don’t tell others what they can and cannot do on property you don’t own.

They didn’t. If they bought the block, or easements on it, they would have. But they bought a plot. Others bought adjacent plots. Now they’re arguing they get to tell the adjacent plots what they can and cannot do.

That's exactly what's happening here. Californians have collectively decided that zoning laws need to change. If the current actions by the state are somehow unreasonable, how could the original zoning provisions ever have been considered reasonable in the first place?

And they did. The decision by the people was to "nuke" current zoning regulations.

Don't want a skyscraper in downtown SF? Buy the plot. Can't afford it? Sorry, you're getting neighbors. You shouldn't try and bog them down with a nightmare bureaucratic process of shade measurement and bird counting.

It's a good thing.

All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.

Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?

Honestly, this is sane zoning. The Japanese model is very effective. They saw roughly 0% growth in housing prices from 1990 to present. Housing in downtown Tokyo is affordable. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Tokyo is an abomination, it's a top-10 world city is basically every ranking.

> All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.

Some of them! Not all of them. Some of them want a place to live within an hour of work, and for them that's more important.

For those that want that they can (a) buy the land around them necessary to make that happen (b) lobby the city around them to buy the land necessary to make that happen (a 'park') or (c) move somewhere like-minded people live.

> Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?

Why should the person who got there first decide what other people get to do? That's not even democracy, that's just gerontocracy.

If the density becomes problematic, buy the land, or mosey on.

This to me is the least compelling counter-argument possible. "Nobody wants to live in a big dense city" is like saying "nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic!" You personally don't, but obviously, we can tell by inspection that's simply not a true statement in general.

Which brings us back to "but I got here first!" which is to me, the second-least compelling argument.

If you don't own a car, you don't determine when to wash it.

If you don't own a property, you totally still get to determine what to do with it by being a whiny neighbor. Why is this OK?

I'm very-much onboard with the "put up or shut up" model of zoning. If you want the place to be empty, you should own it and keep it empty.

People want all sorts of things. Walkability, transit, cafes, restaurants, recreation, jobs. Some do prefer the particular brand of quiet offered by the suburban form, but because it's the only thing you're allowed to build, lots of us who do not want it are forced into it.

I totally agree that "people living together in a small area" can pretty much do what they want. The only issue is when that starts to screw over other folks, and when all the other small areas get together to do the same.

Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision

Totally agree. The state or larger city, etc. is also a community that should be able to make rules that promote the welfare of the great majority over the objections of a small minority, as long as they take care to not harm the small minority unnecessarily. I just think the solution is thoughtful modification of existing codes, possibly forced by larger jurisdictions, and not just a free for all where almost anything goes as was proposed by the parent commenter.

This argument ignores 100 years of research in game theory and development economics. No community is an island, okay except Alameda, but even they are a component of a wider metropolis. The way you set zoning laws and transportation infrastructure influences who comes into and passes through your community — no municipality in the core of a metropolitan area can ever truly behave like a single community organizing its residents' lifestyles.

So you see, for example, an attempt to increase the total property value per resident because it leads to a better school district. You see attempts to block new developments and transit stops because relative popularity may transiently increase the local cost of living, even if it benefits the affordability of the metro as a whole. You see militarized police departments who realize they can't outrun crime but they can certainly outrun Emeryville.

None of these are the products of a community of people democratically deciding what kind of lifestyle fits their particular interests. They are the choices of a faction jockeying for status in the desperate power struggle that characterizes the great modern balkanized American Combined Statistical Area.

What about those of us who actually want to live in cities? The only way cities come to be is incrementally; if an already-settled place cannot intensify then cities cannot exist.

If the city booms, land value goes up. E.g. Manhattan. Trying to keep your small suburb a small suburb isn't maximizing investor value.

edit: to responders, yes I'm aware houses have other value. My comment is in response the parent comment that specifically addresses investment value protection aspect.

If instead my neighborhood is converted to apartments or high-density condos, I might not have the capital to take advantage of those opportunities but my single family house becomes undesirable in that zone. I am forced to sell to a developer in order to maximize return. I probably still make money, but it might be less then I could have made in the other scenario, and I am unable to use the house for my own residence up until the time I need to liquidate.

So its not necessarily illogical.

First, I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell, unless there's some truly huge and necessary infrastructure development. You are generally offered some money by a developer and you personally decide whether or not to take it. Sometimes people can be stubborn and there are plenty of examples of large high-rises built around tiny structures that wouldn't sell.

Also, your price per square foot goes up fastest directly adjacent to the largest developments. If your neighborhood can economically support larger buildings, that directly increases the amount of money developers will pay for your land. The less development you allow your neighborhood to have, the less your neighborhood will be able to support large developments. You want your neighborhood to support large developments.

You may want to hold on to YOUR house as an investment, and to keep from a property tax re-assessment, but it makes no economic sense to prevent your neighbors from building higher if they want to.

Maybe not in the USA but certain countries have a special emergency nationalisation procedure that has payment first, skips the consent and leaves the challenge to after-the-fact.

edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.

These things are typically solvable at a policy level but the policies are often fought against by the same people asking for the city to solve crime.

You cant just out-violence poverty. If someone has nothing to lose, you can't convince them to not risk it all.

How do you solve "people are too poor to survive to the homeowner's standards" without quoting mien kampf or socializing things and spending money on social projects? It typically feels like suburban communities lean towards the former. Very little empathy for people as long as they don't need to see them anymore.

I'm hoping this zoning change would work for the better. I know "missing middle" is a bit of a meme at this point but a few house sized quadplexes on a block would scale and provide a lot more housing. Its typically the "property value" crowd that fights against them, but sometimes its simply a racist generalization of "the poors" that would live in a multifamily home.

The problem is as cities grow a smaller percentage of the overall population can live in a small suburb. The next 10 mile ring is Pi * (25^5 -15^2) = less than double the area at 1,256 square miles and now needs a longer commute through the inner ring.

PS: Geography adds it’s own constraints. If the cities core in next to the ocean then much of the hypothetical low density ring is under water.

NYC inner core may be toxic, but the average New Yorker’s environmental impact is well below the national average.

I'm also curious if you could actually back up that New York statement with some unbiased research.

“New York residents were using an average of 572 kWh a month in 2017.” NYC is so efficient that: “New York ranks 50th out of the 51 states and the District of Columbia. The only state with a lower per capita consumption is Rohde Island at 176 million Btu (MMBtu) or 51.6 MWh. The total 2016 U.S. consumption per capita was 301 million Btu (88.2 MWh).”

It’s consistent across different countries, here’s UK’s data: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49639003

Second that article makes it really unclear what is being included in "energy expenditures". In the earlier paragraphs it talks about electricity which makes sense given a.) it's extremely expensive in NY and b.) I'd imagine more heating comes from natural gas as opposed to AC in southern climates which comes from electricity.

It lacks a lot of critical information to measure environmental impact vs. other cities.

Lastly who is being included? Inner city residents only? Or metro area?

Using electricity has an environmental impact. As does burning fossil fuels for heat etc, which is where the BTU numbers show up.

The biggest benefit is land use it’s self has an environmental impact. The ability to leave land for nature requires people not to be living on it. We don’t want wolves and buffalo walking through suburbs. Rabbits etc can’t graze on a paved roads, and drained swamps stop being swamps.

If you look at the actual population vs land available it needs a far higher density than I am talking about. 1k people per square mile is really low density. That’s single family homes with 1/2 acre back yard territory.

The problem isn't about land - there's plenty of that elsewhere. The problem is people all wanting to live in the same area and having high standards. You have a visous cycle where the denser places have the most jobs or the highest paying jobs, while the cost of living goes way up and the standard of living goes down.

It would be nice to have smaller cities. The real problem is how to convince businesses to reinvigorate the dying cities, or for people to change their preferences (either for locality or property type/size). These are being largely ignored in these conversations.

> We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL

So do you or do you not have a big city nearby?

> our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's

As always, the big question - how old is that infrastructure, and when was it last renewed? What is the budget/reserves/debt like of the town? Because if infrastructure doesn't cost a lot to build, it doesn't mean it's sustainable to maintain/renew in the medium/long term.

Here's a video about some of the studies done to come to this conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.

They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.

From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development.

"In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."

But then I look at the housing prices. TimPC's explanation seems legit.

I would really only categorize Lincoln and Wellesley "low density suburb". The rest certainly have car centric qualities but they're too built up to be called the exception to the rule.

http://www.usa.com/rank/massachusetts-state--population-dens...

https://www.towncharts.com/Massachusetts/Top-25-Cities-in-Ma...

Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years, start with thee streetcar suburbs (which often feature lots larger than what the new suburbs around me are building). They have already added sewer, water, telephone, eclectic, cable TV, internet, and some of those have been replaced as well. They have already replaced their roads many times over the years.

Sure there are some suburbs that have been badly managed and so haven't kept up. However that is a reflection on the short sighted voters, and not suburbs.

Then I took that overall very positive lens and started to apply it to what I saw and the financial arguments didn’t hold up to what I could plainly see in the low-density, car-dominated towns and suburbs around me.

If that's true, why do cities annex suburbs?

Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years. They have rebuilt their roads many times. They have installed modern things like telephone, running water and so on over the years.

Which 'metropolitan core' are we leeching from? It's not San Jose - it famously has a higher nighttime population implying people leave to work (and it's obvs to locals based on traffic patterns). It's probably not San Francisco, we're 1 hour away.

If you need an explicit answer, generally speaking, SF is "the metro core" for the bay. Travel distances matter little compared to macro-economic "correlation" distances when considering metro areas.

The people making money tend to leave cities because they want different property, fewer people, better services, less crime, etc. The people who can afford to do this are relatively well off. This ends up creating an area with fewer poor people and a higher tax income even if tax rates are lower. Cities have higher tax rates to have even similar (if that) per capita revenue because they have more poor people who cannot pay and must tax the ones who can at a higher rate. This is nothing against poorer people, just a reality of it works. You have a market force basically segregating people by income.

A local example for me is how Philadelphia County is extremely poor - the poorest in the state and has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty for any big city in the US. Some of the richest counties in the state are the ones immediately surrounding it, like Bucks, Chester, and Delaware. Even within these counties you have poor cities/towns and rich townships. The main difference isn't the tax rate, it's that the concentration of wealthy people.

But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.

But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.

61% of Americans live in a town of less than 50,000 people.[1]

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...

Most of these, you wouldn't know you were in a separate city if you didn't pay close attention to roadside signs, and I suspect the same is true of a large percentage of that 61% figure.

That says something, since those people didn't choose to live closer to the central of the metro area, but it doesn't say as much as you're implying it does, because they're all examples of places for which, if someone outside of Texas asks where they live, they're going to say "Austin" or "Dallas" or "San Antonio," and only if asked where in Dallas will they respond Little Elm, just as they might otherwise respond Lakewood or Hamilton Park, which are neighborhoods but not separate cities.

So uh, apparently the answer is "it doesn't.'

If you're already 5x leveraged into a single asset in a single location whose value is wholly outside of your control you don't need the extra risk of redevelopment

E.g. I have a friend whose area has become extremely popular for city people and prices have gone up a ton over the past couple years.

Their father owns a bunch of property in the area and sits on a bunch of local board, and specifically lobbies to block housing development to protect their "future" that's locked up in these properties. (Mostly SFH in suburbs.) It's an explicit goal for some people.

As long as demand is high, b/c of mostly immutable factors, schools/weather/job opportunities etc and people have the money to spend then prices will go up if you keep housing supply low.

Now with large corporate ownership in residential real estate the problem has gotten worse as hoke are investments not places for people to live.

At best, single family zoning preserves the value of a (depreciating!) house to a limited extent.

Supported. Individual property owners rarely have external zoning power.

0. https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/06/17/...

See e.g. The Racist History of Single-Family Home Zoning, https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...

Sure there are a few buildings that are historic and should be preserved, but the vast majority are only old, and have no other historic value.

People want to preserve old stuff because (and only when) it's beautiful, but there's no reason we couldn't and shouldn't be building beautiful stuff today!

I don't like that we have to have laws like this in society anymore than you do. But you're kind of ignoring Chesterton's fence here.

I've lived next to places like you're describing, and I don't mean trash heaps like you see in rural parts of America, though I've lived next to them, too. I mean collectors who simply fall behind on preventative maintenance for mundane reasons. So I don't care until I'm forced to... Which is typically when the rats show up.

Actually we have oil derricks in the middle of residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Source: Grew up in Texas surrounded by mostly harmless pump jacks and then moved to Louisiana in Cancer Alley.

In either case, the fact that zoning laws aren't stopping this but are taken as seriously as laws of physics when it comes to apartments shows that they're mostly a scam

Houston has both petrochem refining and chemical plants with people living in "sacrifice zones".

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-03-05/deserte...

Modern epidemiology also enables really accurate tracking of the increase in asthma and other health problems near wells:

https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2021-06-02/urban...

None of the other big buildings in SF are connected to the bedrock. None of the towers in LA have supports connected to the bedrock. Heck, the Burj Khalifa isn't connected to bedrock. They all use friction piles, and these can work fine if they're done properly.

Absolutely not true.

Salesforce Tower, Park Tower and 181 Fremont all being examples of tall buildings in the immediate vicinity that do go to bedrock.

Whether or not friction piles are a good idea is another matter.

[1] Not sure the exact depth, but whatever, they went like half way down to save on money.

In short, shortcuts.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/10/san-francisc...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8105988/

Many (most?) of these types of rules are imposed by HOAs made up of property owners, not the city.

This is a transfer of power from the people, that is democracy, to the oligarchy.

> I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value.

That is such an awful attitude and a big problem of what is wrong in the country today. We live in communities and communities agree to certain values. It's about well more than just you and what you want to do.

In my experience, the city regulations around what you’ve listed are always sensible. It’s the HOA regulations that tend to be kooky and capricious.

You can get darn close in some places. I mean, in Texas, residential damage and evacuations from chemical plant explosions are practically routine. I live in a neighborhood surrounded by biotech labs, which tend not to blow up, though we do joke a bit about being zombie-apocalypse-ground-zero (also, every available developable lot gets sucked up by a new lab project). And of course, in some rural areas, the proximity of farms waste lagoons and low-income neighborhoods is a serious issue.

Because the plants always got built on the outskirts and then the outskirts expanded.

The same thing used to happen in the formerly industrial parts of CA before CA kicked out most of its heavy industry over the decades.

See also: Charleston, West Virginia.

Locals sometimes call the Kawawha Valley "Chemical Valley."

Kids growing up learn different lyrics to The Mickey Mouse Club:

  M - I - C — Methyl isocyanate!
  K - E - Y — It's why we evacuate!

These two at least make some sense. The former, landscaping restrictions, can be used to prevent people from creating groundwater issues or flood risks, and the latter... no one wants a neighbor in a residential zone keeping broken-down trash cars out in the open.

Some things have to be regulated even in a relatively free society because otherwise the potential is too high for greedy or stupid people to ruin everyone else's life.

But rules based on "it doesn't look nice"? That seems both subjective and ridiculous. If someone has garbage on their property and it's blowing into yours, that gives you a right to complain. But if you just think their property is ugly for whatever reason, well, maybe don't look at it? What made people think they should have any say over the visual appearance of what someone else owns?

Even so, today's trash car that does not look posh can be a tomorrow's restored historical car that does.

People have limits. While some people push those limits too far (in either direction), there are times when those limits are realistic.

I've lived off-grid in the desert, and I've seen certain people become 'garbage collectors' - a few cars turns into 20+, with all the associated junk. In the desert, nobody really cares - but you'd be crazy to move in next to one of those junk yards.

It's not going to ruin anyone's life, but it's definitely not nice. It depends on the community and circumstances I suppose.

Do those neighbors care what I want?

Hahaha the GP is misattributing the issue. These are usually HOA strictures, and HOA will require green lawns in the middle of a desert.

For instance, this is west des moines, Iowa: https://www.wdm.iowa.gov/government/public-services/communit...

Terms like "Junk and debris in the yard." get tortured to mean almost literally anything. Also 10" of weeds can grow in a matter of days after a rain.

Yes, society probably won't crumble if we cave to your whining and regulate your pet issue of the minute but regulating in this manner is like littering in the park, if everyone does it the park is ruined.

If people are poisoning the groundwater or creating other "off their property" problems then fine them accordingly. If they aren't then screw off. None of this "the thing you want to isn't already on the approved list so you have to go through an onerous and expensive process of proving it won't hurt anything" garbage.

I disagree, and I think this sort of nonsense is a cornerstone of why society is crumbling. People don't look at their homes as homes they look at them as temporary investments that they hope to sell to somebody else for more money in the future. People don't end up investing (in the societal, emotional sense) into their communities and their homes because they recognize that they don't really own them.

Give the rights back to the people to own their homes and they start to care again. Tell property investors that I'm sorry, but actually you might have to deal with a guy who doesn't give a shit about weeds and likes to work on his car in the driveway next to your investment and maybe houses stop being such a safe speculative vehicle.

I dislike the idea of home-as-investment as much as the next guy, but I'd like to think about some consequences of houses stopping to be an investment, Japan-style.

I wonder where the investment of the "nest egg" investments would go.

That's a pretty ironic comparison, because laws against littering are exactly the sort of quality-of-life regulation that you seem to oppose.

So free.

What justifiable reason is there for this?

Other cities and states have worse problems with drug use but don't have problems with homelessness because housing is more affordable there.

I'm assuming you are U.S. citizen and not super familiar with the common law; apologies up front if that isn't the case.

Property law principles in the common law are vastly more complicated than this. There are all sorts of ways that your right to use real estate as you wish can be affected by past practices, hazy conventions, etc. Check out "easements", "mineral rights", "air rights", "adverse possession", and the sometimes elaborate processes of establishing title and specific property interests in particular jurisdictions.

And many of those limitations are logically prior to U.S. specific legislation around zoning, restrictive covenants, etc.

Lots of people disagree with this! There are tons of chemical processing facilities that pop up near my neighborhood, particularly rail car cleaning.

Can smell a different chemical every day depending on what they’re spraying out of the rail cars.

La Porte, TX

Pasadena, TX

Lake Jackson, TX

There are both new subdivisions and new processing facilities going up all the time. ProPublica ran some big articles on it, absolutely skyrocketing cancer rates around here.