We have zoning and internationally recognized building safety codes already.

Our current housing emergency happening everywhere is a pretty good indicator that we should be much more aggressive about trimming back the regulatory state which has ossified our cities.

Zoning is already pretty bad (at least in the US), and doesn't really have anything to do with safety.

In the sense that even without zoning laws, there were already public nuisance laws that wouldn't have allowed you to open a coal fired power plant next to a Kindergarten.

Zoning laws have a lot to do with safety & public health. Industrial zoning is far away from residential because factories produce pollution.

Edit: Some parts of zoning law has to do with safety/health. Some parts don't. Some parts are about more than one thing.

When I was growing up there was a chemical fire in a factory in town. People were evacuated. Luckily, very few homes were evacuated because zoning laws kept homes far away from the factory. The residential area that was evacuated was low density.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is some value in some of these rules.

Pollution laws protect against industrial operations polluting other areas, not zoning.

The real "pollution" they zoning was invented to solve was the "pollution" of residents of apartments living close to wealthier people. Seriously! Check out how the original Supreme Court decision phrased its motivation:

> “very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district …. interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes.”

Here's a more extensive analysis from an org purporting to represent real estate, the source of much historical support for this sort of exclusionary zoning:

https://cre.org/real-estate-issues/americas-sordid-history-o...

Yes, there's some value in some of these rules.

However by and large, the value that would be provided by zoning is already provided (and used to be provided) by other rules not falling under the bucket of 'zoning'. Especially not 'Euclidean zoning'.

Okay, what is the safety reason my barber can’t operate out of a room in his house?

No reason. Countries like Japan have reasonable zoning, meaning industrial uses are separate, but commercial and residential is largely interspersed. Which is great!

That's easy: your barber operating a business out of his house will result in customers coming to your neighborhood, and that might bring "those people" around, and we can't have that.

That's ridiculous. Those people can't get even get to the neighborhood because the residents have gone out of their way to eliminate public transit (which is for poors).

It's all relative. Plenty of poorer people have cars, but instead of $150k cars, they have cheap-o $25k cars. We can't have those kind of people in our neighborhood.

Here in Singapore, we only have about 1 million licenses for cars total. They are auctioned off to the highest bidder.

So there are no cheap-o $25k cars. (The car itself might be cheap, but you need the license to run it.)

My description in this context is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but this is actually a great system given the limited road space we have here. And auctioning off the licenses is about the most economically efficient way to allocate them.

Here in Tokyo, they do things a little differently (and pretty sensibly I think): you simply can't own and register a car in the city unless you have a place to park it. So you have to get some kind of proof from the police showing they've certified you have a parking space that will fit the car, and they come out with a measuring tape to check too, based on the car's actual dimensions. So if you can afford a parking place, you can own a car. Otherwise, no. So car prices are subject to market forces and not artificially constrained; the constraint is the actual land area available for parking, and that's subject to market forces too, since it could be used for something else like a building, so parking tends to be expensive.

Side answer. This kind of regulation lifts GDP by mandating some sort of economic activity. A barber in a room in his house means less rental, less money for commercial real estate company, less money spent buying "commercial" chairs and commercial chemicals. And thousands of other things I can't even fathom as the scope of this problem is huge and so intertwined with all other economic activity.

That’s nonsense. It does not lift GDP any more than breaking windows does. It redirects labor and capital from one use to another.

What are you on about? It does the exact opposite.

I can’t believe I’m seeing this on HN.

What do you mean? This is a perfectly possible / valid theory, you're welcome to try poke at it if you're open to debate instead of dismissing me.

It's the broken window fallacy. There's literally a fallacy named after the very thing you're espousing.

Usually when people discuss zoning it excludes things like industrial zoning and focuses on single family zoning vs multi-family zoning. In this case, yes, zoning needs to be deregulated. Zoning for housing should be zoning for housing and whether it is single or multi family shouldn't matter. But we should keep the industrial zoning from being put next to an Elementary school.

> Our current housing emergency happening everywhere is a pretty good indicator that we should be much more aggressive about trimming back the regulatory state which has ossified our cities.

That isn't true though. Our housing emergency is limited to places that are growing and thriving. There isn't a housing emergency in Detroit or much of the midwest for example, just not many are thrilled about moving to those places (or want to leave them as soon as possible).

Those places that don't have housing emergencies generally have just as bad regulations, and would have the same problems the instant they became appealing enough to move there. Eventually you run out of built out sprawl.

> hose places that don't have housing emergencies generally have just as bad regulations, and would have the same problems the instant they became appealing enough to move there.

If American population was equalized across these other cities, there would be less pressure on the few hot places everyone wants to move now, since our population isn't growing so much these days.

> Eventually you run out of built out sprawl.

Manhattan is not a sprawl and a very desirable place to live, with super high rents to boot. Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and even Tokyo are the same, so I'm not sure what you are trying to claim here. Out of all those, only Tokyo does well, but that wasn't the case in the 80s and is on the basis of a moribund economy and a not growing national population (one wonders when Seoul and SH will follow). IF you want to solve your housing emergency, limit growth in some way (or at least, make sure residents don't have as much money to bid up housing).

>Manhattan is not a sprawl and a very desirable place to live, with super high rents to boot. Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and even Tokyo are the same, so I'm not sure what you are trying to claim here.

Those cities are actually impossible to have in America (yes, including Manhattan), because of zoning laws and various other laws. Manhattan is only allowed to exist because it's grandfathered in and the local laws allow it. Such a city could never be built anywhere else in the US without some huge changes in legislation (not to mention local culture, since that drives the local legislation).

>IF you want to solve your housing emergency, limit growth in some way

Tokyo works because growth isn't limited: it's very easy to build here, unlike in the US. Tokyo builds hundreds of thousands of new housing units every single year, while the US struggles to build any. This is entirely because of regulations.

Fun fact: the US and Italy have about the same number of elevators, because it costs us about ten times more to build one.

I've seen be some terrifying elevators in Italy.

More about Tokyo new units here: https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/361409_dcd56370...

Title = How Tokyo built its way to abundant housing

TL;DR: Since 1995 (yes, during the lost decade) they are building ~150k new "dwellings" per year. Wow.

How many are they tearing down to rebuild? Buildings only last ~20-30 years in Japan, so a lot of those are just replacing something that was torn down.

> Buildings only last ~20-30 years in Japan

This is a myth in central Tokyo.

> Out of all those, only Tokyo does well, but that wasn't the case in the 80s and is on the basis of a moribund economy and a not growing national population (one wonders when Seoul and SH will follow).

Japan's economy is growing again (Nikkei is now at the level it was in 1990) and Tokyo's population has always been growing.

…but the rent isn't, because they allow infill development.

> IF you want to solve your housing emergency, limit growth in some way

This makes about as much sense as fucking for virginity

>internationally recognized building safety codes

I mean, the "International Building Code" is a little bit like the "World Series"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Building_Code

>"Calling it 'international' keeps it from being called the 'U.S. Building Code.'" explains Bill Tangye, SBCCI Chief Executive Officer.

Your argument doesn't really make sense because the problem isn't lack of houses or apartments, there's plenty of places to put everyone. The problem is one of affordability. The costs of stuff that already exists and has existed for ages isn't really tied to the current cost to build, even if we buy the specious argument that all regulation raises costs and those costs are inevitably passed directly to tenants.

supply and eemand sets rents. You you rent perfecly good existing houses cheap in rural areas. Nobody wants to like there.

There is no reason to think there is enourh room for everyone who wants to like in San Francisco, and statistics prove they heve not been building much. Mean while in other states we find areas of demand where housing is not expensive. Where I live you can rent one bedroom apartments for under $1000, mohe in won't be until spring as the building is still under construction. The owners are planning on starting the next building when this is done. That is what allosing building does.

Supply, demand, and cartels like Realpage.

Real estate has very distributed ownership and none of them are motivated to form a cartel.

The only way they can maintain one is through legal force. Zoning laws are almost entirely that force; they're a way to establish a cartel of homeowners.

Cartel's can't just magically set prices.

They can withhold supply, and that might have an effect on market prices.

You can't pay the mortgage on a place you're not renting out though, so they mostly can't withhold supply.

It applies more to things like retired people living by themselves in a 3 bedroom house.

OK.

Though if they can't withhold supply, how are those cartels supposed to hold up prices, then?

They don't, it's not real.

(Except that they can prevent construction of new units through zoning.)

Ehm, what? Of course cartels can magically set prices. That's what a cartel is for: to make collusion easier.

Even OPEC can't magically set prices. Cartels make collusion easier, but you still have to do concrete steps to raise market prices.

OPEC does that via production cuts. Or rather tries to do that.

This is just factually not true. There is plenty of empty homes, apartments and condos to house everyone. There are many units kept empty rather than lower prices. It is a myth that supply and demand sets prices.

This comment makes me really sad; it's someone who wants to help but ends up hurting.

There is also the effect of rich people needing a place to stash money and not wanting to bother with tennants

Housing activists in Melbourne have been campaigning about that for years now

I did not believe that was true until I stumbled on it happening. A rich lawyer, a salary far too big to spend, so they collected (empty) houses. They did not care about cash flow

A tax on empty houses in areas with accommodation shortage at worse cannot hurt and at best could free up a lot of accommodation

> Nobody wants to li[v]e there.

It would be better to say that rents are lower in rural areas because there is either more supply or lower median salary.

Setbacks, parking minimums and floor area ratios have nothing to do with safety. Community reviews have absolutely nothing to do with safety.

Side setbacks absolutely have an effect on fire safety (a greater distance gives less propensity to ignite the neighboring building and provides access with which to fight the original structure fire).

Front setbacks and lot area coverage ratios have a more minor version of this same effect from fires across the street. It takes a pretty good sized fire to ignite the building across a street, but as density increases and more of a lot's area is able to covered with structures, the chances to get a pretty good sized fire going do increase.

Ya. My setback is 3 feet, definitely just a margin for fire safety. I wanted to put an awning in but couldn't because it would be too close to the fence of my property boundary (I live in a town home that abuses the 3 foot setback to maximize living space).

I have minimum lot size of 5 acres. Can't see the wisdom in that one. I also have a minimum square footage size. $20,000 impact fee just to build a house and I receive no utilities or city/ county services.

I wish more than anything we could legislate the fee structures backwards. If the government wants an environmental impact study then the government is footing the bill for it. Putting it on the builder is stupid and just a way of hiding the budget item in other people's wallets.

Ok, the government will fund your environmental impact study so you can build, but...oh...given their budget they will have it done sometime in 2100.

> Side setbacks absolutely have an effect on fire safety

Sure, but is the benefit worth the cost? Manhattan and denser European cities without those haven't burned down since we fireproofed building materials

And yet other areas let buildings be physically against each other if they're built not to spread fire. Just let everyone do that.

> Community review

Any feedback brought up in a community review is on official record. I have witnessed safety concerns being brought up in community review multiple times that caused changes to the building plan. In one situation it was a very serious concern about blocking fire truck access to an elementary school.

why didn't the code catch that?

The code doesn't catch anything. People catch violations of the code. Community review is a place people can point out code violations. It's actually extremely embarrassing when this happens to a developer.

Buildings get built with infractions all the time. With the MFH buildings it's actually a point of law to see who gets stuck with the liability -- the person that built it or the person that bought it.

Careful with those absolutes.

From what I've seen of environmental review laws, they mostly just have to do with noise and construction nuisance. Whereas community review is mostly about aesthetics. I don't think these are the tools designed for safety.

In practice, the <environmental stuff> has mostly been used by non-environmentalists to delay development they simply don't like. (This one has to do specifically with CA, but it's not the first time I've seen this complaint.)

"Projects designed to advance California’s environmental policy objectives are the most frequent targets of CEQA lawsuits: transit is the most frequently challenged type of infrastructure project (edging out challenges to both highways and local roadways); renewable energy is the most frequently challenged type of industrial/utility project; and housing (especially higher-density housing) is the most frequently challenged type of private-sector project."

"Our study found repeated examples of intentional efforts to cloak the identity of CEQA litigants behind environmental-sounding names of fake and even unlawful “associations.”"

https://www.planningreport.com/2015/12/21/new-ceqa-study-rev...

I'm clueless on the subject and don't intend to argue the point, but it struck me that the metric that article consistently uses is one that almost guarantees the results: It's not surprising to learn that the categories that have the greatest amount of activity by far are the ones with the most CEQA challenges.

The point would be much stronger if it was made in terms the rate of challenges for varrious project types rather then in terms of frequency of CEQA challenges being that kind of project.

The assumption I'd draw from that, being ignorant of the subject, is that the argument is unsupportable on that more reasonable basis.