[Lazare]

> It seems like it's theoretically possible for residents and visitors in a given city to enjoy its current building stock while simultaneously desiring different standards for new construction.

Is it? Can you explain why this would be so? Or even better, provide any evidence that this is true in any of the locations people have been discussing (Montreal, Somerville, Manhattan, Portland, etc.?)

Let's drill down and focus in particular on laws about multi-family dwellings. What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more, and even bad if you wanted rebuild them after a natural disaster?

[georgefox]

Talk to a typical owner of an old house, and you'll likely hear something about how they love its quirks. But would they build a house the same way today? Some probably would, but others would certainly not. This actually probably applies well outside of old homes too. I suspect something akin to the endowment effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect) plays in here.

It also makes sense to me that someone would appreciate a historical landmark but place a lesser value on a modern replica of that landmark. Similarly, I could imagine a person admiring a historical neighborhood more than a modern recreation of it.

> Let's drill down and focus in particular on laws about multi-family dwellings. What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more, and even bad if you wanted rebuild them after a natural disaster?

I'm not sure the answer needs to be logical (see above), but even if it must be, I don't know why placing limits on something implies that it was never actually good in the first place. Natural disasters are another story for sure, but I would imagine that sort of massive rebuilding was not the primary motivation for the present zoning laws in Somerville.

[eli_gottlieb]

> What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more

A duplex is split between two families. They both think multi-family housing is for college students, the universal bane of Massachusetts housing debates.