[kafkaesq]

It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking.

It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct.

And if you're going to be fair, you'd acknowledge that ultimately it presents a set of tradeoffs, with both positive and negative impact.

All of California's inequality problems go back to that.

Inequality is a very complex problem, with many forces and actors at play. Any analysis that attempts to reduce it to a single causal factor will instantly fail.

[zkms]

> It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct.

No particular implementation of zoning law is a "natural construct", and USian zoning laws have an extremely particular focus on preventing the construction of high-density housing (hell, some jurisdictions even criminalise roommates in pre-existing housing). There's nothing natural or inherent about that; and plenty of other countries have more sensical zoning laws that provide for adequate and dense housing supply while still having zoning (and they have lower rents and less problems with homelessness and housing-cost induced poverty, gasp).

[kafkaesq]

Oh, not every ordinance (or planning department directive) is "natural" or reasonable, of course. But zoning generically is a pretty well established and generally understood practice by this point - on par with the idea of "democracy", or for that matter, this business land "ownership" in the first place.

Or that is to say, "natural".

[nine_k]

Zoning is not natural, the way the law of gravity, or even the idea of liberty, is natural.

Zoning is invented by people, as you correctly noticed, to balance several trade-offs. Maybe in 1950s it was adequate; since 2000s, the balance of trade-offs has shifted drastically.

Maybe it's time to rebalance things. The problem is that those who profited form it most (the old realty owners), due to that very fact, can also afford to spend most resources (as in time, money, and lobbying efforts) to resist it.