[dirtyv]

A great example of tossing the baby out with the bath water. The grocery store chain across the street from my house went bankrupt and closed all of their stores. A truck assembly company tried to get a variance to take over the vacant building they left. Zoning can definitely be improved but I see no advantage, for the average person at least, in discarding it completely

[imtringued]

Americans haven't heard about hierarchical zoning. For them zoning means you can only do one thing and nothing else. This means you have a dedicated residential zone, dedicated commercial zone and dedicated industrial zone.

Everything is far apart because the zones aren't mixed use. In most sane countries you can build low impact buildings in every zone, medium impact buildings (commercial real estate) in medium impact zones and above and high impact (industrial real estate) buildings in high impact zones.

Yes, you can build your house near a factory but the factory can't be built near your house.

[wrycoder]

This is not the case. We have mixed zoning in most communities.

Industrial zones are usually reserved for industry. There are good reasons for that, primarily to keep noise, dust, and heavy traffic separated from residential areas. It's best not to allow residential use in an industrial zone, because it tends to promote very low quality housing.

The zone I live in is residential-agricultural with a manufactured home overlay district. Permitted uses include farms, home businesses, and professional offices in homes. The major limitations are density, height, and setback restrictions. There's a moderate amount of conservation land due to wetlands and streams, and the local residents are pretty active about protecting the watersheds and quality of life. You can't open a restaurant, grocery store, or auto repair business, but there are a few grandfathered uses like that near me.

As population in an area increases, the normal course is for zoning to change to permit increased density. I think most communities are best served by having areas of higher density surrounded by lower density, rather than making a uniform sprawl. Around here, the higher density, low setback zones are about three miles apart. That's where the stores are.

Speaking as someone who served on a planning board for a decade: you shouldn't try to stop development - you should ease it in. If you don't it, it tends to catch up with you all at once, which is very disruptive.

[cperciva]

It's best not to allow residential use in an industrial zone, because it tends to promote very low quality housing.

Presumably nobody wants to live in "low quality housing", and no developer wants to build housing which they can't sell; so this reads to me like a policy statement of "we'd rather that people are homeless".

Historically this has definitely been as thing -- American cities have prohibited low-income housing as a covert effort to enforce racial segregation, and in the early days of Victoria, Canada, free land grants were available to anyone who brought at least six servants with them -- but I'm not sure that such a policy has any place in modern society.

[wrycoder]

In that paragraph, I was only referring to industrial zones.

[mint2]

While the overall point is good, For more pollution prone industries it would be very risky not to prohibit housing next to it, otherwise it’s dooming poor people and their kids to health issues and early death. For example, battery recycler in the past have lead to massive heavy metal pollution in the vicinity.

So for the most risky industrial facilities housing should be prohibited, but for all others yeah it should be mostly hierarchical.

[ClumsyPilot]

in Many EU contries a house has to meet sone limits on noise and other pollution or it will not be allowed to be sold as a residential property.

[clairity]

rather than arbitrary zoning rules and an implicit pass for such obvious and wanton pollution, those businesses should be regulated and heavily punished (too bad the supreme court made things like this harder not easier recently). that's a literal externality. it's the kind of thing where the corporate veil should be pierced mercilessly, and the executives and owners all held personally culpable.

then it wouldn't matter who lived next door.

[mint2]

Theoretically and on paper that would be a nice proposition. Unfortunately we are humans. That will not work

[abirch]

I was born and raised in farm county. You wouldn't want a pig farmer to move in next door. Yes too much zoning is a bad thing; too little is bad as well.

[analog31]

In the state where I live, every community within a large region has received an application to build and operate a pig farm with upwards of 10k pigs, plus multiple satellite farms with 999 pigs each. These applications have been traced through murky chains of ownership to one or two businesses, notably Smithfield.

So a "pig farmer next door" is the Peoples Republic of China, and the "farm" is 20000 pigs. Also, every business that proposes moving into the state lobbies the state government for relaxation of environmental regulations, and files lawsuits to challenge regulatory jurisdictions, especially regarding water pollution. The small communities are totally out-lawyered, and out-lobbied.

Look up "the Highland Clearances." That was what happened when someone figured out that sheep were more valuable than people. Now someone has figured out that pigs are.

[thedougd]

https://www.space.com/pig-poop-lagoons-landsat-5-satellite

[voisin]

Arguably a pig farmer isn’t going to want to raise pigs on a suburban lot either. And many places already allow backyard chickens, bees etc.

I don’t like how much my neighbour’s dog barks, but can you imagine if zoning prevented dog ownership? Why allow yappy dogs but not pigs? Is it just the number of animals or is it truly the type?

[ClumsyPilot]

you are missing the forest for the trees. zoning does not prohibit you from owning a pig as a pet. have you ever seen the kind of nutrient rich runoff a pig farm produces?

[voisin]

Ok, I agree with this, but in this case there is a direct impact to the adjacent landowner receiving this runoff. So regulate that.

For some reason we craft all these laws to avoid the possibility of bad things happening, creating these broad dragnets that impact so many things unintentionally, rather than just regulating the thing we don’t want directly.

[heretogetout]

Runoff isn't the only concern. There's noise, big-rig traffic, odor, unappealing landscape (important to some). At some point it's a lot cheaper and easier to just regulate with zoning than to regulate each individual component of a site[0]. And frankly both sides -- residential and farmer -- should be happy to be away from each other.

0: Which, of course, developers would also object to and would lead to a lot of patchwork regulation due to grandfathering.

[darkerside]

What you're describing is a recipe for a convoluted and incomprehensible zoning code that tries to predict every possible consequence instead of simply stating what people don't want.

[voisin]

And yet this is how cities developed for the vast majority of human existence and created the cities that people flock to as tourists.

[ghaff]

Don't know where the pig farms are around my town--New England, so a lot of farms are fairly small--but there's a dairy farm down the street alongside houses, people have goats and chickens, there's some light industry including a junkyard just down the road. (With respect to farming specifically, like many Massachusetts towns, it's a "right to farm" community, which means with some restrictions farming activities are generally allowed.)

Now you certainly can't walk places for the most part if that's why you want mixed zoning.

[zip1234]

There are way better ways than zoning to regulate negative externalities. For example, rather than blindly saying 'no commercial', a rule could regulate the bad parts of commercial, such as noise. Zoning is a blunt tool and pretty much fails at it's entire point.

[FastMonkey]

That sounds great on paper, but you would almost definitely get people squeezing around the letter of the law.

I mean, take noise. It seems easy to regulate because you just put a decibel limit on it, but that doesn't take the nature of the sound into account. So, you could have a business making crying baby sounds for dolls putting that out all day. It's really hard to define something like "no overly annoying sounds", and that's just one aspect of this kind of thing.

There needs to be a relaxation of the tight zoning rules we have these days, but trying to define limits on externalities has lots of problems too.

[fragmede]

The question is, at what level are those zoning decisions happening upon? Until that's being done at a planetary scale, anything else is forcing participants into a zero sum game in which everyone loves.

[heretogetout]

This sounds a lot more expensive and time consuming than broadly regulating by category, and for what is probably marginal gain. Why bother?

[mulmen]

How is “no noise” implemented if not ultimately through zoning? Sounds like you are arguing for higher resolution, not a new paradigm.

[noirbot]

It also puts the onus on policing. This is exactly the issue that people have with Airbnb and short term rentals. It's "evil" because it bypasses zoning because people "don't want to live next to a hotel or party".

If you're not going to push for zoning, then you're asking for one-off governmental agents to decide when something has gone too far.

[zip1234]

Noise rules could be quiet hours between certain times, rules about measured decibels, etc.

[mulmen]

Sure but the rules can’t be the same everywhere. They vary based on your zone, literally. That’s the entire point.

What you are describing is just zoning.

[noirbot]

Most places already have that, pretty much. It doesn't work, generally.

[pantalaimon]

Offices are not very noisy

[nradov]

Offices have a lot of noisy traffic.

[wrycoder]

There are levels of industrial zones, with specific businesses and industries allowed in each zone.

[ClumsyPilot]

could you quantify the "betterness"?

[belligeront]

Zoning is almost all bath water. We can regulate where industrial use can exist as separate laws and get rid of the 97% of zoning that has been a disaster for the US socially, economically, and environmentally.

[masklinn]

> We can regulate where industrial use can exist as separate laws

That's called zoning...

e.g. maximum-nuisance (or maximum-use) zoning: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sV5ETXDs_8M/Ux-axBTuF2I/AAAAAAAAAs...

> and get rid of the 97% of zoning that has been horrible for land use in the US

It's not like the zoning policy which causes those issues is a huge amount of stuff, the issue with american zoning is that it's exclusionary: each zone can only have one use, and municipalities micromanage zones.

[voisin]

It isn’t just that it is exclusionary. It also micromanaged setbacks, heights, parking ratios, amount of green space, etc etc etc. All of this adds costs and decreases diversity that you see in dense European/Asian cities that have stood for Thousands of years.

There’s a pretence of knowledge that modern planners are smarter than all who have come before, and the result has been an abject failure that planners won’t admit to.

[masklinn]

> It isn’t just that it is exclusionary.

Oh no, far from it, but it’s the root.

> There’s a pretence of knowledge that modern planners are smarter than all who have come before, and the result has been an abject failure that planners won’t admit to.

They’re only a failure if you assume planning in the US is about sustainable, equitable, liveable spaces.

[voisin]

> They’re only a failure if you assume planning in the US is about sustainable, equitable, liveable spaces.

100%. Which is why I favour abolishing zoning bylaws. If it was truly about sustainability, equity, or creating living spaces designed for human flourishing, then I would support them, but it isn’t now and it never was.

[belligeront]

It is a huge amount of stuff: parking minimums, minimum setbacks, minimum lot sizes, height limits, maximums on number of units, density, architectural style, etc., etc., etc.

Zoning codes are massive and complex documents that require hugely specialized knowledge. And they are different in each municipality, so housing developers can't easily work across different municipalities. This also increases costs by making it harder to standardize building plans and use cheaper, more automated building techniques.

Compare this with Japan which has a small set of zoning uses set at the national level.

[NonNefarious]

And they're packed in like sardines. People who want to live like that can go live in city centers.

Zoning allows people to choose the type of neighborhood they want to live in. How are you going to accomplish that without it?

[0x53]

So, if we allow people to live closer together there will somehow be less space?

There will always be suburbs in America. If people want to live in the suburbs it will always be possible here. Zoning actually prevents people from living where they want to because only single family homes are allowed to be built.

[NonNefarious]

That doesn't follow at all. How will there "always be suburbs" if they're not protected from wholesale buyout and replacement with high-density housing blocks by developers and corporations?

Your last statement doesn't make sense either. If you want to live in a single-family-zoned area... you want to live there. If you don't like it, don't live there. WTF is the confusion?

[Pxtl]

> Zoning allows people to choose the type of neighborhood they want to live in.

Considering the massive shortage of housing in overly-micromanaged zoning areas, it has monumentally failed at this.

[dasv]

Fixed it:

> Zoning allows people _with enough money_ to choose the type of neighbourhood they want to live in.

[NonNefarious]

I love the caterwauling about a "shortage," as if everyone is entitled to move into an area and live on top of the people who are already there... who chose to live there because of the type of neighborhood it is.

Manhattan is full. The USA as a whole is not. Go live somewhere else.

[cuteboy19]

Zoning specifically outlaws certain kinds of neighbourhoods. That is the main purpose of zoning

[tharne]

> 97% of zoning that has been horrible for land use in the US

If it's so horrible, why do so few people want to get rid of it? The truth is that most Americans are pretty happy with their neighborhoods and communities. Sure, suburban single-family homes may offend the aesthetic of the elites, but most other people like them just fine.

[droidist2]

The fact that the few dense cities in the US where you don't need to drive everywhere are ridiculously expensive would indicate there's more demand for these kinds of places than we're supplying.

[treis]

Your cause and effect is backwards. They're dense because they're expensive.

[spacemanmatt]

They're dense and expensive because they're desirable.

[treis]

Desirable for reasons independent of their density. You can't, as an example, replicate Manhattan in Upstate NY and expect people to flock there.

[nrr]

I'm not sure I follow. Could you perhaps explain?

[pandaman]

You could make an argument that people like traveling packed like sardines because airlines flight most people this way and it's also an expensive way to travel. However it does not follow, it's likely that people like convenience of air travel and value it more than the abysmal accommodations. To wit, the richest people travel in roomy private planes with plenty of room and the less rich go with business/1st class, also allowing more room.

Likewise, even the most expensive cities still have mansions in the middle of micro-apartments. If these cities really were valued for their density, the mansions would either be gone or would be cheaper than the surrounding dense dwellings.

[ClumsyPilot]

if they were undesirable they woupd be cheaper than suburban properties. obviously the demand is there

[justapassenger]

Like land locked Manhattan? Or land locked SF?

[masklinn]

> Sure, suburban single-family homes may offend the aesthetic of the elites, but most other people like them just fine.

Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

[flenserboy]

No, they're not. Even if something bad is somewhere in an origin story, that doesn't taint the existence of a thing. Most of the complaining about suburbs comes from people who want people to live bunched together, ant-like lives. Should there be more room for small businesses in and around suburbs? You bet. Encouraging walkability, not having to drive forever to get groceries, etc., is useful. But this push to take away the freedom of people to not live on top of each other is another form of classism, one oriented toward the imposition of suffering rather than toward encouraging freedom.

[BirdieNZ]

> But this push to take away the freedom of people to not live on top of each other is another form of classism

This sounds like a ridiculous straw-man; who's pushing to take away freedom of people to not live on top of each other?

People advocating for suburbs to pay their fair share of taxes, and for less car subsidy, and for less restrictive zoning are not restricting freedom but increasing it.

[cuteboy19]

This is so absurd. Zoning involves so much central planning that it would put the Soviet Union to shame.

Suppose you want to add an extra room to your house on your land that you ""own"" in this system. You would need to go prostrate yourself before some bureaucrat in city hall. Who then inevitably declines that variance because some busybody somewhere thought that it interferes with the ""neighborhood character"".

How can we even say that you own your own land if you are not allowed to build on it as you please? Where is the freedom in any of this?

[NonNefarious]

No, they're not. They're a style of living that people can choose, and work to achieve. If you want to choose a different style, then do so; they're available.

If you want high density, go live in a city center. But there's no reason to allow developers and corporations to destroy other types of neighborhoods that are ALREADY residential.

This pro-developer/pro-corporate-ownership shilling is way past tired.

[tharne]

> Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

Prior to the widespread development of suburban single family homes post WWII, most Americans outside of those in rural areas could not afford to home their own home. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy, and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans, including a majority of immigrants, live in the suburbs.

[drewcoo]

> . . . post WWII[1], most Americans outside of those in rural areas[2] could not afford to home their own home[3]. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy[4], and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans . . . live in the suburbs[5].

[1] Note that home prices wobbled a bit but were relatively even from the recovery after WWI and the flu through the early 60s. Income over that time increased significantly (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/16-05intax.pdf). Things change rapidly after that. I think it suggests a more complicated situation than "it all changed post WWII."

https://voxeu.org/article/home-prices-1870

[2] About half of the country. Nothing like today.

https://getrawmilk.com/content/urbanization-usa-rural-vs-urb...

[3] Affordable because of VA and FHA loans after the war. And increasing wages. And flat housing prices.

[4] Actually, the FHA (#3) mainstreamed redlining. That's pretty darned elitist.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mapmaker-r...

[5] We're mostly suburban in the same way we're all middle class, smart, and attractive: self-description, but not any objective measure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/u-s-is-ma...

[pru567]

Part of the attraction of the suburbs is that most US cities aren't very compelling. Its not like the choice is a Cleveland suburb vs Barcelona; its a Cleveland suburb vs Cleveland. Neither choice is all that great.

[tharne]

That's fair.

[nosianu]

An anecdote from Nazi Germany from the town I grew up in.

The Nazis did exactly the same! As part of their program - similar to what Putin wants to do now? - to become self-sufficient, among many other projects, they built a very large chemical fiber factory into the middle of underdeveloped Thuringia. That's the German state just above Bavaria.

https://www.all-neumann.de/rud-zellwolle.html

For the thousands of new workers, only some of which could be sourced from the local population, they build the equivalent to American suburbs, in 1935.

A few pictures, old black and white:

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/H5NXR6CAX2M...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/2GD55POKL3R...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/UNFBR42B35M...

The factory, by the way, even back in the 1930s included two olympic-size swimming pools, one heated (by the next door factory coal power plant) and one with waves:

https://www.all-neumann.de/images3/Schwarza_119674.jpg

That suburb still exists, with a lot of kind of equal double-houses surrounded by a lot of garden.

Google maps, you can see how all houses and plots are similar: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.6840376,11.3145743,413m/data...

Until after reunification they could still walk for shopping in little stores, Schwarza, a tiny place at the edge of which the new houses were built, even had a butcher shop. To get to the factory could be done by bike leisurely within ten minutes.

However, in my old hometown (Rudolstadt) industry and houses often were right next to one another. There were quite a few of those, and they were in the city or at the edges, next to houses and villas. There's an x-ray tube factory (https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/about/history/stor...) and quite a few other industries, beginning early 20th century. I don't know if those various factories were at the edge of town in the 1920s, but even if they were, it can't have been very long that it all got a bit mixed. Today we have zoning too, kind of, "Gewerbegebiet" (industrial park) is where you have to go with your manufacturing business these days.

We now have very similar discussions about more mixing, example (German): "Architect recommends more mixed use areas" -- https://www.nw.de/lokal/bielefeld/mitte/21979129_Architekt-e... But also the opposite, "Please don't mix" -- https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article518393/Bitte-nicht-mis...

[JaimeThompson]

>Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

How so?

[belligeront]

The origins of zoning were to exclude black, Chinese, and jewish workers and residents from white neighborhoods. https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...

Today, they continue to be used to exclude poorer residents from richer neighborhoods through mechanisms like minimum lot sizes (housing is much more expensive if you require 10000 sqft lots, etc.) and prohibitions of multi-family dwellings (which make housing cheaper by allowing multiple households to split the cost of land).

[refurb]

That doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to be a suburb to exclude non-whites. It could be an apartment building.

[JaimeThompson]

He didn't say zoning, he said homes so I was asking them why a single family home was elitist.

[zip1234]

My city is holding public hearings about a new apartment development. People are outraged because it might bring in poor people.

[kingkawn]

False constrain on housing supply despite population boom causes housing prices to rise incredibly, an increase entirely subsidized by the desperation of the working poor to find somewhere affordable to live.

[masklinn]

And additional costs of means of transportation in order to be able to live there, because of exclusionary single-family zoning, residential areas are wastelands of nothing, essentially requiring a car per adult individual. This also significantly constrains people with mobility issues.

[Pxtl]

Ever seen a zoning consultation meeting to build multi-family residences in a single family detached neighborhood?

The objections are wholly classist worries about What Kind of People are going to be living there.

[asveikau]

Build a car centric life and then wonder why everyone is so stressed and obese. But the people are happy with it!

Many of those people are conditioned to expect these things because it was considered progress and increasingly it's all that they can get, and I think have some blind spots that probably keep them from living their best life.

Surely pointing this out is elitist.

[justapassenger]

There’s waaaay more reasons to why Americans are obese and stressed, than single family houses zoning.

[goosedragons]

Of course but requiring a car to do 95% of tasks surely doesn't help.

[bandyaboot]

More precisely, nearly all the people who can afford to live there like them just fine.

[rychco]

This is an intentionally poor & misleading question.

So few people want to get rid of it because so few people are even aware of what it is, why it’s bad, and how it affects their community.

[tharne]

> So few people want to get rid of it because so few people are even aware of what it is, why it’s bad, and how it affects their community.

So you're going to convince us to abandon zoning using the the argument that it's bad but we're all just too stupid to know better? Good luck with that. A great many suburbanites lived in cities at one point in their life and decided to move out.

[rychco]

Nobody is too stupid to understand zoning, and I never suggested that was the case. I am saying that most people are entirely unaware how/why zoning occurs around them at all.

[nrr]

Is this true? This fact isn't obvious to me.

[belligeront]

I don't think there is much evidence, since voters don't directly vote on this, but some points to no: - Houston voted against zoning on a public vote - Many people report wanting to live in more walkable neighborhoods - The few cities that have walkable, dense neighborhoods in the US are much more expensive than other cities and walkable neighborhoods are more expensive than non-walkable. This suggests that there is something limiting the supply of walkable neighborhoods (zoning).

[drewcoo]

> If it's so horrible, why do so few people want to get rid of it?

People fear change? And media reinforces that.

Things suck now . . . but how much worse is the unknown? [cue scary music]

[amluto]

I’ve seen one Bay Area use of zoning that I like. In Palo Alto, there are areas zoned for retail (which I think means retail or restaurant, but must be things that interact with customers who walk in). This helps for a somewhat odd reason: retail space is quite a bit less expensive than office space or housing, and property owners would often like to convert to office space. But doing so at scale would introduce a tragedy of the commons: office space is desirable in part because of the presence of retail!

(I’m not saying the economics have to work this way — I can easily imagine that more relaxed zoning and development rules would equalize the values of different types of space. But in the mean time, this policy at least appears to benefit people who live or work in the area.)

[thot_experiment]

I'm not a zoning expert but this rings true to me, I recently spent some time back in europe and boy do I miss having a grocery store and a tram station 3 minutes walk away from my commie block in the suburbs. USA urban design is absolute trash.

[dasv]

I live in a commie block — well, fashy block since it's Spain — and although the zone is something that in the US would be seen as "the projects", the zone is nicer than the surrounding neighbourhood: well oriented blocks with plenty of light, no inner courtyards, surrounded by parks, minimal walls with neighbours, etc. Something is failing in city planning when the absolute cheapest houses that were built in a post war economy to house poor families were more thoughtfully designed than the rest of the area under city hall code.

[drewcoo]

I'm not falling for "think of the babies."

There's a lot of bath water. Drain it. We'll be better off than now.

We can talk about adding whatever zoning laws we actually need after this mess is cleaned up.

[jdasdf]

I completely disagree, zoning is a negative in every sense, and the world would be a better place without it.