[wizofaus]

> It's ridiculous that government agencies can decide critical things about people's lives but the decision framework is totally arbitrary.

Arguably that's what we elect governments to do. And if they're doing a bad job of it, they get voted out. Obviously it's not a very fine grained system and there's an argument for a constitutional requirement for legislation to be reviewed periodically but that carries the risk of even more bureaucracy and effective regulation being repealed for ideological/partisan reasons rather than any sort of evidence based analysis.

[pas]

I was sloppy in my phrasing, I mean building approval/permitting. A bunch of local delegates are required to meet to have a new simple building (whatever the neighborhood a bit bigger denser is simple) erected? And we are surprised that housing costs are outpacing inflation?

"urbanization" is ongoing for decades and density is not the default? and people are surprised that suburban sprawl is the result?

[wizofaus]

But areas with higher densities tend to have more regulation than those without, so I'm not sure what your argument is? I totally agree suburban sprawl is the really of poor government policy but I'm less convinced it's an issue of building permits being overly restrictive. It's not hard to envisage high levels of regulation that are designed to make sprawl unprofitable - e.g. a maximum distance between residences and retail/industrial developments or PT facilities, or even regulation that prevents provision of ground-level parking etc.

[pas]

My argument is that those areas would be even denser, more walkable, would support more people, better infrastructure (thanks to more people bearing the costs, plus economies of scale). Would be even more engines of wealth generation, would benefit more people overall.

Regulations are obviously necessary to coordinate large populations with some decent throughput, but they need to be optimized for legibility, efficiency. (Eg. self-service portals, understandable - easily human computable - conditions, the less need for domain experts for regular business as usual things, the more transparent and standardized the decision making of bureaucracy is, the less waste there is in the coordination system.)

Therefore for housing, which is as basic a function as it gets, ought to be as easy to add more as it can be. Eg. copy paste an existing building.