[glimshe]

But isn't a zoning law that prevents the denser building an artificial restriction? So why do they have the right to demand whatever density is in place there? Why are the current residents entitled to a restriction that didn't apply to them when they moved in - after all, there could have been an even more restrictive limitation in place that would have prevented the original owners from moving in.

I sympathize with both ends of the conversation. Sure, maybe we don't want to turn that town into Manhattan or Tokyo, but this line of thinking is what creates the major housing crisis in California.

[Brian_K_White]

The zoning law is put in place by the people who live in the zone.

I think exactly the same thing about the housing crisis in California. I put the whole thing in scare quotes and don't recognize it as a crisis at all.

Other than the outbidder/displacer aspect I acknowledged, the "crisis" is nothing other than a bunch of people want something they have no right to.

I think the larger umbrella state and federal governments rights over smaller local municipalities is (or should be) limited to things like, you can't say "here, we're ok with discrimination" or murder or slavery etc. This housing & zoning thing could obviously also be a major tool for discrimination, so you have to watch for that.

But being as full as they want and saying "we're flattered, but no thanks" to more is not automatically discrimination.

The outbidders are a problem, and I don't know what the answer is for that, but probably anything simple that sounds good is probably wrong.

[medvezhenok]

I think the same way that landowners colluding to keep rents high and keeping units vacant in lieu of renting at a lower price would be considered an anti-trust violation, homeowners voting for exceedingly strict zoning laws for self-benefit should be considered an anti-trust violation.

Your ownership of a house should not entitle you to decide what other people do with their land to such an absurd degree that you can manipulate the market in the area where you live.

[Brian_K_White]

No land within a country is it's own country. We are all members of communities.

That same argument does also apply to the larger state and federal community, but it applies to different classes of things at different scales, and needs to be justified by some need of the larger entity somehow. The local community gets to decide how dense they want to be unless the state can show that somehow the state actually requires that a particular town get denser for some reason.

Short of that, the current residents can absolutely collectively decide that one inconsiderate douche may not, for instance, operate a chicken farm in a residential neighborhood, or, allow a developer to increase the overall density within a given area where the voting majority of other residents don't want it.

If you want to have no such thing as zoning, so that every property owner is their own king of a 50 foot country, that should have to come bundled with an equal freedom of the other neighborhood kings to deal with the one pissing in the pool in whatever way amuses them.