I'm conflicted. Who should be allowed to say what gets built in an area: the neighbors, the neighborhood, the city, the county, the state, the federal government?
The property owner, unless what's being built is really smelly, loud, or dangerous. With perhaps some carve outs if people want to voluntarily have some kind of HOA type thing that isn't publicly enforced.
I agree that a property owner should be able to do what they want as long as excess noise, smells, or shadow doesn't leave their property. I wonder if zoning rules aren't just another form of HOA that people voluntarily opt into by moving to specific cities.
> I wonder if zoning rules aren't just another form of HOA that people voluntarily opt into by moving to specific cities.
It's the other way around; HOA's are largely an outgrowth of the real estate industry stepping in to solve the problem of how racial discrimination in housing could be made formalized and still publicly enforced through the courts when explicit racial discrimination by local governments in racial zoning was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917; starting with racial restrictions, other busybody terms started getting adding to property covenants.
If you're going to have common use areas like clubhouses or private roads or even shared roofs on townhouse buildings then an HOA (or something equivalent) is a necessity to deal with maintenance, insurance, and usage rules enforcement.
> ith perhaps some carve outs if people want to voluntarily have some kind of HOA type thing that isn't publicly enforced.
HOA's entire point is to using leveraging property covenants to create viral contracts attached to property that leverage contract to create a basis or public enforcement, that's the hammer behind any of their private enforcement, without which they would have no effect. "Voluntary...HOA type thing" is an oxymoron.
I thought zoning was supposed to provide predictability, stability. So if you buy a house in an area zoned for denser stuff, don't whine when a building starts to go up.
No, mostly what zoning was intended to do was to keep Black families (and, before that, Chinese families) out of white suburbs. The documentation on this point is extensive and convincing. That effect is less deliberate, overt, and intensive today than it was in, say, 1964. But "we've always done it this way" is a uniquely weak argument when it comes to single-family zoning.
(The problem, throughout most of America, is lack of multifamily zoning; it's not as much that people own single-family houses near multifamily lots, because their grandparents generally took care of that problem in the late 1940s when most major metro areas got rezoned to eliminate those multifamily lots).
I think this take on it is pretty good: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines