[Schiendelman]

This take is actively destructive. We need to let people CHOOSE to live WHERE they want to live - and let people who buy land CHOOSE to build housing for demand they perceive. That's it. That's the problem and the solution. It should be unconstitutional to limit housing production arbitrarily.

[xnx]

How do we "CHOOSE" who gets to live in the most desirable areas?

[Schiendelman]

By letting people build upward. This is self solving, except for our arbitrary limits on how much housing a land owner is allowed to build.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ah, I see you are a fan of the Kowloon Walled City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

[Schiendelman]

There's a great book called "City of Darkness" about it - a lot of what we believe about it was a campaign funded by the Hong Kong government to turn public opinion about it negative because they wanted the land back from China.

Most of the reason there were any problems there at all was that there was no legal jurisdiction over it, there are still buildings in Hong Kong that have nearly that density with none of the legal issues.

[seanmcdirmid]

There was no zoning, no fire safety inspections, no fire safety, haphazard infrastructure, lack of water to drink and clean with, etc…it was basically an unregulated slum (which you can still find in many countries).

Hong Kong has density sure. But no one would call it cheap density.

[apparent]

Should people also be allowed to move into neighborhoods that are zoned as suburban (not so much in SF as in nearby areas), and have them remain that way?

I get the libertarian impulse to let people do what they want with their property, but it seems like part of that freedom should be the right to move into areas where there are zoning restrictions.

[Schiendelman]

Zoning should always have been unconstitutional, and the court case enabling it proved that.

The Supreme Court upheld it a hundred years ago, in 1926, after batting down previous efforts by the same people to explicitly ban black people from neighborhoods. They realized that since black families couldn't afford houses by themselves (they needed to buy houses with two or three families together), they could get around it with single family zoning. Ever wondered why it isn't called "house" zoning? Because it was segregation.

The appellate court in the case threw out zoning, because it was so obvious that it was about race. The Supreme Court overturned it by ignoring the entire appellate court decision and defining a building itself (apartments) as a nuisance, instead of making the petitioners regulate actual behaviors. Because the behaviors weren't the problem, it was the black people they didn't want.

Sorry - this riles me up. :)

You should absolutely not be able to have a say over how much housing your neighbor builds. Sure, if they make noise, or bad smells, or bright lights, THAT you should be able to regulate. But the outcomes of having a say over how much housing your neighbor can build is the strongest root of a whole host of issues - from CO2 to obesity to high commute times and traffic to municipal budget bloat. It causes sprawl. Increasingly, parts of the left and right are starting to realize we need to overturn it.

[robocat]

We have zoning in New Zealand and it wasn't started by segregation.

Zoning has other reasons than racism.

Oversimplifying things down to single causes is an error of thinking.

[Schiendelman]

You've never heard of papakainga?

Zoning and land use code in New Zealand is one of the better examples of structural racism.

In housing law in the United States, we've figured out that because people often use feelings rather than clear statements for their reasoning, we had to pay attention to disparate impact, rather than discriminatory intent.

What you'll find is that in nearly every country, zoning and similar laws originate in or were dramatically expanded to exclude wealth generation by minority groups.

[apparent]

What part of the Constitution is violated by zoning laws?

I have heard of laws that prevent the construction of structures that shade other properties (skyscrapers) or block views of the ocean. If those are apparently legal, why not a law that says you can't build a big apartment complex that would greatly increase traffic, for example?

[Schiendelman]

See the Village of Euclid v Ambler Realty case, which is what I'm referencing in my long comment. A federal appeals court found that those restrictions were racially motivated and cause racial segregation, which is unconstitutional (and we've studied this to death since to confirm it). The Supreme Court, nine white guys... ignored that finding when overturning the appellate court decision.

[scoofy]

Yes, but not forever!!!

Growth has to happen in the long run. We have the same zoning as we did before the people looking for housing were born.

We can have incremental changes, or we can have sudden change. It's going to happen predictably or with a ton of political conflict. The better solution is always to allow a self-reinforcing pressure release on housing. I've long said that everyone should be allow, by right, to expand their housing by 2x the median building unit within a half mile radius, by units, sqft, and height.

Suburban neighborhoods then slowly turn into duplexes over one generation, then row houses over another, then finally start building up after a third generation. Predictable, fair, and sustainable.

[Schiendelman]

If you make it slow, you cause the same issues - and then the neighborhood just says "well if it's FOUR generations that's not too bad, is it?" And because the people who don't get to move in later don't get a say... it gets worse forever.

It's insidious, but as long as you allow people to regulate how much housing their neighbors can produce, it always gets this bad eventually.

[scoofy]

It’s self reinforcing. When demand is highest, building will be highest, and median unit size will increase more rapidly, allowing more building, allowing more units.

The pace is limited, but the URBAN output increases exponentially, which is exactly what we want.

[xnx]

> Growth has to happen in the long run.

This is not sustainable. The good news is that, due to demographic shifts, we might have a glut of housing in 20 years.

[Schiendelman]

Japan is shrinking. Tokyo, however, is growing. It would not be good news if our cities had a glut of housing. We have three billion people of rural->urban shift we still need to do.

[scoofy]

Localized growth has nothing to do with total population.

These urban housing crises in every major western country have nothing to do with population growth and everything to do with population concentration.

We should expect this problem to accelerate during periods of population decline, because there will be even stronger economic incentives to move into concentrated population centers.

[pixl97]

When all areas have zoning restrictions you've reversed the problem again removing peoples freedom.

[HDThoreaun]

No, you have no right to force your neighbors to behave exactly as you want.

[seanmcdirmid]

We can’t let everyone choose to live in the same place. There has to be some mechanism, hopefully market-based but it could also be a residency system, that ensures people spread out and live in different places. Even if you could get SF to support a billion people in living space, I’m sure infrastructure and resources like water would cut things off before it got to that many people.

[Schiendelman]

There absolutely does not have to be in mechanism to spread people out. It is cheaper to provide infrastructure to people who are much closer together than it is to provide the same infrastructure to people who are spread farther out.

There's been a website for the last 20 years called Strong Towns that talks about this a lot if you're interested in learning more.

[seanmcdirmid]

Building up isn’t cheaper at some point. Around 30 stories is the economic limit right now when you consider fire safety, with anything higher reserved for splurges.

Having lived this in China, the economics get wonky in dense cities. I’ve never seen the built up area with lots of 30 stories being cheaper than 4 story blocks. And that is in the most zone-agnostic build happy country on earth.

[gogobio]

So go buy land and build a house, just CHOOSE to spend your money and buy land. What's so hard about that? Ah yes we conveniently forget in our youthfulness that we are not original and if thousands of software leeches choose to relocate en masse they will sky rocket the costs on just about everything - simple supply and demand.

[Schiendelman]

The point here is that the existing owner of a house is often happy to build an apartment building, and almost always not allowed to.