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Comment by asift | Hacker News Reader

It's too bad the game doesn't include an option to adopt Houston-style regulation and create a better institutional framework for regulating housing in the first place.

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I read Yglesias' "The Rent is Too Damn High" book and liked it ( http://amzn.to/1Zo1TEj ) but it seemed a bit "high-level". I wonder if there are other examples of places that have significantly looser zoning, besides Houston, that actually look like attractive places to live? Houston is not my cup of tea.

Also, how does that really work out in practice - can I buy a house in a residential neighborhood and open a noisy biker bar in it?

Japan.

Fair enough. I meant in the US, but what are Japan's zoning laws/culture/whatever like?

For a good overview of Japanese zoning check out:

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

versus US style "euclidian" zoining:

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/euclidian-zoning.html

I believe there's supposed to be an element of realism to the game. Building new housing is hard enough, imagine trying to convince SF to do away with zoning bylaws.

The rule that Marin can't be upzoned is hilarious.

There's no real public transportation to/fro Marin to San Francisco, so how do you add substantial units to Marin without greatly impacting traffic which is already pretty painful?

The same NIMBYs that prevent new housing also prevent new public transit. Build both - whichever one comes first will speed the other along.

BART was intended to go there when they first started building it, iirc. Marin dropped out of BART, and then San Mateo county.

This is why there's the double decker tunnels downtown - one was intended to branch off towards Marin.

>There's no real public transportation to/fro Marin to San Francisco

After the loans on the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge were paid off (some time in the 1960s or 1970s) instead of eliminating the tolls, it was decided to use the revenue from the tolls to subsidize public transportation between SF and the counties to the north of it. The buses and ferries between Marin and SF remain very good IMHO.

Houston-style regulation is pretty bad: they don't put the madness into the zoning per-se, but they require lots of mandatory `free parking', don't they?

Not having laws to prevent "bad behavior" would make most of the Bay Area NIMBYs heads explode.

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