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The SFH has domain over their property - and that's where it should reasonably end. Giving them domain over what gets built on everyone else's property is where we get into trouble.

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Except that they don't exercise the preference over what happens over everyone else's property in isolation. The SFH owners collectively vote for their town councils and governments and what not. And those governments in turn make the zoning rules.

If we choose to overturn those collective preferences, we need to have principled discussions as to why our preferences should rule over the other groups'.

You have to ask what’s special about geographical clustering. Homeowners have all the power because they are arranged in big, continuous, municipal-government-sized blobs. Renters have none because they are dispersed across little pockets of each jurisdiction. If all the renters moved to one suburb they could easily get zoning power there, but they can’t, because that suburb would never allow 51% rental housing. The next best thing is to push zoning power up to a more aggregated level, where the scattered renters can form a more significant bloc.

Geometry is an arbitrary basis for power, not a principled one. There’s no deep reason why the block is too small to decide and the state is too big to decide and the City of Sunnyvale is just right.

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