Comment by tropdrop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tropdrop | Hacker News Reader

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Echoing kgermino's statement, I also live in a (small but dense) city on the East Coast, in a very walkable neighborhood where the train station is a ten minute walk away from my house. There are kids bicycling and playing outside, lots of families with dogs, all enabled because the roads are smaller and we're still a walking distance from food, hardware store, etc.

Do not confuse the singe-zoned, panopticon-esque tracts of land with nothing around but houses with small yards and not a single shred of grocery stores, points of interest or wildlife-allocated land for dozens of square miles (necessitating car travel) [1] with "living in cities." Additionally, crime goes down not just with a fewer number of people, but also with people taking ownership over their community – as you'll see in loved neighborhoods of bigger cities like New York – rather than barricading themselves inside their house and watching with suspicion any person that walks past their shuttered blinds, because in places so hostile to travel on foot, no one in their right mind walks.

In an era of continuously increasing human footprint on the planet, we should not be talking about the (environmentally and fiscally) expensive expansion of humans to the corners of the planet that remain "rural" and a respite for our Earth's natural resources. We should consider how to use properly the space we have already colonized, and we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land.

1 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/7/abolish-single-...

> we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land

Not everyone's needs and preferences are the same. It's great that your city meets your needs and preferences. That doesn't give you the right to impose your preferred solution on everybody else.

Hilarious.

What do you think zoning is, if not "imposing <someone's> preferred solution on everyone else [ who might develop it ]" ?

Zoning is explicitly how communities act to stop people from doing things in with property there that a sufficiently powerful subset (hopefully a majority, but only hopefully) of the people already there don't like.

> What do you think zoning is

A way for individual communities to be the way the owners of those communities would like them to be. That's why different communities can be zoned different ways, i.e., one community does not get to impose its preferred way of being on everyone else.

The post I was responding to advocated abolishing single-zoned tracts of land altogether, which is a way for some people to impose their preferred solution on everyone else.

Zoning allows people that do not own land to decide what can be done with it.

That has some positive purposes ... it may indeed be a good idea not to put a toxic manufacturing facility next door to residential lots or a school. It might possibly make sense to focus retail development in a certain area within a community rather than haphazardly throughout it.

But single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing. It is, quite simply, rich people telling poor people "we don't want you here".

> Zoning allows people that do not own land to decide what can be done with it.

Land ownership, at least in every US jurisdiction I have experience in, is not that simple. Yes, technically my wife and I "own" our house and the plot of land it sits on. We have a title deed filed with the county clerk. (I'm leaving out the fact that we have a mortgage because the lien holder on the mortgage doesn't really have any rights that are relevant to this discussion; for our purposes here it would be the same if we owned the house and land free and clear.) That gives us a whole bundle of rights connected with the house and land, but it is not absolute "ownership" in the sense you appear to be using the term. The city, the county, and the state all have rights that don't go away just because someone buys the house and land; after all, they were all there long before we got there, and they all played a role in building the house and improving the land, not to mention all the infrastructure--roads, sewers, electricity, water, telephone, Internet. Our house and land aren't just sitting there in a vacuum; they are part of a community that is bigger than us and that has some ownership rights over the whole community that have to be balanced against the rights of individuals within the community.

Someone who really, really doesn't want to put up with any of that can go out to a highly rural jurisdiction and buy a plot of land that's far enough from all neighbors that they can basically do whatever they want.

> single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing.

Sorry, not buying it. You're welcome to build your own community that works the way you want it to if you don't like any existing communities. But you don't get to just declare by fiat that communities that don't work the way you prefer are evil.

I'm glad that you've outlined why property/ownership is much more complex than libertarians and conservatives typically acknowledge. I entirely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and it's all extremely important stuff.

However, I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing, and this led me to do a bunch of reading about the way this zoning classification is used across the US. That reading left me with only one conclusion: it is almost entirely a classist tool, used by the wealthy to exclude everyone else. Of course, the communities that do this have lots of nice sounding justifications for it which do not sound remotely problematic. But dig a little deeper (I did, really), and I am fairly confident that it becomes completely clear what is actually going on.

> I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing

I agree that such communities exist. However, that does not mean all communities that have some parts of them zoned for single-family dwellings are like that. Every community I have lived in that had portions of it zoned for single family dwellings also had townhomes and apartments, all in the same community and all within similar reach of whatever amenities were provided. (I have also been on both sides of the divide you draw, living in townhomes and living in single family homes.)

It doesn't need to be the case that every community with even one single-family dwelling zoned neighborhood has the same motivation.

As I said, it wasn't until I started reading around about this issue that I came to see how pervasive this use of the law was, and how in so many cases the motivation was reasonably easy to ascertain.

I'm not denying that conceptually speaking, such zoning could be done with purely good intent. I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.

> I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.

And your basis for this claim is your personal anecdotal experience, plus "a bunch of reading" you have done. IMO that's a pretty flimsy basis for such a sweeping claim.

This is attacking a straw man; the elimination of single-family zoning does not imply replacing that zoning with some other equally onerous requirement. Allowing students to attend school without requiring a dress code is hardly "imposing your preferred solution on everybody else".

Also, the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues, like the lack of housing in California causing sky-high home and rental prices. See e.g. a review of the book Golden Gates, which touches on NIMBY-ism in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-...

> the elimination of single-family zoning does not imply replacing that zoning with some other equally onerous requirement

Sure, it does: it explicitly says (not implies) that nobody who wants to live in a single-zoned community is allowed to any more, anywhere. That's an onerous requirement for anyone who does want to live in such a community.

> the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues

I think you mean "present" issues.

The problem I see is the idea that local interests should have no power to block the grandiose plans of politicians and bureaucrats who won't have to live with the results. At least in the case described in the article you linked to, the city manager, as far as I can tell, was also a resident, so he had skin in the game.

I note, btw, that the project mentioned in the article was allowed by zoning rules.

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