Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

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The government is literally forcing them in the case of virtually all new residential development. In most places it is illegal to have lots under 5000 square feet or more than one family on a lot (no duplexes etc). In many places the lot size restrictions are even more extreme, requiring 10-20k sqft per lot.

Almost every inch of the US and Canada has a litany of rules saying that buildings have to be 20’ or more set back from the street and have to leave 5-10’ on each side clear on the sides and rear. Usually they are limited to two stories and in some cases only one.

A lot of places take this further with rules on how much of your house has to be brick, or what color the roof can be etc. And since that’s still not enough to please some people’s desire for perfect conformity, most modern homes layer on top of this special HOA rules, for example restricting what kind of window shades are acceptable and how tall and green your grass most be. These rules are enforced by the local municipality and backed by the force of the police.

I have no doubt that there are many people who like single family housing and would buy designs like the common cookie cutter standard if it was part of a truly free market menu, but how much genuine demand exists we will never know, because virtually nothing else is legal and it hasn’t been for two generations now! People generally don’t “want” things they’ve never experienced and have no access to.

Just to drive this point home, imagine we passed a law saying that people were only allowed to eat seafood of certain dimensions and without tentacles. Fish, shrimp, and lobster between 1-7 lbs are OK. No squid or octopus. You can cook them however you want, except no grilled salmon is allowed in Vermont. Any other food requires years of community hearings to acquire one-off conditional approvals on a meal by meal basis.

Would you find plenty of people who liked seafood and defended this system? Yes. Would you know anything about people’s true preferences if they were allowed to be omnivores? No.

That’s what our world has been reduced to, and it’s the product of an almost unfathomably deep and Byzantine regulatory complex by which the government micromanages the built environment around us.

I agree that there are problems, but there’s still plenty of room to start new towns with better rules. Although certainly it varies, I believe that the process is to get enough people to move to an area and then agree to form a town together. And the rules in existing areas can be changed too, if you prefer. Just get a group of like–minded people to all move to the same area.

Also, I suspect that there are more towns out there that are dense and walkable than you realize, and more HOAs that are useful and reasonable (and that therefore never make the news) than there are terrible ones. The one my parents are in seems to have been run entirely without drama for decades; it just cleans the community pool and mows the median of the central avenue and replaces the sign at the front of the neighborhood every so often. A few years back a contractor replacing a culvert caused a flood and damaged a street and some houses; I’m not sure if the HOA hired them or the city did. Either way, the road was repaired and the pond refilled, and this is the most dramatic thing that’s ever happened in the area.

It's worth noting that this extends beyond the current housing market, too. Two common examples I often bring up:

1. We don't know whether or not consumers actually like having touchscreens in their cars as the primary means of control, because the "free" market lacks any other choice.

2. We don't know whether or not consumers actually like having TVs with built-in "smarts" (as opposed to, say, a box or stick that one can upgrade/replace at any time without having to replace the entire TV), because the "free" market lacks any other choice.

In order for a free market to exist, it has to be, you know, actually free. That means having some actual choices, and without coercive pressure toward a particular choice.

What makes the housing market even worse, however, is that said lack of choice is almost always through government fiat - making it even more impossible for a competitor to offer choices different from the ones currently in vogue.

At some point, we the people need to stand up for ourselves and tell NIMBYs and such to go pound sand instead of actively making our lives as difficult as possible simply because they can.

I’m not an expert on cars, but isn’t there only one brand known for having all the controls on a giant touchscreen? The other brands all have buttons and dials and things, with haptic feedback of some kind. Maybe some have smaller screens, for a navigation system that you can pay extra for? But then smart phones have become so popular, that maybe that’s not so important any more.

I don’t own a television myself, but surely there must be _some_ dumb tvs still available. If not, then just buy a computer monitor instead.

I think that these two examples are probably overreaching.

However, I agree that zoning and building codes can be overly restrictive. If you want to get away from them, move out of the city. The county rules are often less restrictive.

> I’m not an expert on cars, but isn’t there only one brand known for having all the controls on a giant touchscreen?

They seem to be ubiquitous among all but the most budget of models. There might have some buttons, sure, but the vast majority of interaction is through a touchscreen. And this predates the brand you're likely thinking off, too. When I rent a car, regardless of make or model, there's a touchscreen (with a handful of exceptions, and those exceptions are pretty far on the low end of rentals).

And usually it ain't even a good touchscreen; the overwhelmingly vast majority of them over the last decade have been clumsy imprecise resistive ones - which is probably "reasonable" for those wearing gloves, but that problem would be avoided entirely by, you know, not pushing for touchscreens as the primary means of input.

> Maybe some have smaller screens, for a navigation system that you can pay extra for?

The screens themselves are becoming increasingly standard, even without the navigation system. None of the cars I've rented in the last 5 years have had a navigation system, yet the vast majority of them had touchscreens, and those touchscreens were mandatory for anything beyond the most trivial of operations.

> I don’t own a television myself, but surely there must be _some_ dumb tvs still available.

If you want 4K, Sceptre is literally the only option of which I'm aware. That is, accordingly, the only brand of TV I've bought in the last 5 years.

> If not, then just buy a computer monitor instead.

Monitors of sizes suitable for watching something in a living room from a couch are vastly more expensive than even the highest-end "smart" TVs. And that's assuming you can even buy them; such monitors are intended for things like digital signage, meaning that businesses - not consumers - are the intended customer.

I’ll have to defer to your superior knowledge of cars, I guess. I’ve only seen one car in the last few years with a touchscreen. And I’ve been in cars dozens of times over that period. Perhaps they just haven’t been new enough models.

> Monitors of sizes suitable for watching something in a living room from a couch are vastly more expensive than even the highest-end "smart" TVs. And that's assuming you can even buy them; such monitors are intended for things like digital signage, meaning that businesses - not consumers - are the intended customer.

Funny how the size of monitor that is considered “suitable for a living room” has changed over the years.

I think what you’re saying is that we don’t have a free market because the products advertised to consumers are more narrowly tailored than they appear. I disagree. I think that consumers have more information available to them than ever before at any point in history. If they have strong preferences, then there is nothing stopping them from getting exactly what they want. If they just want a nice looking flat–panel TV, and don’t want to spend a lot of time researching TVs, then they don’t have to bother. We should not even want them to have to bother, in that case, because that wouldn’t satisfy their values.

The old adage “The Customer is Always Right” applies here, in its original meaning. Whatever product sells the best is by definition the one that is most fit for the market, and we can't complain that it’s ugly, or not as well–built as it ought to be, or that it’s not fit for our particular purposes. If it sold well, then it wasn’t ugly to the people who purchased it, it was built well enough for the people who purchased it, and it fit their purposes well enough that they spent their hard–earned cash on it. It’s no good looking down our noses at them; they just don’t have the same tastes or preferences at us.

Maybe there’s a hypothetical product that could have sold better than whatever is selling the best right now, but there are often good reasons why those aren’t available yet. iPhones, for example, sell well primarily because they are trendy and hip. There are plenty of Android phones that are just as good, or even better, but they don’t satisfy people’s need to be trendy and hip. Maybe once iPhones lose their cachet, then the Android phones with the best features and technology will sell better. Or maybe by then Symbian will turn the market on its ear and become the big new thing. Or maybe brain implants that give us telepathy will make phones obsolete.

I think the market _is_ free, in spite of trendy things like iPhones and smart TVs. Certainly in some areas, like architecture, the government puts its thumb on the scales pretty heavily and distorts the market. Houses and apartments can’t be too small, because that wouldn’t be good for the people living in them, and other paternalistic rules of that type do distort the market. They do make it less free, by artificially limiting the available choices ahead of time.

I’m sorry, the height of your grass is actually policed, by the police?!

He is being a little hyperbolic there. If you are a member of an HOA, and the HOA votes in a rule governing the height of your grass, then the HOA can enforce the rule with fines. If you don’t pay the fines, the HOA can put a lien on your house. It would be quite odd for the police to be involved at any point.

A lien just means that the house cannot be sold without paying the lien holder. Liens are actually quite common; any house bought with a mortgage also has a lien put on it for the balance of the loan. This forces you to pay off the loan if you sell the house.

If the house is put up for auction due to a foreclosure, I think a lien holder could recover their money from the sale price, or even gain ownership of the property. At that point the police might be involved in order to evict the former owner. But the HOA’s lien cannot cause a foreclosure, I think. That requires either defaulting on your mortgage, or a tax lien put on it by a municipality, state, etc.

Honestly, a town or city could make ridiculous rules about the length of your grass as well, and you would have just as much trouble or more. There are certainly enough horror stories told about HOAs to make a person wary of them. If all they do is manage property owned in common by the residents, then they’re usually fine. When properly run they are the most boring type of government ever invented. All they have to do is clean the pool regularly, mow the grass from time to time, or save up enough to buy a new roof for the building every couple of decades.

Meanwhile the city you live in probably sold hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds to buy a new football stadium, which earns hundreds of millions in yearly revenue. Naturally, they gave the owner of the stadium all that money and a tax break to boot, just to attract them to the area. Sales taxes went up a bit because of the increased tourism, but not enough to cover the bond payments, so your property taxes probably went up too. The mayor’s cousin’s construction company made a pretty penny building parts of the stadium, and his wife earned a bundle as a motivational speaker giving talks at conventions funded by the company that sells the concessions. Which is worse?

Certainly you always need to keep on top of what your HOA is doing, but you can’t ignore what your town is doing either.

I used to live in Scottsdale, AZ. They can fine you up to $3,000 a day if your yard isn't up to code. They say debris could be hidden in the yard and someone could get hurt. I don't know if the police would get involved though.

That seems extremely unlikely in practice.

Ouch. I guess I can cross that town off my list. Personally, I think trespassers should take personal responsibility for the risks that they take.

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