Comment by xt00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xt00 | Hacker News Reader

Changing zoning in your neighborhood that you currently live in (and continue to want to live in) will likely change it, so for people to accept that risk they should be given an incentive.. for example within a given neighborhood what if the state gave those areas huge property tax breaks to allow zoning changes? Then there is a trade-off, pay less taxes and then you get something for the potentially different future. Maybe it’s better maybe it’s worse but saying to people “please just allow changes to the zoning” has not worked...

edit: basic thing I was thinking about was giving people incentives for YIMBY pushes in areas.. yea prop13 complicates it, but just wondering if there is any incentive for the folks that live in someplace already or the base assumption is that a very large percentage will vote against it?

More than half my neighborhood already gets massive property tax breaks from Prop 13. Some people pay like 1/10th of what a new owner would pay.

They bought a house. It came with a deed. The deed delineates exactly what rights are conferred. Zoning is not one of them.

Why do we have to bribe people to rescind rights that they never had in the first place?

There is an expectation that where I live won't just be rezoned industrial to make way for more Amazon warehouses.

There's also an expectation that aliens don't invade, and chickens won't mutate into tyrannosaurus rexes with all the 5g going up.

Luckily, none of that will ever happen. You'll get apartments, not warehouses.

The people that live in those area, and own those deeds, are the ones that vote and or convey their desires to their representative to impact the rules in those areas.

So I guess the answer to your question is "because those people bought their deeds under when a certain set of rules were in place, and they are in a position to exert pressure to keep those rules in place". Why would you expect them to act against (what they perceive as) their own self interest?

The answer of "because it helps society as a whole" is a powerful one, but not one that holds enough weight for a lot of people to give up a significant portion of their net wealth / retirement / satisfaction.

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