The idea that a state government can seize land-use decision-making power from local communities is anti-democratic and grossly immoral.
You're confusing your ideas of property rights with actual US democratic ideals, which are not equal at all. In fact the idea of property rights is explicitly left out of the Declaration of Independence; where Locke would declare "Life, Liberty, and Property" as inalienable human rights, Jefferson changes "Property" to "Pursuit of Happiness". (Quite a strange distinction for a man who owned slaves!) This is because there was great debate about property and lordship in the New World. Property holders were seen as the tyrants who oppressed the colonists, and prevented the Americans from doing what they needed to do to live, in pursuit of their own profits and investments. So, the idea of a democratic government's eminent domain is absolutely the point: to keep the land available for public good and not for the sole-benefit of the few.
We need to allow the mob to steal everything - it's the most democratic social process possible!
I mean, what do you think majority vote is if not essentially the largest mob of people?
It happens in this case that the state is in favor of less governance over property than local governments so I'm in support of the state here, but that doesn't always hold true and I'd be pro-local if the situation was reversed.
But yeah, these rules are draconian and surpass their intended spirit, creating regulatory capture for the construction industry and preventing perfectly acceptable possibilities that the community would want.
For example, I want to create a summer camp for kids here on my farm, but zoning and other over-regulation actively prevents me from building any of the needed dorms, classrooms, or kitchen/bathing facilities. Countless possibilities like this are being crushed every day. I personally have given up trying.
It's very much like the "first speaker" issue with free speech "advocates"; somehow the first homeowner/speaker has greater rights than the newer homeowner/speaker.
The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking sometimes.
Got an example there? Not sure I'm following.
Example: Dave Chappelle makes a joke about trans people, other people criticize Chappelle and vow to boycott Netflix. Those are BOTH free speech but a lot of people think Chappelle's free speech rights should take priority over his critics.
To be clear, I believe Chappelle has the right to make trans jokes and I also believe he has brain worms about the issue and has become distinctly unfunny because of it.
> but if you use your free speech to criticize my speech, you're censoring me ("cancel culture") and depriving me of my free speech, so the "second speaker" does not have a right to free speech.
entirely follows; in particular since the hallmark of "cancel culture tends to be communicating with other people to orchestrate action or dissociation of the one of the speakers from society.
It seems much closer to something akin to the practice of industrial blacklisting/secondary striking in employment/labor reltions law. In that you're using speech to command/coordinate a group to force an action or change in circumstance on someone else.
I'm not saying mind, that even those and similar activities don't have a place, but they are examples of "patterns of speech elevated to action", and thereby removed from the arena of "free speech", and firmly plopped in the "freedom of association"/situationally labelled and verboten bucket.
The spirit of free speech is you are free to voice things without the threat of government force gagging you, or compelling you to say otherwise.
Now... Where is the dividing line between the "Government" and "a sufficiently large group of people that there is warranted a stepping in and reminder that "if a government employee eould be specifically restricted from keeping you from saying this then mayhaps as a very large group of citizens it warrants the same consideration of restraint; as we've all got a vested interest in not windi g up on the wrong side of a snowball network effect"... That's an entirely different kettle of fish.
For example, say I give a speech and people criticize me for it. If I then say “I’m practicing free speech. My critics are against free speech” then it’s like I’m saying that only the first person to speak is allowed free speech; everyone else needs to shut up.
It sounds silly in this example but this is an extremely common rhetorical technique.
The rhetorical technique is frustrating, but there is a clear dividing line between exercising free speech, and coordinating with enough people to facilitate a societal ostracization. In one, a party is availing themselves of making a point; adding something to the intellectual crock pot, if you will. The other is essentially working the room to prevent a party in particular from doing so at all.
I do not think anyone can reasonably argue that someone 'gathering up the boys to defenestrate someone with an odious opinion' is merely a good faith "exercising of free speech".
But again, at that point we're starting to argue about something other than free speech, and more representing enforcement of the Overton window, and what everyone is comfortable with counting as reasonable to be an outcome of being found to be outside it.
In this scenario you and folks who want more building are the justice system: you want defection, you want building. You say, "how is it moral for prisoners to constrain each other's actions?" but they voted for it freely because mutual cooperation is better than mutual defection, even if they personally would defect given the choice.
Seems like there's a spectrum (even if the dividing line is in the wrong place on that spectrum right now).
Many suburbs prohibit owning roosters (they wake your neighbors at dawn) though female chickens are OK. I think it's OK if you can't open a slaughterhouse next door in an urban or other dense area. It's also reasonable to require that new construction be up to code, as your close-by building not to fire code could threaten my home.
At the other extreme are restrictions on how you paint your house or operating a slaughterhouse in a low density agricultural area is none of your (distant) neighbors' business, assuming the roads are up to the new traffic.
Increasing infill density doesn't seem bad to me, but even then, you need adequate utility and road capacity, and it's easy for NIMBYs in town to prevent that from being upgraded.
Hypothetically? Because I live downhill from you, you didn't do any mandated hydrology / runoff study for new construction, and when you moved earth to make room for your deck you turned my nice backyard into a swamp by changing the drainage layout.
This is one of the reasons some new construction requires permitting, for example.
there's a balance to be struck, and at the moment it seems the scale has been heavily tilted towards wealthy home-owners deciding what their neighbors can do on their own property
zoning should be flexible and applied equally within a region (rules as determined by the voting population) but in expensive cities this is not the situation
The local government has been deemed a failure. They have repeatedly been told they need to fix zoning, and each time the local government fails differently. Now their authority has been revoked.
This is very reminiscent of the political distracting and gerrymandering cases currently in flight.
State bureaucracy is far removed from the people.. you are just a row in an excel sheet, if you are lucky.
If the California constitution says cities have more power, then they do. But I'm pretty sure it says (like every state constitution I'm familiar with) that city power is wholly defined by state authority and if the state wants to explicitly revoke the right to zone, they can do that.
(Whether or not it's a bad idea is independent of the question "Do they have the authority").
The constitution of the U.S., and likely of every State, clearly does not endow any independent sovereignty to local municipalities.