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Comment by gamepsys | Hacker News Reader

Zoning laws have a lot to do with safety & public health. Industrial zoning is far away from residential because factories produce pollution.

Edit: Some parts of zoning law has to do with safety/health. Some parts don't. Some parts are about more than one thing.

When I was growing up there was a chemical fire in a factory in town. People were evacuated. Luckily, very few homes were evacuated because zoning laws kept homes far away from the factory. The residential area that was evacuated was low density.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is some value in some of these rules.

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Pollution laws protect against industrial operations polluting other areas, not zoning.

The real "pollution" they zoning was invented to solve was the "pollution" of residents of apartments living close to wealthier people. Seriously! Check out how the original Supreme Court decision phrased its motivation:

> “very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district …. interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes.”

Here's a more extensive analysis from an org purporting to represent real estate, the source of much historical support for this sort of exclusionary zoning:

https://cre.org/real-estate-issues/americas-sordid-history-o...

Usually when people discuss zoning it excludes things like industrial zoning and focuses on single family zoning vs multi-family zoning. In this case, yes, zoning needs to be deregulated. Zoning for housing should be zoning for housing and whether it is single or multi family shouldn't matter. But we should keep the industrial zoning from being put next to an Elementary school.

Yes, there's some value in some of these rules.

However by and large, the value that would be provided by zoning is already provided (and used to be provided) by other rules not falling under the bucket of 'zoning'. Especially not 'Euclidean zoning'.

Okay, what is the safety reason my barber can’t operate out of a room in his house?

No reason. Countries like Japan have reasonable zoning, meaning industrial uses are separate, but commercial and residential is largely interspersed. Which is great!

That's easy: your barber operating a business out of his house will result in customers coming to your neighborhood, and that might bring "those people" around, and we can't have that.

That's ridiculous. Those people can't get even get to the neighborhood because the residents have gone out of their way to eliminate public transit (which is for poors).

It's all relative. Plenty of poorer people have cars, but instead of $150k cars, they have cheap-o $25k cars. We can't have those kind of people in our neighborhood.

Here in Singapore, we only have about 1 million licenses for cars total. They are auctioned off to the highest bidder.

So there are no cheap-o $25k cars. (The car itself might be cheap, but you need the license to run it.)

My description in this context is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but this is actually a great system given the limited road space we have here. And auctioning off the licenses is about the most economically efficient way to allocate them.

Here in Tokyo, they do things a little differently (and pretty sensibly I think): you simply can't own and register a car in the city unless you have a place to park it. So you have to get some kind of proof from the police showing they've certified you have a parking space that will fit the car, and they come out with a measuring tape to check too, based on the car's actual dimensions. So if you can afford a parking place, you can own a car. Otherwise, no. So car prices are subject to market forces and not artificially constrained; the constraint is the actual land area available for parking, and that's subject to market forces too, since it could be used for something else like a building, so parking tends to be expensive.

Side answer. This kind of regulation lifts GDP by mandating some sort of economic activity. A barber in a room in his house means less rental, less money for commercial real estate company, less money spent buying "commercial" chairs and commercial chemicals. And thousands of other things I can't even fathom as the scope of this problem is huge and so intertwined with all other economic activity.

That’s nonsense. It does not lift GDP any more than breaking windows does. It redirects labor and capital from one use to another.

What are you on about? It does the exact opposite.

I can’t believe I’m seeing this on HN.

What do you mean? This is a perfectly possible / valid theory, you're welcome to try poke at it if you're open to debate instead of dismissing me.

It's the broken window fallacy. There's literally a fallacy named after the very thing you're espousing.

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