American zoning prohibiting shops in residential zones but allowing a drone hub just 800ft from residential buildings is a special kind of irony
I lived my entire childhood in the same house in Suburbia, and I still don't know most of my neighbors' names. The neighborhood was "peaceful", because of zoning laws, but it was boring as shit, and most of all, I'm not so sure having to get in a car and drive just to get a box of cereal was a good thing.
Don't get me wrong, I like my quiet suburb too. That said it's become increasingly apparent to me and I feel to society at large how incredibly atomized and alienated our society is with itself. All of us have "community" on the Internet, which is both not as good, and also is insanely catered to your individual desires and wants, and this is, frankly, unhealthy. A little social friction with people you live and work amongst is a good thing, it teaches you how to resolve conflicts, how to express difficult feelings, and how to negotiate your way through the world.
I'm reminded of the book "Life in Code" by Ellen Ullman:
“…the ideal of the internet represents the very opposite of democracy, which is a method for resolving difference in a relatively orderly manner through the mediation of unavoidable civil associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. Here all needs and desires are equally valid and equally powerful. I’ll get mine and you’ll get yours; there is no need for compromise and discussion. I don’t have to tolerate you and you don’t have to tolerate me. No need to care for my neighbour next door when I can stay with my chosen neighbours in the ether, my email friends and the visitors to the sites I visit, people who think as I do, who want what I want. No need for messy debate and the whole rigamarole of government with all its creaky bothersome structures. There’s no need for any of this, because now that we have the World Wide Web the problem of our pursuit of happiness has been solved! We’ll each click for our individual joys, and our only dispute may come if something doesn’t get delivered on time. Would you rather be at home?”
And what is this if not the core essence of Suburbia? Tiny kingdoms for tiny kings, each answerable only unto itself, and utterly beside itself with rage any time that authority is questioned by... anything, from Neighborhood Associations to building codes to the local city.
I'm sure if that guy could move his business he would, if money and personal circumstances dictated otherwise.
Turns out the choice between "Middle America Suburbia" path and the other you describe really is a choice. Some have very deliberately chose one and some equally deliberately have chosen the other.
Like you I've nearly always lived in the "American Suburbia" style. Like you I literally didn't realise (in fact I would have scoffed at the idea) there were other choices. That was despite the fact I was taught by migrant European teachers, who, when I look back, made it very plain what they thought of the "American Suburbia" style of living. Us calmly accepting the extra overheads of longer roads, consequent travel times, power transmission, transport fuel costs, freight and so on just blew them away. It blew me away too once I understood it.
Then, again like you, I got live in one of these high density neighbourhoods for a very short while, and experienced the level of social cohesion and the "big village" feel of it.
Now I think "wtf? I've been had".
American zoning in practice: the only place homes are permitted is within 50 meters of freeways.
It's fascinating, zoning in practice just has nothing to do with any of its stated goals.
I think you misunderstood the parents comment.
The origins of zoning is to prevent the mixing of blacks and whites. It's not about noise pollution; it's about segregation.
Let's be perfectly clear -- racial segregation is illegal in the USA; zoning has many implementations, many uses, many pressures and has baggage from historical situations
The fundamental problem is that a large part of the population feels entitled to use government to micromanage things that are better off just not managed at all.
It is none of your business what your neighbor puts on their property whether it's a homeless shelter or luxury apartment or a bodega or a fancy coffee shop. Real estate development is something market solves very well if people mind their own business and not other people's business.
Not just zoning, but pretty much any government regulation. It boggles my mind that my state's equivalent of the EPA can just decree whatever their policy is, which has consequences on what they'll approve or won't, and this affects land values massively, and this doesn't legally get classified as a taking.
>they abandon the whole platform to defend zoning.
Which is a social problem that pretty much the entire western world suffers from these days. We don't shun, marginalize and otherwise punish people who are chronically two faced and lack principals (whatever those principals may be).
I appreciate your maximalist libertarian proposition, it's a fun exercise when you have no skin in the game. But a) housing is an investment as well as a lodging (and for most people their largest investment), and the value of that investment has everything to do with what's around it. 2) community is a real thing, even when it describes a group of people outside the usual members of sympathetic "intersectionalities".
Everyone hates HOAs until they have to live next to my father, who kept three rusting "parts cars" in the driveway, piles of scrapwood in the yard, and let our dogs run all over the neighborhood.
That's all to say that it is well understood by people who study zoning in the US, of which there are plenty, that american racial dynamics are central in the history and use of zoning. It was not always used intentionally for segregation, but it was used for that very frequently over a long enough period of time that you can't consider it incidental to the practice.
If you look to the early 20th century you can read the discussions people were having at the time about it: letters, and op-eds, and sometimes the ordinances themselves explicitly discuss the racial justifications. At the time racial segregation was well within the national overton window, they did not have a reason to hide to hide this motivation and so they did not. Later on it gets more complicated.
I preferred the expensive one.
I don't hate the poors.
(I know there's been a lot written about redlining specifically, but I'm talking more broadly of the development and history of zoning.)
The east side of Los Angeles (Los Feliz Silver Lake, Atwater Village, Echo Park, Highland Park, Eagle Rock, Glassell Park) has managed to replace most of its neighborhood councils with YIMBY-sympathetic types that are pushing for mixed use and density along their arterials.
Not that it’s the end-all-be-all solution, but compared to the west side where I have family, it’s a breath of fresh air to see neighbors generally cautiously enthusiastic about new development rather than immediately trying to figure out how to stop it by default
Amazon can.
Chain stuff can.
That's a large part of why every good school district that's inevitably full of bad people winds up looking exactly the same.