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Comment by nostrebored | Hacker News Reader

This is empirically not supported. Relaxing zoning rules works extremely well.

Look at Japan, look at any metropolitan U.S. city that has actually leaned into it. Europe has had mixed use zones for effectively centuries and is not the dystopia that NIMBYs proclaim will appear in the absence of zoning.

It is unpopular because we subsidize the lives and assets of people who “have things” through zoning policy that they make.

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Up to a point. Yes, it is nice to mix housing and retail and the like, and some zoning laws prevent this. But you have to look back into the 19th century before zoning laws existed and you had things like slaughterhouses opening in residential neighborhoods. Zoning has good reasons to exist.

Residential and commercial can work pretty well together, up to the point of noise and chemical risks. Industrial will pretty much always need to be zoned because of different hazards it presents.

Correction: zoning had good reasons to exist, but it doesn't anymore. Everything that we used to solve that problem is better solved by environmental laws than it ever was by zoning. It turns out that if you make companies pay for their environmental pollution via noise, chemicals, air pollution, etc., they tend to locate their industrial capacity where it is easier to solve or less impactful.

And while every single reasonable but outdated justification for zoning has slowly disappeared, zoning has been thoroughly co-opted by greedy sociopaths and meddlesome wannabe HOA presidents who want to control their neighbors and police aesthetics and keep out undesirables and inflate the value of their investments.

Taxing land works better. Look at Japan where property taxes encourage development.

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