But if the zoning restriction is "absolutely nothing except single-family homes", this becomes insane. So even if there is a local neighborhood who would like to build a sports field or a community center, they can't because of zoning? This makes no sense for me at all.
Is this just about not allowing more compact housing like condos or high-rises?
With section 8 (fed housing welfare) rules, any multifamily structure has a better than not chance of becoming slum housing in a time frame less than the average span of homeownership.
Which is both about property values and not wanting to live in/near section 8 residents.
"Planning" and zoning aren't the problem, they're the enforcement mechanism. (Since police and other public enforcement of quality of life issues has been all but neutered in the name of equity/civil-rights/whatever.)
Same reason for the seemingly inexplicable popularity of HOAs that everyone seems to hate.
High prices are one of many resultant 'enforcement' prongs.
I dont get the rationale with those two. What it is, to make living less comforta ble for residents? Doesnt everybody wants a grocery store and cafe nearby?
Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
I place freedom as a higher value than the market. Thus while I recognize that market exists, I don't allow anyone to serve it. Your ability to keep poor people away ends at your property line. They can walk on the sidewalks in front of your house because roads (a sidewalk is just another road) are not your property. They can live in a shack because that isn't your property and so you can't control what they do on it.
Freedom isn't absolute. They are not allowed to release poison into the air just because of freedom (unless they can keep that entirely to their property - which ends not far above their buildings since airplanes get their own roads above their house)
Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.
That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
Some places are taking baby steps in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go.
Or, maybe... a VAT-funded UBI?
One person's freedom always ends at the point where another person's begins. That's not exactly a new observation.
That's a very fatalistic take, essentially saying that rich people will always win. The entire point of a strong government is to provide a counterforce to that.
> For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
Aha, and what kind of jobs would that be? How would the quality of infrastructure be in those areas?
Another major issue is there's a false impression about what's profitable when it comes to property ownership. That, in turn, drives up the price of property in a way no amount of "tent cities" can really compete with. In particular, landlords are using their freedoms to price fix and gouge. They've all realized that it's better to have 50% occupancy with 10x what a competitive market could bear (netting them 5x the profit of competition) then it is to shoot for 70% or 100% occupancy at a competitive market rate. And the cost of joining their ranks is high enough that there's really no option for a spoiler to come in and disrupt the market.
Further, we have the freedom of airbnb which has recognized that if you pay a rate that's 30x the cost of rent you only need rent a property out once a month to turn a profit. And, as it turns out, that rate is often somewhat competitive with a hotel.
All these freedoms give property owners massive extractive power against the working class.
Zoning, IMO, is a red herring to the real problem. You can fix it, you can not fix it. It really doesn't matter because builders very often are participating in exactly the same structure and they aren't going to build themselves out of profit. Looser restrictions will mostly just mean they'll spend even less delivering homes while still charging the same rates because their rates are based not on a market but rather on the income of their tenets.
The fix is a brutal one. The poors need to understand the predicament and vote for politicians that will serve their interests and not the interests of the property owners. A very hard uphill battle because property owners have a lot of money and politicians can be unfortunately easy to buy.
I live in an area where there's almost no homeowner pushback to new housing. A lot of it is going in. Yet the housing market and property values continue to increase and record setting rates.
It's quiet far from the individual home owner that's driving these rates at this point. The closest I can blame individual home owners here is because they just so happen to always vote for big property owners. Most of my local politicians are landlords themselves.
At the individual-homeowner level, a lot of NIMBYism, HOA activity, and other toxic activity is grounded in "I have $400k of equity sunk into this square of land and it's the only meaningful asset I have for my increasingly oncoming retirement."
There are probably plenty of people who are subconsciously self-sabotaging due to that-- they may personally prefer a denser neighbourhood or more mixed-use facilities, but that Zillow number is blinking in their mind at the same time.
If the real estate were nationalized and people were leasing it from a state-owned trust, at basically its cost of operation (maintenance and amortized construction costs), it would free up a lot of resident income for other use or investment opportunities, and make a lot of changes less threatening to residents. (ISTR claims that rents in the USSR were on the order of 5% of income, and this when 30% or less was still a feasible story in the US)
“If voting changed anything they wouldn’t let us do it” - Emma Goldman
I'm not going to lie, I'm not deluded enough to think voting will (often) bring change quickly. I don't even have a lot of hope in the likelihood of it working. However, it's not nothing and it's something everyone can and should do.
Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.
That’s not even remotely true political parties determine privately who they will fund to put on the ballot underneath their particular party
The public is not invited to vote in those outside of certain primaries and even then the people who are proposed for the primaries are chosen from the party members
Ballot access for third-party or non-affiliated typically require a petition to apply and that threshold is again set by party members in office
>Politics is a major part of all aspects of life and you'll do yourself no favors by completely opting out because it's hopeless.
Voting is the lowest possible bar or participation for political engagement
Organizing and agitating are the day to day efforts people should be doing but aren’t because they prefer to have money
I promise you you will have zero success getting Claudia De-La Cruz (who I voted for and was on the ballot in VA) put on the DNC or RNC ballot.
So no, you can’t just get on a ballot as a candidate by showing up. You need to be a party loyalist and there are no independent parties that voters show up for.
Hell even “down ballot” have to stick to the party line.
The trouble is, the people who are most vocal about "no poors allowed" emphatically do not subscribe to it, and the people who are most likely to have power over these things do not subscribe to it (there is some, but not perfect, overlap between these groups).
And it's kinda tricky to go over their heads and get rules put in place at the next level above them (ie, the level that sets the rules they have to follow) that can effectively prevent this sort of thing.