> Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density.

Of course they're entitled to stop efforts to change the world around them. If you moved into a neighborhood with a minimum lot size was X acres, it's a reasonable expectation that it remains as such. If someone comes along and not only wants to change that, but also build multi unit apartment complexes across the street from you, why should you not have a say? Clearly the person was not allowed to do that before changing the zoning rules so why can't I try to stop them from changing them at all?

There's nothing racist about wanting to live a quiet suburban or rural life where you can neither see nor hear the next house over.

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supertrope 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change. This is very understandable. Using force of law to maintain aesthetic levels and social class divides is where the perverse incentives set in. The US Supreme Court approved the earliest zoning laws based on health justification. The dicta in the court opinion cited cities as parasitically infringing on bucolic greenery. We now see the logical endpoint of restrictive zoning. Million dollar houses that are mostly the right to live at that address (the structure is small and worn). Landlords having tremendous power over tenants.

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tw04 3 days ago | parent [-]

>People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change.

Correct, people making what is for most the largest financial investment and commitment of their lives want to have control over what happens to it. When you have a 30 year mortgage on a piece of property that is many times your gross yearly income, you're kind of invested in the most literal sense of the word.

It would be one thing if the re-zoning included an offer to buy or move every house within X distance that has property values and "standard of living" directly affected by the re-zoning. But in almost all cases when the re-zoning occurs, the response is: sucks to be you.

I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not. There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why? Because the developer will make more money if it's in an already developed area, at the expense of all the existing homeowners.

	▲	danaris 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		OK, now extend that line of thought just a little bit further. Why will the developer make more money if it's in an already developed area? Because that area has better access to shops, schools, and workplaces. Sure, you could build a giant apartment building out on the edge of town—the land would certainly be cheaper! But, given how things are today, it's unlikely you'd ever fill it in a way that would recoup your investment. In order to make something like that work, what we'd really need is proper public transport that reliably stopped at (or near) such a development, with well-sited stops in town in order to allow residents to do all the things they need to do. To reach the things that are in the town.
	▲	lazyasciiart 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why? Because the vision of quarter acre blocks from sea to sea is gut-wrenching and we would prefer to limit the bounds of human building so that some forests and wild lands remain.
	▲	potato3732842 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not. I think a large part of the problem is that states and to a lesser degree the feds are trying to compensate for problems created by places like SV (not that every state doesn't have comparable places doing similar) so they write rules that incentivize X or Y and so you wind up with weird "a bunch of duplex townhouses on .2ac" developments in the middle of nowhere and other places they don't make sense because developers are naturally pairing the incentivized types of construction with the cheapest suitable land.

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tptacek 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There's nothing intrinsically racist about having lot size preferences, but the lot sizes we have in most 20th century vintage zoning codes are in fact racist by design. Minimum lot sizes were a way of keeping Black families from crossing borders from redlined ghettoes into white neighborhoods or suburbs, by preventing people from subdividing lots into smaller, more affordable houses.

Meanwhile: it's perfectly understandable that people don't want to see change in their neighborhood, or that they buy a property in the expectation that everything good about it will remain. But that's not a reasonable constraint for the law to operate under. You do not in fact have a strict right to control things that happen outside the borders of your own lot.

Some community restrictions are reasonable. We broadly agree that it's not OK for someone to open a tannery in the middle of a suburban residential block. Others are not; for instance, neighbors several blocks over will argue that they have a right not to endure extra traffic when our local hospital, the largest employer and best hospital in the region, plans a small addition.

The most important phenomenon here is hyperlocalism. The immediate neighbors of new proposed residential developments will reliably oppose it. They'll also make up the overwhelming majority of those who show up for public comment, because normal people don't turn out to support new apartment buildings built across town. But if you accept that resistance as a given right, you're essentially saying nothing will ever get built.

The muni I'm in has managed to go from 70,000 residents to 50,000 by consistently applying this strategy, so it's not even accurate to say it's about "change", so much as it is about strangling out as many residents as possible to achieve a targeted demography.