I fully reject this POV. There's currently a bill working through ATL City Council to rehash our Zoning laws. The people who show up regularly to the council meetings are not community members - they are lawyers representing private development firms, many of whom make five to six-figure political contributions to sitting council members. They're the ones pushing against any pro-social, community-oriented zoning practices (like ADUs, parking lot restrictions, and public transportation and pedestrian requirements).

Believing that neighborhood units are the largest impediment to effective and efficient planning is to believe the corporate landowners at their word. There's so much astroturfing that happens in these spaces, largely rejecting density and public transportation.

I can name off the top of my head a half-dozen community-oriented projects blown up by the very same groups, and even one instance where a former state ACLU director came in, pretended to be a movement-aligned mediator, and then proceeded to torpedo the drafted neighborhood deal. This same director later went on to be hired by the same private firm for a six-figure job.

The rot is real and rarely gets reported. David Simon was a rare one in his coverage of Baltimore, not all cities have skeptics like him who dig deep.

A lot of our 'process' is dominated by wealthy people who benefit from the status quo (or think they do). I wrote up this housing hearing I went to, and I wish more people could experience something like it to understand the problem:

https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...

If I hadn't seen corporate lawyers representing multi-billion dollar investment firms regularly advocating my City Council with just this piece of rhetoric almost verbatim, sure.

But it's been ten years since I've been involved with local community organizing and I know a dogwhistle when I see one. Whether or not the original poster intended it to be a dogwhistle or just formed that opinion memetically after uncritically absorbing astroturfed 'drain the swamp' rhetoric, it all leads to the same place where private equity and other investors get to run rampant with little regulatory oversight.

this site has always welcomed posters who are incredibly shitty and rude, so long as most of the shit is kept as _subtext_. Then they can pretend they were polite, even though they weren't.

HungryHobbit's response is just making that clear... he's actively defending what was objectively a shitty and unnecessarily snarky and confrontational post, because it adhere's to the HN norms of being smug, superior, dismissive, and dickish... but in a way that is just indirect enough that these maladjusted fucking nerds can pretend that they're polite and professional.

You'll enjoy the site more if you walk in expecting that everyone you're talking to is a smug little asshole who needs to get punched in the fucking face.

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You might consider that many many more places than Atlanta have this same baggage, all because of Robert Moses's advice.

I grew up in Nashville and it also had a vibrant black neighborhood split in half by a highway. It was explicitly how Moses told planners across the country to get highways built it happened everywhere.

What big city in the USA has not had redlining or had highways blasted over disadvantaged racial minority communities? I'll wait while you look that one up.

Every single real estate fortune in this country is built on theft, corruption and lies. I've worked for a couple of them and seen it at the highest levels. The most recent places I worked had lists of zip codes they were targeting, dip into those stats a bit and you see a pattern.

Hell this country is founded on the practice of stealing and reallocating land ownership on the basis of race. Its our favorite tradition.

Not to be argumentative, but it's worth noting that Lynchings were considered legal because there was usually a criminal accusation and local officials involved.[1] A bill has been introduced in every Congress since 1918 to make Lynching illegal. It actually became illegal with the Emmett Till Antilynching Act (H.R. 55), enacted on March 29, 2022[2].

Now it's true that it could have been prosecuted anyway as murder or a civil rights violation, but it wasn't because of that convenient interpretation.

1. https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-l...

2. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/55

In Berkeley, CA, restrictive zoning in the early 1900s was used to reinforce and codify those outcomes that separated the rich and the poor. Those laws stayed in place for over 100 years, far longer than the term of a single elected official. So you have to be careful what kind of laws you pass.

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/07/23/berkeley-zoning-has-...

> I think in most cases these rules would have just been ignored by municipalities because they largely exist to protect monied interests not vulnerable populations.

When there are rules on the books, and they are bulldozed over, you can generally sue.

This is true but I'd rather close loopholes and have independent auditors that root out astroturfing than do away with the system entire. It's got good bones - it's just the flesh that's rotten.

YES. I think homeowners are too close to the problem to make rational choices.

People move to a place and then expect it to never change again. After all, they bought a house there because they liked it as it is now.

All that does is create places that are encased in amber and unable to adapt. Homeowners have a disproportionate say. aspiring homeowners don't show up to local city council meetings

The top-down approach surely has problems too, I'm not denying that. I just think we need people in charge who can look at the problem holistically and say "hey maybe that inner suburb next to transit shouldn't force you to have a 1/2 acre lot".

This is a complicated issue. What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway? I don't know... it's complicated.

Isn't that fundamentally what California did to solve the problem? They provided a route that a local municipality could not override to build housing, as long as the state level rules were followed.

I dunno, it seems like decisions about what to build in a given spot should be made as locally as possible. If I want to build a house in Sonoma, the voters in LA should not get a say.

Major projects like power plants or dams should be made at a state or even national level, but rules for which house goes where, less so. And if your town's rules are overly burdensome and stupid, that's an issue for your town's government to solve.

Fun fact, that's basically the case in large swaths of the country. Many states do not have home rule, which means counties can't set zoning rules. So in mostly rural areas of these states, it's wide open unless the state has decided to set rules or to be benevolent enough to grant the county the right to set zoning rules

Many states operate that way, and many other states have rules that limit what the local governments can do.

That has been the recent trend in California with several laws restricting local development power.

This is all backlash from the eminent domain seizures of the 70s when they built those stupid highways through the middle of everyone city

No, that would be terrible and much worse, obviously, compared to walking down the street to my local borough building and getting a permit. In the vast majority of the country, that would be very silly suggestion.

Most of what you are saying about Germany is not true, misleading, or gross hyperbole. Do you have any sources whatsoever to back that up.

Look, at least with the one I had experience of, you knew what you were getting. They would invite you to tea. You grease their palms, and the vast majority of the time, you got what you tacitly agreed to. And you did it after you built, not before. If something went wrong, it was all just haggling on price. Nothing esoteric & labyrinthine with a few warring ideals going up against a hundred petty voices and a handful of corporate interests.

... The french contractors who built the tgv tried working with california in 2011 to build HSR here too. But they backed out, saying the bureacracy was too great and they were going to help Morocco instead. And guess who has high speed rail today? California or Morocco?

Morocco's high speed rail line opened in 2018.

Just because its heavily regulated doesn't mean it is centrally planned. Housing isn't decided at the federal level. Even city and county commissions that largely decide fate of large, new projects have to abide by state laws or executive orders from governors that sometimes overrule them. And as long as you propose a project that fits zoning rules on the specific parcel you own, you get a permit to build your dream house.

And if one city, county or state says no to your commercial or industrial venture, it's nice that you can shop other states that might love to have you.

In practice that would create even more ineffective veto points that already result in stasis and dysfunction in the US Congress.

For more than a decade the US has been stuck operating by renewing the same budget more or less with minor modifications at random intervals of time depending on the political mood. It always gets approved eventually after occasional pointless, wasteful shutdowns. But nothing actually changes from those veto points, just more routine dysfunction and grandstanding.

Same with debt ceiling. Another veto point that gives leverage but has zero effect on actual spending. It probably sounded like a brilliant idea to control spending in the 70s or whenever it originated. But is entirely ineffective at the purpose of addressing the deficit.

Self expiring legislation would very likely end up the same way. Just another pro forma procedural roadblock that wastes time and makes the legislature even less effective at real problem solving instead of posturing.

This might be a good idea for marriages, too.

Well, partly. Cryptocurrencies rediscovered why there are so many regulations. But they also enabled near-instant (hours) cross-border transactions in a way the existing system just can't do because it is too ossified. It also allows people to opt out of regulations they feel are getting in their way too much, which is a good check against over-regulation.

In other words, both the old way and the new way have value. The perfect ideal system is probably a synthesis of both, but in lieu of that, we can have both separately.

Indeed. I have a much harder time imagining the problem if you built one that was, say, an 11ft cube.

>Pretty much the entire city of Paris caps out at 7 stories.

And despite that, Paris is one of the densest cities in the world, and an incredibly pleasant place to live. This should be a good lesson to everyone that "high density" does not have to be synonymous with reams of skyscrapers.

Supply and demand. If you don’t want to increase supply, then you can reduce prices by turning the city into the kind of place that nobody wants to live in.

I repeated the same argument here many times. But the reality is that density creates a vicious cycle of price increases. Higher density provides easier access to talent for companies, so they concentrate in urban cores. This in turn results in the only desirable jobs (and housing) being within the commute distance from the cores. So more people move in, resulting in even greater advantage for companies. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Think about this: EVERY large European city now has a "housing crisis". And nice cities just a couple of hours from them have housing that is essentially free. In Japan it's often _literally_ free.

Want an example of a city that doesn't have a housing crisis and is comparable in population to Paris or Berlin? Houston, TX.

Not really. Urbanists admit it, they just don't like to talk about it.

Hell, there are even consulting companies that provide guidance on how to upzone the city to squeeze most taxes out of new density.

> high demand != shortage.

Yes, it just means higher costs.

Encouraging no parking without a robust public transit system is like punching a disabled person for not walking fast enough.

I don't even think (most) proponents of high density are saying low density should be banned, they just want to have both options. Low-density living always comes along with long commutes by geometric necessity, so that's one reason some people would prefer high-density living.