Oh, I believe it. That's great! I don't mind that people who want to live like that CAN live like that if they can afford it. But it should not be the ONLY way people can live. Right now our laws prevent us from building affordable and livable homes like I mentioned above. Only the richest get to live in such communities.
Google 'missing middle'. There are tons of laws restricting what kind of homes can be built so we end up with whole swaths of cities being a single kind of home that is unaffordable and doesn't work for a lot of people.
We no longer build the types of urban homes that were popular when this was primarily an agrarian country, and this only happened because of zoning laws?
it sounds ironic, but much of the shift to suburban development patterns in the USA was indeed driven by the Great Migration into cities – specifically, the migration of formerly-enslaved Black Americans out of the rural south and into cities. US public policy was very explicit about disinvesting in cities and destroying vibrant urban neighborhoods, replacing them with freeways and parking lots.
today, large portions of US cities are zoned for exclusively single-family homes, and other zoning requirements like parking minimums, and minimum setback and lot sizes continue to slow urban, transit-oriented redevelopment.
> the migration of formerly-enslaved Black Americans out of the rural south and into cities
My understanding is this is where it started but the mass migration of everyone off of the farm really started to happen when gasoline engines became standard equipment and replaced beasts of burden.
> and lot sizes continue to slow urban, transit-oriented redevelopment.
I'm not convinced this is the entirety of the problem, fortunately US policy is not a monolith, and several cities are experimenting with different configurations. It will be interesting to see if "developers" start opting for the multiplex configurations that are now being allowed in traditional single family zones.
Do these laws serve no other purpose other than to prevent building? Which of these laws can be discarded to 'solve' the housing problem? Which should we keep?
Some of the housing regulations were legitimately put in place for safety reasons to protect people. Others were put in place to keep black and Asian people out. Especially after government initiatives to prevent discrimination in housing like the 1968 Fair Housing Act, efforts to keep out minorities became cloaked in the garb of "public safety", and minority-excluding regulations were sanitized into affordability-excluding regulations.
but it's a lot more than that. Blue cities are by far the worst offenders at anti-housing regulations. part of it must be that people are funadamentally extremely conservative when it comes to housing.
Actually yes they do more than just prevent building, they were also implemented to keep "undesirables" out of more affluent areas by making it too expensive for them. This is covered extensively in the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, and is a great read.
Specifically:
- Huge min lot sizes
- Offsets
- Covenants*
We can start by removing/revising those.
(*Certain covenants are no longer enforceable today)
The obvious one is residential only zoning. How are you supposed to be able to walk to local businesses if there are no local businesses as zoning prohibits them?
zoning laws are usually locally voted on and approved - if the locals in any given area want to allow business, they can - but lots of people don't want to live close to businesses - so they vote accordingly.
People that want to live near businesses and don't, should move to places that have it - there are lots of places in the country like that.
People that want to live in an entirely residential area, but don't, should move to those places that are.
Why do we need a single solution for everyone, in all areas?
Housing discrimination, Jim Crow, anti-asian immigration, and red-lining laws were locally voted on and approved.
That doesn't make them just or a good idea.
>Why do we need a single solution for everyone, in all areas?
Because we have a severe housing shortage. Because why should a crank three blocks over get any input at all into me wanting to put a multiplex on my private property. This isn't advocating for a single solution, it is advocating for a revisiting of a set of rules that are increasingly being found to be the cause of very serious social problems that benefit very few people.
If you want to live in a place that is only SFH with no businesses, that necessarily places a restriction on a historically allowable use of someone else's private property. Zoning is a VERY recent invention.
> zoning laws are usually locally voted on and approved - if the locals in any given area want to allow business, they can - but lots of people don't want to live close to businesses - so they vote accordingly.
By this logic, it would seem impossible to critique really anything that any democratically elected government does.
Local elections have notoriously low voter turnout and candidates are often supported by developers and real estate brokers. Often local city council members are outright bribed by people who have an interest in only approving their own projects. In addition, sometimes city counselors will prevent zoning changes to increase the value of their own property. City officials are often the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to corruption.
A really prominent case in Moreno Valley, CA exposes how this often works:
> Local elections have notoriously low voter turnout
The flaw in democracy, manifest.
You simply can't say "We literally do not need anyone. Things are fine. If there's an emergency we can convene something, but outside of that, I don't actually want a body convened with the responsibility of changing things randomly. I'm busy and I don't have the time to keep an eye on these goofs."
It should be that if voter turnout is less than 25%, the election is canceled and either held again, or the seat just left vacant until the next election. Or you are elected, but without power until an emergency is declared, then you have the standard powers but only for that temporary period.
Then you get Brazil. Literal clowns and jokes for candidates.
> i dont understand why people seem to refuse to participate in democracy
Participating in democracy means actually going to meetings, trying to get on the agenda, watching and reporting on the business of the government. Voting is literally the smallest form of participation available.
Further, even if it wasn't, I'm a free person. I didn't ask to be born in your democracy, I don't feel required to participate in it, and even your system of participation explicitly denies me the right to say "no."
> and it's mandatory here
My view is all this does is give politicians a false mandate. They're forcing you to pick from a slate they've likely manipulated and introduce the majority mode of "least worst of."
Is that what my forced participation is to boil down to? Giving full authority to the least worst person that got sent up that year? What about this makes you feel that you have participated in anything?
if the alternative is the worst worst, then yes i actually participated in something. as summed up by someone else, and i am paraphrasing here, if you have the option to vote for 80% hitler and actual hitler, and you choose neither, if actual hitler gets into power you are complicit through your inaction. sometimes democracy is about selecting the least bad person, because if you dont things can just get much MUCH worse
The notion that compulsory voting results in an engaged electorate is not plausible to me. Human nature does not work that way.
It does not seem wise to solicit (much less demand) opinions from those who would choose to withhold them. These would be the least-informed opinions available.
We have enough trouble with the people who insist on sharing when their opinion is unwelcome. (These are often a close second on the least-informed scale!) :)
Where I live in Australia, small developers would be the biggest opponents of things that limit their opportunities to subdivide and build more densely - parking minimums, setbacks, frontage minimums, shadowing, sight-lines and so on. (I don't know what "offset" is in US real estate lingo.)
The limitations are largely NIMBYism. There's a block of six units in my short one-block street of otherwise detached single-family dwellings, and the elderly neighbours here talk about how they wished they'd objected to its building decades ago because it changed the character of the street.
It's all tension between "what is best for me and the street as it was when I bought into it" and "what is best for us all collectively". Building here is slightly outpacing population, but it is too financially attractive to buy second and third properties as investments, and it is politically risky to tackle that.
Try to build a multi unit housing development in just about every SFH neighborhood in North America and you will quickly discover the layers of laws that actively prevent it.
Plus, if the choice is going to be between great family homes for some + terrible quality ultra-expensive appartements for most, or decent reasonably priced appartements for everyone but few family homes.. then yeah, screw family homes.
So the suburbs are net recipients of infrastructure taxes, which is a bad thing. Got it. Shall we also apply this to other government services? It would be kind of shameless to complain about suburbanites being the net-beneficiaries of one service, while expecting them to be net-contributors to literally every other government service in existence, right?
It would be amusing if the end result of harassing net-productive taxpayers (suburbanites) is that they exit even further into wholly private areas where the government provides almost no services and nearly all the "local tax" is spent on upkeep of only the private community.
I’ll admit that I merely skimmed the study, but as I read it states that local/municipal property taxes in many cases don’t cover the road infrastructure required to support those homes. To make the argument that they are subsidized you’d also have to factor in municipal and state income taxes.
Subsidies are about relative costs. Tax collection is an interesting thing to look at in addition, but ultimately if we are to determine whether the suburbs are subsidized, it would require analyzing cost to deliver city services per capita.
They don't cover them to the tune of many tens of percentage points where I live. It's to the degree that the state basically has to redistribute wealth from the cities to the counties where the roads are built.
If the communities served by a road had to pay the full price of the road you'd see a lot of little 8-10 house hamlets with 10 million dollar bridges pack up and leave.
long ago in the netherlands the road in front of your house was your responsibility. You could agree with your neighbors to a crappy road but with loss of status and probably the value of the home. (The last remnant was the requirement to remove weeds. That was how I found out.)
I keep reading that claim. Then I look at old streetcar suburbs which have successfully a repaired thier roads over decades (including removing the old tracks). They have also added water, sewer, electric, phone, catv since being built.
which is to say it doesn't pass the smell test. I don't know where the studies go wrong but something isn'c adding up.
Old streetcar suburbs are much denser than typical American suburb today due to increased setbacks, lot coverage rates and other factors. But yes, even streetcar suburbs get subsidized back then. The subsidy is just more productive in it opening economic mobility with cheap, carbon neutral transport, depending on your views on rail transport.
assuming his numbers are correct, that shows that in one town in one state, the local taxes don't seem to cover the cost of infrastructure. But what about state taxes? Do they reimburse the locality? Federal funds?
It’s a fairly intuitive thing to understand, the suburbs require significantly more infrastructure per capita. More roads, power lines, sewer/water lines, etc.
Just look at something as simple as trash pickup. In the burbs you have to travel a significantly greater distance per household.
I'd imagine practically no one actually takes that because the standard deduction is more lucrative. Unless you live in a far above average priced home with a jumbo loan.
Is it? Those same people work and pay taxes. If they couldn’t live in a city due to cost that city would have less revenue as a result of fewer employed people buying goods and services.
You’re misreading me. I replied to the idea that suburbs are subsidized. The view was that people should be taxed to off set their supposed subsidies. I don’t think the suburbs are really subsidized.
I'm not an expert on municipal expenses, but I'd wager that it takes a pretty unusual cost situation to render it cheaper to pave/trench/replace more miles of road/pipe/wire and maintain more service entries to serve fewer people.
This is compex. Rural gravel roads are likely cheaper per capite than paved roads, but they don't scale to the triffic of a suburb. A city street needs to be more expensive yet.
Although it's not really that much of a factor these days, it effectively is equivalent to a subsidy. So is government backing of mortgages for that matter.
It’s also possible it’s like that because the city and apartments they are familiar with suck. I used to live in a small, admittedly rich, city, and had all amenities within 7 minutes walk, park within 3 minute walk. The city policy is that there is a primary school within kids walking distance. We had 4 apartments in the city with these characteristics, and didn’t hear the neighbors (much) except for the above neighbors heels in one of them.
I would like for all of the things I buy to be cheaper, including housing. No one finds that hard to believe. But reducing housing costs will require making tough decisions and some special interest groups will end up as net losers, so it's just hard to build political consensus for any major changes.
