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.
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?