Comment by kspacewalk2
11 hours ago
There are multiple ways of imposing this structure, laws, and trade-offs between various stakeholders. For example, Japan has a national top-down system where municipalities have little control over development, and therefore by necessity the system is mostly rules-based - if you meet the hopefully well-crafted requirements, you build. Whereas in North America, housing is a top-down and centrally planned economy at the municipal level. In Britain and a lot of North America, decisions are 'discretionary' and subject to reviews and debates and NIMBY tantrums (otherwise known as democratic control by taxpayers). Various bandaids are applied over the North American system to attempt to stop it from becoming a Kafkaesque bureaucratic mess where nothing gets built, and at times those efforts even partially succeed, even if the whole thing has an air of reforming the Gosplan.
Maybe we would be better off in the US if zoning, permitting, &c was hoisted up to the state level.
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.
> I think homeowners are too close to the problem to make rational choices.
The homeowners are making rational choices. That's the problem. As the most expensive asset a typical homeowner will ever own is their home, it makes rational sense for them to support any policy that supports it's value and oppose any policy that undermines it's value. Building more housing undermines it's value.
And this is why the local community absolutely should not have any more say about a new development than a hypothetical someone who would like to live there, but can't, because there is no available housing.
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I keep saying that permitting should be - broadly - same as driving.
You get handed a nice set of rules, you get tested on them.. and then you can go ahead and build within those rules without asking anyone for permission.
If you break the rules - we break your piggy bank to set everything straight. You can buy insurance (which will have its own set of rules) - or not.
Maybe in some jurisdictions you need to buy insurance, while in others you get to have a choice.. after clearing it with your financier.
Zoning is actually rule-making. Permitting is just bureaucracy. Keep them separate.
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> What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway?
They did. Google Robert Moses for details.
Ultimately I think this particular problem is a diseased outgrowth from the cancer that is "homes as an investment vehicle." Is it so much that people don't want change or is more that they (correctly) identify a house and the land it sits upon as the only thing in their life that appreciates in value, consistently? It represents stability, a future to be handed down to one's children, that sort of thing.
It seems to be having houses function this way is just causing too many social ills to ignore. It's why private equity is holding tons of houses, during a housing crisis, and refusing to sell. It's a cornerstone of the 2008 financial crash. It's why few in my entire damned generation can HAVE a home, not to invest in but to simply live in.
IMO a house can be a need for life, or it can be an investment. It can't be both at the same time.
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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.
Yes, but the rule only came into effect this summer. I think we should start to see some traction in the next year or two when developers begin to challenge NIMBYs.
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
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.
This sounds reasonable, but all this means is "nothing gets built".
For example there's me, an empty plot, and the next neighbor. Nothing is more local to the both of us than the empty plot. We've even grassed it, and maintain it.
The owner of the plot wants to build a house. Since we are the locals we simply say no. We like the plot as it is. Plus the loss of this open plot would affect the value of our property. And traffic in the neighborhood would increase.
This sounds bonkers - surely the owner of the plot has rights too? Sure, but this is democracy so our 2 votes outweigh his one.
The consequence of small govt is that nothing gets done at all because the majority of people are resistant to any change at all. If everything takes a majority, well, nothing happens.
Ultimately though local people are the worst decision makers. Which is why my city let's the owner build on his plot, and doesn't allow me and my neighbor to decide.
>If I want to build a house in Sonoma, the voters in LA should not get a say.
Should they get a say about building the necessary infrastructure to make your home (as opposed to homestead) possible in Sonoma? Their tax money is spent on it.
>And if your town's rules are overly burdensome and stupid, that's an issue for your town's government to solve.
And whose issue is it to solve if every single town's rules are overly burdensome and stupid? Not for incumbent homeowners, mind you, for them all is well and they'd like to keep it that way. But for renters and those wanting to afford a place to live.
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.
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.
This makes no sense. You could have a local office for a state agency. The Post Office is federal and has local offices.
This is all backlash from the eminent domain seizures of the 70s when they built those stupid highways through the middle of everyone city
Those highways were mostly built through neighborhoods filled with poor, marginalized people. Most of the NIMBYism that you see in the US is suburbs that don't want to upzone for more density that is badly needed.
At least in North America if you build something, it exists. In Germany they have a system where the government will bulldoze a completed skyscraper if you did the paperwork wrong. As a result it takes years to start construction because they don't want that risk.
Hmm, this sounds like hyperbole. Do you have any examples?
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.