Let's discuss zoning laws

[History_Buff]

These issues are linked!

If people with any amount of pull refuse to be "part" of the greater city environment guess who gets to live next to not 1, but all the "undesirable" buildings.

Statement one is pretty much the cause of much of the urban blight and suburban sprawl we get in the states.

Well, it's entirely possible to build all residential neighbourhoods that aren't terrible. The problem is that North American developers won't do it, and I can't see an obvious reason, so the only conclusion is that it must be cheaper somehow (I don't see how).

Basically you get away from all the curvilinear streets and cul-de-sacs, and all the other things that are difficult for outsiders to navigate, and impossible to efficiently bring transit to. Replace those with a standard British-Dominion grid system, with an arterial road every 4-5 blocks. No traffic lights unless absolutely necessary either; traffic circles are to be preferred.

 

[illram]

Zoning, like anything else, is not a black and white thing. No zoning would be bad, and overly strict zoning is also bad. There is a happy medium: "good" zoning. I know, I know, this is truly insightful and brilliant, thank you, you are too kind.

*ahem* This is important to point out for this discussion: the alternative to zoning is not "no zoning." It is not accurate to say Houston has no land use controls; Houston just does it in a different way, through private deeds and encumbrances enforced by the government. See this article. So the real question is: do you want legislated voting, or do you want private land use controls that you can only control to the extent that you have the economic means to do so? Or do you simply want no land use control at all? (I think we can all agree that would silly, as it would involve preventing private parties from controlling the use of their own property.) That is the real question.

Anyway, stopping the factory from being built next to the house you currently have a 30 year mortgage on is a good thing, albeit a far fetched example. Public zoning gives property owners (and renters, to an extent) transparent predictability, which is important for property values; if you have absolutely no clue what is going to be built in that open field next to your house, do you really want to spend your savings and encumber yourself and your family for a significant portion of your remaining years on this earth hoping that a 7 story apartment building is not built there that blocks your nice view of the ocean? Or a morgue? Or a bar? Or a strip club? If there is a private encumbrance that needs to be negotiated, or that was already negotiated Houston style, it might not be as easy to either re-negotiate it or figure out what it says, as opposed to a public zoning code you can go look up online.

That's the extreme example. And yes it can happen. The more common example however is density; e.g., a residential zone can have "light commercial" and low density housing, which is not just important for property values, it is important for government planning for things like: how many parking spaces they need, the adequacy of thoroughfares for traffic planning, plumbing, electricity, and things like that. Zoning laws typically follow a "general plan" which is a document a municipality makes once ever few decades to literally plan how their city or county will look. There are bad ones, and there are good ones. As History Buff mentioned, there are trends right now towards more "mixed use" to encourage walking, biking, and public transit, but owing to the extended timeframes (and the fact that a lot of places are, well, already built up) more "progressive" (e.g. forward thinking, not political) communities are still a ways away.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Good post. I like the "mixed" approach. I just think that segregation, while not absolutely bad, should be handled very carefully if it is something the government can influence. For instance, the city planing of my current home town is marvelous. The whole town is kind of one big lively whole, where everything comes together. And I just intuitively think that the different environments and the different people living in them should not be totally estranged to one another. Though this may sound crazy to Americans living in big cities, where there are areas one is basically told to NEVER go.

 

[illram]

I should clarify that while I agree that complete segregation (e.g., cookie cutter suburbs square mile after square mile) is bad, bad, bad (IMHO) it is just as easy to get there with no zoning, or with inadequate land use controls.

In California you see it in a lot of unincorporated county areas, (unincorporated means not an incorporated city) where huge swaths of land are openly designated on county maps, and huge real estate developers buy all of it and build massive swaths of tract housing. Which is awful. The only hoop they need to jump through is maybe subdivisions on county plots and building permits. The only future thinking going on here is short term: maximizing real estate investments. in my opinion, the future livelihood of a community is not always in lockstep with maximizing real estate development profits. You get maybe a single "mall sprawl" area with a few gas stations, a McDonalds, and an Olive Garden, surrounded by unending sea of boring single and multifamily residential homes, with a highway in the middle. All of it built to capitalize on a quick sale of most of it in a short period of time, and the investors have no long term investment to keep them motivated to develop anything with an eye towards the future. Drive up the 5 from Fresno to Redding, or 80 from SF to Sacramento, and you see this everywhere. This often occurs because there were no adequate* land use controls to prevent suburban sprawl, and it was up to private developers, Houston style, to dictate what type of community it would be, as opposed to zoned areas that controlled density or dictated a mix of commercial and residential, or whatever.

*"adequate" obviously being in the eye of the beholder, I think these types of communities are bad for a variety of reasons, forcing the use of the automobile and not designing anything with any sort of public transit plan in place being one of the primary ones. But if you are a total laissez faire type then much of what I am saying is going to fall on deaf ears. "If people want to live there" and so on. (Ignoring the fact that so many of these sprawling suburban areas now lie empty due to the housing crisis, further deflating housing costs and leaving the home owners who bought into these messes holding the bag, while the developers by and large made all their money and got out.) But now I am kind of ranting...

 

[Terxpahseyton]

This is a decent POV. Just as I don't say "Let the government handle it just for the heck of it!" I am also no total laissez faire type. Maybe the procedures which lead to zoning can be modified so be less prone to special interests and more the merit of the grand scope, but I don't know enough (that is - next to nothing) to truly talk about that.

 

[Tahuti]

*"adequate" obviously being in the eye of the beholder, I think these types of communities are bad for a variety of reasons, forcing the use of the automobile and not designing anything with any sort of public transit plan in place being one of the primary ones. But if you are a total laissez faire type then much of what I am saying is going to fall on deaf ears. "If people want to live there" and so on. (Ignoring the fact that so many of these sprawling suburban areas now lie empty due to the housing crisis, further deflating housing costs and leaving the home owners who bought into these messes holding the bag, while the developers by and large made all their money and got out.)

Sorry for the nitpick, but I doubt the zoneless free areas are of such size to have a serious effect in general, for good or ill. Idem dito if the situation was to be reversed.

 

[Elfdemon]

Government-enforced zoning is inherently immoral. It distorts the market and deprives the people the oppotunity to freely choose where they live.

When you want to purchase a house, if you don't want those so-called "undesirable" stuffs pop up in your residential area in the future, you can simply ask the developers if they will be allowed or not. If they say yes, then you can simply go away, no one is forcing you to purchase it. If they say no, and they breaks their word after you moved in, then you can sue them for breach of contract, simple as that.

If the developer said yes and you still move in, then it's your free choice. Housing development that allow "undesirable stuffs", are typically cheaper. By depriving the people to make such choices, you are depriving the right of the people to purchase cheaper houses. Moreover, some people might simply prefer to have these "undesirable" things in vicinity. One man's garbage is another man's treasure.

It's all about freedom. You statists obviously does not value it very much, and seek to deprive the people of it by imposing your own personal preferences.

 

[JollyRoger]

Private deed restrictions have their downsides too. In the affluent counties north of Dallas, you can hardly buy into a new neighborhood without subjecting yourelf to a homeowners associations and many of these abuse the covenants. Want to choose your phone, internet and cable provider? Too bad - the private developers have taken that freedom away in many area subdivisions. Give me the "oppression" of a zoning board over the "freedom" of a Homeowners Association.

 

[Farm Boy]

I agree JR. Homeowners Associations are generally abominations.

 

[Elfdemon]

Since when there is a seperation of home-owner association and zoning laws? They co-exist. And in the case of home-owner associations, you can freely choose whether you want to be under their influence by purshasing or not purhasing property under their control. Zoning laws are much harder to "escape".

If anything, it is the government who created the strong power of home-owner association by restricing the land supply via regulations such as zoning laws and so-called "environmental protection", placing some so-called wetlands or endangered species above cheap housing. The limited land supply means less competition among developers, and the increased price means lesser ability of residents to move out and find a new place, all these streghten the power of the association.

 

[kramerfan86]

Id much rather live under a zoning code than be bound to the whims of the little crone across the street who has influence with the homeowner's association.

 

[Farm Boy]

Homeowners guidelines tend to be much more specific and far more restrictive as well. They can, and often do, have rules that apply to minor details backed by heavy fines. Slow payment of low sums of fines levied by your neighbors in the association(think less than 200 bucks) can easily balloon to several thousand dollars one the association's lawyer triggers to generate the fine's paperwork - particularly a problem because many associations have shown great eagerness in foreclosing on houses for small sums of money.

 

[Tahuti]

Private deed restrictions have their downsides too. In the affluent counties north of Dallas, you can hardly buy into a new neighborhood without subjecting yourelf to a homeowners associations and many of these abuse the covenants. Want to choose your phone, internet and cable provider? Too bad - the private developers have taken that freedom away in many area subdivisions. Give me the "oppression" of a zoning board over the "freedom" of a Homeowners Association.

If homeowners associations are not in the common interest, why not just ban requiring such memberships in the first place instead wholesale enforcement of zoning laws?

 

[Cutlass]

If homeowners associations are not in the common interest, why not just ban requiring such memberships in the first place instead wholesale enforcement of zoning laws?

That would interfere with private contracts...

 

[Tahuti]

That would interfere with private contracts...

That would only be a problem if I were arguing from a Libertarian perspective, but I'm not.

 

[Cutlass]

That would only be a problem if I were arguing from a Libertarian perspective, but I'm not.

The people who are blocking laws that interfere with these contracts often are libertarian. Sometimes conservative. Whichever politics they follow, they don't want the government to take away their petty monopoly on power because they want the power to serve their own interests at the expense of others. And they have the political clout to prevent governments from overruling them.

This is a direct refutation of the concept that the least government or the lowest level of local government promotes greater liberty. It in fact very often works just the opposite.

 

[Mise]

Having the property developer tie homeowners in to phone, internet, TV, water, electricity, gas, etc supply deals means that the property developer is more likely to make a return on his investment, which means that there will be (a) cheaper housing developments, and (b) a greater stock of housing. If housing is already cheap and abundant enough that you don't consider (a) and (b) above particularly "beneficial", then you can probably find a house without restrictive covenants of the kind JR is describing anyway. Either way, I don't see a problem.

 

[JollyRoger]

The phone and internet restrictions tht I speak of are in high-end develpments (and most, if not all high end developments in the area have HOAs) and are not less expensive to the homeowner than getting such service (even the same brand) on the open market. Its sole purpose is to provide a kickback to the developer and managemnt company. They really should be illegal under Texas law (and they actually violate the covenants in the HOA I am aware of). I've got a test case that I may file, but I need to win the judge lotto when it gets assigned. I know of one judge in particular that would uphhold the restrictions.