> Zoning allows people that do not own land to decide what can be done with it.
Land ownership, at least in every US jurisdiction I have experience in, is not that simple. Yes, technically my wife and I "own" our house and the plot of land it sits on. We have a title deed filed with the county clerk. (I'm leaving out the fact that we have a mortgage because the lien holder on the mortgage doesn't really have any rights that are relevant to this discussion; for our purposes here it would be the same if we owned the house and land free and clear.) That gives us a whole bundle of rights connected with the house and land, but it is not absolute "ownership" in the sense you appear to be using the term. The city, the county, and the state all have rights that don't go away just because someone buys the house and land; after all, they were all there long before we got there, and they all played a role in building the house and improving the land, not to mention all the infrastructure--roads, sewers, electricity, water, telephone, Internet. Our house and land aren't just sitting there in a vacuum; they are part of a community that is bigger than us and that has some ownership rights over the whole community that have to be balanced against the rights of individuals within the community.
Someone who really, really doesn't want to put up with any of that can go out to a highly rural jurisdiction and buy a plot of land that's far enough from all neighbors that they can basically do whatever they want.
> single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing.
Sorry, not buying it. You're welcome to build your own community that works the way you want it to if you don't like any existing communities. But you don't get to just declare by fiat that communities that don't work the way you prefer are evil.
I'm glad that you've outlined why property/ownership is much more complex than libertarians and conservatives typically acknowledge. I entirely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and it's all extremely important stuff.
However, I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing, and this led me to do a bunch of reading about the way this zoning classification is used across the US. That reading left me with only one conclusion: it is almost entirely a classist tool, used by the wealthy to exclude everyone else. Of course, the communities that do this have lots of nice sounding justifications for it which do not sound remotely problematic. But dig a little deeper (I did, really), and I am fairly confident that it becomes completely clear what is actually going on.
> I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing
I agree that such communities exist. However, that does not mean all communities that have some parts of them zoned for single-family dwellings are like that. Every community I have lived in that had portions of it zoned for single family dwellings also had townhomes and apartments, all in the same community and all within similar reach of whatever amenities were provided. (I have also been on both sides of the divide you draw, living in townhomes and living in single family homes.)
It doesn't need to be the case that every community with even one single-family dwelling zoned neighborhood has the same motivation.
As I said, it wasn't until I started reading around about this issue that I came to see how pervasive this use of the law was, and how in so many cases the motivation was reasonably easy to ascertain.
I'm not denying that conceptually speaking, such zoning could be done with purely good intent. I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.
> I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.
And your basis for this claim is your personal anecdotal experience, plus "a bunch of reading" you have done. IMO that's a pretty flimsy basis for such a sweeping claim.
Land ownership, at least in every US jurisdiction I have experience in, is not that simple. Yes, technically my wife and I "own" our house and the plot of land it sits on. We have a title deed filed with the county clerk. (I'm leaving out the fact that we have a mortgage because the lien holder on the mortgage doesn't really have any rights that are relevant to this discussion; for our purposes here it would be the same if we owned the house and land free and clear.) That gives us a whole bundle of rights connected with the house and land, but it is not absolute "ownership" in the sense you appear to be using the term. The city, the county, and the state all have rights that don't go away just because someone buys the house and land; after all, they were all there long before we got there, and they all played a role in building the house and improving the land, not to mention all the infrastructure--roads, sewers, electricity, water, telephone, Internet. Our house and land aren't just sitting there in a vacuum; they are part of a community that is bigger than us and that has some ownership rights over the whole community that have to be balanced against the rights of individuals within the community.
Someone who really, really doesn't want to put up with any of that can go out to a highly rural jurisdiction and buy a plot of land that's far enough from all neighbors that they can basically do whatever they want.
> single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing.
Sorry, not buying it. You're welcome to build your own community that works the way you want it to if you don't like any existing communities. But you don't get to just declare by fiat that communities that don't work the way you prefer are evil.