> Yet somehow nearly no one in America is aware of this or concerned about it. I wish I understood why that is.
Because people love zoning! NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood. It's the main reason zoning exists! Particularly the wealthy people who have the influence to make it happen, but the casual racists of the past century, and middle class yuppies of the past half century, have plenty to answer for.
But it's also clear that bad zoning (like the 2-stack rule) is also an artifact of poor system maintenance. When you design a system, you may put in certain constraints for safety. Over time the system changes, but the entire design and its constraints are not re-evaluated for each change. So eventually you have constraints that are completely out of whack with the current state. Doesn't matter if it's zoning or a microservice architecture, you're going to end up with crappy legacy rules that only get re-evaluated when things break.
> NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood.
Yes some of prefer zoning to "mixed" and "diverse" neighborhoods. What's wrong with me not willing to see a laundromat or an office building next to my house? Or what's wrong with me willing to live in quiet family-oriented neighborhood, where I can let children go outside alone since age of 6-7?
What’s wrong is everything the top comment mentioned. Zoning in the US is an albatross on our GDP, increases wealth inequality and racial segregation, and is forcing the car-centric culture that we currently live in. In the broadest sense, it’s making it close to impossible to modernize our cities and will be a major factor in the US’s fall from being the biggest economy in the world.
If you’re okay with all of that as the price of you getting to live in an eternally quiet neighborhood (that your children will never have a similar opportunity to live in themselves due to zoning-driven real estate prices going far beyond what standard wages can afford), then sure. As long as you acknowledge what consequences your desires have on wider society, then you can say you think the price is worth it or that you don’t really care.
Excessive zoning makes everyone poorer and is implemented by a local political elite who have power because they can afford to spend the most time on politics.
Nothings wrong with that. Nothing is stopping you from buying up the land around you, or agreeing with you neighbors to make a HOA that has those characteristics.
The problem with zoning, is that it isn't voluntary.
It's certainly as voluntary as a HOA, which were originally called White Homeowners Associations.
Zoning is assigned by democratically elected administrations. HOAs are restrictive covenants that are required for the purchase of a house. Every single thing identified as NIMBYism could be enforced by covenants, and keeping blacks and Jews out was literally their original purpose.
Because the wording of such restrictions are often just window-dressing on the true motive, which is racial segregation.
The first zoning law in the country was in Los Angeles in 1908. Part of the law was crafted to force certain businesses to relocate retroactively. It was crafted specifically to target the Chinese businesses, which were the laundromats. White people just did not want to live alongside Chinese people.
Redlining was a further practice of both bankers and zoning having restrictions which were explicitly racially motivated. Levittown, the first planned community in the United States, was very explicitly "not mixed" - it had racial covenants that restricted blacks or jews from moving in. The intent was to sell more homes, as they presumed white people would not want to live in "mixed" areas with neighbors of an undesireable race. That practice continued throughout planned communities and zoning laws all over the country. Many of those racial covenants are still in place today.
As an aside: you can let your children go outside in most cities. The moral panic over children getting kidnapped or abused if they step foot outside the house has been overblown for decades, and at this point is just a bizarre psychological trope of America.
> What's wrong with me not willing
Misery loves company. City-dwellers have to deal with crime, dodging homeless excrement, noise, and general unpleasantness? So should you.
Why blame the rich people rather than the system that allows them to abuse it? Rich people will always exist. The solution is to make it so that abuse is not possible. One possibility: create a state system for zoning and override every local zoning system. Let local zoning boards decide how to zone but make zoning be based on a tiered zoning system. Namely every zoning is a superset of the previous zoning. So industrial areas also allow every other type of zoning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk
I don't know about your state, but in my state, rich people have influence at the state level too.
It doesn't seem axiomatic to me that rich people will always exist (I'm not sure I even agree that poor people will always exist, despite believing that the guy who most famously said it was divine), and one of the things I have learned from working in an industry with very rich people is that merely being rich is enough to let you influence the rules of the game. If someone was able to argue for tiered zoning, you can pay people to argue for un-tiered zoning. If there's a law preventing you from influencing local zoning, and you're rich, you can go change that law just as easily as it got created. If there's a law requiring certain representation on zoning boards, you can go lobby that representation. If there's a law moving zoning to an "apolitical" government agency, you can fund candidates willing to politicize it. And so forth.
Making people not have that level of influence/leverage in the first place, hard as it might be, seems like the only viable solution.
My post was actually about defining a system of zoning and forcing localities (if they want to allow zoning for industry at all) to also allow high rise housing and commercial in the same area as well. And anywhere that's zoned commercial also has to automatically allow residential. Localities can still choose how they zone, but the state sets the types of zoning possible.
Because people love zoning! NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood. It's the main reason zoning exists! Particularly the wealthy people who have the influence to make it happen, but the casual racists of the past century, and middle class yuppies of the past half century, have plenty to answer for.
But it's also clear that bad zoning (like the 2-stack rule) is also an artifact of poor system maintenance. When you design a system, you may put in certain constraints for safety. Over time the system changes, but the entire design and its constraints are not re-evaluated for each change. So eventually you have constraints that are completely out of whack with the current state. Doesn't matter if it's zoning or a microservice architecture, you're going to end up with crappy legacy rules that only get re-evaluated when things break.