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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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If land value is independent of zoning restrictions, then it just makes a ton of people poor without letting them build improvements that house more people.

Zoning restrictions don't exist in a vacuum. This would probably happen, which would ideally lead to a far greater willingness to repeal/change ridiculous zoning regulations. Arguably the reason zoning has gotten so ridiculous is because it's an extremely powerful and effective tool for land owners to speculate and prevent competition in the land market.

At least in my metropolis, zoning is a way for the City to extract fees from developers, for politically-involved individuals to influence what gets built in their neighborhoods, and for city planners to try and create the perfect city of their dreams (and universally fail), as well as keeping a goodly number of specialist attorneys, permit fixers, etc. in business.

Most developers I've interacted with would prefer the zoning requirements to vanish rather than stay as they are (i.e. expensive, time-consuming, uncertain, and subject to political interference)

Arguably the reason zoning has gotten so ridiculous is because it's an extremely powerful and effective tool for land owners to speculate and prevent competition in the land market.

I'm absolutely certain there are bad actors abusing zoning regulations / bribing municipal officials, or whatever, but it seems a stretch to say that zoning is a tool for speculation and shutting out the competition. Can you lay out your case here?

The idea is that single-family housing zones prevent denser housing from competing with SFH. I suppose. I'm realizing I need to study up quite a bit more on this whole topic.

Well, the problem is that many, if not all, types of non-SFH have negative externalities for the people in the SFH.

For example, if my neighbor sells their house to a developer who then builds a 5 story apartment building, this will have significant effects for me.

My street will go from quiet to busy.

I will go from knowing all my neighbors to definitely not knowing all my neighbors.

Noise will go up.

Etc.

All these are externalities we, the current residents of this neighborhood, seek to avoid.

Therefore, we work with the town to zone our area for SFH.

There's no aspect of "competing" here except insofar as we are in a death struggle with developers.

Yeah, this is one area where I think the intellectual arguments are butting up against physical reality. I live in a SFH neighborhood and it's quite nice, great sense of community.

That being said, the Georgist logic inherently makes a lot of sense to me, and seems like it would strongly incentivize better use of land which I think is crucial. I'm torn.

The goal of human civilization and society is not to make the most efficient use of resources. If you can accept that then there’s no reason to insist on a tax policy that would inherently sacrifice things that are genuine good things.

The goal of human civilization and society is not to make the most efficient use of resources.

Agreed, but look around. Efficiently using resource is what brought us the modern era. Myself and other utilitarians are hoping to keep all the material and intellectual wealth of modernity while retaining the good things about being human.

That requires learning how to use resources efficiently to preserve the things we care about.

Utilitarianism is a false god. You can never genuinely capture what Utility is. Goodhart’s Law will bite you in the ass every time.

Put another way, if you really want to be a utilitarian, become a religious traditionalist. Amish, trad cath, Muslim, Hindu, Hasidic, doesn’t matter.

It may be false but it is powerful. How can we contend with it by turning away?

The idea is that single-family housing zones prevent denser housing from competing with SFH

I suppose, if I squint, but you're going to to have to lay out the mechanics more before I'm fully convinced.

Back on The Motte, grendelkin (I think?) regularly posted about zoning fights in the Bay Area and it was usually "community leaders", not SFH owners protesting developers trying to remove historically-significant laundromats, or whatever, to build denser housing.

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