5 ms·

Zoning rules in the US are one thing I will never understand. Especially since it is very anti market and the US seems to believe on a free market more than mo

Zoning rules in the US are one thing I will never understand. Especially since it is very anti market and the US seems to believe on a free market more than most countries. I wonder if it has to do with suburbs of American cities being much more planned than most other city areas. Planned residential areas in Europe suffer from the same problems. Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas?

iambenrussell 11y ago
The main reasons for zoning are cultural. For some reason or another, US households and governments have a greater preference for income segregation (keeping apartments away from wealthy neighborhoods) and "quiet" residential areas. The fears are/were that the natural beauty of certain types of development would be spoiled by low-income housing, factories, and commerce. Of course, as you say, it's very any I - market. People already tend to naturally cluster based on income, level of education, desire for public goods, etc, so it shouldn't be necessary to have such restrictions. It inevitably comes down to money, too, where minimum lot size restrictions shut out potential tenants/owners who can afford the per square foot cost in low quantities but not a large property. These restrictions are supposed to ensure a high enough tax yield per dwelling, but it's in the name of beautification. You could say it all goes back to the car. When it suddenly became much cheaper for low income people to move out of the city center and commute from traditionally rich suburban areas, the rich got scared. Some moved further away, but governments also used zoning laws to make sure to poor stayed in the city, where they belonged.
- jdavis703 11y ago
  A lot of zoning restrictions were an attempt to circumvent anti-segretation laws for schools and housing through policies such as redlining.
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    Bingo. A lot of the configuration is rooted in our racial history. Even sans zoning, black people have chased white people to the suburbs, back downtown again, and basically all over the map. You can't understand American city structure without the context of race relations here.
    - michaelbuddy 11y ago
      You also can't say its all about race either because that would be trying to deliberately mislead.
      - unclebucknasty 11y ago
        Hence the phrase "a lot" vs. "all about".
    - srtjstjsj 11y ago
      "chased" is a strange choice of words here.
      - unclebucknasty 11y ago
        Not to be taken literally. A word chosen to parody the ridiculousness of the overall dynamic. Hoping to evoke a Keystone Cops-on-a-map style mental image.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
      That's an "interesting" phrasing, but I find it less convincing than the usual "white flight" interpretation.
      - unclebucknasty 11y ago
        Flip sides of the same coin. Didn't mean the phrasing literally, as much as in parody. That said, there is an element of upwardly mobile African Americans seeking opportunities for their children. While they are not explicitly "chasing white people", this search frequently lands them in the same suburban locales.
  - michaelbuddy 11y ago
    You're ignoring the lions share of zoning which is really about safety and conforming to standards. People like the money they spend to mean stability. And that means nice neighborhoods of houses don't want certain businesses because of trucks, unfamiliar traffic which equal danger to pedestrians. Some don't care about lawns or flags or color as much but it turns out the most insufferable people end up being drawn to the hoa boards.
    - Throwaway23412 11y ago
      What's interesting is that the word "safe" doesn't show up once in the "Zoning" Wikipedia article. However, words like "business interests", "income segregation", and "racial segregation" seem to show up quite a bit. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Functional_zoning_-_categories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Functional_zoning_-_cat... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Criticism_of_zoning_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Criticism_of_zoning_law...
      - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
        the word "safe" doesn't show up once in the "Zoning" Wikipedia article Then that Wikipedia article needs to be amended. Look at an example from the real world. This is happening right now, in Portland Oregon. http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/two-portland-glass-companies-lack-pollution-controls-on-their-chimneys/Content?oid=17577339 http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/two-portland-glass-c... The problem is that glass factories are "adjacent to a 100-child daycare facility, two public schools (Cleveland High School and Winterhaven K-8), and a city park." These factories have been emitting metals such as cadmium and arsenic into the air. As you can imagine, this being Portland, everyone is quite upset. And rightly so. You can argue about the quantities of emission that any given plant should be allowed. But you can't argue that, for any given emission level, society as a whole is much better off if these factories aren't adjacent to daycare facilities and schools. Keeping schools and factories separated is a very legitimate "safety" goal of zoning.
        ajmurmann 11y ago
dnautics 11y ago
Planning is an American tradition since before the Constitution. Territories West of Pennsylvania were organized by surveying, the "township" was a square plot of land of fixed size (6mi square). This is reflected also in the square shaped of counties in many Western states, the squares of Chicago's layout, and the presence of many streets called "base line"
CalRobert 11y ago
In addition to zoning, parking minimums mean that US landscape is mostly asphalt with some buildings sprinkled here and there, instead of actual city. Really, look at satellite photos of a modern American city and it's primarily car infrastructure. http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par... http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/04/10/parking-craters-arent-just-ugly-theyre-a-cancer-on-your-citys-downtown/ http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/04/10/parking-craters-arent-...
- r00fus 11y ago
  Reminds me of the Treansformers comics where the Autobot computer thought vehicles were the dominant lifeform on the planet...
api 11y ago
The US is in almost all things far less free market than the rhetoric would have you believe, and this is a bipartisan thing. The American right throws free markets under the bus as much as the left, but often for different reasons.
- bobdole1234 11y ago
  You know how Klingons are always talking about honor? But they're the ones that do all the crazy things that are decidedly less than honorable? That's what Americans do with the free market.
AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas? You don't know the half of it. Suburban sprawl was national policy during the Cold War. The idea was to spread out the population to reduce the damage a nuclear weapon could do. They did it on purpose.
- nyolfen 11y ago
  source? i was under the impression it had more to do with a convergence of car culture and white flight
  - huac 11y ago
    the argument i've heard is that the highway expansion made it possible to live farther away from cities, and the connection with the nuclear scare is that the highways were constructed with transporting nuclear weapons in mind
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerability.pdf http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerab...
- srtjstjsj 11y ago
  This is silly. USA is sprawled (and has been since before WW II) because the USA has far more territory (and far more territory per person) than any other temperate-region nation. This happened because the native populations of the USA were far less technologically developed and highly-reproductive until ~18th Century when they got displaced.

iambenrussell 11y ago

The main reasons for zoning are cultural. For some reason or another, US households and governments have a greater preference for income segregation (keeping apartments away from wealthy neighborhoods) and "quiet" residential areas. The fears are/were that the natural beauty of certain types of development would be spoiled by low-income housing, factories, and commerce. Of course, as you say, it's very any I - market. People already tend to naturally cluster based on income, level of education, desire for public goods, etc, so it shouldn't be necessary to have such restrictions. It inevitably comes down to money, too, where minimum lot size restrictions shut out potential tenants/owners who can afford the per square foot cost in low quantities but not a large property. These restrictions are supposed to ensure a high enough tax yield per dwelling, but it's in the name of beautification. You could say it all goes back to the car. When it suddenly became much cheaper for low income people to move out of the city center and commute from traditionally rich suburban areas, the rich got scared. Some moved further away, but governments also used zoning laws to make sure to poor stayed in the city, where they belonged.

jdavis703 11y ago
A lot of zoning restrictions were an attempt to circumvent anti-segretation laws for schools and housing through policies such as redlining.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  Bingo. A lot of the configuration is rooted in our racial history. Even sans zoning, black people have chased white people to the suburbs, back downtown again, and basically all over the map. You can't understand American city structure without the context of race relations here.
  - michaelbuddy 11y ago
    You also can't say its all about race either because that would be trying to deliberately mislead.
    - unclebucknasty 11y ago
      Hence the phrase "a lot" vs. "all about".
  - srtjstjsj 11y ago
    "chased" is a strange choice of words here.
    - unclebucknasty 11y ago
      Not to be taken literally. A word chosen to parody the ridiculousness of the overall dynamic. Hoping to evoke a Keystone Cops-on-a-map style mental image.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    That's an "interesting" phrasing, but I find it less convincing than the usual "white flight" interpretation.
    - unclebucknasty 11y ago
      Flip sides of the same coin. Didn't mean the phrasing literally, as much as in parody. That said, there is an element of upwardly mobile African Americans seeking opportunities for their children. While they are not explicitly "chasing white people", this search frequently lands them in the same suburban locales.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  You're ignoring the lions share of zoning which is really about safety and conforming to standards. People like the money they spend to mean stability. And that means nice neighborhoods of houses don't want certain businesses because of trucks, unfamiliar traffic which equal danger to pedestrians. Some don't care about lawns or flags or color as much but it turns out the most insufferable people end up being drawn to the hoa boards.
  - Throwaway23412 11y ago
    What's interesting is that the word "safe" doesn't show up once in the "Zoning" Wikipedia article. However, words like "business interests", "income segregation", and "racial segregation" seem to show up quite a bit. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Functional_zoning_-_categories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Functional_zoning_-_cat... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Criticism_of_zoning_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Criticism_of_zoning_law...
    - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
      the word "safe" doesn't show up once in the "Zoning" Wikipedia article Then that Wikipedia article needs to be amended. Look at an example from the real world. This is happening right now, in Portland Oregon. http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/two-portland-glass-companies-lack-pollution-controls-on-their-chimneys/Content?oid=17577339 http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/two-portland-glass-c... The problem is that glass factories are "adjacent to a 100-child daycare facility, two public schools (Cleveland High School and Winterhaven K-8), and a city park." These factories have been emitting metals such as cadmium and arsenic into the air. As you can imagine, this being Portland, everyone is quite upset. And rightly so. You can argue about the quantities of emission that any given plant should be allowed. But you can't argue that, for any given emission level, society as a whole is much better off if these factories aren't adjacent to daycare facilities and schools. Keeping schools and factories separated is a very legitimate "safety" goal of zoning.
      - ajmurmann 11y ago

dnautics 11y ago

Planning is an American tradition since before the Constitution. Territories West of Pennsylvania were organized by surveying, the "township" was a square plot of land of fixed size (6mi square). This is reflected also in the square shaped of counties in many Western states, the squares of Chicago's layout, and the presence of many streets called "base line"

CalRobert 11y ago

In addition to zoning, parking minimums mean that US landscape is mostly asphalt with some buildings sprinkled here and there, instead of actual city. Really, look at satellite photos of a modern American city and it's primarily car infrastructure. http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par... http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/04/10/parking-craters-arent-just-ugly-theyre-a-cancer-on-your-citys-downtown/ http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/04/10/parking-craters-arent-...

r00fus 11y ago
Reminds me of the Treansformers comics where the Autobot computer thought vehicles were the dominant lifeform on the planet...

api 11y ago

The US is in almost all things far less free market than the rhetoric would have you believe, and this is a bipartisan thing. The American right throws free markets under the bus as much as the left, but often for different reasons.

bobdole1234 11y ago
You know how Klingons are always talking about honor? But they're the ones that do all the crazy things that are decidedly less than honorable? That's what Americans do with the free market.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago

> Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas? You don't know the half of it. Suburban sprawl was national policy during the Cold War. The idea was to spread out the population to reduce the damage a nuclear weapon could do. They did it on purpose.

nyolfen 11y ago
source? i was under the impression it had more to do with a convergence of car culture and white flight
- huac 11y ago
  the argument i've heard is that the highway expansion made it possible to live farther away from cities, and the connection with the nuclear scare is that the highways were constructed with transporting nuclear weapons in mind
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerability.pdf http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerab...
srtjstjsj 11y ago
This is silly. USA is sprawled (and has been since before WW II) because the USA has far more territory (and far more territory per person) than any other temperate-region nation. This happened because the native populations of the USA were far less technologically developed and highly-reproductive until ~18th Century when they got displaced.