7 ms·

If you want to fix the country then remove all limits, let developers develop whatever and whereever they deem there is demand. That's a bad idea, too. For exa

If you want to fix the country then remove all limits, let developers develop whatever and whereever they deem there is demand. That's a bad idea, too. For example, in Fremont right now, there's a development that was built without being placed in a school district. So the students who will live there have no real school. Also, there are serious environmental impacts that need to be considered every time you build a new housing unit. Outlawing zoning completely is a bad idea too: you'll end up with housing units built next to noisy factories or smelly plants, and then the people in the new houses will complain to get the factory shut down, even though the factory was there before they were, and it was making noise when they moved in. Furthermore, when you build new housing, you need to consider how those people are going to get transportation, water and electricity (and heating in most places). You can't just throw up a housing unit anywhere and expect those things to be built magically.

nickff 11y ago
What you say assumes that people want to purchase anything a developer builds, anywhere, at any price. In reality, market forces encourage developers to build nice homes in good areas well served by various amenities (which are publicly and privately available). The problem is that development is so tightly restricted in most areas, that new residents have few options. In short, you are blaming the market for the results of zoning and land use restrictions.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  In short, you are blaming the market for the results of zoning and land use restrictions. I didn't blame the market for anything. You have reading comprehension issues. Fix that.
- saeranv 11y ago
  I agree with the sentiment of vastly deregulating urban zoning conditions. However there are a couple of places where the market forces will lead to poor long-term community development. For example, outside of urban areas the market tends to incentivize suburban sprawl. In Toronto, you can see this in the GTA region like Markham or Brampton: vast tracts of cookie-cutter residential neighborhoods, without any consideration for integration with mixed use. Zoning does compound this, with density limitations, and parking requirements. However, the developers are perfectly happy with the high return on investment they can get building cheap single-family houses. I also abhor zoning and what it does to cities. But look at Japanese cities to see what good, minimal zoning can achieve, without prohibitive height limits, nonexclusive zoning etc. More on Japanese zoning: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
  - zanny 11y ago
    They aren't building mixed use because the residents do not want mixed use. Persuade people to want mixed use, rather than trying to force it down the throats of home owners, and you will have much better results. Developers are perfectly happy to deliver want buyers want. If you want better cities, have a population of people who want better cities. If the city you live in is not good enough, first try persuading your peers, and if that does not work, go somewhere more like minded. It is not an excuse to cripple everyone in this trap of zoning and regulation that has stunted growth in almost every sector across the entire country.
icebraining 11y ago
For example, in Fremont right now, there's a development that was built without being placed in a school district. So the students who will live there have no real school. Why would people with children move to a place without schools?
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  People with children move into places without schools because they're short-sighted or because other priorities are higher for them. Some portion of people with children may not care at all about them. That's one reason why there's public education, to prevent parent's lack of concern being something that cause a child to have nearly no future. Of course, such considerations seem to be already going away, so sure we'll have whole housing developments for home schooling nuts.
  - swiley 11y ago
    Homeschooling is underrated honestly.
    - ktRolster 11y ago
      It's a lot of work though. You're not going to do it with both parents working.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Then doesn't it make more sense to prevent people with kids from living in these developments, than preventing their construction in the first place? After all, more than 50% of households have no children at all, why should they be prevented from living in a place without schools?
- nvader 11y ago
  People without children have a way of turning into people with children, sometimes unexpectedly.
  - 11y ago
joe_the_user 11y ago
The NYTimes had an article on an absolutely unregulated city in India. Sewage bumped in vacant lots is a problem. Safety outside developed areas is a problem. Still, removing parking requirements might be a good thing if creates incentive for public transit. Removing single family home mandates seems like it would be great for avoiding sprawl. But as you say, just these two. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world/asia/09gurgaon.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world/asia/09gurgaon.html
- skewart 11y ago
  You're making a massive leap from legalizing more different kinds of development in the US to a totally unregulated city in India. It's basically a strawman fallacy. The article clearly talks about a lack of many basic government authority and services way beyond zoning codes, like electricity and criminal justice. I think the lack of reliable power and sweage treatment might have a lot more to do with it being chaotic than the lack of laws banning multifamily apartment buildings.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    If you think builders won't screw home-purchasers every chance they get, then you don't know many home builders. There's a reason we have housing inspections at so many steps in the building process.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Actually, there are many reasons, some of which are good for home-purchasers. It might interest you to know that the inspection regimes of different municipalities vary drastically.
    - skewart 11y ago
      Building inspections are to enforce building codes, not zoning. Building inspections and building codes are a very good thing. I don't think anyone in these comments is saying otherwise. Zoning and building codes are two vastly different things. Zoning controls how buildings can be used, what types of new buildings can be built, and, in some cases buildings' overall shape and size. Building codes specify how buildings can be built, and what quality and safety standards the construction has to meet. Like many other pro-housing-affordablity people, I believe we should massively relax zoning laws in most places (though not necessarily abolish them entirely). I do not think we should change building codes in any way.
revelation 11y ago
What does that mean, "without being placed in a school district"? Is the next school 20+ miles away?
- ktRolster 11y ago
  It might be 20+ miles away, or your kids might go to different schools: http://abc7news.com/education/developer-suing-fremont-unified-over-placement/1041285/ http://abc7news.com/education/developer-suing-fremont-unifie... The school district has designated this new area as unassigned, meaning the children will have a seat somewhere, but no guarantee of a close neighborhood school.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    So there is a school district, and what you wrote first was mere hyperbole?
    - mjevans 11y ago
      It's more like an area that was previously unzoned between cities. There are different options for how to hook up water, power, data, etc; however due to the way that school districts work the kids will only be covered by one such domain. Within that domain, this new source of housing has not been factored in to the balance of how to divide resources. (Think of classroom seats as hyperthreads and teachers as processor cores). The kids going to different schools (lack of CPU affinity) is the issue as differently aged kids might go to different schools, have to travel needlessly far to get to a school with free resources, and potentially even two kids of the same age from the same family might not go to the same school.
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        That's what I thought. It is in fact a major flaw of the entire USA public school concept that "kids will only be covered by one such domain", but you can't blame developers for that. School districts partition the state, and they do so in every state. Therefore this objection amounts to "the school district in which this development is located didn't prepare for new students while it was being built", and that objection may be lodged against any new development. Do public school boosters really want to reject all new development? Or is this more of what was mentioned upthread, that they only like development for certain types of people?
protomyth 11y ago
> That's a bad idea, too. For example, in Fremont right now, there's a development that was built without being placed in a school district. So the students who will live there have no real school. Perhaps abolishing the whole idea of school districts and assigning kids to schools via address as opposed to parental decision. The whole pay for schools via property tax and local levies has a pretty big negative impact on students from low income neighborhoods. Its classism baked into the system. Backpack tuitions would right a lot of wrongs in the education of our children.
- pkaye 11y ago
  Actually in Fremont, there is one school district with 5 high schools. The city is carved out into districts and generally based on proximity of home address, students assigned to the appropriate high school. The thing though is there is a huge ranking difference between the high schools. The top one is maybe in the 99% percentile in the state while the lower one is maybe 60% percentile. This makes for a huge pricing difference between houses maybe a few blocks apart to the degree of a 2x price difference. So the ones in the expensive houses will pay more property taxes but I believe the funding is equally divided among the high schools based on student population. In the end, probably the big difference is racial difference among different parts of the city and the affluence and education background of the parents that drive the difference in the school rankings.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  A school district is a system of assigning kids to schools via address. In California, the schools are funded equally based on property tax collected at the state level. Schools are funded based on how many students are sitting in class, not on where they are located.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    > A school district is a system of assigning kids to schools via address. I think I'm aware of this, and it is often not what the parent's want used as a determinate. If someone says they have moved somewhere to get their kids in a "good" school district then the system has failed. > In California, the schools are funded equally based on property tax collected at the state level. Schools are funded based on how many students are sitting in class, not on where they are located. Except for districts where local property tax portion exceeds the funding formula levels since the property tax is kept local to the district. Also, CA schools are funded on more than property taxes such as having an income tax share.
lukasm 11y ago
"school district" - this is exactly what OP is suggesting. Another obstacle with classist and racist origin. It really blows my mind why some countries have such incredibly stupid laws. Can you image a law when you can buy only in one shop if you are from a certain district? That would suck tremendously. No competition.
- tzs 11y ago
  Do you have a citation for the claim that school districts have classist and racist origin? As far as I can tell school districts arose at a time when it was completely impractical for children, other than those whose parents were wealthy enough to send them away to boarding school, to attend a school that was not local, and at a time when it was generally believed that local government should be responsible for local services (sanitation, roads, water, schools, etc). I don't see how at that time they could have been used for racist and classist purposes, so doubt that their origin was such.
  - infosample 11y ago
    I'm not sure citation is needed to prove the origin and consequences of segregation. Black people could not live in white neighborhoods, black people could not go to school with white people until 1960. Whether classist, racist, or coincidence, the results are obvious.
    - tzs 11y ago
      > I'm not sure citation is needed to prove the origin and consequences of segregation And I didn't ask for one. I want one on the origin of school districts. As you noted, neighborhoods were segregated. As a consequence of that, everything local was de facto segregated, but that doesn't mean you can infer that everything local has a racist origin. For instance, since neighborhoods were segregated a neighborhood's sewers were generally only available to one race. Do you conclude that public sanitation has racist origins?
      - infosample 11y ago
Houshalter 11y ago
The lack of school district is the most hilarious objection. If you live in a rural area, then the government is required to send a bus miles out of it's way to get your kids to school. Yet people living in one of the most populated cities in the US apparently live too far away from schools and shouldn't be allowed to build.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > If you live in a rural area, then the government is required to send a bus miles out of it's way to get your kids to school. As one of those kids who got up at 04:00 to catch the 04:30 bus that arrived at school at ~07:45, (and repeated the trip -but in reverse- starting at ~15:00) I can confirm the truth of this statement. [0] [0] I was literally the first child on and last child off of that particular bus. :/
e40 11y ago
The perfect example of what you are talking about: the suburbs of Charlotte, NC (the ones I'm thinking of are actually near the SC/NC border). Wild grow with little planning for transportation and water. It's a complete mess. You can sit in traffic jams in the middle of nowhere. And the crazy thing, they are still building like crazy so it's only going to get much worse than it is now. I've been visiting the area for 15 years (my Dad lives there), and each year I go back I'm amazed how much worse it is. 15 years ago it was lush forests. Now: mall and housing developments are everywhere, and the roads are mostly the same--there have been some upgrades to roads, but not nearly enough.

nickff 11y ago

What you say assumes that people want to purchase anything a developer builds, anywhere, at any price. In reality, market forces encourage developers to build nice homes in good areas well served by various amenities (which are publicly and privately available). The problem is that development is so tightly restricted in most areas, that new residents have few options. In short, you are blaming the market for the results of zoning and land use restrictions.

ktRolster 11y ago
In short, you are blaming the market for the results of zoning and land use restrictions. I didn't blame the market for anything. You have reading comprehension issues. Fix that.
saeranv 11y ago
I agree with the sentiment of vastly deregulating urban zoning conditions. However there are a couple of places where the market forces will lead to poor long-term community development. For example, outside of urban areas the market tends to incentivize suburban sprawl. In Toronto, you can see this in the GTA region like Markham or Brampton: vast tracts of cookie-cutter residential neighborhoods, without any consideration for integration with mixed use. Zoning does compound this, with density limitations, and parking requirements. However, the developers are perfectly happy with the high return on investment they can get building cheap single-family houses. I also abhor zoning and what it does to cities. But look at Japanese cities to see what good, minimal zoning can achieve, without prohibitive height limits, nonexclusive zoning etc. More on Japanese zoning: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
- zanny 11y ago
  They aren't building mixed use because the residents do not want mixed use. Persuade people to want mixed use, rather than trying to force it down the throats of home owners, and you will have much better results. Developers are perfectly happy to deliver want buyers want. If you want better cities, have a population of people who want better cities. If the city you live in is not good enough, first try persuading your peers, and if that does not work, go somewhere more like minded. It is not an excuse to cripple everyone in this trap of zoning and regulation that has stunted growth in almost every sector across the entire country.

icebraining 11y ago

For example, in Fremont right now, there's a development that was built without being placed in a school district. So the students who will live there have no real school. Why would people with children move to a place without schools?

joe_the_user 11y ago
People with children move into places without schools because they're short-sighted or because other priorities are higher for them. Some portion of people with children may not care at all about them. That's one reason why there's public education, to prevent parent's lack of concern being something that cause a child to have nearly no future. Of course, such considerations seem to be already going away, so sure we'll have whole housing developments for home schooling nuts.
- swiley 11y ago
  Homeschooling is underrated honestly.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    It's a lot of work though. You're not going to do it with both parents working.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Then doesn't it make more sense to prevent people with kids from living in these developments, than preventing their construction in the first place? After all, more than 50% of households have no children at all, why should they be prevented from living in a place without schools?
nvader 11y ago
People without children have a way of turning into people with children, sometimes unexpectedly.
- 11y ago

joe_the_user 11y ago

The NYTimes had an article on an absolutely unregulated city in India. Sewage bumped in vacant lots is a problem. Safety outside developed areas is a problem. Still, removing parking requirements might be a good thing if creates incentive for public transit. Removing single family home mandates seems like it would be great for avoiding sprawl. But as you say, just these two. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world/asia/09gurgaon.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world/asia/09gurgaon.html

skewart 11y ago
You're making a massive leap from legalizing more different kinds of development in the US to a totally unregulated city in India. It's basically a strawman fallacy. The article clearly talks about a lack of many basic government authority and services way beyond zoning codes, like electricity and criminal justice. I think the lack of reliable power and sweage treatment might have a lot more to do with it being chaotic than the lack of laws banning multifamily apartment buildings.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  If you think builders won't screw home-purchasers every chance they get, then you don't know many home builders. There's a reason we have housing inspections at so many steps in the building process.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Actually, there are many reasons, some of which are good for home-purchasers. It might interest you to know that the inspection regimes of different municipalities vary drastically.
  - skewart 11y ago
    Building inspections are to enforce building codes, not zoning. Building inspections and building codes are a very good thing. I don't think anyone in these comments is saying otherwise. Zoning and building codes are two vastly different things. Zoning controls how buildings can be used, what types of new buildings can be built, and, in some cases buildings' overall shape and size. Building codes specify how buildings can be built, and what quality and safety standards the construction has to meet. Like many other pro-housing-affordablity people, I believe we should massively relax zoning laws in most places (though not necessarily abolish them entirely). I do not think we should change building codes in any way.

revelation 11y ago

What does that mean, "without being placed in a school district"? Is the next school 20+ miles away?

ktRolster 11y ago
It might be 20+ miles away, or your kids might go to different schools: http://abc7news.com/education/developer-suing-fremont-unified-over-placement/1041285/ http://abc7news.com/education/developer-suing-fremont-unifie... The school district has designated this new area as unassigned, meaning the children will have a seat somewhere, but no guarantee of a close neighborhood school.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  So there is a school district, and what you wrote first was mere hyperbole?
  - mjevans 11y ago
    It's more like an area that was previously unzoned between cities. There are different options for how to hook up water, power, data, etc; however due to the way that school districts work the kids will only be covered by one such domain. Within that domain, this new source of housing has not been factored in to the balance of how to divide resources. (Think of classroom seats as hyperthreads and teachers as processor cores). The kids going to different schools (lack of CPU affinity) is the issue as differently aged kids might go to different schools, have to travel needlessly far to get to a school with free resources, and potentially even two kids of the same age from the same family might not go to the same school.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      That's what I thought. It is in fact a major flaw of the entire USA public school concept that "kids will only be covered by one such domain", but you can't blame developers for that. School districts partition the state, and they do so in every state. Therefore this objection amounts to "the school district in which this development is located didn't prepare for new students while it was being built", and that objection may be lodged against any new development. Do public school boosters really want to reject all new development? Or is this more of what was mentioned upthread, that they only like development for certain types of people?

protomyth 11y ago

> That's a bad idea, too. For example, in Fremont right now, there's a development that was built without being placed in a school district. So the students who will live there have no real school. Perhaps abolishing the whole idea of school districts and assigning kids to schools via address as opposed to parental decision. The whole pay for schools via property tax and local levies has a pretty big negative impact on students from low income neighborhoods. Its classism baked into the system. Backpack tuitions would right a lot of wrongs in the education of our children.

pkaye 11y ago
Actually in Fremont, there is one school district with 5 high schools. The city is carved out into districts and generally based on proximity of home address, students assigned to the appropriate high school. The thing though is there is a huge ranking difference between the high schools. The top one is maybe in the 99% percentile in the state while the lower one is maybe 60% percentile. This makes for a huge pricing difference between houses maybe a few blocks apart to the degree of a 2x price difference. So the ones in the expensive houses will pay more property taxes but I believe the funding is equally divided among the high schools based on student population. In the end, probably the big difference is racial difference among different parts of the city and the affluence and education background of the parents that drive the difference in the school rankings.
ktRolster 11y ago
A school district is a system of assigning kids to schools via address. In California, the schools are funded equally based on property tax collected at the state level. Schools are funded based on how many students are sitting in class, not on where they are located.
- protomyth 11y ago
  > A school district is a system of assigning kids to schools via address. I think I'm aware of this, and it is often not what the parent's want used as a determinate. If someone says they have moved somewhere to get their kids in a "good" school district then the system has failed. > In California, the schools are funded equally based on property tax collected at the state level. Schools are funded based on how many students are sitting in class, not on where they are located. Except for districts where local property tax portion exceeds the funding formula levels since the property tax is kept local to the district. Also, CA schools are funded on more than property taxes such as having an income tax share.

lukasm 11y ago

"school district" - this is exactly what OP is suggesting. Another obstacle with classist and racist origin. It really blows my mind why some countries have such incredibly stupid laws. Can you image a law when you can buy only in one shop if you are from a certain district? That would suck tremendously. No competition.

tzs 11y ago
Do you have a citation for the claim that school districts have classist and racist origin? As far as I can tell school districts arose at a time when it was completely impractical for children, other than those whose parents were wealthy enough to send them away to boarding school, to attend a school that was not local, and at a time when it was generally believed that local government should be responsible for local services (sanitation, roads, water, schools, etc). I don't see how at that time they could have been used for racist and classist purposes, so doubt that their origin was such.
- infosample 11y ago
  I'm not sure citation is needed to prove the origin and consequences of segregation. Black people could not live in white neighborhoods, black people could not go to school with white people until 1960. Whether classist, racist, or coincidence, the results are obvious.
  - tzs 11y ago
    > I'm not sure citation is needed to prove the origin and consequences of segregation And I didn't ask for one. I want one on the origin of school districts. As you noted, neighborhoods were segregated. As a consequence of that, everything local was de facto segregated, but that doesn't mean you can infer that everything local has a racist origin. For instance, since neighborhoods were segregated a neighborhood's sewers were generally only available to one race. Do you conclude that public sanitation has racist origins?
    - infosample 11y ago

Houshalter 11y ago

The lack of school district is the most hilarious objection. If you live in a rural area, then the government is required to send a bus miles out of it's way to get your kids to school. Yet people living in one of the most populated cities in the US apparently live too far away from schools and shouldn't be allowed to build.

simoncion 11y ago
> If you live in a rural area, then the government is required to send a bus miles out of it's way to get your kids to school. As one of those kids who got up at 04:00 to catch the 04:30 bus that arrived at school at ~07:45, (and repeated the trip -but in reverse- starting at ~15:00) I can confirm the truth of this statement. [0] [0] I was literally the first child on and last child off of that particular bus. :/

e40 11y ago

The perfect example of what you are talking about: the suburbs of Charlotte, NC (the ones I'm thinking of are actually near the SC/NC border). Wild grow with little planning for transportation and water. It's a complete mess. You can sit in traffic jams in the middle of nowhere. And the crazy thing, they are still building like crazy so it's only going to get much worse than it is now. I've been visiting the area for 15 years (my Dad lives there), and each year I go back I'm amazed how much worse it is. 15 years ago it was lush forests. Now: mall and housing developments are everywhere, and the roads are mostly the same--there have been some upgrades to roads, but not nearly enough.