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There should not be zoning policy. It exists out of racist midcentury policy to keep "those sorts of people" out of the neighborhood
by BrainInAJar 9y ago
There should not be zoning policy. It exists out of racist midcentury policy to keep "those sorts of people" out of the neighborhood
- gehwartzen 9y agoOr to keep an oil refinery out of the neighborhood.
- closeparen 9y agoThere are plenty of industrial uses that it's perfectly sane to segregate from residential neighborhoods. I might agree that zoning should be all-or-nothing with respect to residential uses, and that there should not be such a thing as a "luxury residential only" (i.e. single family home only) zone.
- dionidium 9y agoInterestingly, this is what NIMBY used to mean (i.e. we all agree there should be industry/prisons/landfills/etc, just please not near me). But this is something totally different. This is just urban incumbents opposing further urban developments in their neighborhoods on the grounds that they’ve got theirs and there’s no upside to making it any easier for other people to move there, too. This isn’t about keeping the oil refinery out. This is about keeping other people out. That’s a fundamentally different thing. NIMBY isn’t even the right word for it.
- nasredin 9y ago>That’s a fundamentally different thing. NIMBY isn’t even the right word for it. "Fuck you, I (literally) got mine"?
- donarb 9y agoYou are talking about covenants, which is concerned with what types of people live in an area. Zoning has to do with the types of buildings.
- dionidium 9y agoI’d suggest “The Color of Law” for a better rebuttal to your argument than I can provide here. Zoning absolutely has been an important tool in establishing and maintaining segregationist housing aims where more explicit policies like restrictive covenants were rejected by the courts.