28 ms·

Things that are illegal to build in most American cities now

491 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

text70 7y ago
Houston is one of the only cities in the US that I know of that does not have any zoning laws. All of these would be possible to build with zero-lot lines, no commercial or residential zones, and no height restrictions to speak of.
- rory096 7y ago
  Enormous parking requirements, though.
- lurquer 7y ago
  This is a myth. Enormous chunks of land surrounding the three airports have actual zoning. The rest has de facto zoning. It just isn't called zoning. This is why Houston looks pretty much like any other city with zoning. A lot of what can and can't be built is covered by deed restrictions, which are enforced by the city. (i.e., a developer may put a restriction in the deed stating that only residences can be built, and no commercial activities.) In addition, there are gazillions of 'land-use' ordinances that control the height of buildings, lot size, parking, etc. While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-houston-really-does-have-zoning-sort-of/ https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-h... [edited to supply link]
  - jordonwii 7y ago
    Incidentally, these sorts of things (deed restrictions/covenants) are also what preceded zoning as we know it today. They're just more difficult to enforce because you can't control what happens on the edge of your covenant-protected neighborhood. This paper has a really good summary of the history here: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/02-03.pdf https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/02-03.pdf > While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. If you're counting covenants as "zoning", I'm not really sure that such a thing is possible without a major change in property right law (except for the parking and height restrictions, which obviously have a big influence on structures everywhere and should go away IMO).
  - InitialLastName 7y ago
    > While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. It seems to me that Houston is a great example of that experiment: in the absence of a formal centralized zoning system, the vacuum of limiting who can build structure x in location y is filled by informal and labyrinthine arrangements.
    - lurquer 7y ago
      Indeed. This idea always comes to mind when I hear people wonder out loud what a true 'anarchist' society would look like... I privately answer, "Pretty much exactly like what we have now."
      - asdff 7y ago
        If you want to see anarchy one only needs to visit Venice Beach.
      - antognini 7y ago
        Reminds me of a famous essay in the anarchist literature: "Do we ever really get out of anarchy?" by Alfred Cuzán https://uwf.edu/media/university-of-west-florida/colleges/cassh/departments/government/cdocs/II.A.1.-Cuzan-1979-Do-We-Ever-Really-Get-Out-of-Anarchy.pdf https://uwf.edu/media/university-of-west-florida/colleges/ca...
    - zip1234 7y ago
      The issue isn't necessarily zoning per se. The issue is that zoning as practiced in most of the US is centered around cars first. This means segregating usage and type completely and placing everything far apart with lots of parking and space between things.
  - kxyvr 7y ago
    To build onto this, the Ashby high-rise dispute has been going on since I was in graduate school over a decade ago: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/article/Ashby-casts-long-shadow-over-Houston-land-use-7213635.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/articl... There was a more recent dispute in the Heights where a the local residents secured an ordinance to force single family homes in an area under proposed development: https://theleadernews.com/owner-nearby-residents-remain-at-odds-over-fate-of-heights-property/ https://theleadernews.com/owner-nearby-residents-remain-at-o... The point being to re-enforce the point, the lack of zoning in Houston is a myth. Deed restrictions, ordinances, and nuisance laws create a patchwork of regulations that essentially create an ineffective, confusing, and legally complicated zoning system.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    > While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. Kowloon Walled City would probably be one possible outcome...
    - mywittyname 7y ago
      Kowloon is certainly an example of what can happen in ultra-high-density environments, but I think most of the developing world is a good example of what would happen in most of the US without building regulations. A GIS of "housing <developing country>" provides a reasonably good example of such housing. Think somewhere between wooden shed, to modestly constructed masonry and no electricity.
  - asdff 7y ago
    No need to set up an experiment, look outside of the U.S. at Rio de Janero. High rises aplenty for the middle and upper class, and the working class living in favelas straight out of the middle ages but with high voltage power lines. That being said, living in a favela is probably much more comfortable than what we deem acceptable for our economic underclass: living in a tent on the street.
    - adventured 7y ago
      > living in a tent on the street You're drastically exaggerating of course. Unless you're primarily talking about a few cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. The US has a wildly successful Housing First program that has pushed its homelessness rate below that of France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand. A rate comparable to that of Finland, Netherlands, Austria.
  - darksaints 7y ago
    > While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. Take a look at the core neighborhoods of pretty much any major city on the east coast. They were built out pretty extensively before zoning existed. I still struggle to see what was so bad about it. The few things that might have been bad would probably be better addressed with nuisance law instead of the endlessly prescriptive micromanagement that zoning brings.
toomuchtodo 7y ago
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204306278173958145.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204306278173958145.html
vorpalhex 7y ago
Some of these were removed from zoning because they weren't fantastic housing. I've been in a bunch of those old boarding houses (several existed near my university) and they were relatively terrible structures with minimal privacy and universal rodent issues.
- aero142 7y ago
  But they were cheap. Which is a really great thing when you are broke but still want to go to college.
  - wolfram74 7y ago
    If the health situation is bad enough, it's just making externalities via health risks for everybody those residents interact with, since they're now vectors for whatever diseases crop up.
    - aero142 7y ago
      Sure. Hypothetically. But banning and entire class of building because someone says they saw rats seems a bit heavy handed.
    - chillacy 7y ago
      Yea but in many cases the alternative isn't "good housing" it's living in your car or a shelter. That has other health risks.
    - bradlys 7y ago
      lol - how is this any different from living in a house with other people? For reference - I lived in a very clean SRO in a co-op building. We all kept it looking good.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Unless the health risks are greater than those for homelessness, we shouldn't care. Absent additional research, my prior is that homeless disease vectors are probably worse, since people in that position have fewer shelter options from the elements and more direct exposure to the public. Houses don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than what we have right now. I mean, even in a bad situation... there are rats on the street. It's very difficult for me to imagine someone in that condition looking at a house and saying, "no, the street is cleaner." Maybe there's an extra perspective I'm missing.
monksy 7y ago
> 5 Live/work units of ground level retail and second and third story housing. > The US often doesn't allow inclusionary zoning like this unless development is denser. 4+1s are fairly common now. Most new development in chicago has this.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  Here in northern New Jersey there is a building currently under construction that meets the exact description quoted. There are several others that have been recently built in the 2-5+1 range as well.
- asdff 7y ago
  They are popping up everywhere in LA. A lot of parking is still required, however, which ups the builds cost and moves those businesses and apartments into another economic class. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but the only places cheap enough to buy and raze are places currently occupied by the working class, who will still have their jobs in town but will end up with longer commutes to affordable neighborhoods.
- jandrese 7y ago
  I had never heard about this until about 10 years ago, now it seems like they're going up everywhere. Most of the new construction here is listed as mixed use commercial/residential.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  For those unfamiliar with the (rather unsearchable) "4+1" notion, also known as "four-plus-one": https://forgottenchicago.com/features/defining-the-four-plus-one/ https://forgottenchicago.com/features/defining-the-four-plus... Somewhat specific to Chicago as terminology, though the construction is more widespread.
- jpindar 7y ago
  They're building a lot of these in New England now.
gerbilly 7y ago
>Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, I read somewhere that the lack of rooming-houses significantly contributes to homelessness. They fill a gap between an individual apartment and your car or the street. It's too bad these aren't allowed any more. I know those populations can be hard to live with, but it's better than having them live on the street.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  They also made it much easier to move to a new city to try out the job market there. It's no surprise that worker mobility is at historic lows given how hard it is to even put a roof over your head in another place, especially if you don't have good credit or income.
  - Klonoar 7y ago
    Seattle banning micro-unit construction is maddening, considering they're slowly creeping into SF territory with pricing.
    - h5re43ae5r4 7y ago
      Seattle is a bad example, it's cheaper relative to peer cities (with 50+ units right now under $1500 in Seattle proper), and the market isn't keeping pace with surrounding King county or even national housing prices: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-home-prices-lower-than-a-year-ago-for-second-month-in-a-row/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ho...
      - Klonoar 7y ago
        I know the units under $1500 very well, as I'm helping someone move out here who's not in tech/finance/medicine/law. That's simply not cheap enough, and micro-housing works for these people. People come to cities for economic opportunity, they need to be able to live here while getting on their feet.
  - mncharity 7y ago
jcomis 7y ago
#2 does not seem to be true in some cities. There are a lot of new "pod" apartment buildings with shared kitchen facilities. There's one right across the street from me in Denver.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  Sure, housing regulations are hyper local, so there will be exceptions. The fact that some many localities have converged on banning the same stuff is still remarkable, and evidence that it's being driven by the same forces rather than being a tailored response to details of a particular community.
  - lolsal 7y ago
    How is that remarkable? Local governments governing locally sounds completely normal to me.
    - jessriedel 7y ago
      Local governments are widely acknowledge by political scientists to be be lower quality than national governments, believe it or not, and to have significantly less oversight. The argument for giving them huge power to dictate what people can and can't build on private land is that local regulations can be more tailored to local details. But if all the local governments are, e.g., setting high minimum plot sizes, this is not them responding nimbly to local details; it's just a way to keep out poor people.
      - korethr 7y ago
        > Local governments are widely acknowledge by political scientists to be be lower quality than national governments Since you're invoking authority here, I'm gonna say [Citation Needed]. > But if all the local governments are, e.g., setting high minimum plot sizes, this is not them responding nimbly to local details; it's just a way to keep out poor people. Or, it could be as simple as a locality copying what seems to have been successful in other nearby localities, with not enough people speaking up with compelling evidence to the contrary. Believe it or not, not everything bad that happens to poor people happens out of malice directed their way. Sometimes, bad shit happens to poor people, because, being poor, attempting to change conditions to make less bad shit happen would further strain their already stretched-to-the-limit resources. And there's one resource that anyone who wants to participate in local policy making must spend without exception, one which those struggling to make ends meet will tend to have the least of: Time. There is no Machiavellian mustache-twisting involved in keeping the poor out; the poor never show up to give their input on the policies that might adversely affect them. It's kinda hard to even know about the 90 day advance notice postings in town hall when you're working 2.5 jobs to keep food on the table and the heat on during the coldest winter months so you don't freeze, and the public bus routes you rely on don't even go near city hall. Never mind having the time to think about the Nth order effects of such proposed policies to figure out if they'd adversely affect you, or then getting down to city hall for the planning meeting to give the council or committee your 2 cents. I mean, some localities are better than others about giving all of their local socioeconomic strata sufficient advance notice and a fair chance to provide input, but there's a limit to what's reasonable. Eventually, time for input and comment will have to be ended so a decision can be made, otherwise nothing would ever get done. If the above sounds sucky and unfair, well, you're right. It does suck and it is unfair. But if you want the conditions of the poor to suck less and become more fair, you're going to have a hard time being effective if you are too quick to ascribe results to malice.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
The problem with all these regulations is that it completely stops all innovation. Imagine what the internet would have turned out to be if, from day one, it was heavily regulated as housing. Imagine if every company or every developer had to get a permit before building any website and every website had to look a certain way with certain margin. We'd be nowhere. Housing, desperately needs permission-less innovation (completely regulation/zoning free). Maybe not everywhere. But, come on, CA has 163,707 square miles, can we just carve out a couple of those, even if it's just 100 or 200 or so (with enough economies of scale to attract serious VC money), in an area that has no NIMBYs, for build whatever you want and let builders and innovators innovate. We can take what's working and slowly apply it other areas. At the current rate, the way things are, we're never going to see any progress in housing.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  The chilling effect of (some) regulation often goes unnoticed, because it impacts few people directly. The chilling effect is essentially invisible until we can see a better way. Eg uber vs taxis. There's usually an incumbent that benefits from these regulations as well that will argue against lessening them. I think your recommendation can help with this issue, but I wonder if CA is a good place for this. As I understand it, access to water is a limiting factor in CA.
  - davidw 7y ago
    > access to water is a limiting factor in CA. It is: for farmers, who use something like 80% (I forget the exact number). It isn't for cities, and denser cities use less water because there are no big lawns and other waste.
    - Accujack 7y ago
      Many cities in my state (MN) still have laws on the books that will fine lawn owners for failing to maintain a green, healthy appearance. Never mind if it's in a desert or forest terrain... they only allow paved spaces, green grass and landscaping, or certified native prairie replantings, which cost a mint's worth of money to do. Because "everyone loves green grass" no matter how much water it uses or how much fertilizer runoff it allows.
xrd 7y ago
It looks like the author might be in the NW. I'm curious whether they would be optimistic about the zoning changes (https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-single-family-zoning-law-effect-developers https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-single-family-zoning...) here (https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2019R1/Measures/Overview/HB2001 https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2019R1/Measures/Overview/HB...)
- davidw 7y ago
  Yes, he's from Oregon. HB 2001 is good news, but we need to allow for more variety, and it'd be wonderful to also allow light commercial by right, so that, say, you can walk to a corner store instead of getting into a gas guzzling SUV just to do something people in many countries can do on foot.
  - Legogris 7y ago
    > allow light commercial by right Is this a US-specific term? What does it mean? (Only really found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light)
    - davidw 7y ago
      "By right" means that you can just build it without having to apply for any specific exceptions, go through hearings, etc... "Light commercial" means things like small corner stores, barber shops, local restaurants, stuff like that. There are legit reasons to not want, say, a tannery right next to housing.
      - Legogris 7y ago
        Ah, right, indeed. Related to the thread, I don't see how banning "#5 Live/work units of ground level retail and second and third story housing" makes any sense. These can be a game-changer for local town life.
        7y ago
fnord77 7y ago
> #2 Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, which have multiple people sharing a room, or individuals getting small rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces, for short to medium term living. Aren't there a few startups doing this and marketing them as communal living for young techies?
- asdff 7y ago
  Yup and priced at market rate for studios usually. "dorm room living," I still have PTSD from what was left in those communal bathrooms after a weekend of drinking.
- wahern 7y ago
  SROs don't have to use communal bathrooms. A family member lives in what's classified as an SRO, but in the ritzy Cow Hollow neighborhood. It's a tiny unit but has its own bathroom, including shower, and a very tiny kitchenette (sink, no stove). It's probably smaller than most of the more modern SRO'ish units that have recently been built around SOMA, even though some of those rely on communal spaces. Other than the size of the units, it's a typical apartment building--office workers, teachers, retail workers, and even a dentist with a house in Marin who keeps a unit so he doesn't have to commute during weekdays. It was probably built in the 1940s or 1950s, before zoning laws stopped construction of such buildings.
sharpneli 7y ago
Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US? It’s relatively popular way of living in Finland. It’s something between a highrise apartment and your own house. I’ve always wondered why US seems to lack those and that neatly explains it.
- Frondo 7y ago
  I spent some time in Philadelphia, where nearly all of the housing in the city core is rowhouses or apartment buildings. It's fantastic. It makes a dense, walkable city, and people still get the amenities of their own house with a little tiny backyard (big enough for a fire pit or grill). Also better for the environment when heat doesn't radiate off all four sides of a house. They've been building some of what they call row homes in the PNW, but these are still detached houses (no adjoining walls). It's better than it used to be, you can fit three houses on the space formerly reserved for one or two, but go the extra mile and connect 'em together.
  - burfog 7y ago
    I think you really should have enough room for scaffolding. How are you going to take care of a wall that is physically touching your neighbor's wall? That wall ought to get inspected at least. It might need paint. If one house starts to collapse onto the other, then both have problems. You're also at a higher fire risk, even if the walls in the middle can't burn, because embers can more easily go from one roof to the other.
    - drewbug 7y ago
      Yeah, the Philly MOVE incident led to 64 other buildings burning.
      - Frondo 7y ago
        I think the scope of that fire is better attributed to: the police dropped a bomb from a police helicopter on the home where people were living, and it was a poor neighborhood that may not have had firewalls between dwellings. I've seen fires there where the shared walls are brick, and those firewalls do work.
wang_li 7y ago
The setbacks complaint seems mainly to be that locals can't privatize, or otherwise restrict usage of, public spaces.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  How does having my house near the street on my lot restrict public usage of the street?
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    The sidewalk. And the street right of way extends beyond just the physical street in most places.
    - asdff 7y ago
      Your lot usually doesn't include the sidewalk or the treelawn for that matter, although you are usually held responsible for its maintenance.
    - jessriedel 7y ago
      This comment is pedantic. Yes, there are special regulations about homeowners in some areas having to place and maintain sidewalks along their property. (In other areas, they are owned and/or maintained by the city.) That's very distinct from setbacks, which prohibit construction for a depth much further than the width of the sidewalk.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    The combination of setback and building height limit establishes the maximum amount of natural sunlight that your building can block from your neighbors, and the adjoining street. I believe the template for setbacks and height limits came from New York City, wherein a new 40-story building cast a good deal of the surrounding neighborhood into permanent shadow. As the "Ancient Lights" doctrine of English property law had been repudiated in America, and the Prescription Act 1832 obviously came after independence, the neighborhood incumbents had no real legal grounds for complaint. This disturbed enough people that New York passed its first architectural restriction laws. Land-use restrictions basically came out of racists trying to legislate segregation. Those nuisance laws combined with architecture laws to birth modern zoning. Once that camel's nose entered the tent, the rest of the camel came right in. Every problem that has a nexus with private land use had an attempted zoning solution attempted somewhere. So things like parking-space allotments and environmental impact assessments were added. The NIMBYs could halt developments they didn't like by dealing the death of a thousand permits and public hearings through the zoning laws.
whiddershins 7y ago
That first one, the single family homes with a shared courtyard? We need more stuff like this! Backyards in Brooklyn used to be treated more communally (before my time) which created a large shared space safe from cars where children could play. Now I just stare out my window and watch people basically never go in to their yards. What a horrible waste.
- h2odragon 7y ago
  Go out in your yard, then, to watch the people who aren't there. Be the change you want to see, etc. Or possibly learn why they don't go out, "never noticed that odor til i sat here for an hour... now i'll never not notice it"
  - ng12 7y ago
    A lot of times the yard is rented as part of the ground-flour unit ($$$) so only ~1/4th of the people in the building have access.
    - danudey 7y ago
      I lived in a three-storey walk-up that was built at a shift in grade, so two of the floors were ground-level. The top floor (us) had a small balcony in the front, and that was it. The middle floor had a medium-sized ground floor patio out the front of the building adjacent to the parking area, and a small balcony in the back. the lower floor had a gigantic fenced ground-floor yard that was easily bigger than the entire top floor we lived in. They were the only people in the building who had any green space.
      - close04 7y ago
        They probably also payed for it I imagine. Something like this rarely comes for free.
  - klyrs 7y ago
    Speak for yourself. We've got a small yard. The kid loves it -- when I get stuffy about screen time, he gets bored and unless the weather is awful, he'll go out and play. There's other kids on the block, and they'd be friends (well, or enemies, but there's valuable life lessons there either way) by now if there were shared spaces.
biesnecker 7y ago
For what it's worth, I recently bought a new-build condo-ownership model townhouse in Silicon Valley that is effectively a row house. Six units in a building, three stories each. It's not quite the same, but it seems to be cut from the same mold.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Do you have a link to a similar one? Curious for what that goes for and how it looks
  - 0xffff2 7y ago
    Here's one similar development: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4166212,-122.087934,3a,75y,70.68h,92.74t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1slqfjPvYQEeKsvTJbrJBOAg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4166212,-122.087934,3a,75y,7... Prices are well over $1million. These developments are quite common around the south bay. There are two more similar developments within a couple of blocks of this one, and I used to live in yet another over in Milpitas.
    - WhompingWindows 7y ago
      Very cool, thanks for sharing! Seems like a decent quality of living, definitely higher density than I was imagining, but it could foster community and lead to more efficiency than all single family homes.
- asdff 7y ago
  How is the shared wall? I used to live in an old brownstone sorta place and that thing was like a tomb in terms of noise. Now I live in new construction which is timber framed, cheap drywall, and cheaper california insulation, and I can tell what specific video game my neighbor is playing along with his bowel schedule. Once this lease is up I'm running for the oldest heaviest looking building I can find.
  - biesnecker 7y ago
Legogris 7y ago
> Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons. Is this really true for all of them? I see in the thread that > Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons. Some of the ones who are not NIMBYism or the above I can absolutely see how they could be motivated in an effort to slow down/hinder certain socioeconomic dynamics. > #2 Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, which have multiple people sharing a room, or individuals getting small rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces, for short to medium term living. In a poor environment and/or when housing is scarce, these easily become hosts for abusive or exploitative relationships between landlord and tenants or shitty housing. > #1 Bungalow Courts. Single family homes with shared walls and a communal courtyard. And no car parking requirement. Aka gated societies EDIT: Downvoters, why? Care to reply? Is this question ignorant or irrelevant to the conversation? I'm not defending any of these or claiming that they actually have the desired effect.
- BryantD 7y ago
  I don't think this is an insane question. My take: #1 -- gated communities are way bigger than a bungalow court and are much easier to isolate from the community around them. I think this correlation is a misapprehension. Here's a highly renovated example: https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/4/17200290/pine-street-cottage-for-sale-rsl https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/4/17200290/pine-street-cot... See how it faces the street like any other house, but there's a little private shared area in back? It's not self-contained like a gated community can be. #2 -- yep, there's the potential for abusive relationships. There is no rental model that works without strong protections for tenants and, yes, landlords. So that problem isn't inherent to rooming houses. However, the power relationship is usually tilted towards the party with more money and that's likely to be accentuated in this type of housing. You gotta be careful.
faissaloo 7y ago
When there is so much regulation there is a point where the only real law becomes "have you sufficiently annoyed someone"
- mywittyname 7y ago
  Most zoning laws are the result of a group of politically-connected individuals saying, "they shouldn't be able to do that" and using their influence to stop such behavior. Some are really just there to ensure that developers don't cheap out on the stuff in the walls in order to cut costs. But I don't think people are really complaining about requirements for the species of wood required for framing or the number of electrical outlets per square foot.
exabrial 7y ago
How to solve the housing crisis: get the government out. Nobody should be forced to have an electrical outlet in the garage for an electric car and the government has no business requiring that. This is just my favorite example of thousands of silly regulations that are put in place to keep the poor from becoming owners. No poor person can afford a Tesla, yet: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-new-buildings-to-be-wired-for-electric-car-charging-stations https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-n...
- daveslash 7y ago
  Agreed. If you have enough money to own a house with a garage and electric car, you can probably afford to have an electrician run an outlet to your garage if it doesn't already have one. Similarly, I doubt anyone who owns a house and gasoline car is going car shopping and saying "Oh, honey, this car is electric, and we don't have an outlet in the garage... we can't get this..."
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    You have the qualifier of "probably" - but money may not be the only thing holding someone back. For instance, I want a 220 outlet in my garage so I can have a proper welder out there. I don't have an electric car (and even if someday I do own one, it won't fit in my current garage, due to various reasons - chief one being it's a conversion from a carport). That all said - I am not sure I can get such an outlet. Money isn't the issue - but it could become the issue. Because I would need an additional 220 circuit added to my existing circuits in my breaker box. But the panel is full. So I would probably need to either get a larger panel, or add on an auxiliary panel (likely the latter). But that also depends on my service from the main transformer. I might not be able to get an extra circuit if my service isn't large enough to support such an extra circuit. The only way to change that would be to have a larger capacity transformer installed. That transformer is shared between my house and the neighbor's house. I don't even want to contemplate what it would cost to change that out (thinking somewhere in the 5 figure range - but where?). So money isn't an issue - until you have an electrician come out and tell you that to run an additional line is going to require major changes to your current electrical service.
klyrs 7y ago
A family friend was the proud owner of the last outhouse in Boise city limits. All things considered, I'm not too shocked at this omission... Also it's illegal to build chicken coops in many cities. Not sure how common that one is, though
jhallenworld 7y ago
I own and live in a two family house built in 1924. It's one step up from an English row house in that you have windows on all sides. These, and New England "triple-deckers" are pretty good. In Worcester MA you could buy an 1890/1900 triple-decker for $30k in the early 90s.. if only I was smart enough to buy one then. These are wealth generators in that renters are paying your mortgage. My grandparents lived in a Queens NY row house (until 1970s white flight). I have early memories of it, was a cool house. It had lots of fireplaces, varnished wooden gates, wall sconces and shared back courtyard. My parents lived in a 1950s single family house, but we gen xers rediscovered cities. New houses around Boston are mass Lego block low rise apartments. They all are corporate owned, which means they are expensive, and the rent goes up automatically, but they sometimes have nice ammenaties. SROs: I want to live the way Sherlock Holmes did. Mrs. Hudson cooked, cleaned, answered the door.. did people really live like this in late 19th century London? How much was the rent?
- JCharante 7y ago
  I was kinda shocked to see Worcester mentioned here in the top comment. I and some other students are currently paying $4350/mo for one of these triple deckers that you mentioned. I really prefer the zoning laws and building style present in Hanoi. Our house is five stories tall, and some of our neighbors have houses with six stories. Although they are not very big per floor (they may only have 2.5 rooms per floor), they are very space efficient which allows for tons of amenities to be within walking distance.
  - jhallenworld 7y ago
    For the whole house I hope... It was $750 for a three bedroom near WPI in 1992. Ours had left over (disconnected) gas jet lighting, sliding wooden pocket doors for one of the living rooms and a separate entrance for one of the bedrooms (for maid I think). You could see where chimney for the original coal stove in the kitchen was. Also had a slate roof.
    - makmanalp 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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gok 7y ago
Minimum housing size regulations (which is really what the source is about) has similar impact to minimum wages. It gives lower middle class people bigger homes / higher wages but increases homelessness / unemployment.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Maybe I'll try and find the talk again. But saw one where the speaker showed slides of various housing units. They varied from a very nice looking art deco style apartment in Redwood City at something like 220 units per acre. And single family homes in Los Vegas built and zoned for 4 units per acre.
gpvos 7y ago
Key sentence: > Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons.
nullc 7y ago
Most by what metric? A great many cities in the US permit most (all?) of these things. None of them are popular to build now, however, where they are allowed.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Examples?
duelingjello 7y ago
Anything to make new housing as expensive and complicated as possible so NIMBYs don't have more housing inventory to attack their valuations or more neighbors too close to them. The consequences of this selfishness are more expensive rents, more expensive housing and more homelessness.
Dan_JiuJitsu 7y ago
I think a lot of this is due to people in the neighborhoods not wanting the neighborhoods to change. It's this way in the USA precisely because of citizen control. Single family home neighborhoods are some of the nicest places to live in America. Why shouldn't the people who have invested in the community get to decide how the neighborhood evolves?
- imtringued 7y ago
  That would be perfectly okay if they didn't invite more workers to their cities.
deleted 7y ago
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irrational 7y ago
Come to the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Tons of new rowhouses. Live/work units are increasingly common.
greggman2 7y ago
It would be nice to know the why's for each of these laws. I'm sure some seemed at the time, or maybe still do have legit reasons. Houses, or rather apartments with a shared kitchen and maybe shared bathrooms are still a thing in Japan. There are "share houses" of which maybe the most famous/notorious is Sakura House that has many locations and caters to visitors. There's also https://www.social-apartment.com https://www.social-apartment.com which is targeted more at locals. I've thought about joining one for the social aspect. I think there would be a market in other countries, especially if there was an activity director making sure events happened. I didn't know it would be illegal in the USA. There are also high end apartments that have an activity "roof top". A friend lives in one. The rooftop has a restaurant, live entertainment, indoor and outdoor areas, a pool, and rooms you can reserve for private parties. Tangentially, lots of old USA movies show characters living in boarding houses, having a room to themselves but sharing meals. Seems nice in the movies. No idea how it was in real life.
- chadlavi 7y ago
  NIMBYism in most cases
- dahart 7y ago
  It’d be nice to know what laws we’re even talking about, and what locales they apply to. There are a lot of tall claims in that thread that seem unsubstatiated and/or exaggerated, and a lot of replies with counter-examples.
- mc32 7y ago
  I go like having sidewalks. I do like setbacks. The rest of it, some of it is outdated for modern society (tenement housing), but most others are mostly okay and good options (like density in small towns, mixed use housing, multiplexes in appropriate locations (town centers). I think context matters. I would not want multiplexes in the middle of a leafy neighborhood, but certainly should be okay next to busier areas like shopping boulevards and shopping districts, etc.
- nikanj 7y ago
  Mostly: Poor people live in these, or even worse, poor black people. Most of the zoning laws were not written recently, and they do carry a heavy burden of being both anti-poor and racist.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
At least in the bay area the retail on the bottom, housing on the top is now quite commonly built. There are new units in Mtn View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose. And maybe if the courts don't stop it, Cupertino :-)
dragonwriter 7y ago
No citations are provided to support the “most American cities” claim, and many of them are common even in the places best known for anti-development NIMBYism, so I suspect that their association with the thread title is frequently inaccurate.
- keeganjw 7y ago
  A lot of them are common in places where they were built before modern American zoning laws came into being.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    #5 is common in new construction today, in the NIMBY-heavy Northern California (including the SF Bay Area), which is, to be sure, not free of the influence of “modern American zoning laws”, and I can think of at least one Bay Area small town where (if one restricts to residential structures) the same developments that contradict #5 also is do so for #8. The essential equivalent of #7 is a common form (including, again, in the Bay Area) of newer condo development, though they are usually marketed as “townhouses” rather than “rowhouses”.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      For every one place you see it built, there's many more places zoned in such a way to exclude it. You're seeing the few exceptions.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > For every one place you see it built, there's many more places zoned in such a way to exclude it. I've seen it in virtually every urban and suburban area of Northern California, it's practically the on-trend mode of infill development and has been for a couple decades. Either Northern California has the reverse relationship to the rest of the nation that it is reputed to have for development (which I doubt), or the assertion that this is prohibited in most US cities is false.
habosa 7y ago
Is there any possible way to break the American addiction on housing as the primary investment / wealth for a family? As long as existing homeowners are incentivized to drive up the price of their home, none of our housing supply woes are likely to change. And who can blame them? For most people their house is worth more than all their other possessions and investments combined. Besides the incentive issue, the fact is that most increases in home value are not created by the homeowner. They're created by the city who provide streets, infrastructure, security, etc. They're created by small business owners who make a neighborhood attractive to live in. They're created by nearby employers who bring in wage earners who create demand. The new bathroom the homeowner puts in is a minor matter. Yet all of the value (minus property taxes where applicable) is captured by the private home owner.
- burlesona 7y ago
  Raise property taxes and you suddenly have a lot of people who don’t want home values to go up any more. This is a common phenomenon in the sun belt, especially the Houston, TX area where you’ll see public meetings crashed by people opposed to projects they think will raise property values and thus their tax bill. But, good luck campaigning for tax increases.
- solidsnack9000 7y ago
  One way would be to encourage alternative investments. It's actually really tough for non-wealthy Americans to invest in capital markets in an efficient way. Another would be to encourage them to really commit to the value of their homes (instead of the price). If property taxes in California rose with the value of homes, many more people in San Francisco would have found it expedient to (a) sell to developers or (b) let out their homes or (c) remodel their homes as denser housing. Well...(c) could have happened, if it were not so difficult to build in San Francisco, but that goes back to helping people find better ways to invest, by not discouraging commerce. Most investments work the way you describe: "...most increases in home value are not created by the homeowner." It's the same when you put money in a 401k or an index fund. Investing is putting capital out there and hoping it comes back. Doesn't make sense to advance this argument against home ownership as an investment.
- 7y ago
tingletech 7y ago
I don't think you can build new trailer parks in most of the U.S.
PascLeRasc 7y ago
There's something really beautiful about streets without setbacks like this [1]. I can't put my finger on what it is but they're all over Amsterdam and Japan, and they always make me so happy to walk though. Does anyone know what it is about these? [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELaN6w_UUAAQbOC?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELaN6w_UUAAQbOC?format=jpg&name=...
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  No/little room for cars, lets one feel safe.
- Kungfuturtle 7y ago
  No cars? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ More seriously, my guess is that you enjoy those streets because there's so much more character to them. They are generally part of an older, more storied urban core, so the streets are more imbued with a "there"ness of the community. Contrast this with the experience of walking down a recently-gentrified street.
- viburnum 7y ago
  They’re at human scale. There’s lots to look at, it’s quiet, there’s sense of security from not being out in the open, tons of advantages for humans.
- sdrothrock 7y ago
  I can't stand them myself; they're rarely that uncrowded and many streets with cars/cycle traffic here also don't have setbacks while, at the same time, allowing private property to build high walls. This results in a large number of blind turns where you can't tell if anyone's coming around the corner unless there are mirrors available, which aren't always a guarantee.
- pertymcpert 7y ago
  Lack of cars and the fact that you're near other people. We are social creatures, we need some minimum amount of space, but more than that just makes us feel isolated.
- 7y ago
StillBored 7y ago
There is also the building code related things, you can't build a texas dogtrot, or in many cases middle eastern compound style houses (thick walls, high concrete fence) anymore either. Never-mind outhouses, despite them being all over parks/etc these days under the name "composting toilets".
rambojazz 7y ago
What a sensationalized title. These are urban regulations and they exist in every city.
- degosuke 7y ago
  I'm on edge whether the title is sensationalized or not... It does state the fact that it is illegal to do these. I would even see it as a better reflection of the current status then perhaps stating "Urban regulations prevent building these types of buildings."
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
subject117 7y ago
Cronyism. Outlawing building types like these hurts middle and low class individuals. They take advantage of the public by citing “safety” reasons but really this just lines up the pockets of larger real estate developers and their political cronies. I imagine it is more correlated with left-leaning cities but wouldn’t be surprised to see cronies on the right too
ascari 7y ago
Meanwhile most of these are what you get in England

491 points by oftenwrong 7y ago

Houston is one of the only cities in the US that I know of that does not have any zoning laws. All of these would be possible to build with zero-lot lines, no commercial or residential zones, and no height restrictions to speak of.

rory096 7y ago
Enormous parking requirements, though.
lurquer 7y ago
This is a myth. Enormous chunks of land surrounding the three airports have actual zoning. The rest has de facto zoning. It just isn't called zoning. This is why Houston looks pretty much like any other city with zoning. A lot of what can and can't be built is covered by deed restrictions, which are enforced by the city. (i.e., a developer may put a restriction in the deed stating that only residences can be built, and no commercial activities.) In addition, there are gazillions of 'land-use' ordinances that control the height of buildings, lot size, parking, etc. While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-houston-really-does-have-zoning-sort-of/ https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-h... [edited to supply link]
- jordonwii 7y ago
  Incidentally, these sorts of things (deed restrictions/covenants) are also what preceded zoning as we know it today. They're just more difficult to enforce because you can't control what happens on the edge of your covenant-protected neighborhood. This paper has a really good summary of the history here: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/02-03.pdf https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/02-03.pdf > While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. If you're counting covenants as "zoning", I'm not really sure that such a thing is possible without a major change in property right law (except for the parking and height restrictions, which obviously have a big influence on structures everywhere and should go away IMO).
- InitialLastName 7y ago
  > While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. It seems to me that Houston is a great example of that experiment: in the absence of a formal centralized zoning system, the vacuum of limiting who can build structure x in location y is filled by informal and labyrinthine arrangements.
  - lurquer 7y ago
    Indeed. This idea always comes to mind when I hear people wonder out loud what a true 'anarchist' society would look like... I privately answer, "Pretty much exactly like what we have now."
    - asdff 7y ago
      If you want to see anarchy one only needs to visit Venice Beach.
    - antognini 7y ago
      Reminds me of a famous essay in the anarchist literature: "Do we ever really get out of anarchy?" by Alfred Cuzán https://uwf.edu/media/university-of-west-florida/colleges/cassh/departments/government/cdocs/II.A.1.-Cuzan-1979-Do-We-Ever-Really-Get-Out-of-Anarchy.pdf https://uwf.edu/media/university-of-west-florida/colleges/ca...
  - zip1234 7y ago
    The issue isn't necessarily zoning per se. The issue is that zoning as practiced in most of the US is centered around cars first. This means segregating usage and type completely and placing everything far apart with lots of parking and space between things.
- kxyvr 7y ago
  To build onto this, the Ashby high-rise dispute has been going on since I was in graduate school over a decade ago: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/article/Ashby-casts-long-shadow-over-Houston-land-use-7213635.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/articl... There was a more recent dispute in the Heights where a the local residents secured an ordinance to force single family homes in an area under proposed development: https://theleadernews.com/owner-nearby-residents-remain-at-odds-over-fate-of-heights-property/ https://theleadernews.com/owner-nearby-residents-remain-at-o... The point being to re-enforce the point, the lack of zoning in Houston is a myth. Deed restrictions, ordinances, and nuisance laws create a patchwork of regulations that essentially create an ineffective, confusing, and legally complicated zoning system.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. Kowloon Walled City would probably be one possible outcome...
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    Kowloon is certainly an example of what can happen in ultra-high-density environments, but I think most of the developing world is a good example of what would happen in most of the US without building regulations. A GIS of "housing <developing country>" provides a reasonably good example of such housing. Think somewhere between wooden shed, to modestly constructed masonry and no electricity.
- asdff 7y ago
  No need to set up an experiment, look outside of the U.S. at Rio de Janero. High rises aplenty for the middle and upper class, and the working class living in favelas straight out of the middle ages but with high voltage power lines. That being said, living in a favela is probably much more comfortable than what we deem acceptable for our economic underclass: living in a tent on the street.
  - adventured 7y ago
    > living in a tent on the street You're drastically exaggerating of course. Unless you're primarily talking about a few cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. The US has a wildly successful Housing First program that has pushed its homelessness rate below that of France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand. A rate comparable to that of Finland, Netherlands, Austria.
- darksaints 7y ago
  > While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example. Take a look at the core neighborhoods of pretty much any major city on the east coast. They were built out pretty extensively before zoning existed. I still struggle to see what was so bad about it. The few things that might have been bad would probably be better addressed with nuisance law instead of the endlessly prescriptive micromanagement that zoning brings.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204306278173958145.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204306278173958145.html

vorpalhex 7y ago

Some of these were removed from zoning because they weren't fantastic housing. I've been in a bunch of those old boarding houses (several existed near my university) and they were relatively terrible structures with minimal privacy and universal rodent issues.

aero142 7y ago
But they were cheap. Which is a really great thing when you are broke but still want to go to college.
- wolfram74 7y ago
  If the health situation is bad enough, it's just making externalities via health risks for everybody those residents interact with, since they're now vectors for whatever diseases crop up.
  - aero142 7y ago
    Sure. Hypothetically. But banning and entire class of building because someone says they saw rats seems a bit heavy handed.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    Yea but in many cases the alternative isn't "good housing" it's living in your car or a shelter. That has other health risks.
  - bradlys 7y ago
    lol - how is this any different from living in a house with other people? For reference - I lived in a very clean SRO in a co-op building. We all kept it looking good.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Unless the health risks are greater than those for homelessness, we shouldn't care. Absent additional research, my prior is that homeless disease vectors are probably worse, since people in that position have fewer shelter options from the elements and more direct exposure to the public. Houses don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than what we have right now. I mean, even in a bad situation... there are rats on the street. It's very difficult for me to imagine someone in that condition looking at a house and saying, "no, the street is cleaner." Maybe there's an extra perspective I'm missing.

monksy 7y ago

> 5 Live/work units of ground level retail and second and third story housing. > The US often doesn't allow inclusionary zoning like this unless development is denser. 4+1s are fairly common now. Most new development in chicago has this.

vonmoltke 7y ago
Here in northern New Jersey there is a building currently under construction that meets the exact description quoted. There are several others that have been recently built in the 2-5+1 range as well.
asdff 7y ago
They are popping up everywhere in LA. A lot of parking is still required, however, which ups the builds cost and moves those businesses and apartments into another economic class. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but the only places cheap enough to buy and raze are places currently occupied by the working class, who will still have their jobs in town but will end up with longer commutes to affordable neighborhoods.
jandrese 7y ago
I had never heard about this until about 10 years ago, now it seems like they're going up everywhere. Most of the new construction here is listed as mixed use commercial/residential.
dredmorbius 7y ago
For those unfamiliar with the (rather unsearchable) "4+1" notion, also known as "four-plus-one": https://forgottenchicago.com/features/defining-the-four-plus-one/ https://forgottenchicago.com/features/defining-the-four-plus... Somewhat specific to Chicago as terminology, though the construction is more widespread.
jpindar 7y ago
They're building a lot of these in New England now.

gerbilly 7y ago

>Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, I read somewhere that the lack of rooming-houses significantly contributes to homelessness. They fill a gap between an individual apartment and your car or the street. It's too bad these aren't allowed any more. I know those populations can be hard to live with, but it's better than having them live on the street.

CydeWeys 7y ago
They also made it much easier to move to a new city to try out the job market there. It's no surprise that worker mobility is at historic lows given how hard it is to even put a roof over your head in another place, especially if you don't have good credit or income.
- Klonoar 7y ago
  Seattle banning micro-unit construction is maddening, considering they're slowly creeping into SF territory with pricing.
  - h5re43ae5r4 7y ago
    Seattle is a bad example, it's cheaper relative to peer cities (with 50+ units right now under $1500 in Seattle proper), and the market isn't keeping pace with surrounding King county or even national housing prices: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-home-prices-lower-than-a-year-ago-for-second-month-in-a-row/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ho...
    - Klonoar 7y ago
      I know the units under $1500 very well, as I'm helping someone move out here who's not in tech/finance/medicine/law. That's simply not cheap enough, and micro-housing works for these people. People come to cities for economic opportunity, they need to be able to live here while getting on their feet.
- mncharity 7y ago

jcomis 7y ago

#2 does not seem to be true in some cities. There are a lot of new "pod" apartment buildings with shared kitchen facilities. There's one right across the street from me in Denver.

jessriedel 7y ago
Sure, housing regulations are hyper local, so there will be exceptions. The fact that some many localities have converged on banning the same stuff is still remarkable, and evidence that it's being driven by the same forces rather than being a tailored response to details of a particular community.
- lolsal 7y ago
  How is that remarkable? Local governments governing locally sounds completely normal to me.
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    Local governments are widely acknowledge by political scientists to be be lower quality than national governments, believe it or not, and to have significantly less oversight. The argument for giving them huge power to dictate what people can and can't build on private land is that local regulations can be more tailored to local details. But if all the local governments are, e.g., setting high minimum plot sizes, this is not them responding nimbly to local details; it's just a way to keep out poor people.
    - korethr 7y ago
      > Local governments are widely acknowledge by political scientists to be be lower quality than national governments Since you're invoking authority here, I'm gonna say [Citation Needed]. > But if all the local governments are, e.g., setting high minimum plot sizes, this is not them responding nimbly to local details; it's just a way to keep out poor people. Or, it could be as simple as a locality copying what seems to have been successful in other nearby localities, with not enough people speaking up with compelling evidence to the contrary. Believe it or not, not everything bad that happens to poor people happens out of malice directed their way. Sometimes, bad shit happens to poor people, because, being poor, attempting to change conditions to make less bad shit happen would further strain their already stretched-to-the-limit resources. And there's one resource that anyone who wants to participate in local policy making must spend without exception, one which those struggling to make ends meet will tend to have the least of: Time. There is no Machiavellian mustache-twisting involved in keeping the poor out; the poor never show up to give their input on the policies that might adversely affect them. It's kinda hard to even know about the 90 day advance notice postings in town hall when you're working 2.5 jobs to keep food on the table and the heat on during the coldest winter months so you don't freeze, and the public bus routes you rely on don't even go near city hall. Never mind having the time to think about the Nth order effects of such proposed policies to figure out if they'd adversely affect you, or then getting down to city hall for the planning meeting to give the council or committee your 2 cents. I mean, some localities are better than others about giving all of their local socioeconomic strata sufficient advance notice and a fair chance to provide input, but there's a limit to what's reasonable. Eventually, time for input and comment will have to be ended so a decision can be made, otherwise nothing would ever get done. If the above sounds sucky and unfair, well, you're right. It does suck and it is unfair. But if you want the conditions of the poor to suck less and become more fair, you're going to have a hard time being effective if you are too quick to ascribe results to malice.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

The problem with all these regulations is that it completely stops all innovation. Imagine what the internet would have turned out to be if, from day one, it was heavily regulated as housing. Imagine if every company or every developer had to get a permit before building any website and every website had to look a certain way with certain margin. We'd be nowhere. Housing, desperately needs permission-less innovation (completely regulation/zoning free). Maybe not everywhere. But, come on, CA has 163,707 square miles, can we just carve out a couple of those, even if it's just 100 or 200 or so (with enough economies of scale to attract serious VC money), in an area that has no NIMBYs, for build whatever you want and let builders and innovators innovate. We can take what's working and slowly apply it other areas. At the current rate, the way things are, we're never going to see any progress in housing.

Mirioron 7y ago
The chilling effect of (some) regulation often goes unnoticed, because it impacts few people directly. The chilling effect is essentially invisible until we can see a better way. Eg uber vs taxis. There's usually an incumbent that benefits from these regulations as well that will argue against lessening them. I think your recommendation can help with this issue, but I wonder if CA is a good place for this. As I understand it, access to water is a limiting factor in CA.
- davidw 7y ago
  > access to water is a limiting factor in CA. It is: for farmers, who use something like 80% (I forget the exact number). It isn't for cities, and denser cities use less water because there are no big lawns and other waste.
  - Accujack 7y ago
    Many cities in my state (MN) still have laws on the books that will fine lawn owners for failing to maintain a green, healthy appearance. Never mind if it's in a desert or forest terrain... they only allow paved spaces, green grass and landscaping, or certified native prairie replantings, which cost a mint's worth of money to do. Because "everyone loves green grass" no matter how much water it uses or how much fertilizer runoff it allows.

xrd 7y ago

It looks like the author might be in the NW. I'm curious whether they would be optimistic about the zoning changes (https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-single-family-zoning-law-effect-developers https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-single-family-zoning...) here (https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2019R1/Measures/Overview/HB2001 https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2019R1/Measures/Overview/HB...)

davidw 7y ago
Yes, he's from Oregon. HB 2001 is good news, but we need to allow for more variety, and it'd be wonderful to also allow light commercial by right, so that, say, you can walk to a corner store instead of getting into a gas guzzling SUV just to do something people in many countries can do on foot.
- Legogris 7y ago
  > allow light commercial by right Is this a US-specific term? What does it mean? (Only really found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light)
  - davidw 7y ago
    "By right" means that you can just build it without having to apply for any specific exceptions, go through hearings, etc... "Light commercial" means things like small corner stores, barber shops, local restaurants, stuff like that. There are legit reasons to not want, say, a tannery right next to housing.
    - Legogris 7y ago
      Ah, right, indeed. Related to the thread, I don't see how banning "#5 Live/work units of ground level retail and second and third story housing" makes any sense. These can be a game-changer for local town life.
      - 7y ago

fnord77 7y ago

> #2 Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, which have multiple people sharing a room, or individuals getting small rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces, for short to medium term living. Aren't there a few startups doing this and marketing them as communal living for young techies?

asdff 7y ago
Yup and priced at market rate for studios usually. "dorm room living," I still have PTSD from what was left in those communal bathrooms after a weekend of drinking.
wahern 7y ago
SROs don't have to use communal bathrooms. A family member lives in what's classified as an SRO, but in the ritzy Cow Hollow neighborhood. It's a tiny unit but has its own bathroom, including shower, and a very tiny kitchenette (sink, no stove). It's probably smaller than most of the more modern SRO'ish units that have recently been built around SOMA, even though some of those rely on communal spaces. Other than the size of the units, it's a typical apartment building--office workers, teachers, retail workers, and even a dentist with a house in Marin who keeps a unit so he doesn't have to commute during weekdays. It was probably built in the 1940s or 1950s, before zoning laws stopped construction of such buildings.

sharpneli 7y ago

Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US? It’s relatively popular way of living in Finland. It’s something between a highrise apartment and your own house. I’ve always wondered why US seems to lack those and that neatly explains it.

Frondo 7y ago
I spent some time in Philadelphia, where nearly all of the housing in the city core is rowhouses or apartment buildings. It's fantastic. It makes a dense, walkable city, and people still get the amenities of their own house with a little tiny backyard (big enough for a fire pit or grill). Also better for the environment when heat doesn't radiate off all four sides of a house. They've been building some of what they call row homes in the PNW, but these are still detached houses (no adjoining walls). It's better than it used to be, you can fit three houses on the space formerly reserved for one or two, but go the extra mile and connect 'em together.
- burfog 7y ago
  I think you really should have enough room for scaffolding. How are you going to take care of a wall that is physically touching your neighbor's wall? That wall ought to get inspected at least. It might need paint. If one house starts to collapse onto the other, then both have problems. You're also at a higher fire risk, even if the walls in the middle can't burn, because embers can more easily go from one roof to the other.
  - drewbug 7y ago
    Yeah, the Philly MOVE incident led to 64 other buildings burning.
    - Frondo 7y ago
      I think the scope of that fire is better attributed to: the police dropped a bomb from a police helicopter on the home where people were living, and it was a poor neighborhood that may not have had firewalls between dwellings. I've seen fires there where the shared walls are brick, and those firewalls do work.

wang_li 7y ago

The setbacks complaint seems mainly to be that locals can't privatize, or otherwise restrict usage of, public spaces.

jessriedel 7y ago
How does having my house near the street on my lot restrict public usage of the street?
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  The sidewalk. And the street right of way extends beyond just the physical street in most places.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Your lot usually doesn't include the sidewalk or the treelawn for that matter, although you are usually held responsible for its maintenance.
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    This comment is pedantic. Yes, there are special regulations about homeowners in some areas having to place and maintain sidewalks along their property. (In other areas, they are owned and/or maintained by the city.) That's very distinct from setbacks, which prohibit construction for a depth much further than the width of the sidewalk.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  The combination of setback and building height limit establishes the maximum amount of natural sunlight that your building can block from your neighbors, and the adjoining street. I believe the template for setbacks and height limits came from New York City, wherein a new 40-story building cast a good deal of the surrounding neighborhood into permanent shadow. As the "Ancient Lights" doctrine of English property law had been repudiated in America, and the Prescription Act 1832 obviously came after independence, the neighborhood incumbents had no real legal grounds for complaint. This disturbed enough people that New York passed its first architectural restriction laws. Land-use restrictions basically came out of racists trying to legislate segregation. Those nuisance laws combined with architecture laws to birth modern zoning. Once that camel's nose entered the tent, the rest of the camel came right in. Every problem that has a nexus with private land use had an attempted zoning solution attempted somewhere. So things like parking-space allotments and environmental impact assessments were added. The NIMBYs could halt developments they didn't like by dealing the death of a thousand permits and public hearings through the zoning laws.

whiddershins 7y ago

That first one, the single family homes with a shared courtyard? We need more stuff like this! Backyards in Brooklyn used to be treated more communally (before my time) which created a large shared space safe from cars where children could play. Now I just stare out my window and watch people basically never go in to their yards. What a horrible waste.

h2odragon 7y ago
Go out in your yard, then, to watch the people who aren't there. Be the change you want to see, etc. Or possibly learn why they don't go out, "never noticed that odor til i sat here for an hour... now i'll never not notice it"
- ng12 7y ago
  A lot of times the yard is rented as part of the ground-flour unit ($$$) so only ~1/4th of the people in the building have access.
  - danudey 7y ago
    I lived in a three-storey walk-up that was built at a shift in grade, so two of the floors were ground-level. The top floor (us) had a small balcony in the front, and that was it. The middle floor had a medium-sized ground floor patio out the front of the building adjacent to the parking area, and a small balcony in the back. the lower floor had a gigantic fenced ground-floor yard that was easily bigger than the entire top floor we lived in. They were the only people in the building who had any green space.
    - close04 7y ago
      They probably also payed for it I imagine. Something like this rarely comes for free.
- klyrs 7y ago
  Speak for yourself. We've got a small yard. The kid loves it -- when I get stuffy about screen time, he gets bored and unless the weather is awful, he'll go out and play. There's other kids on the block, and they'd be friends (well, or enemies, but there's valuable life lessons there either way) by now if there were shared spaces.

biesnecker 7y ago

For what it's worth, I recently bought a new-build condo-ownership model townhouse in Silicon Valley that is effectively a row house. Six units in a building, three stories each. It's not quite the same, but it seems to be cut from the same mold.

WhompingWindows 7y ago
Do you have a link to a similar one? Curious for what that goes for and how it looks
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  Here's one similar development: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4166212,-122.087934,3a,75y,70.68h,92.74t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1slqfjPvYQEeKsvTJbrJBOAg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4166212,-122.087934,3a,75y,7... Prices are well over $1million. These developments are quite common around the south bay. There are two more similar developments within a couple of blocks of this one, and I used to live in yet another over in Milpitas.
  - WhompingWindows 7y ago
    Very cool, thanks for sharing! Seems like a decent quality of living, definitely higher density than I was imagining, but it could foster community and lead to more efficiency than all single family homes.
asdff 7y ago
How is the shared wall? I used to live in an old brownstone sorta place and that thing was like a tomb in terms of noise. Now I live in new construction which is timber framed, cheap drywall, and cheaper california insulation, and I can tell what specific video game my neighbor is playing along with his bowel schedule. Once this lease is up I'm running for the oldest heaviest looking building I can find.
- biesnecker 7y ago

Legogris 7y ago

> Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons. Is this really true for all of them? I see in the thread that > Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons. Some of the ones who are not NIMBYism or the above I can absolutely see how they could be motivated in an effort to slow down/hinder certain socioeconomic dynamics. > #2 Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, which have multiple people sharing a room, or individuals getting small rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces, for short to medium term living. In a poor environment and/or when housing is scarce, these easily become hosts for abusive or exploitative relationships between landlord and tenants or shitty housing. > #1 Bungalow Courts. Single family homes with shared walls and a communal courtyard. And no car parking requirement. Aka gated societies EDIT: Downvoters, why? Care to reply? Is this question ignorant or irrelevant to the conversation? I'm not defending any of these or claiming that they actually have the desired effect.

BryantD 7y ago
I don't think this is an insane question. My take: #1 -- gated communities are way bigger than a bungalow court and are much easier to isolate from the community around them. I think this correlation is a misapprehension. Here's a highly renovated example: https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/4/17200290/pine-street-cottage-for-sale-rsl https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/4/17200290/pine-street-cot... See how it faces the street like any other house, but there's a little private shared area in back? It's not self-contained like a gated community can be. #2 -- yep, there's the potential for abusive relationships. There is no rental model that works without strong protections for tenants and, yes, landlords. So that problem isn't inherent to rooming houses. However, the power relationship is usually tilted towards the party with more money and that's likely to be accentuated in this type of housing. You gotta be careful.

faissaloo 7y ago

When there is so much regulation there is a point where the only real law becomes "have you sufficiently annoyed someone"

mywittyname 7y ago
Most zoning laws are the result of a group of politically-connected individuals saying, "they shouldn't be able to do that" and using their influence to stop such behavior. Some are really just there to ensure that developers don't cheap out on the stuff in the walls in order to cut costs. But I don't think people are really complaining about requirements for the species of wood required for framing or the number of electrical outlets per square foot.

exabrial 7y ago

How to solve the housing crisis: get the government out. Nobody should be forced to have an electrical outlet in the garage for an electric car and the government has no business requiring that. This is just my favorite example of thousands of silly regulations that are put in place to keep the poor from becoming owners. No poor person can afford a Tesla, yet: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-new-buildings-to-be-wired-for-electric-car-charging-stations https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-n...

daveslash 7y ago
Agreed. If you have enough money to own a house with a garage and electric car, you can probably afford to have an electrician run an outlet to your garage if it doesn't already have one. Similarly, I doubt anyone who owns a house and gasoline car is going car shopping and saying "Oh, honey, this car is electric, and we don't have an outlet in the garage... we can't get this..."
- cr0sh 7y ago
  You have the qualifier of "probably" - but money may not be the only thing holding someone back. For instance, I want a 220 outlet in my garage so I can have a proper welder out there. I don't have an electric car (and even if someday I do own one, it won't fit in my current garage, due to various reasons - chief one being it's a conversion from a carport). That all said - I am not sure I can get such an outlet. Money isn't the issue - but it could become the issue. Because I would need an additional 220 circuit added to my existing circuits in my breaker box. But the panel is full. So I would probably need to either get a larger panel, or add on an auxiliary panel (likely the latter). But that also depends on my service from the main transformer. I might not be able to get an extra circuit if my service isn't large enough to support such an extra circuit. The only way to change that would be to have a larger capacity transformer installed. That transformer is shared between my house and the neighbor's house. I don't even want to contemplate what it would cost to change that out (thinking somewhere in the 5 figure range - but where?). So money isn't an issue - until you have an electrician come out and tell you that to run an additional line is going to require major changes to your current electrical service.

klyrs 7y ago

A family friend was the proud owner of the last outhouse in Boise city limits. All things considered, I'm not too shocked at this omission... Also it's illegal to build chicken coops in many cities. Not sure how common that one is, though

jhallenworld 7y ago

I own and live in a two family house built in 1924. It's one step up from an English row house in that you have windows on all sides. These, and New England "triple-deckers" are pretty good. In Worcester MA you could buy an 1890/1900 triple-decker for $30k in the early 90s.. if only I was smart enough to buy one then. These are wealth generators in that renters are paying your mortgage. My grandparents lived in a Queens NY row house (until 1970s white flight). I have early memories of it, was a cool house. It had lots of fireplaces, varnished wooden gates, wall sconces and shared back courtyard. My parents lived in a 1950s single family house, but we gen xers rediscovered cities. New houses around Boston are mass Lego block low rise apartments. They all are corporate owned, which means they are expensive, and the rent goes up automatically, but they sometimes have nice ammenaties. SROs: I want to live the way Sherlock Holmes did. Mrs. Hudson cooked, cleaned, answered the door.. did people really live like this in late 19th century London? How much was the rent?

JCharante 7y ago
I was kinda shocked to see Worcester mentioned here in the top comment. I and some other students are currently paying $4350/mo for one of these triple deckers that you mentioned. I really prefer the zoning laws and building style present in Hanoi. Our house is five stories tall, and some of our neighbors have houses with six stories. Although they are not very big per floor (they may only have 2.5 rooms per floor), they are very space efficient which allows for tons of amenities to be within walking distance.
- jhallenworld 7y ago
  For the whole house I hope... It was $750 for a three bedroom near WPI in 1992. Ours had left over (disconnected) gas jet lighting, sliding wooden pocket doors for one of the living rooms and a separate entrance for one of the bedrooms (for maid I think). You could see where chimney for the original coal stove in the kitchen was. Also had a slate roof.
  - makmanalp 7y ago

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gok 7y ago

Minimum housing size regulations (which is really what the source is about) has similar impact to minimum wages. It gives lower middle class people bigger homes / higher wages but increases homelessness / unemployment.

Gibbon1 7y ago
Maybe I'll try and find the talk again. But saw one where the speaker showed slides of various housing units. They varied from a very nice looking art deco style apartment in Redwood City at something like 220 units per acre. And single family homes in Los Vegas built and zoned for 4 units per acre.

gpvos 7y ago

Key sentence: > Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons.

nullc 7y ago

Most by what metric? A great many cities in the US permit most (all?) of these things. None of them are popular to build now, however, where they are allowed.

dredmorbius 7y ago
Examples?

duelingjello 7y ago

Anything to make new housing as expensive and complicated as possible so NIMBYs don't have more housing inventory to attack their valuations or more neighbors too close to them. The consequences of this selfishness are more expensive rents, more expensive housing and more homelessness.

Dan_JiuJitsu 7y ago

I think a lot of this is due to people in the neighborhoods not wanting the neighborhoods to change. It's this way in the USA precisely because of citizen control. Single family home neighborhoods are some of the nicest places to live in America. Why shouldn't the people who have invested in the community get to decide how the neighborhood evolves?

imtringued 7y ago
That would be perfectly okay if they didn't invite more workers to their cities.

deleted 7y ago

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irrational 7y ago

Come to the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Tons of new rowhouses. Live/work units are increasingly common.

greggman2 7y ago

It would be nice to know the why's for each of these laws. I'm sure some seemed at the time, or maybe still do have legit reasons. Houses, or rather apartments with a shared kitchen and maybe shared bathrooms are still a thing in Japan. There are "share houses" of which maybe the most famous/notorious is Sakura House that has many locations and caters to visitors. There's also https://www.social-apartment.com https://www.social-apartment.com which is targeted more at locals. I've thought about joining one for the social aspect. I think there would be a market in other countries, especially if there was an activity director making sure events happened. I didn't know it would be illegal in the USA. There are also high end apartments that have an activity "roof top". A friend lives in one. The rooftop has a restaurant, live entertainment, indoor and outdoor areas, a pool, and rooms you can reserve for private parties. Tangentially, lots of old USA movies show characters living in boarding houses, having a room to themselves but sharing meals. Seems nice in the movies. No idea how it was in real life.

chadlavi 7y ago
NIMBYism in most cases
dahart 7y ago
It’d be nice to know what laws we’re even talking about, and what locales they apply to. There are a lot of tall claims in that thread that seem unsubstatiated and/or exaggerated, and a lot of replies with counter-examples.
mc32 7y ago
I go like having sidewalks. I do like setbacks. The rest of it, some of it is outdated for modern society (tenement housing), but most others are mostly okay and good options (like density in small towns, mixed use housing, multiplexes in appropriate locations (town centers). I think context matters. I would not want multiplexes in the middle of a leafy neighborhood, but certainly should be okay next to busier areas like shopping boulevards and shopping districts, etc.
nikanj 7y ago
Mostly: Poor people live in these, or even worse, poor black people. Most of the zoning laws were not written recently, and they do carry a heavy burden of being both anti-poor and racist.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

At least in the bay area the retail on the bottom, housing on the top is now quite commonly built. There are new units in Mtn View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose. And maybe if the courts don't stop it, Cupertino :-)

dragonwriter 7y ago

No citations are provided to support the “most American cities” claim, and many of them are common even in the places best known for anti-development NIMBYism, so I suspect that their association with the thread title is frequently inaccurate.

keeganjw 7y ago
A lot of them are common in places where they were built before modern American zoning laws came into being.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  #5 is common in new construction today, in the NIMBY-heavy Northern California (including the SF Bay Area), which is, to be sure, not free of the influence of “modern American zoning laws”, and I can think of at least one Bay Area small town where (if one restricts to residential structures) the same developments that contradict #5 also is do so for #8. The essential equivalent of #7 is a common form (including, again, in the Bay Area) of newer condo development, though they are usually marketed as “townhouses” rather than “rowhouses”.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    For every one place you see it built, there's many more places zoned in such a way to exclude it. You're seeing the few exceptions.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > For every one place you see it built, there's many more places zoned in such a way to exclude it. I've seen it in virtually every urban and suburban area of Northern California, it's practically the on-trend mode of infill development and has been for a couple decades. Either Northern California has the reverse relationship to the rest of the nation that it is reputed to have for development (which I doubt), or the assertion that this is prohibited in most US cities is false.

habosa 7y ago

Is there any possible way to break the American addiction on housing as the primary investment / wealth for a family? As long as existing homeowners are incentivized to drive up the price of their home, none of our housing supply woes are likely to change. And who can blame them? For most people their house is worth more than all their other possessions and investments combined. Besides the incentive issue, the fact is that most increases in home value are not created by the homeowner. They're created by the city who provide streets, infrastructure, security, etc. They're created by small business owners who make a neighborhood attractive to live in. They're created by nearby employers who bring in wage earners who create demand. The new bathroom the homeowner puts in is a minor matter. Yet all of the value (minus property taxes where applicable) is captured by the private home owner.

burlesona 7y ago
Raise property taxes and you suddenly have a lot of people who don’t want home values to go up any more. This is a common phenomenon in the sun belt, especially the Houston, TX area where you’ll see public meetings crashed by people opposed to projects they think will raise property values and thus their tax bill. But, good luck campaigning for tax increases.
solidsnack9000 7y ago
One way would be to encourage alternative investments. It's actually really tough for non-wealthy Americans to invest in capital markets in an efficient way. Another would be to encourage them to really commit to the value of their homes (instead of the price). If property taxes in California rose with the value of homes, many more people in San Francisco would have found it expedient to (a) sell to developers or (b) let out their homes or (c) remodel their homes as denser housing. Well...(c) could have happened, if it were not so difficult to build in San Francisco, but that goes back to helping people find better ways to invest, by not discouraging commerce. Most investments work the way you describe: "...most increases in home value are not created by the homeowner." It's the same when you put money in a 401k or an index fund. Investing is putting capital out there and hoping it comes back. Doesn't make sense to advance this argument against home ownership as an investment.
7y ago

tingletech 7y ago

I don't think you can build new trailer parks in most of the U.S.

PascLeRasc 7y ago

There's something really beautiful about streets without setbacks like this [1]. I can't put my finger on what it is but they're all over Amsterdam and Japan, and they always make me so happy to walk though. Does anyone know what it is about these? [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELaN6w_UUAAQbOC?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELaN6w_UUAAQbOC?format=jpg&name=...

mixmastamyk 7y ago
No/little room for cars, lets one feel safe.
Kungfuturtle 7y ago
No cars? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ More seriously, my guess is that you enjoy those streets because there's so much more character to them. They are generally part of an older, more storied urban core, so the streets are more imbued with a "there"ness of the community. Contrast this with the experience of walking down a recently-gentrified street.
viburnum 7y ago
They’re at human scale. There’s lots to look at, it’s quiet, there’s sense of security from not being out in the open, tons of advantages for humans.
sdrothrock 7y ago
I can't stand them myself; they're rarely that uncrowded and many streets with cars/cycle traffic here also don't have setbacks while, at the same time, allowing private property to build high walls. This results in a large number of blind turns where you can't tell if anyone's coming around the corner unless there are mirrors available, which aren't always a guarantee.
pertymcpert 7y ago
Lack of cars and the fact that you're near other people. We are social creatures, we need some minimum amount of space, but more than that just makes us feel isolated.
7y ago

StillBored 7y ago

There is also the building code related things, you can't build a texas dogtrot, or in many cases middle eastern compound style houses (thick walls, high concrete fence) anymore either. Never-mind outhouses, despite them being all over parks/etc these days under the name "composting toilets".

rambojazz 7y ago

What a sensationalized title. These are urban regulations and they exist in every city.

degosuke 7y ago
I'm on edge whether the title is sensationalized or not... It does state the fact that it is illegal to do these. I would even see it as a better reflection of the current status then perhaps stating "Urban regulations prevent building these types of buildings."

deleted 7y ago

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subject117 7y ago

Cronyism. Outlawing building types like these hurts middle and low class individuals. They take advantage of the public by citing “safety” reasons but really this just lines up the pockets of larger real estate developers and their political cronies. I imagine it is more correlated with left-leaning cities but wouldn’t be surprised to see cronies on the right too

ascari 7y ago

Meanwhile most of these are what you get in England