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If you want to change their minds, and change housing policies in major US cities... you may want to try harder to understand why people want single family home

If you want to change their minds, and change housing policies in major US cities... you may want to try harder to understand why people want single family homes, and why they don't see zoning as evil. You've got a lot of minds to change! Both sides are understandable to me because those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from. I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want. Yes, it's what they want versus what other people want... that's unavoidable! It's the other side of the "if you want to continue living in a less dense area, go move somewhere more rural (until we pick it for densification too)" coin. Some folks think the tiebreaker here is that cities are more sustainable, but that doesn't avoid the problem that if you want to move more people into denser housing, some people aren't going to be able to get what they want. I find both sides understandable because I don't expect anyone to be happy when people more powerful than them tell them they can't have what they want. Can you really not understand why someone would be unhappy with someone else coming in and saying "I have the right to change your life?" Why "well you better be rich enough to own the land for the entire neighborhood" is a hollow response?

shuckles 6y ago
Yes, because I think it's absurd to claim that someone building a small apartment building on property they own down the street is changing my life. In fact, in your last claim, the property owner who is exercising control over their neighbor's building is the one unfairly "changing lives." In addition, developing on my own property has little to do with relative power imbalances. Who really holds power when I have to bribe my neighbors to get a variance to build an ADU in my backyard? > those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from This is kind of a silly claim because it suggests that the country is an undifferentiated landmass and there are no relative benefits of a particular geographic location. There are clearly relative advantages to living in a place, so telling people they can choose anyplace else is not really a choice! > I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want. This is only barely a coherent argument at the international levels ("Middle Eastern refugees shouldn't be able to decide where to settle in Europe!"). When you live within a country with freedom of movement, this is a very difficult argument to make. Should I only be allowed to vote in places where I am a property owner? For what it's worth, there are plenty of developing legal arguments _against_ local zoning, and California is on track to solve its housing issues by having the state take control of zoning away from cities.

shuckles 6y ago

Yes, because I think it's absurd to claim that someone building a small apartment building on property they own down the street is changing my life. In fact, in your last claim, the property owner who is exercising control over their neighbor's building is the one unfairly "changing lives." In addition, developing on my own property has little to do with relative power imbalances. Who really holds power when I have to bribe my neighbors to get a variance to build an ADU in my backyard? > those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from This is kind of a silly claim because it suggests that the country is an undifferentiated landmass and there are no relative benefits of a particular geographic location. There are clearly relative advantages to living in a place, so telling people they can choose anyplace else is not really a choice! > I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want. This is only barely a coherent argument at the international levels ("Middle Eastern refugees shouldn't be able to decide where to settle in Europe!"). When you live within a country with freedom of movement, this is a very difficult argument to make. Should I only be allowed to vote in places where I am a property owner? For what it's worth, there are plenty of developing legal arguments _against_ local zoning, and California is on track to solve its housing issues by having the state take control of zoning away from cities.