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This is an inflammatory title, meant for clickbait: if building a home from decades of savings in which to nurture a family, would one want to find an industri

• ojagodzinski 4y ago
  And you think that there is nothing between US zoning laws and "industrial factory subsequently next door"?
• Redoubts 4y ago
  Sounds like an expensive place to build an industrial factory.
  • hhh 4y ago
    sounds like an amazingly cheap place to build one to me
    • Grimburger 4y ago
      A factory would not out compete a 40 storey building. Saying this as someone who lives where 40 storey buildings and high tech export factories both vie for land.
  • jjtheblunt 4y ago
    not when there's no zoning?
    • Redoubts 4y ago
      Strikes me as orthogonal, really.
• Victerius 4y ago
  Factories are not built overnight. You could offer to sell your lot to the factory builders and buy elsewhere. In this world, houses would be affordable.
  • throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
    "If you don't like it leave" is a solution to many problems. Just not one that people find acceptable or sometimes even possible.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    have you seen dark waters? the farmer's neighbour sold his land, and a toxic dump was built there. the farmer couldn't sell his land to the company - they didnt need any more. he could sell his land to anyone - noone wants a poisoned land next to a toxic dump. So his livehood was destroyed, and he had to recourse.
  • heretogetout 4y ago
    Don't worry about climate change causing the sea level to rise. If your land is at risk you can always sell it and move, right?
• jacobolus 4y ago
  People clearly shouldn’t put tanneries, steel mills, and chemical processing plants in residential neighborhoods right next to primary schools. But massively simplified and less restricted zoning standardized across broader geographical regions (vs. every town for itself) would be very helpful, and in cities there’s really no good reason to have areas zoned to only allow single family detached houses with no multi-unit buildings or commercial activity allowed whatsoever. And the parking requirements, height limits, mandatory setbacks, etc. make North American cities remarkably space-inefficient and infrastructure-expensive. The zoning requirements in Japan seem like a good model.
  • mirceal 4y ago
    There is definitely a middle ground and I agree with you that the public health concerns should be one of the things that keep some sort of coarser zoning in place. Now, the reason for the ridiculous zoning based on housing type and commercial activity are really really simple: to separate the rich from the middle class and the middle class from the poor. It's extremely prejudiced and wrong. Yet here we are.
    • jen20 4y ago
      It also seems designed to stop anyone walking to a bar, yet be able to walk to a church.
  • lazide 4y ago
    It’s that way because the folks there with control (in this system, the voters, though often ‘influenced’ by local politicians and power players) want it that way. If someone has a setup they consider nice, or even just wants to not get stepped on by a bunch of other changes, they’re going to work hard to protect it. It’s human nature.
    • ambrozk 4y ago
      The solution is to decrease the power of hyper-local interests whose incentives do not align with those of the broader polity. Small cities and even neighborhoods benefit from regional economic growth but would rather their distant neighbors pay the cost for it in terms of density. That's a recipe for dysfunction.
• Grimburger 4y ago
  > in which to nurture a family Over the years I've noticed basically every zoning argument turns emotional like this, you can't have logical, considered debate. It's always about the home rather than the land it sits on.
  • nathanaldensr 4y ago
    Today I learned that nurturing my family is "emotional." Thanks; I had no idea.
  • tharne 4y ago
    > Over the years I've noticed basically every zoning argument turns emotional like this That's because it is an emotional issue for most of us. We put our wealth, our time, and our energy into buying a house and finding/creating a community to raise our kids in. We're happy with with we live, then someone comes in, waves their credentials and says, "You losers are doing it all wrong, let me 'fix' your town". We don't want our towns fixed. If we thought they were bad, we wouldn't have moved their in the first place.
    • nrr 4y ago
      The challenge is allowing communities to grow. You have or want kids, which means that, without imparting a value judgment, you've contributed to some increase in the population. Likewise, your neighbors surely have had kids of their own, or they're planning to, which means that they're similarly contributing to population growth. All of this means that there will need to be more places to live. My question is: Where will your kids and your neighbors' kids live? As you advance in age, how does this play out when you'll want (or perhaps even need) them nearby to help? If/when your kids move away, will they be able to afford to move back? It's probably best that you don't have the answers to those right now, but they're worth thinking about in a climate where the law of supply matters more.
      • doktorhladnjak 4y ago
        As is always the answer in these sort of discussions, "somewhere else" or "not in my backyard"
• pickovven 4y ago
  You don't need zoning to control pollution.
• kqr 4y ago
  I don't get why that should require zoning laws. In the end, no factory builds itself. It takes actual persons out there pouring concrete. Real, fellow humans choosing to ignore the well-being of all the people living around them, enter their neighbourhood and in effect destroy their homes. The fact that society is so bureaucratised we don't think of it that way freaks me out a little. The solution is not more bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is how we ended up in this situation in the first place, where I could walk into a neighbourhood and ruin it, as long as I have the right official permits, and then sleep well at night thinking that I have done a good job. How about we try to collectively drop this idea that "I'm an X therefore I pour concrete where they tell me to without thinking more about it?" Make people personally responsible for their actions!
  • Klinky 4y ago
    > Real, fellow humans choosing to ignore the well-being of all the people living around them, enter their neighbourhood and in effect destroy their homes. Except the people making these decisions or pouring the concrete often don't live in the neighborhood or care, they're "just doing their job". >Make people personally responsible for their actions! They can easily hide behind corporate bureaucracy and limited liability. If you want laissez-faire zoning, please beef up corporate civil/criminal liability and punitive damages, so offenders learn their lesson or are taken out of business.
    • kqr 4y ago
      > Except the people making these decisions or pouring the concrete often don't live in the neighborhood Sure, but would you feel okay about ruining someone else's home as long as it's not in your neighbourhood? > or care, they're "just doing their job". This is the problem I want to address. When you are knowingly doing harm, you are never "just doing your job". You are intentionally taking the role of acting harmfully. As a species, we already know this. When a war crime is committed, it is private first class John Baluzki holding the rifle who will be dragged to the Hague. "I was just following orders, please go after my superiors" is not a defense. Individuals perform actions, corporations or dictators are powerless without individuals willing to go along with their crap. Those individuals are responsible for what they did.
• dhc02 4y ago
  The problem with zoning is that at some point we realized that it was harmful to have industrial land use like factories and dumps right next to residential neighborhoods. And then we assumed that there must be a spectrum with landfill on one end and single family homes in the other, with every other possible land use being some level of bad. When in fact, we need to zone industry that creates sounds, smells, chemicals, or other environmental hazards into its own non-residential areas, but everything else should be allowed to self-organize. Commercial (retail, office space, professional, services) is not industrial-light. It is not something to quarantine. It is integral to a healthy, functioning, tax-revenue-generating neighborhood. The more commercial and retail are mixed into neighborhoods, the more desirable those neighborhoods are. Of course it almost goes without saying that most of the rest of what we mean when we say zoning is also counterproductive if your goal is a functioning, financially solvent, culturally cohesive city: single-family-only, parking minimums, setbacks, etc.
  • belligeront 4y ago
    We can regulate where industrial use can exist as separate laws and get rid of the 97% of zoning that has been horrible for land use in the US
  • zip1234 4y ago
    Many of the first zoning ordinances were just there to keep poor people or other races out. Most places already had rules about industrial and dangerous uses before zoning.
  • mijamo 4y ago
    There are actually much more reasons for zoning. For instance, commercial real estate pays much more per square meter than residential, so without zoning you'd end up with no resident in many popular areas. In a similar way, if you just let anybody open hotels you have the same problem as what came in with AirBNB except worse, which is why hotels have been zoned in most cities for a long time. You also have other reasons such as organizing public transports, infrastructure, avoiding tax competing between cities and much more. Contrary to some belief in here cities in Europe are often heavily zoned. It can go as far as encouraging or forbidding some special kinds of shops / restaurants (ex: limiting number of fast food restaurants in touristic places to maintain a certain "standing", having special tax for luxury shops to have them focus on a few streets to create an exclusive areas growing in the city and controlling the special delinquency that can come with...).
• lordnacho 4y ago
  I guess it's a rhetorical tool, what would be better, no zoning laws or the current zooming laws?
• Bukhmanizer 4y ago
  It’s always interesting to hear this stuff argued out because the effect of too little zoning is much more visceral than the effect of too restrictive zoning. One (correctly) cringes at the thought of a factory being placed in their residential neighborhood. But the converse, and the reality we find ourselves in, is that millions of families don’t have stable housing at all. It’s a clearly worse outcome. Unpleasant housing is obviously better than no housing. but there’s no cringe factor, it’s all in the abstract.
• scythe 4y ago
  "Abolish zoning", like "end car ownership" and "ban sprawl" are the result of the extremism treadmill of the modern media environment applied to the United States's ossified real estate market. Regardless of whether they'd be possible, these ideas just aren't necessary — a much milder package of reforms, broadly applied, would do plenty to address the supra-inflationary housing price trend.
• zip1234 4y ago
  How does zoning prevent an industrial factory right next door? It doesn't. Zones must exist on a plane and naturally butt against each other. Go look at a map of a major city. The industrial areas often butt right against residential.