> CA and WA have had some recent wins with state-level zoning reform. It's too early to call this a win. In my personal experience, giving decision making powe

> CA and WA have had some recent wins with state-level zoning reform. It's too early to call this a win. In my personal experience, giving decision making power to those without intimate knowledge of an area generally leads to poor results. There is a total mismatch incentives. Local residents are heavily invested in their town and want to keep it nice. Non-local officials, however, have no ties to the community and are willing to damage communities to meet some political objectives. Two personal examples: 1. The state government constructed a bridge over a small creek by my condo on the outskirts of NYC. They performed a traffic study saying this would have no impact on traffic, but locals knew this to be a lie and no one wanted this completed. When there's no traffic, this bridge saves you 5 minutes from driving to the next crossing. Now that this crossing has been completed, it's basically become an additional lane of the highway during rush hour. It's extremely dangerous to walk around as frustrated motorists speed through red lights. If you need to run an errand with your car in the morning, you need to leave at least an hour for a trip that used to take 15 minutes. 2. In the town I live now, there are certain roads maintained by the county. You can tell which ones are which because crossing the county roads as a pedestrian is extremely dangerous. Multiple kids have been hit by cars this year. The county doesn't care and the town is powerless to change the county roads. I really believe that it's important that locals have the power to influence their environment that impacts their day-to-day life. Also, I hate how every issue in the U.S. is framed in a way that conveniently leaves out the capitalist class. Like yea, our housing issues are definitely caused by those damn NIMBYs who like their homes, not the investor class who owns 50 million housing units and are heavily subsidized by the federal government.