8 ms·

Or they're targeting polyamory.

toomuchtodo 1y ago
tptacek nailed it with regards to it being historically racial, but I've also seen, to your point, animosity towards anything that isn't a "traditional" or nuclear family. Fear of the different and unknown is a powerful motivator of the people who bring these complaints. Also animosity towards poverty and the belief or perception of material increases in crime and/or traffic. (property owner, many units, yimby, have to interface with the citizenry at zoning meetings, etc)
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I'm sure in some/many cases there were racial motivations but also SROs that have many unrelated people in individual rooms often become seen as flophouses and are seen as undesirable by other property owners. So they are often prohibited at least in single-family zoned areas.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density. (as someone who has acquired lots, rezoned, and have contracted to have multifamily built in such areas)
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      I do agree that one contributor to the housing crisis in many areas is the lack of SRO and boarding houses, which used to be much more common at least in urban areas. Those are all largely gone now, and they used to be common entry-level housing options for young singles. If I owned a house would I object to the neighbor taking in a boarder or two? No, but I could see being unhappy about them moving out and turning the house into an SRO rental, especially if those tenants created a nuisance in the neighborhood. Same as a problematic Air BnB. I think a good compromise might be allowing SRO/boarding if the owner also lives in the house. That is what my town is discussing for at least some residential neighborhoods. SROs should also be more often allowed in already multifamily/high density residental areas.
    - bpt3 1y ago
      Property owners absolutely are entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density, and I say this as someone who also has done similar work to you. If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        > If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right This is an opinion, not a right codified in statute, and state laws can be enacted to override local planning ability to prevent upzoning. People who live in their community are entitled to affordable housing (again, my opinion, maybe not yours). Property owners leave, property owners die; the path to success is to simply continue to grind against the nimby machine. https://www.yimbylaw.org/ https://www.yimbylaw.org/
        SoftTalker 1y ago
        I disagree that people are entitled to affordable housing where they desire to live. There are neighborhoods I could not afford to live in, and I am not entitled to live there. I live where I can afford, and this is the case up and down the market. If I want to live in some community, it's up to me to be able to afford it. That said, if I can afford to buy property and want to build higher-density lower-cost rental housing on it, that should generally be my right as well.
        tptacek 1y ago
        The issue isn't that some communities are expensive. The issue is the deliberate engineering of extra housing expense extrinsic to the market itself using the force of law, which is a capability home rule grants exclusionary communities if not policed carefully.
        bpt3 1y ago
        It's an inherent right, otherwise CA wouldn't have to pass laws to override it (which is an overreach IMO). No one is entitled to affordable housing in any specific location.
    - koolba 1y ago
      > Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density. Of course they're entitled to stop efforts to change the world around them. If you moved into a neighborhood with a minimum lot size was X acres, it's a reasonable expectation that it remains as such. If someone comes along and not only wants to change that, but also build multi unit apartment complexes across the street from you, why should you not have a say? Clearly the person was not allowed to do that before changing the zoning rules so why can't I try to stop them from changing them at all? There's nothing racist about wanting to live a quiet suburban or rural life where you can neither see nor hear the next house over.
      - supertrope 1y ago
        People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change. This is very understandable. Using force of law to maintain aesthetic levels and social class divides is where the perverse incentives set in. The US Supreme Court approved the earliest zoning laws based on health justification. The dicta in the court opinion cited cities as parasitically infringing on bucolic greenery. We now see the logical endpoint of restrictive zoning. Million dollar houses that are mostly the right to live at that address (the structure is small and worn). Landlords having tremendous power over tenants.
        tw04 1y ago
        >People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change. Correct, people making what is for most the largest financial investment and commitment of their lives want to have control over what happens to it. When you have a 30 year mortgage on a piece of property that is many times your gross yearly income, you're kind of invested in the most literal sense of the word. It would be one thing if the re-zoning included an offer to buy or move every house within X distance that has property values and "standard of living" directly affected by the re-zoning. But in almost all cases when the re-zoning occurs, the response is: sucks to be you. I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not. There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why? Because the developer will make more money if it's in an already developed area, at the expense of all the existing homeowners.
    - oceanplexian 1y ago
      > Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density. Property owners are absolutely entitled to their property but that also includes things like noise, sanitation, and crime. It's called an HOA or a master planned community and approximately 30% of the US population lives in one. Few people like HOAs but still engage in them despite all the downsides because they specifically don't want to live in high density housing where people are packing 10 or 15 unrelated people to a house, inviting crime, noise, sanitary issues, and all the other negatives of high density housing.
      - ratelimitsteve 1y ago
        it's called an HOA or a master planned community and its a voluntary agreement between homeowners, not something any one homeowner is entitled to over the protestations of others. People who want to join an HOA are entitled to do that, and people who don't are entitled to not, but that's different from the law because the law is not optional or voluntary. It is, by its very nature, a restriction on the liberties of people without their express consent. What you're talking about is very, very different and deserves to be discussed independently of this.
      - lazyasciiart 1y ago
        Most people who engage in a HOA do so because existing regulation requires newly developed subdivisions to create their own local government to do the work of providing streets, etc, that should be done by the existing city government.
  - petsfed 1y ago
    Sure, but part of the point of in-effect racist zoning policies is that the affected population is predominately the targeted minority. It would be more effective and more equitable to address the actual issues created by flophouses. Single-family zoned areas by definition only have single-family homes, and only some families will be able to afford those homes. The designers of such policies are often well-aware that the only families affluent enough to purchase or rent a home in such an area is of the preferred race (thanks to the strong racial correlation to socioeconomic class, as well as historic explicit racist policies like redlining, employment and education segregation, etc etc). To be clear, I don't believe that single-family zoning is necessarily racist, especially with the continued democratization of the middle class. Single-family zoning is bad for a lot of reasons. Its just that it is absolutely the case that historically single family zoning was deliberately used in several cases as a racist policy, but in such a way that it would pass muster in court.
  - array_key_first 1y ago
    When things are seen as undesirable by property owners and we want to understand why, the reason is almost always racism. See also: HOAs, school districting, road construction, railroad construction, gentrification... That's just America.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  The whole race thing is a red herring. Pretty much every "racist" law outside of the former confederacy was written with the Irish in mind and last I checked they were just as white (technically whiter if you want to hair split) as the wasps who championed those laws. Those people back then were trying use government force to make it harder for people to live in ways they didn't like in the via regulation all the same as people do here and now in 2025. They used race/nationality as a proxy for that insofar as it was an accurate proxy (which is why in the US it largely fell out of favor starting in the 1950s after the culturally flattening effect of the depression + ww2). Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit, because to take a step back and assess the fundamentals of the sort of rulemaking being advocated for would be detrimental to their cause(s).
  - joshuamorton 1y ago
    This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism. > Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit, You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things, so I'm very confused. Do you somehow think that removing restrictions on unrelated tenancies is going to "micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways "?
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism. Regardless of exactly which laws were passed to make living the "wrong" way hard for which demographics the fact of the matter is that race-baiting is purely a distraction and manipulative debate tactic here. The laws are bad on a fundamental level. To use "law is racist, therefore bad" is to engage in a logical slight of hand to avoid the question "if it's bad for municipalities to regulate in this manner why ought states be allowed to do it". Most local zoning codes, if not evaluated by a judicial system highly biased toward the government, would fail the Penn Central test in many places. Simply porting that level of micromanagement to the state level and then scaling it back from 11 to 7 doesn't make the fundamental premise of what's going on here (the government essentially taking land via regulation, to the detriment of owners and communities in the longer term) any less odious. Yeah, not cranking it to 11 does mostly solve it in the moment, but that's like replacing an bad king with a benevolent one. This just isn't an area the government ought to be regulating to the degree that it is. Yeah there's some extreme examples (toxic waste dumps and whatnot) but neither state nor local nor federal government has any business telling people where they can't put apartments or warehouses or other mild things like that. These laws are bad because the government has no legitimate authority to micromanage the housing stock (and other things) on the fine grained level it does. The sum total of regulations effectively amount to a taking without compensation. They might also be racist in some cases, but that's on top of an already flawed premise. >You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things No, I'm saying this in reply to someone who's pretending to want to deregulate but simply wants to regulate in a different way. It's a more permissive way and an overall improvement but the premise is still flawed. Having state regulation that says municipalities can't zone away X, Y and Z simply moves the bickering over minutia from the town hall to the state legislature. It's like adding more and more rules to a geocentric solar system model. You'll get better and better but it's still not right at its core.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  I don't know what the racial origins are, but I have grown skeptical of many racial explanations, because they're often simplistic, speculative, and often lack a comprehension and awareness of the greater social context and events occurring around the middle of the century, like the intentional weaponization of "racism" against ethnic neighborhoods that were not assimilating into the ever-nebulous category of "whiteness". (Mass migration is one classic instrument, as are highways and bad urban planning. In the first case, mass migration from the South was used to break up ethnic neighborhoods in the North, causing their scattering across the suburbs to hasten assimilation. You could have used practically any outside group, but the convenience here was that it exploited the moral high ground of the civil rights movement, allowing opposition to mass migration to be cast as an expression of racism.) However, ascribing opposition to "fear of the unknown" as a motivator is likewise lazy. It works from the assumption that a) the nuclear family is arbitrary and thus have no presumption in their favor, and b) that there is no tolerance for substitutes for the nuclear family, in the strict sense. It's not like most people are clamoring to live in a polyamorist sex commune, so it's not a good explanation.

tptacek nailed it with regards to it being historically racial, but I've also seen, to your point, animosity towards anything that isn't a "traditional" or nuclear family. Fear of the different and unknown is a powerful motivator of the people who bring these complaints. Also animosity towards poverty and the belief or perception of material increases in crime and/or traffic. (property owner, many units, yimby, have to interface with the citizenry at zoning meetings, etc)

SoftTalker 1y ago
I'm sure in some/many cases there were racial motivations but also SROs that have many unrelated people in individual rooms often become seen as flophouses and are seen as undesirable by other property owners. So they are often prohibited at least in single-family zoned areas.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density. (as someone who has acquired lots, rezoned, and have contracted to have multifamily built in such areas)
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I do agree that one contributor to the housing crisis in many areas is the lack of SRO and boarding houses, which used to be much more common at least in urban areas. Those are all largely gone now, and they used to be common entry-level housing options for young singles. If I owned a house would I object to the neighbor taking in a boarder or two? No, but I could see being unhappy about them moving out and turning the house into an SRO rental, especially if those tenants created a nuisance in the neighborhood. Same as a problematic Air BnB. I think a good compromise might be allowing SRO/boarding if the owner also lives in the house. That is what my town is discussing for at least some residential neighborhoods. SROs should also be more often allowed in already multifamily/high density residental areas.
  - bpt3 1y ago
    Property owners absolutely are entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density, and I say this as someone who also has done similar work to you. If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right, even if other people who can't afford to live there or would just like to see higher density would really like them to change their mind.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      > If a community wants to remain SFH-only, that is their right This is an opinion, not a right codified in statute, and state laws can be enacted to override local planning ability to prevent upzoning. People who live in their community are entitled to affordable housing (again, my opinion, maybe not yours). Property owners leave, property owners die; the path to success is to simply continue to grind against the nimby machine. https://www.yimbylaw.org/ https://www.yimbylaw.org/
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        I disagree that people are entitled to affordable housing where they desire to live. There are neighborhoods I could not afford to live in, and I am not entitled to live there. I live where I can afford, and this is the case up and down the market. If I want to live in some community, it's up to me to be able to afford it. That said, if I can afford to buy property and want to build higher-density lower-cost rental housing on it, that should generally be my right as well.
        tptacek 1y ago
        The issue isn't that some communities are expensive. The issue is the deliberate engineering of extra housing expense extrinsic to the market itself using the force of law, which is a capability home rule grants exclusionary communities if not policed carefully.
      - bpt3 1y ago
        It's an inherent right, otherwise CA wouldn't have to pass laws to override it (which is an overreach IMO). No one is entitled to affordable housing in any specific location.
  - koolba 1y ago
    > Certainly, but I'll also argue that single family zoning needs to go, and upzoning enabled anywhere reasonable. Do existing owners not like flophouses? Do they not like density? Do they not like any change at all? All of the above. Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density. Of course they're entitled to stop efforts to change the world around them. If you moved into a neighborhood with a minimum lot size was X acres, it's a reasonable expectation that it remains as such. If someone comes along and not only wants to change that, but also build multi unit apartment complexes across the street from you, why should you not have a say? Clearly the person was not allowed to do that before changing the zoning rules so why can't I try to stop them from changing them at all? There's nothing racist about wanting to live a quiet suburban or rural life where you can neither see nor hear the next house over.
    - supertrope 1y ago
      People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change. This is very understandable. Using force of law to maintain aesthetic levels and social class divides is where the perverse incentives set in. The US Supreme Court approved the earliest zoning laws based on health justification. The dicta in the court opinion cited cities as parasitically infringing on bucolic greenery. We now see the logical endpoint of restrictive zoning. Million dollar houses that are mostly the right to live at that address (the structure is small and worn). Landlords having tremendous power over tenants.
      - tw04 1y ago
        >People pick housing based on current conditions and want it to never change. Correct, people making what is for most the largest financial investment and commitment of their lives want to have control over what happens to it. When you have a 30 year mortgage on a piece of property that is many times your gross yearly income, you're kind of invested in the most literal sense of the word. It would be one thing if the re-zoning included an offer to buy or move every house within X distance that has property values and "standard of living" directly affected by the re-zoning. But in almost all cases when the re-zoning occurs, the response is: sucks to be you. I think part of the problem is people are framing this discussion as if the whole US is silicon valley with extremely limited land when it's not. There are plenty of places trying to force multi-family dwellings in existing neighborhoods instead of just finding vacant property on the edge of town. Why? Because the developer will make more money if it's in an already developed area, at the expense of all the existing homeowners.
  - oceanplexian 1y ago
    > Property owners are entitled to their property, they are not entitled to stop efforts around them to increase housing supply or density. Property owners are absolutely entitled to their property but that also includes things like noise, sanitation, and crime. It's called an HOA or a master planned community and approximately 30% of the US population lives in one. Few people like HOAs but still engage in them despite all the downsides because they specifically don't want to live in high density housing where people are packing 10 or 15 unrelated people to a house, inviting crime, noise, sanitary issues, and all the other negatives of high density housing.
    - ratelimitsteve 1y ago
      it's called an HOA or a master planned community and its a voluntary agreement between homeowners, not something any one homeowner is entitled to over the protestations of others. People who want to join an HOA are entitled to do that, and people who don't are entitled to not, but that's different from the law because the law is not optional or voluntary. It is, by its very nature, a restriction on the liberties of people without their express consent. What you're talking about is very, very different and deserves to be discussed independently of this.
    - lazyasciiart 1y ago
      Most people who engage in a HOA do so because existing regulation requires newly developed subdivisions to create their own local government to do the work of providing streets, etc, that should be done by the existing city government.
- petsfed 1y ago
  Sure, but part of the point of in-effect racist zoning policies is that the affected population is predominately the targeted minority. It would be more effective and more equitable to address the actual issues created by flophouses. Single-family zoned areas by definition only have single-family homes, and only some families will be able to afford those homes. The designers of such policies are often well-aware that the only families affluent enough to purchase or rent a home in such an area is of the preferred race (thanks to the strong racial correlation to socioeconomic class, as well as historic explicit racist policies like redlining, employment and education segregation, etc etc). To be clear, I don't believe that single-family zoning is necessarily racist, especially with the continued democratization of the middle class. Single-family zoning is bad for a lot of reasons. Its just that it is absolutely the case that historically single family zoning was deliberately used in several cases as a racist policy, but in such a way that it would pass muster in court.
- array_key_first 1y ago
  When things are seen as undesirable by property owners and we want to understand why, the reason is almost always racism. See also: HOAs, school districting, road construction, railroad construction, gentrification... That's just America.
potato3732842 1y ago
The whole race thing is a red herring. Pretty much every "racist" law outside of the former confederacy was written with the Irish in mind and last I checked they were just as white (technically whiter if you want to hair split) as the wasps who championed those laws. Those people back then were trying use government force to make it harder for people to live in ways they didn't like in the via regulation all the same as people do here and now in 2025. They used race/nationality as a proxy for that insofar as it was an accurate proxy (which is why in the US it largely fell out of favor starting in the 1950s after the culturally flattening effect of the depression + ww2). Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit, because to take a step back and assess the fundamentals of the sort of rulemaking being advocated for would be detrimental to their cause(s).
- joshuamorton 1y ago
  This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism. > Of course people who want to use government to micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways in the present harp on the race bit, You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things, so I'm very confused. Do you somehow think that removing restrictions on unrelated tenancies is going to "micromanage other people's decisions in shortsighted ways "?
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >This is both just historically inaccurate (many of these laws were written, specifically, with black people in mind, even in northern states), and even if it were true, would still be a clear example of anti-irish racism. Regardless of exactly which laws were passed to make living the "wrong" way hard for which demographics the fact of the matter is that race-baiting is purely a distraction and manipulative debate tactic here. The laws are bad on a fundamental level. To use "law is racist, therefore bad" is to engage in a logical slight of hand to avoid the question "if it's bad for municipalities to regulate in this manner why ought states be allowed to do it". Most local zoning codes, if not evaluated by a judicial system highly biased toward the government, would fail the Penn Central test in many places. Simply porting that level of micromanagement to the state level and then scaling it back from 11 to 7 doesn't make the fundamental premise of what's going on here (the government essentially taking land via regulation, to the detriment of owners and communities in the longer term) any less odious. Yeah, not cranking it to 11 does mostly solve it in the moment, but that's like replacing an bad king with a benevolent one. This just isn't an area the government ought to be regulating to the degree that it is. Yeah there's some extreme examples (toxic waste dumps and whatnot) but neither state nor local nor federal government has any business telling people where they can't put apartments or warehouses or other mild things like that. These laws are bad because the government has no legitimate authority to micromanage the housing stock (and other things) on the fine grained level it does. The sum total of regulations effectively amount to a taking without compensation. They might also be racist in some cases, but that's on top of an already flawed premise. >You are saying this in reply to someone who is discussing past racism while also commenting on how they want to de-regulate things No, I'm saying this in reply to someone who's pretending to want to deregulate but simply wants to regulate in a different way. It's a more permissive way and an overall improvement but the premise is still flawed. Having state regulation that says municipalities can't zone away X, Y and Z simply moves the bickering over minutia from the town hall to the state legislature. It's like adding more and more rules to a geocentric solar system model. You'll get better and better but it's still not right at its core.
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
I don't know what the racial origins are, but I have grown skeptical of many racial explanations, because they're often simplistic, speculative, and often lack a comprehension and awareness of the greater social context and events occurring around the middle of the century, like the intentional weaponization of "racism" against ethnic neighborhoods that were not assimilating into the ever-nebulous category of "whiteness". (Mass migration is one classic instrument, as are highways and bad urban planning. In the first case, mass migration from the South was used to break up ethnic neighborhoods in the North, causing their scattering across the suburbs to hasten assimilation. You could have used practically any outside group, but the convenience here was that it exploited the moral high ground of the civil rights movement, allowing opposition to mass migration to be cast as an expression of racism.) However, ascribing opposition to "fear of the unknown" as a motivator is likewise lazy. It works from the assumption that a) the nuclear family is arbitrary and thus have no presumption in their favor, and b) that there is no tolerance for substitutes for the nuclear family, in the strict sense. It's not like most people are clamoring to live in a polyamorist sex commune, so it's not a good explanation.