7 ms·

I serve as a planning commissioner for my city, and my city just recently tried to overhaul our zoning code to allow for more affordability and better economic

• systemtest 9mo ago
  A good start would be to allow everyone living in the city to vote. I don't care about politics, zoning or planning if I am not allowed to vote or participate. There isn't anything I can do, so why bother putting effort into it?
  • petcat 9mo ago
    > allow everyone living in the city to vote Who is "everyone" in this case?
    • systemtest 9mo ago
      People who live in the city for the majority of their time. They should be able to vote. Regardless of their housing situation. In basically all of Europe, voting for local elections is tied to having stable housing.
      • ishouldstayaway 9mo ago
        I don't disagree with you per se, but how would that work in practice? How could you actually tell someone lives there if they don't have an address to back up that claim?
        • systemtest 9mo ago
          By allowing them to register as citizens of that city
          • ishouldstayaway 9mo ago
            This just pushes the problem back a step, and both has and produces all the same problems as the issue it purports to solve.
    • gedy 9mo ago
      My guess is non-citizens or 'undocumented immigrants'.
      • systemtest 9mo ago
        Those as well. But even citizens and immigrants with paperwork can often not vote for local elections if they do not have stable housing.
        • trinix912 9mo ago
          Yes, because they don’t legally permanently live in that place. Sorry not sorry. Why do you think anyone can just sign up for some local elections and vote for a town they’re not even legally permanently situated in??
          • systemtest 9mo ago
            Then change the fucking system so that people who have been living in a city for years can legally do so. Or kick them out. But don't have this vague system of sub-humans that are not allowed to influence their surroundings by voting.
  • dymk 9mo ago
    Did you not register to vote or something?
    • systemtest 9mo ago
      I've lived in various European cities where I was not able to vote for various reasons. Such as living hotel long-term, living in a holiday home, being semi-homeless, sub-letting, crashing on someones couch. Seasonal workers, migrant workers or people with unstable employment are typically in this situation. No, I was not able to vote.
      • whynotminot 9mo ago
        I don’t want someone drifting through town in the local motel to be able to meaningfully vote to change the city I am rooted in.
        • systemtest 9mo ago
          I'm talking about people who live in the city for years.
          • moi2388 9mo ago
            Then find a legal place to stay and register and you can vote.
            • systemtest 9mo ago
              A yes, why didn't I think of that! Let me just completely ignore the broken housing market, the 15+ year waiting list for social housing and scrape together... lets checks... €400k for a small appartement with a 45 minute commute to work. Do you have any clue how privileged you sound here? This is peak "have you tried not being poor" attitude.
              • mjr00 9mo ago
  • freedomben 9mo ago
    I'm not saying GP was implying this, but my read of their comment is that it would be a bad thing for everyone to start to voting. If a person doesn't know what they're voting for, they're not more likely to make good decisions. They're just more likely to cancel out the vote of someone who did educate themselves.
  • Spooky23 9mo ago
    There’s a lot you can do. Voting is the entry stake. You can make a big impact with a very low level of political engagement. Allowing popular referendum for everything just invites a particular and usually really dumb level of politics. You can influence a board’s decision and get some or all of what you want. IMO one of the biggest problems with society is that you have this view that politics is this idea that it’s some sort of magical thing that is done to you. I can get my city councilman on the phone easily. Probably would get a meeting with my state senator in a few days if need be. Just show up and work with people.
• mothballed 9mo ago
  I think there is a snowball effect with zoning. I specifically sought out a place zoned with no building code checks and hardly any zoning. I value my right to die in a fire a lot more than I value my right to have the jack-boot enter my own property and tell me he knows best. People like me go to places with fairly free zoning. The jack boot lickers go to places with restricted zoning. Once one has a majority it just snowballs and pushes harder and harder in the direction it is going, because no one wants to buy/build a house in a place that will flip from the one strategy to the other.
  • vel0city 9mo ago
    I can't imagine I'd ever want to buy a house from someone who makes a point to live someplace where they can install sub-par plumbing and wiring, that this lack of code compliance was the selling point of where to build. Imagine buying a meal from a restaurant which prides themselves by not meeting the standards of the nearby town's health department.
    • mothballed 9mo ago
      Well that's luck for you, because I built the house I live in, and I'm not selling it. Although since I actually have to live in the house, the wiring was designed by an electrical engineer and installed at or above NEC requirements. But there was no one to look over my shoulder when I did it. If there were regulations house would have cost at least double. Because I have a day job and no time for inspectors, nor any trade license. >Imagine buying a meal from a restaurant which prides themselves by not meeting the standards of the nearby town's health department. Lol having lived in the third world I've eaten from probably a hundred of these. Very tasty. Not much different than the US where inspector is basically never there so you still must apply all the food sanitation rules in deciding regarding buying food from a vendor.
    • floatrock 9mo ago
      It's not about not meeting the standards of the town's health department, it's about having a 1-size-fits-all health standards. If you make a 5-seat japaneese-style neighborhood micro-eatery conform to the same cross-contamination standards as a 800-people-per-hour mcdonalds, you're making one of these unprofitable and de-facto illegal. Yes, lets have health codes. But lets also recognize different risk profiles and encourage all sorts of entrepreneurship. If it's 1-size-fits-all, then the only size is going to be XXL.
• favflam 9mo ago
  Some politician in Japan pushed zoning away from cities up to the prefecture and national level. So locals do not get veto rights over new construction.
  • milkytron 9mo ago
    My state did something similar recently as well for land within a quarter mile of transit, they have to be zoned for a minimum number of housing units, and parking minimums cannot be enforced in that radius. Some of the municipalities impacted are suing the state.
    • m463 9mo ago
      I wonder if this just means they will eliminate transit or move stations/stops/routes around.
  • cornholio 9mo ago
    It's an archetypal social coordination problem that can't be solved at a local level. If relaxed zoning pushes all new buildings into my neighborhood, because all other vote against it, then I'm going to end up with 20 stories of balconies hanging above my property but see no benefits, not even indirect ones like lower rents leading to lower inflation and prices etc. Some developer will simply capture that rent - both in the rent extraction sense and the real estate rent meanings. A smart central planner can act for the shared benefit, they are sensitive to the votes of renters in some other high density area that also can't solve the problem locally etc.
    • pas 9mo ago
      if your neighborhood gets denser you will see the benefits if you want to live there you can pick from more options developers capture value, but the buildings are there obviously the usual problem is that the land value goes up, and thus the rent goes up too (because suddenly the neighborhood becomes more desirable - which again is a sign of benefits for those who already live there)
  • 9mo ago
• vjulian 9mo ago
  This sort of citizen engagement is cute, naïve and ultimately pointless. Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things. I’m not being sarcastic.
  • mgfist 9mo ago
    > Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things Idk exactly what you mean by `major landowner(s)`, but where I live, zoning and permitting is controlled by retired people who own homes and have all the time to show up to 2pm meetings on Tuesdays and demand nothing new get built to "preserve character". They are landowners, but they're certainly not billionaires. The young people who need housing are working and thus can't show up, thus nothing gets built, creating a flywheel of stagnation and price increases.
  • freedomben 9mo ago
    Yep, largely the same for me. Half the city council and most of the planning commission seats are held by real estate people or developers. The state government is heavily influenced by the Realtors Association, and will frequently override local ordinances at the state level when they don't go favorably enough for the real estate industry. It was pretty disappointing to discover.
  • soared 9mo ago
    Just 16 people voted in Glendale’s municipal election amid the pandemic https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/21/glendale-election-coronavirus-michael-dunafon/ https://www.denverpost.com/2020/04/21/glendale-election-coro... Glendale, Colorado is the quintessential example of this. Like 2,000 people live there due to insane gerrymandering, but there are tons of businesses and money moving around. The mayor gives crazy zoning benefits to his wife (strip club and dispensary on the main road, right next to target and chikfila) among other controversy. Dunafon controls the county with the help of other powerful players.
    • ecshafer 9mo ago
      Lack of engagement in local elections and politics is a major issue in the United States, there is a huge amount of low level corruption like this because its really easy to game things when 20 people vote.
• dv_dt 9mo ago
  Protests come when people are pushed into a corner with little other choice. Participation is more prevalent when people have free time in their lives. Our economics has systematically squeezed free time out in favor of more work to most of our workforce, and particularly hard for young people. One reason so many local city policies favor the old, is that they're retired and have the time to participate
  • eigencoder 9mo ago
    I don't think economics have squeezed out free time -- phones squeeze out all our free time.
    • LunaSea 9mo ago
      Having two or three jobs is not really conductive to free time.
      • quaverquaver 9mo ago
        In the US per official data ~5% have more than one job (and that includes lawyers doing consultancy for example) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
        • LunaSea 9mo ago
          So that would mean 1 in 10 families that are affected on average. Seems like a lot.
          • veidr 9mo ago
            concerning
          • pocket 9mo ago
            Hmm… 1 in 20 individuals are affected… I get the idea being 2 adults per family, one of them affected, hence 1 in 10 families, but I think its incorrect/misleading (potentially in either direction) to say 1 in 10 families. I haven't looked at the data about how many families are single parent (which could increase the impact per family) OR how many of those 5% identified as working multiple jobs are married (I wouldn't be surprised if more of them are unmarried, since a two parent family with both working one job might be expected to not need the additional jobs).
• dfxm12 9mo ago
  5.1% were in favor of a limit on housing construction, and it passed before later being made illegal by the state. FWIW, it is a learned behavior that voting doesn't change much. It doesn't help when elected officials obviously ignore the will of the people (nationally, see polling data on legalizing, or even at least decriminalizing, marijuana, as one example), or when things just get overturned by someone else. My neighborhood "votes" on zoning, but the vote literally means nothing. The city council has to hear how we voted, but they don't have to take the vote into account. I get that it's easy to scold people that don't vote, but it is more important that people with power do something to earn our votes. Hold them accountable. They're failing us more than our neighbors who have either been taught that voting doesn't matter especially when sometimes voting laws make it harder than it should be to vote anyway.
• verisimi 9mo ago
  > most have rose tinted glasses of better economic times from the past, and want to recreate the past instead of learning from it and using it to make the future better for future residents and businesses So the voters are wrong? You know what's "better" for them, right? Whether they want it or not, right? > we need to figure out how to get young people engaged locally Because they are more in line with what you think? PS I'm being downvoted - but what is the point of local administrators, except to follow the voters demands? Sure, if you are a local politician, make your case, but local administrators ought to be doing whatever-it-is that people voted for. That's the whole point of voting, as I understand it. The point is NOT to make people keep voting until they get it right, according to the administratots. That's the wrong way around! The administrators should be enacting whatever the voters want.
  • blacksmith_tb 9mo ago
    Not the OP, but I took their implication to be that 5% of the electorate decided the direction future development would take (or not take).
  • milkytron 9mo ago
    > So the voters are wrong? You know what's "better" for them, right? Whether they want it or not, right? It doesn't really matter what I think when 5% of the population are controlling policy that impacts 100% of the population. > Because they are more in line with what you think? No, because they will be impacted for a longer period of time, and are less engaged locally.
• packetlost 9mo ago
  It's touched on in this article, but there's a lot more than just zoning that makes it impractical to operate businesses like the ones being talked about. Tax code, health code, ADA, etc. not to mention the complete lack of density in the majority of the US. As much as I'd love to have something like Matsuya in the US, it's just not practical here. I'm surprised it hasn't been talked about yet, but zoning is also a major factor in the spiraling of housing costs.
• nobodyandproud 9mo ago
  I’ll add that I don’t even know how to paricipate; or likely would if I did (inconvenient times, dates). This is no accident. Edit: I’m not young, but I didn’t grow up with any sort of privilege.
• slumberlust 9mo ago
  How do you even find out about these types of votes? Other than state/federal voting every two years, I wasn't aware there were more times to cast a vote locally.