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It's quite possible to enforce anti-growth NIMBYism without municipal zoning. Houston has no zoning, and yet is completely sprawling and full of contractually a
by mjn 14y ago
It's quite possible to enforce anti-growth NIMBYism without municipal zoning. Houston has no zoning, and yet is completely sprawling and full of contractually agreed development restrictions, which are not zoning and do not involve a government but produce the same effect.
Say you're buying a nice suburban house in Houston. It has no zoning, so you're worried your neighbors might sometime in the future replace their house with a loud bar, or a factory, or subdivide it into rental housing. An enterprising subdivision developer realizes they can get more money if they can assure you that none of these things will happen. So when they're building the subdivision, they don't just sell you the property unrestricted. Instead, they draw up a set of rules governing future use of the property, and they require anyone who buys a house in the subdivision to sign a contract agreement to be bound by them. Now they can promise you that your neighbor won't build a factory on their land, because the subdivision rules don't permit it, and your neighbor has signed a contract agreeing to the rules.
The rules you agree to typically along the lines of what you'd normally get from suburban, Palo-Alto-style zoning regulations: you agree not to subdivide the property, not to redevelop it into anything other than a 1- or 2-story single-family house, not to build a structure on the property that doesn't meet certain design and land-occupation percentage requirements, not to operate an industrial or commercial facility on the property, in some cases not to rent it to tenants, etc., etc.
In short, the market demands and produces zoning.
- cpursley 14y agoExactly! This example of private contract law is really the right way. To be fair, Houston really developed post-car + cheap land which explains the low density.
- mjn 14y agoWhat's the advantage of it? It's just a municipal government by another name, but with fewer safeguards, and a throwback "votes only for landowners" style of voting. I'd personally prefer to be regulated by a proper local government than the strange quasi-governmental abomination of an HOA. Had this been the norm last century, Palo Alto would've been developed with these kinds of restrictions, and instead of the Palo Alto city government with its NIMBYism, you'd just have the Palo Alto HOA doing the same thing. You actually see that in one part of SF currently: the least dense neighborhood in SF, Forest Hill, is the least dense in part because it was developed by one of the country's early HOAs, the Forest Hill Association, which works hard to keep it suburban and "small-town".
- jleader 14y agoWhen conditions change, and the community would be better served if some of those restrictions were changed, is it easier to change municipal zoning codes, or to change individual contracts and deed restrictions? From what I've seen, it's nearly impossible to change deed restrictions; even restrictions like "you can't sell to african-americans" stay on the books, but just become unenforceable. At least with zoning laws, it's possible (if hard) to de-clutter them.
- WildUtah 14y agoHouston claims not to have zoning, but substitutes regulations that produce the same sprawling effect as zoning that mandates sprawl. Houston uses building line setback rules, huge minimum parking requirements, street width minima, block size and platting rules, fire code regulations, and the whole panoply of laws that mandate sprawl everywhere else with the sole exception of Euclidian zoning. The result is mandatory sprawl. Market based land use would not have built Houston. It would never have created $3000 basic studio apartments in Palo Alto either. Markets aren't a panacea but what we've mandated instead is a disaster.
- taurath 14y agoWhat happens on the edges of said subdivisions? If there is open land that the subdivision owner doesn't own, someone can put in a chemical plant next to it no?
- evv 14y agoThe properties on the edge are cheaper because they are less protected by the rules of the subdivision.
- querulous 14y agovisiting the outskirts of houston is surreal. planned neighborhoods float like islands amidst prisons, industrial plants, farms and just plain undeveloped land. it's totally alien to someone like me who grew up in areas with relatively high density