4 ms·

It's a bit sad that you have to explain this to grown up people.

• atwebb 13y ago
  I'm not sure that residential/commercial zoning laws in US states falls under the umbrella of general knowledge.
  • _pmf_ 13y ago
    There's nothing US specific about zoning laws. They most probably preceded the founding of your silly colony.
    • Symmetry 13y ago
      The first modern zoning was in 1916 in New York for height related reasons. Great Britain didn't start zoning until 1947. EDIT: I was sort of surprised that was the first zoning, when I just looked it up. I always mentally associated zoning with 1920s progressive social engineering.
      • wavefunction 13y ago
        HAHA, take that ole Blighty! But really, the whole idea that AirBNB should be able to ignore established zoning is another example of why I consider the "sharing" economy to be the "taking" economy. Sharing space peacefully is exactly what zoning is aimed at.
        • mahyarm 13y ago
          Zoning is still a contested topic, it has been blamed for enabling much of the NIMBYism in America for example. Another one is creating huge traffic and commuting situations that don't need to be there by putting business in one zone, housing in another and forcing people to move between the two every day. It makes such things as shopkeeper residences where the shop is on the first floor and the family who manages it lives on the second or third floors significantly more work.
          • wavefunction 13y ago
            My bustling city (one of those "top US cities to move to that isn't the Bay Area or NYC") has tons of first-floor commercial, second floor residential developments, including a fair number of "row houses" zoned commercial first floor residential second and third floors where both the commercial space and residential areas are owned by the same owner. There's a huge push to build high density in this city that was formerly pretty much all low-density ten years ago. These are all new builds in the past 8 years.
      • jacalata 13y ago
        Not true. Paris had zoning laws (including building height restrictions and business location restrictions) since before Haussman, in the early 1800s[0]. New York passed the first US laws, as far as I can tell from a quick search (although I do see vague references to San Francisco using zoning laws against the Chinese in the 1880s, and a lot of people, including Wikipedia, quoting a more limited achievement of 'the first comprehensive/city-wide zoning laws' for New York), but Europe definitely predated them. I believe Germany and some other countries also had them, besides France. [0]: http://books.google.com/books?id=dONVGtJzxrwC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=The+decree+of+26+March+1852&source=bl&ots=mtfyfzosLr&sig=j1cu4n1UQN4XaaYNR7uYKDHF0Zs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LzV0UqWrBoj-igKLiIFo&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20decree%20of%2026%20March%201852&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=dONVGtJzxrwC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA...
      • chmullig 13y ago
        NYC had numerous building codes and restrictions previously, including the 1867 Tenement Law, and the famous 1901 new tenement law.
• flycaliguy 13y ago
  Buddy just asked a question that solicited an informative answer for all of us to read. Not sad.
  • ubernostrum 13y ago
    The general "sad" for me is that HN has so many strong libertarian types who start from an assumption that government regulation is practically always wrong and done for corrupt purposes. Learning that this is not the case is a lesson one could easily pick up much earlier in life, so it's sad that they made it this far without understanding that.
    • _delirium 13y ago
      I put it down to the poor state of our mathematical education. The naive understanding of economic systems libertarians display is actually fairly similar to what you see in introductory dynamical-systems courses. You can, with great care, construct some "well-behaved" systems where you present a set of rules, and the expected thing happens: you push lever X and Y happens. Raise the minimum wage and unemployment rises! But of course, most systems are not so well-behaved, so that is only a lead-in to the real examples, where you change the setup slightly and suddenly analysis grows more complex. Now what happens when you push lever X depends on what region of the state-space you're in! And sometimes pushing lever X can change the region of the state-space you're in, too! There is feedback and internal dynamics. I see very little libertarian economics that displays even a 101-level understanding of any of that.
      • lambdaphage 13y ago
        If you keep treating your intellectual opponents like this, you're going to get trounced the next time you run into a smart one. To be very brief, you seem to think that libertarians believe, roughly, (1) "the world is simple, so we should have simple rules." Instead, you suggest: (2) "the world is complicated, so we should have complicated rules." But this claim is entirely unresponsive to: (3) "the world is complicated, so we should have simple rules." which is what most libertarians I know actually think. If you respond to (1) when your opponents are arguing for (3), you will not have productive conversations.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• umsm 13y ago
  These people are investors. Investors usually look solely at the money instead of the effects or consequences.