4 ms·

The entire premise of government (at each level of granularity: federal, state, local, housing association) is that society must determine what is acceptable be

by beambot 11y ago

The entire premise of government (at each level of granularity: federal, state, local, housing association) is that society must determine what is acceptable behavior and what is not. E.g., You cannot dump toxic waste on your land. You enter into an implicit (or explicit) contracts with your HOA or local government when it comes to zoning, and this introduces restrictions -- it's not NIMBY (necessarily), since you knowingly agreed to the restrictions when you purchased. This is why {Walmart, Airports, etc} cannot just be built willy-nilly in residential neighborhoods.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
> The entire premise of government (at each level of granularity: federal, state, local, housing association) is that society must determine what is acceptable behavior and what is not. E.g., You cannot dump toxic waste on your land. Not disputing that; however, it makes far more sense to regulate things that actually affect neighbors (noise, dumping, etc) rather than proxies for those (long-term versus short-term residency). It shouldn't matter whether the residents are short-term or long-term, as long as they're held to the same standard. > You enter into an implicit (or explicit) contracts with your HOA or local government when it comes to zoning, and this introduces restrictions -- it's not NIMBY (necessarily), since you knowingly agreed to the restrictions when you purchased. It's NIMBY when those restrictions are arbitrary (in particular when they restrict things that don't actually affect neighbors, other than their sense of moral outrage) and changeable in ways that affect existing residents who haven't agreed and only bought into the old restrictions.
- ghaff 11y ago
  The problem is that those things that actually affect neighbors are mostly things that have to be remediated after the fact assuming that they can be--and, perhaps, on multiple occasions. So it's not unreasonable to put in place pre-emptive rules that reduce the chance of those things happening in the first place.
- rnovak 11y ago
  If someone who is renting nightly is noisy, what happens? They might get fined, told not to come back. What happens when the next nightly renter is noisy? That person gets fined/told not to come back. The punishment for one tenant acting poorly does not affect any other tenant, and so there is no global motivation to reduce bad behavior. Whereas with a long-term tenant, it gets expensive/prohibitive really quickly to behave badly. Isn't that genuinely what we want?
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Fine the property owner, and increase the fine for repeat offenses.
    - rnovak 11y ago
      That will not affect the behavior of bad tenants. I'll give a simple example. my aunt owns a house here in AZ, and one out in NY. Lives in each for 6 months out of the year (ish). When she's not there, she rents them out. About a year ago, Verizon sent her DMCA takedown notices, and started their "warning" system (i.e. the step program or whatever it's called). I told her about the safe harbor protections, and she spoke to the tenant several times. Literally, the only thing that stopped the tenant from torrenting was installing OpenWRT on the router and setting up the nftables/iptables to block udp traffic (only after talking to the tenant 8 times). The only thing that can prevent some people from behaving badly is the absence of a chance to do so. Zoning is already a solution to this problem, why do we need to solve it again? Only places zoned for business/tenancy should be acceptable places to rent.
- geebee 11y ago
  "it makes far more sense to regulate things that actually affect neighbors (noise, dumping, etc) rather than proxies for those (long-term versus short-term residency)" Here's the thing, even this is an area where people will reasonably disagree. For instance, suppose you have a couple of kids, and they build friendships with the other kids around your neighborhood. Let's say that a family with a couple of kids gets outbid on the house next to you, because the new buyer can price in the profits of putting 3 bedrooms full time on airbnb, whereas the family would be filling them with two extremely expensive young children. In this case, airbnb could end up turning a substantial amount of the SFH housing stock into hotels. Kids are just one example of the ways people may wish to live in a neighborhood. Obviously, kids are not the only reason people might wish to get to know their neighbors and form longer relationships with them. So these people would like to trade their right to put their house or apartment on airbnb in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't do this either. Other people won't, which is why I support zoning laws that regulate tenancy length, but would prefer to see them kept as local as is practically possible. What I firmly believe is that these zoning laws are reasonable[1] in some areas, and that people should not break the law and impose a hotel on a neighborhood that has democratically chosen to live under this kind of zoning regulation. [1] There are clearly unreasonable neighborhood regulations that are not up to majority vote, and history is full of them.

by beambot 11y ago

JoshTriplett 11y ago

> The entire premise of government (at each level of granularity: federal, state, local, housing association) is that society must determine what is acceptable behavior and what is not. E.g., You cannot dump toxic waste on your land. Not disputing that; however, it makes far more sense to regulate things that actually affect neighbors (noise, dumping, etc) rather than proxies for those (long-term versus short-term residency). It shouldn't matter whether the residents are short-term or long-term, as long as they're held to the same standard. > You enter into an implicit (or explicit) contracts with your HOA or local government when it comes to zoning, and this introduces restrictions -- it's not NIMBY (necessarily), since you knowingly agreed to the restrictions when you purchased. It's NIMBY when those restrictions are arbitrary (in particular when they restrict things that don't actually affect neighbors, other than their sense of moral outrage) and changeable in ways that affect existing residents who haven't agreed and only bought into the old restrictions.

ghaff 11y ago
The problem is that those things that actually affect neighbors are mostly things that have to be remediated after the fact assuming that they can be--and, perhaps, on multiple occasions. So it's not unreasonable to put in place pre-emptive rules that reduce the chance of those things happening in the first place.
rnovak 11y ago
If someone who is renting nightly is noisy, what happens? They might get fined, told not to come back. What happens when the next nightly renter is noisy? That person gets fined/told not to come back. The punishment for one tenant acting poorly does not affect any other tenant, and so there is no global motivation to reduce bad behavior. Whereas with a long-term tenant, it gets expensive/prohibitive really quickly to behave badly. Isn't that genuinely what we want?
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Fine the property owner, and increase the fine for repeat offenses.
  - rnovak 11y ago
    That will not affect the behavior of bad tenants. I'll give a simple example. my aunt owns a house here in AZ, and one out in NY. Lives in each for 6 months out of the year (ish). When she's not there, she rents them out. About a year ago, Verizon sent her DMCA takedown notices, and started their "warning" system (i.e. the step program or whatever it's called). I told her about the safe harbor protections, and she spoke to the tenant several times. Literally, the only thing that stopped the tenant from torrenting was installing OpenWRT on the router and setting up the nftables/iptables to block udp traffic (only after talking to the tenant 8 times). The only thing that can prevent some people from behaving badly is the absence of a chance to do so. Zoning is already a solution to this problem, why do we need to solve it again? Only places zoned for business/tenancy should be acceptable places to rent.
geebee 11y ago
"it makes far more sense to regulate things that actually affect neighbors (noise, dumping, etc) rather than proxies for those (long-term versus short-term residency)" Here's the thing, even this is an area where people will reasonably disagree. For instance, suppose you have a couple of kids, and they build friendships with the other kids around your neighborhood. Let's say that a family with a couple of kids gets outbid on the house next to you, because the new buyer can price in the profits of putting 3 bedrooms full time on airbnb, whereas the family would be filling them with two extremely expensive young children. In this case, airbnb could end up turning a substantial amount of the SFH housing stock into hotels. Kids are just one example of the ways people may wish to live in a neighborhood. Obviously, kids are not the only reason people might wish to get to know their neighbors and form longer relationships with them. So these people would like to trade their right to put their house or apartment on airbnb in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't do this either. Other people won't, which is why I support zoning laws that regulate tenancy length, but would prefer to see them kept as local as is practically possible. What I firmly believe is that these zoning laws are reasonable[1] in some areas, and that people should not break the law and impose a hotel on a neighborhood that has democratically chosen to live under this kind of zoning regulation. [1] There are clearly unreasonable neighborhood regulations that are not up to majority vote, and history is full of them.