I'm somewhat politically engaged in my local municipality over this issue; we're a small suburb directly adjacent to Chicago, and every viable piece of residential land was developed, overwhelmingly SFZ, decades ago.
The problem we have here seems like the solution this article proposes: any new development will, automatically, generate organized opposition from the block (and neighboring blocks) it's sited on, and the challenge is ensuring that the planning and zoning variance process makes decisions for the good of the municipality, and not just to suit the preferences of the neighbors.
I don't know how much our experience ports over to Ireland (probably not that much), but to me this is the opposite of what you'd want; rather, you'd want to do what California ostensibly does: moving control over residential zoning/planning to a level of government high enough that concentrated local interests can't derail the more important diffuse interest in getting more housing built.
Having lived in several places in Ireland and in the US, I think the dynamics are very similar. I live in Magnolia in Seattle, where the city planning meetings, Facebook groups, and NextDoor forums have many neighbors objecting to the first sign of real high density housing in the area, because they want to "preserve its character".
In Ballyfermot in Dublin, I see the very same in the groups there in response to similar developments. Ballyfermot is a well connected inner city suburb - perfect for more density - but most of the locals still seem against it. In Ireland the political party who campaign on housing and stand to benefit the most, Sinn Fein, are often objecting themselves to these projects. The fundamental dynamic is that the people who would benefit just don't live in the area yet, and their future theoretical votes don't count yet.
We have a couple of new estates going in on old farmland next to our 1970's era estate, and the outcry over the fact that building was happening was amazing. There's periodic calls to close a walkway through the wall to the next estate, because the wrong people walk through. This walkway is part of a designated quiet traffic route between parts of town. There's (finally) bike lanes going in on the main road, with initial sitework happening, and the first thing that people yelled about was that they weren't consulted. (Full public comment on that plan has been going on for 5 years. Why it takes 5 years to put a bike lane on .75km of a 50KPH road that connects 5 different schools. None of the students of those schools when the plan was proposed will be still there to take advantage of it.)
At one point last year were 5 places to rent in Meath on the biggest rental site.
We bought about 5 years back, when our rental went up for sale and we couldn't find a new rental then. Hindsight is saying it was a great move, even though prices in our estate have been pretty flat since then.
In WA SB 1110 just got approved, which would allow 4plexes in SFZ lots if the city is over 75k people, so we will see how long can things stay the same now that flood gates will open.
We need to federalize zoning just like Japan. You should be able to build anything permissible on your land - and if your neighbors aren't happy with that they should buy your land to stop it, or move. Exceptions to this policy should be meaningful enough that you need to get the federal government involved.
I think state-level zoning hits the sweet spot— the US has some wildly different climates and geography, and I do appreciate that zoning in, say, Rhode Island, Nevada, and California have distinct enough geocultural situations to have their own codes. I don’t expect federal lawmakers from Ohio to worry about the California coastline, for example.
However, I don’t see any reason why Atherton gets to have a different zoning than San Francisco, or Santa Monica/Beverly Hills an entirely different code than Los Angeles.
Theoretically, it would be amazing to have a singular state zoning board pooled from all of the resources of smaller municipal offices, with one standard application and one process.
Right now it’s crazy that Los Angeles and Beverly Hills have two completely different zoning codes with two completely different processes— so much time wasted on two different bureaucracies (and sometimes, both! If the project is big enough) based on if something is one block over or not.
State level DOTs have shown, in a way, how effective this approach can be (though rather than encouraging sprawl, we do the same for density). If we built housing anywhere as fast as we do highways, imagine how much would get built.
Sorry, no. You don't need state-level zoning, you can do it all at the national level.
Japan has a single national zoning code, and Japan also has wildly different climates and geography: snowy Hokkaido is nothing like tropical Okinawa. The zoning code is very simple, so there's no reason to make it different based on geography. Here's a nice blog posting about it:
To be clear, I would love a simple Japan-style federal zoning code.
I just don’t think that it’s politically feasible nor practical— like most everything at the federal level, including things as fundamental as the IRS tax code or debt ceiling, it would be subject to large changes every year.
“We won’t approve this tax code unless no new housing in California is allowed but also multi-family is banned in many these states” would now be a possible (even likely) debate.
At least California/Texas/whatever representatives are beholden to their own state enough that they won’t actively sabotage their constituents to gain political points. We saw this with the SALT tax repeal under Trump as a specific way to hurt populous blue states and do essentially nothing to rural red states (except Texas, which ironically was a big benefactor of that policy due to its high property taxes). Why wouldn’t federal zoning fall into the same trap?
Furthermore, from a constitutional perspective, there’s no way barring an amendment for the federal government to control how non-federally-owned land is used. The whole purpose of states is to govern matters within their borders, and the federal to govern matters which exceed any one state’s borders. Even the Federal Highway Administration, arguably the closest analog, is not in charge of building or planning highways directly— it just funds plans it approves, but it doesn’t dictate what those plans are, instead leaving it up to the states to grapple with routes and ROW.
> To be clear, I would love a simple Japan-style federal zoning code.
Japan doesn't really have a "federal zoning code", because Japan isn't a federation, it is a unitary state. Japan's prefectures aren't states. In a federal system, such as the Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Germany, Mexico, Switzerland or the US, the constitution grants certain powers to the federal government and the states generally retain the rest. By contrast, in a unitary system, the national government retains all power, but may choose to delegate certain powers to subnational divisions, such as Japan's prefectures. Japan's prefectures are delegated responsibility for certain functions. They don't have general powers of legislation, only the power to make subsidiary laws on certain specific topics where national law grants them that authority. Japan's prefectures are actually just the first tier of Japan's two tiers of local government. There is a proposal to convert Japan into a proper federation (Dōshūsei, 道州制), by creating states/provinces as a new level of government in between the prefectures and national government (except for the prefecture of Hokkaido, which would become a state/province). However, although there is somewhat of a consensus in Japanese politics in support of this idea in principle, in practice not much progress has been made–I believe in part due to disagreements over exactly how many states/provinces to create, what should be their boundaries, and exactly what powers they should have.
The distribution of powers between the state and federal levels is different in every federation. For example, in Canada, Germany and India, enacting criminal law is a federal responsibility, and states lack the power to make their own criminal law, but they still play a major role in its enforcement; by contrast, in Australia and the US, every state has its own criminal law, with state and federal criminal law working in parallel. So there is no reason why, even in a federal system, you couldn't give the federal government powers over zoning. In practice, however, I'm not aware of any country in which that has happened. In most federal systems, zoning law is a state or local responsibility, and a constitutional amendment could be required to transfer that power to the federal level.
In Australia, there is a process called referral by which states can voluntarily transfer certain powers to the federal level, without requiring a constitutional amendment. In principle, Australia could adopt a federal zoning law, without changing the constitution, if every state passed a law referring that authority to the federal level. A state can unilaterally take back the power at any time by repealing its referral law. Never been used for zoning, and I doubt it ever would be, but it has been used in some areas of law – for example, it was used to establish Australia's uniform national corporations law. However, I don't know if that would work in the US, since while Australia's constitution explicitly says you can do this, the US constitution doesn't. Even were the Supreme Court to rule that "states can voluntarily delegate powers to Congress even without an explicit constitutional provision to authorise it", it is a lot easier to get every state to agree on something when you only have 6 as opposed to 50.
Another option would be a uniform law, instead of a federal law – in which every state voluntarily chooses to enact the same law. A famous example in the US is the Uniform Commercial Code. No reason in theory why you couldn't have a Uniform Zoning Code to go with it, but I doubt you'd ever get all 50 states to agree on its contents. Consensus is much easier in commercial law because it is the kind of dry legal area in which few people really care about the details, and few people would be impacted by different options as to what those details are
Nit-pick: Japan does not have "federalized zoning", or federalized anything. Japan does not have a federal government; nor, does Ireland, nor most other countries in the world. This is an Americanism (though it applies to Germany too). In most countries, which have unitary governments, the top-most level of government is the "national government", so what you want is "nationalized zoning".
Anyway, yes, Japan's nationalized zoning is great. We're not having the ridiculous housing problems I keep reading about in western nations. However, it does have its detractors, like westerners vising Japan and then whining about how all the buildings look so different from each other and there's no "character". If you want historically-preserved neighborhoods, or neighborhoods where all the buildings have the same theme and architectural style, you won't find it in most of Japan.
What about historic districts? I noticed some unified styles around Asakusa (noticed while walking home drunk from Uueno, lively red lanterns everywhere and no high rises, just row homes), and definitely in Kyoto’s old town. I’m guessing this is mostly for the tourists, however.
You're not going to find a huge high-rise right next to a bunch of row homes; there's rules against that. High-rises have to have a certain amount of space around them anyway, but also there's rules about how much you're allowed to block your neighbors' sunlight. Basically, making taller buildings is allowed, but they can only be so much taller than the surrounding buildings. Over time, this means things could get very tall, but not quickly.
As for unified styles, there's no laws about that AFAIK. They're probably just like that because the landowners want it that way. Lots of stuff in Japan is done (or not done) without any formal laws or rules, but rather because of social pressure and consensus. It's possible that some very unique or culturally-important districts do have certain rules though, which is why I wrote "... in most of Japan".
Yes, so long as this appeal to a higher authority is about preventing localities from passing legislation that makes it impossible for residents to engage in ordinary economic activity and not instead about central planning by other means.
We've made it impossible to build housing for about 70 years. Let's stop doing that for a while and see what happens.
For people taking on this problem, these two groups are great resources that can give you a big boost in terms of learning how to do this kind of advocacy:
And: it's great and very rewarding. Housing, and how we build our cities, is so central to so many things. The economy, the environment, homelessness of course, and our health.
It's also something where there's been a lot of fairly rapid progress. The state of Washington just passed their 'middle housing' bill, following in the footsteps of Oregon, California and also Montana. The last one hints at an important aspect of the politics: everyone needs a place to live, whether their politics are 'red' or 'blue'.
In Australia I'm observing a trend where state governments are continually removing powers from local councils to approve or deny applications as those councils have proven to be completely dysfunctional and work against the interests of the general population
Doesn't moving the control to a higher level mean the rich-and-well-connected-at-state-level people get to have their way and the "little guy" is powerless? At least with a local system there is local accountability - the local politicians pushing something locally unwanted will probably not get re-elected. With state governments, it is doubtful that the exact placement of a development in a neighborhood will become an issue relevant to their re-election.
One serious way to think about this problem is that every hyper-local decision making body is corrupt, but states are only some of the time. There's no level at which you can make collective action decisions where there's no significant risk of corruption, but the narrower you go, the more natural and unavoidable the conflicts of interest become.
The problem we have here seems like the solution this article proposes: any new development will, automatically, generate organized opposition from the block (and neighboring blocks) it's sited on, and the challenge is ensuring that the planning and zoning variance process makes decisions for the good of the municipality, and not just to suit the preferences of the neighbors.
I don't know how much our experience ports over to Ireland (probably not that much), but to me this is the opposite of what you'd want; rather, you'd want to do what California ostensibly does: moving control over residential zoning/planning to a level of government high enough that concentrated local interests can't derail the more important diffuse interest in getting more housing built.