There's a great book called "City of Darkness" about it - a lot of what we believe about it was a campaign funded by the Hong Kong government to turn public opinion about it negative because they wanted the land back from China.
Most of the reason there were any problems there at all was that there was no legal jurisdiction over it, there are still buildings in Hong Kong that have nearly that density with none of the legal issues.
There was no zoning, no fire safety inspections, no fire safety, haphazard infrastructure, lack of water to drink and clean with, etc…it was basically an unregulated slum (which you can still find in many countries).
Hong Kong has density sure. But no one would call it cheap density.
Should people also be allowed to move into neighborhoods that are zoned as suburban (not so much in SF as in nearby areas), and have them remain that way?
I get the libertarian impulse to let people do what they want with their property, but it seems like part of that freedom should be the right to move into areas where there are zoning restrictions.
Zoning should always have been unconstitutional, and the court case enabling it proved that.
The Supreme Court upheld it a hundred years ago, in 1926, after batting down previous efforts by the same people to explicitly ban black people from neighborhoods. They realized that since black families couldn't afford houses by themselves (they needed to buy houses with two or three families together), they could get around it with single family zoning. Ever wondered why it isn't called "house" zoning? Because it was segregation.
The appellate court in the case threw out zoning, because it was so obvious that it was about race. The Supreme Court overturned it by ignoring the entire appellate court decision and defining a building itself (apartments) as a nuisance, instead of making the petitioners regulate actual behaviors. Because the behaviors weren't the problem, it was the black people they didn't want.
Sorry - this riles me up. :)
You should absolutely not be able to have a say over how much housing your neighbor builds. Sure, if they make noise, or bad smells, or bright lights, THAT you should be able to regulate. But the outcomes of having a say over how much housing your neighbor can build is the strongest root of a whole host of issues - from CO2 to obesity to high commute times and traffic to municipal budget bloat. It causes sprawl. Increasingly, parts of the left and right are starting to realize we need to overturn it.
Zoning and land use code in New Zealand is one of the better examples of structural racism.
In housing law in the United States, we've figured out that because people often use feelings rather than clear statements for their reasoning, we had to pay attention to disparate impact, rather than discriminatory intent.
What you'll find is that in nearly every country, zoning and similar laws originate in or were dramatically expanded to exclude wealth generation by minority groups.
My context is discriminatory urban zoning (à la exclusionary zoning or redlining in the US).
I am not sure there are any examples of that for urban zoning in New Zealand. Please enlighten me if you know better.
I agree there is plenty of history of terrible treatment of maori and their land in NZ, but that is a different topic and not relevant. I admit I am ignorant about the history of urban planning in NZ.
What part of the Constitution is violated by zoning laws?
I have heard of laws that prevent the construction of structures that shade other properties (skyscrapers) or block views of the ocean. If those are apparently legal, why not a law that says you can't build a big apartment complex that would greatly increase traffic, for example?
See the Village of Euclid v Ambler Realty case, which is what I'm referencing in my long comment. A federal appeals court found that those restrictions were racially motivated and cause racial segregation, which is unconstitutional (and we've studied this to death since to confirm it). The Supreme Court, nine white guys... ignored that finding when overturning the appellate court decision.
> The Supreme Court, nine white guys... ignored that finding when overturning the appellate court decision.
Higher courts are allowed to overturn lower courts. That's kind of the whole point of the hierarchy.
But regardless, that case was from 100 years ago. Are you saying that the reason people enact zoning laws now is the same? I love living in a suburb and would be equally displeased whether my neighborhood turned into apt complexes, regardless of the complexion of the residents.
Of course you would. That's why it sticks around, because you get regulatory capture. It's the same reason we don't let a CEO write the rules for regulating their own company's competition. That's another more modern reason why it is unconstitutional, it just hasn't been challenged.
Perhaps I have a different understanding of "regulatory capture" than you do. To me, it means that the regulators are captured by the entities they are supposed to be regulating. It often happens when the main job prospects for people in an industry are either as regulators or in industry. If an oil company offers jobs to policy maker whose boss gets voted out of Congress, they can "capture" the regulators, who won't want to kill their golden ticket.
I'm unclear how this applies to zoning rules voted on by the people who live in an area. There is not an intermediary "zoning regulator" who is capturing anyone. Similarly, there is not a constituency that is being "captured" inappropriately. It is literally just a group of people deciding how they want to live.
If this is regulatory capture, then so is having laws against automatic weapons and speeding.
The harms potentially caused by shooting someone or hitting them with your car at high speed are not the same as someone building something next to you that you find aesthetically displeasing. Can I ask you to step back and think about the fact that you just made that comparison?
You seem to be projecting racism without evidence. I specifically mentioned increased traffic from the construction of apartment complexes in a suburban neighborhood. Surely we can all agree that traffic is a reasonable concern? Other similar concerns would include overburdening schools (in at least the short run, before more can be built) and electrical grids (in areas with brownouts/blackouts).
I don't know why you think that the only reason someone might want their suburban neighborhood to stay suburban is the color of their neighbors' skin; perhaps that says more about you than anything else.
Racist outcomes do not require intent. That's why the Fair Housing Act was written to make discriminatory outcomes illegal, not just intent. And no, I don't think you're racist at all, but the outcomes of the policies you want to keep are racist.
If you're open to some books about this, or study work, I'd be happy to cite. Are you open to changing your mind?
You seem to use the word racist in a different way than I do. What I have learned is that an action can only be racist if there was a race-based intent. It cannot be racist if there was not a race-based intent. For example, if a blind person was unaware that his colleague was Asian, and he hurt the colleague's feelings by referring to his hard work ethic, that is not (to my understanding) a racist remark.
Similarly, a policy is not a racist policy if it disproportionately affects people of one race or another. If that were the case, any policy that increased the share of taxes paid by the poor, or the rich, would be racist (against black people or Indian people). But I believe that any change in tax rates is not intrinsically racist, which is what an outcome/correlation-based definition would require.
You're free to share links, but TBH I think we're speaking different languages here. You've also not answered my point about regulatory capture, which you seem to define in a novel way.
Hm, I don't think I "have to learn the language [you're] using". I am familiar with CRS folks who use terms that way, just as I am familiar with the majority of people who use the terms the way I use them.
If you have any relevant documents, feel free to share. The one you shared does not seem to back your definition of racist/racism, let alone provide reasoning for why your preferred definition is superior to the one I use.
For the record, I find mine to be more apt because I find it useful to distinguish between policies that have disparate impact by race/age/wealth/sex/etc., rather than lumping such policies in with those that seek to discriminate against people based on their race/age/wealth/sex/etc. If we call all of those policies "racist" or "sexist" or whatever-ist, then we have to come up a new term like "intentionally racist" to describe the subset of policies where intent is present.
I generally prefer not to have to make up new terms if we have words that already (for many people) have that meaning. But hey, some people just love doing the euphemism treadmill and its equivalents, as here.
I don't know how to help you. I think you have deep misunderstandings here, and I've seen you say you don't want information about it... so you're kind of stuck. Why did you even respond if you didn't want to learn anything?
Ghost editing the comment, nice. OK well again I think the issue is that you don't like answering questions or defending your position in straightforward ways. Instead you point me to a PDF that does not appear to support your prior reply, and you don't say what exactly your goal was. You also (arrogantly) portray your interlocutors as needing to be educated so they can reach your level of understanding.
I assure you, I am very well-versed on the legal issues regarding disparate impact, race, and sex. I went into this conversation looking to understand what your perspective and motivations are, but little has been provided. I know when to cut my losses though, so I wish you good day.
Perhaps thinking that you need to help me is the main issue? If you wanted to be a courteous member of the community, you could try actually answering some of the questions I raised, or defending your position with logic or evidence. Just a thought!
Growth has to happen in the long run. We have the same zoning as we did before the people looking for housing were born.
We can have incremental changes, or we can have sudden change. It's going to happen predictably or with a ton of political conflict. The better solution is always to allow a self-reinforcing pressure release on housing. I've long said that everyone should be allow, by right, to expand their housing by 2x the median building unit within a half mile radius, by units, sqft, and height.
Suburban neighborhoods then slowly turn into duplexes over one generation, then row houses over another, then finally start building up after a third generation. Predictable, fair, and sustainable.
If you make it slow, you cause the same issues - and then the neighborhood just says "well if it's FOUR generations that's not too bad, is it?" And because the people who don't get to move in later don't get a say... it gets worse forever.
It's insidious, but as long as you allow people to regulate how much housing their neighbors can produce, it always gets this bad eventually.
It’s self reinforcing. When demand is highest, building will be highest, and median unit size will increase more rapidly, allowing more building, allowing more units.
The pace is limited, but the URBAN output increases exponentially, which is exactly what we want.
I wish it worked that way, but from my nearly 20 years of urban land use policy study and writing, I have seen tons of evidence that it does not.
The problem is that the most in demand areas get new buildings at 4-6 stories, and then you get locked up - the airspace above them becomes unavailable for 50-100 years, when there was market demand for some taller buildings from the beginning. It's the same "push down and spread out" that causes sprawl, just more localized.
It takes an awful lot of incentives to knock down a "usable" structure. I'd love to build higher-density right here, right on my lot, but unless I squeeze something in on the same lot, I'm out $150k just to start. $150k covers quite a bit of gas to the lot 2 miles away that's empty.
> It takes an awful lot of incentives to knock down a "usable" structure.
Yes, that’s the point. The policy only really changes things when prices become extreme, and the cost per unit of housing becomes completely detached from the cost of building that same unit.
This is trivially happening in much of San Francisco and New York City.
Japan is shrinking. Tokyo, however, is growing. It would not be good news if our cities had a glut of housing. We have three billion people of rural->urban shift we still need to do.
Localized growth has nothing to do with total population.
These urban housing crises in every major western country have nothing to do with population growth and everything to do with population concentration.
We should expect this problem to accelerate during periods of population decline, because there will be even stronger economic incentives to move into concentrated population centers.
