Zoning Rules!
"Zoning has for a century enabled cities to chart their own course. It is a useful and popular institution, enabling homeowners to protect their main investment and provide safe neighborhoods. As home values have soared in recent years, however, this protection has accelerated to the degree that new housing development has become unreasonably difficult and costly. The widespread Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome is driven by voters’ excessive concern about their home values and creates barriers to growth that reach beyond individual communities. The barriers contribute to suburban sprawl, entrench income and racial segregation, retard regional immigration to the most productive cities, add to national wealth inequality, and slow the growth of the American economy. Some state, federal, and judicial interventions to control local zoning have done more harm than good. More effective approaches would moderate voters’ demand for local-land use regulation—by, for example, curtailing federal tax subsidies to owner-occupied housing"--Publisher's description.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
16mentions
6people
2016–2024years
56% recommend44% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies
Perhaps that should change. Or at least it’s a reason to scrutinize and repeal laws that are used for price fixing.
> Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?
Zoning Rules! by William Fischel gives good a history of zoning. Zoning was originally for segregation within the city but to the question of prices, no it was not inherently problematic. It was not until the 1970s that zoning was used for growth control to make entire cities unaffordable.
- Why do we have clearly divided zoned areas for work and residential again? What era did that start?
If you really, really want to know: https://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulatio...
- Foreign cash investment in real estate is a major cause of high rental prices. But the data on this and investment companies like Blackstone Group is spotty and difficult to follow [3], on purpose.
That's not true. Zoning is the big problem: https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B... or see Zoning Rules! by Fischel.
Blackstone's investments only make sense because of artificial supply limits. Remove those, and their whole strategy is destroyed. The situation really is primarily about supply and demand.
- Tokyo: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c....
Houston and Dallas: http://time.com/80005/why-texas-is-our-future/ or, somewhat less usefully, http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/31/why-is-aus....
The big problem is zoning: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r... as it was implemented in the '70s: http://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulation...
By the way, there is much heat in discussions about housing prices and urban development, but very little light and much misunderstanding. A good rule of thumb is simple: If you don't see any reliable sources being cited, there's a good chance that the assertions aren't true or don't encapsulate the most important parts of the supply-demand picture.
- I think you're mistaking SF and Hong Kong for being more similar than they are.
Hong Kong has about 7.2 million people in about 107 mi² of developable land[0]. In comparison, San Francisco has about 840,000 people in 47 mi² of land.
Additionally, San Francisco is just one piece of its urban area. There is a large amount of developed land outside of it that people can live in who can't afford the city proper. Hong Kong is much more self-contained, geographically and politically.
Furthermore, there is a vast amount of research showing that zoning laws hold tremendous (and quite possibly primary) impact over prices. To start, you might be interested in the book Zoning Rules! by William A. Fischel.
Excuse me for saying so, I can't help but think you made this comment with virtually no knowledge around zoning and urban development in general, and I don't want people to be misled.
[0] http://www.pland.gov.hk/pland_en/info_serv/statistic/landu.h...
- I'm not a 'markets solve all problems' guy. There are plenty of good regulations and plenty of places where markets don't seem to work. I'd be happy to tell you about how single payer health care works in Italy - better than the mess we have here in the US.
That said, I think housing and cities are overregulated in the US.
Those op-eds point out a lot of issues that you can study further and find that mostly, the cause is zoning and regulation of housing/land use. They also cite other sources.
Here's a book, talking just about parking:
http://amzn.to/2jvfxpJ - Donald Shoup's "The High Cost of Free Parking".
Here are some books about zoning and regulation:
Ryan Avent's "The Gated City": http://amzn.to/2jv3dpk
Bill Fischel's Zoning Rules!: http://amzn.to/2j62fTw - dry and very, very thorough.
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