As an architect trying to build density, I constantly think about the mindset one has to be in in order to do the work, knowing that there will be opposition to it no matter what. Accepting it as part of the process is an important first step has been a key realization.
I completely agree with this assessment, and in fact gave a presentation on a similar idea a couple of months ago. I even explicitly call out using an LVT to judge underutilization in restricted areas.
The fundamental difference between my concept and yours, though, is my mechanism for neighbors to regulate land use. I think it should happen under more generalized institutional bodies, which I’m calling “Neighborhood Councils”. Residents can incorporate and give powers to one of these bodies in their neighborhood. The benefit of this, I think, is that it provides a greater platform to socialize and build community, with a built in incentive to meet through impactful neighborhood business. It also helps confer status to more ordinary people, particularly small business owners, which I think is critical in helping quell the unrest in modern society.
I haven’t completely decided the mechanism of land use regulation these Councils should possess, but making it temporary is a valuable idea I hadn’t considered before.
If you’re interested, here’s the full presentation I gave with more of my thoughts on this, and I’m going to soon start an essay series exploring this idea in depth: https://youtu.be/ebAxARgVybs
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It hadn't come up on my research into existing neighborhood orgs yet, but that's likely because of its purely advisory role. The scale of each organization is about what I am imaging though, but I'm of the opinion that, similar to your proposal, these should not be districted by the government, but based on what communities residents feel they are a part of (with geographical cohesion achieved through some sort of majoritarian consensus).
To respond narrowly, a big point of the idea I'm proposing is that council chartering is an optional activity, with the powers and decision-making processes outlined in that charter being highly flexible. So, ideally, people who prefer a similar style of neighborhood governance can congregate together and help build their preferred hyperlocal lifestyle, whether that be a very strong and active council or a non-existent one.
But, more broadly, if someone is too introverted to go, meet their neighbors, and give voice to their interests, then there is not much anyone can do to help them. Effectively living in a democracy means participating in it. You can't shirk civic responsibility and still expect things to go your way.
This is why I reject the fundamental assumption that democracy should trump liberty. My ideal is that with property rights sufficiently well-defined and ironclad, there is no need to "participate in a democracy"; all simply do as they please, with no collective decisions required. In cases of legitimate negative externality that physically intrudes onto others' property (noise and fumes, basically), courts would order compensation for the violations.
My point is not that introverts would be unable to go, but that they would find the experience less pleasant than extroverts do, and having to spend time in such a council advocating for what they should be allowed to do anyway is an unpleasant waste of time for them.
And I actually agree with you on that basic point: there should not be a need to participate in it. But different people want to live in different kinds of communities, and at the scale of a city you can accommodate a lot of different lifestyles. So some self-select to live in a strong council neighborhood which is empowered with finer-grained control over the residents' lives. And some self-select to live in a no-council neighborhood which fulfills the ideal you laid out: everyone can do their own thing with their own property, with only extremely limited citywide pollution regulations.
Importantly to your concern, though, in this scheme ironclad property rights are assumed. It is the decision of each property owner to temporarily cede some of those rights to the council (with, again, a majoritarian consensus mechanism to ensure it actually gets done). And if they come to not like how their neighborhood is being run, or the property rights that they have ceded, they are empowered at that small-scale to fight it at the council-level or simply vote with their feet and leave.
Furthermore, as it stands we don't live in a strong property rights regime. The YIMBY movement is trying to fight that, and doing an admirable job at it, but history has shown there will always be people who fight for keeping their place the same by exerting their will on others. And up to this point we have let them do it at the city level, which has led to the slow decline of our cities and country. And even if we succeed in getting the land regs in the right spot to deal with our current housing crisis, it maintains the same regime, and we'll have to do the whole thing over again when the next crisis comes around. I would rather strengthen property rights again by appeasing the NIMBYs, and then let the system consistently respond to market forces so that we are always building the supply of residential and commercial real estate that we need.
I think we basically agree, then. I'm just wary of systems that implicitly favor the people most willing to spend time arguing, because this leads to arms races and is unfair to people who don't have that time or dislike the process. Wikipedia and the current public comment process are the obvious examples.
And empowering the ones that want to argue or fight is indeed something we should not be looking to do. But I suspect that bringing responsibility of (most) land-use decisions, service delivery, and public space management down to the neighborhood level will decrease the power of the natural shouters.
In our current system yelling at city officials in town halls is the encouraged way of getting what you want. This is because those outside a neighborhood don't have enough familiarity with it to recognize or be able to effectively argue that the people showing up to these meetings don't represent that neighborhood in any meaningful way. When the people making the decisions are at the neighborhood level though--and when its up to them to actually execute on getting what they want/need--then it would seem that the people that want to argue and hold up productive business will quickly be recognized and disregarded as real contributors to governance.
You wrote “As we pursue progress in a democracy we have to work with people who want things we don’t want. If our proposals require us to overcome what other people want, to force them to accept our preferences instead of their preferences, we have a much, much harder road ahead of us, especially when they have the status quo on their side.”
I really, really think you would get much further limiting the geographical scope, rather than pursuing statewide de-regulation of zoning. Geographically, the large majority of land in almost all states is relatively lightly regulated agricultural or wilderness land, and in most states, they have limited political power because agricultural land is not dense. The problem you are addressing is essentially for people who live in or work in urban areas, not insufficient dense growth in far flung small communities.
Those non urban areas have been growing faster, not slower, than cities. They have very little flexibility in their budgets. They generally do not have elasticity in their infrastructure and growth is typically hard limited by lack of public water, public sewer, roads, etc. Removing all local control and expecting urban planners to know how best to regulate agricultural use is pretty horrifying.
Many people care about having gardens, dogs, and horses. They like having a big kitchen garden. They are not going to want to live in an Amsterdam clone no matter how charming it is.
Thanks, Lisa. For what it’s worth, I agree, and I think your argument rhymes with what I’m trying to say in this post. One-size-fits-all doesn’t usually work very well and in large cities that’s part of why things have ended up in a bad status quo.
I think your comment is also referencing a note I posted the other day. FWIW I’m not advocating for state preemption, I’m generally skeptical of state preemption. But then I have the case of states removing parking requirements at the state level, which I think is a great outcome with no real downside. So I’m wrestling with, can I come up with a coherent “first principles” rationale for when I would and when I would not support state preemption? And where I think I’m leaning right now, is that if the state action is defining the limits of government power, that seems appropriate. In fact that’s something that can only really happen at the state level. But if the idea is to replace local control with state control, then I’m very skeptical, because I agree with you that moving the authority from the community to the state has a lot of downside.
Separately from that, I personally am skeptical of zoning as practiced today, and would rather see our cities take a different approach to development regulation. But I’m not advocating for just moving where today’s zoning system is administrated - I don’t think moving a bad system would solve much and I see a lot of downside risk.
Thanks for your comment, and for giving me a chance to unpack that a little bit.
Removing all so-called local control makes control as local as it can possibly be: that of the individual property owner deciding what to do with his own land. Markets know better than government how best to use land, regardless of whether the government is that of the state or a rural county.
Not necessarily. Markets being turned loose without regulation resulted in summer camps built in flood plains and houses being uninhabitable from failed septic tanks. At some point, regulation is a good idea.
As a libertarian, I hear this kind of argument a lot, but every specific example of needing regulation can be trivially refuted.
No one held guns to the heads of the parents of those kids and forced them to send the kids to a camp in a flood-prone area. If this was something they should have been concerned about, they should have made decisions accordingly. That they did not is probably related to the general mentality in our society that it's the government's job, not your own, to keep your kids safe. Further, this was a freak incident, and you can't prevent every untimely death by freak incident without destroying all human freedom and flourishing. Note that more Americans die every weekend in car crashes than died in the Texas floods.
And your article's title refutes your second point: they are suing, and will presumably receive compensation for the defects as ordered by the court, no regulation needed. If the concern is that malicious or incompetent actors can avoid paying out by being broke or pretending to be so, require liability insurance or posting bonds, instead of trying to patch every possible destructive act with a specific rule without basis in market-driven cost-benefit analysis.
You haven’t refuted my argument, but the fact that you think you did is kind of telling.
Camping in a flood plain is a predictable risk, not a freak accident.
Having your house uninhabitable, with a mortgage you have to pay while your house is uninhabitable, plus having to pay rent somewhere else, is what most people consider to be a failure of regulation
There are a lot of flood plains in the United States. Some of them have summer camps in them. But what happened in Texas was newsworthy precisely because it was unusual. And this is not a response to my core point: no one forced any of those people to camp in a flood plain, nor the parents to send their kids there. Freedom necessarily includes the freedom to do risky or stupid things and suffer the consequences.
The court will presumably order the septic tank/construction company to pay compensation for costs like that. If they don't, fix the laws around which costs are included in damages, instead of trying to specify rules against every single thing a construction company could possibly do that could cause harm.
As a matter of fact, nuisance regulations have not worked in the City of Houston and within the region. Railroad facilities and industrial facilities located near or within subdivision are numerous, exposing many residents to poisons. Some of these are legacies of the pre-regulatory era, such as in the Second and Fifth wards, especially the neighborhoods near the Inglewood and Settegast rail yards in the Fifth. Other former towns later annexed to Houston have similar problems, including Harrisburg and Manchester.
I don't take this counterexample as proof that nuisance regulation cannot be effective, only that Houston is not a good example of effective nuisance regulation.
Unfortunately almost every city has facilities like that, especially around the original freight rail lines, which predate environmental regulation and are fully or partially exempted from it. It is a problem, but not really one that most cities could afford to “solve” since it would require paying to relocate industries, which is very expensive.
You are right, the railroad legacies are tough cases.
Any post-modern post-modern facility is a counterexample, and there are plenty of those in Houston.
I also think we are right to question how well zoning handled those nuisances, too. The Germans have the best zoning scheme: isolate industrial uses, and prevent other uses from co-locating.
As an architect trying to build density, I constantly think about the mindset one has to be in in order to do the work, knowing that there will be opposition to it no matter what. Accepting it as part of the process is an important first step has been a key realization.
I completely agree with this assessment, and in fact gave a presentation on a similar idea a couple of months ago. I even explicitly call out using an LVT to judge underutilization in restricted areas.
The fundamental difference between my concept and yours, though, is my mechanism for neighbors to regulate land use. I think it should happen under more generalized institutional bodies, which I’m calling “Neighborhood Councils”. Residents can incorporate and give powers to one of these bodies in their neighborhood. The benefit of this, I think, is that it provides a greater platform to socialize and build community, with a built in incentive to meet through impactful neighborhood business. It also helps confer status to more ordinary people, particularly small business owners, which I think is critical in helping quell the unrest in modern society.
I haven’t completely decided the mechanism of land use regulation these Councils should possess, but making it temporary is a valuable idea I hadn’t considered before.
If you’re interested, here’s the full presentation I gave with more of my thoughts on this, and I’m going to soon start an essay series exploring this idea in depth: https://youtu.be/ebAxARgVybs
Thanks for sharing. I recently learned that Washington DC has something a bit like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advisory_Neighborhood_Commission
Might be worth looking into!
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It hadn't come up on my research into existing neighborhood orgs yet, but that's likely because of its purely advisory role. The scale of each organization is about what I am imaging though, but I'm of the opinion that, similar to your proposal, these should not be districted by the government, but based on what communities residents feel they are a part of (with geographical cohesion achieved through some sort of majoritarian consensus).
No. This penalizes introverts. For them, participating in such councils is an implicit tax.
To respond narrowly, a big point of the idea I'm proposing is that council chartering is an optional activity, with the powers and decision-making processes outlined in that charter being highly flexible. So, ideally, people who prefer a similar style of neighborhood governance can congregate together and help build their preferred hyperlocal lifestyle, whether that be a very strong and active council or a non-existent one.
But, more broadly, if someone is too introverted to go, meet their neighbors, and give voice to their interests, then there is not much anyone can do to help them. Effectively living in a democracy means participating in it. You can't shirk civic responsibility and still expect things to go your way.
This is why I reject the fundamental assumption that democracy should trump liberty. My ideal is that with property rights sufficiently well-defined and ironclad, there is no need to "participate in a democracy"; all simply do as they please, with no collective decisions required. In cases of legitimate negative externality that physically intrudes onto others' property (noise and fumes, basically), courts would order compensation for the violations.
My point is not that introverts would be unable to go, but that they would find the experience less pleasant than extroverts do, and having to spend time in such a council advocating for what they should be allowed to do anyway is an unpleasant waste of time for them.
And I actually agree with you on that basic point: there should not be a need to participate in it. But different people want to live in different kinds of communities, and at the scale of a city you can accommodate a lot of different lifestyles. So some self-select to live in a strong council neighborhood which is empowered with finer-grained control over the residents' lives. And some self-select to live in a no-council neighborhood which fulfills the ideal you laid out: everyone can do their own thing with their own property, with only extremely limited citywide pollution regulations.
Importantly to your concern, though, in this scheme ironclad property rights are assumed. It is the decision of each property owner to temporarily cede some of those rights to the council (with, again, a majoritarian consensus mechanism to ensure it actually gets done). And if they come to not like how their neighborhood is being run, or the property rights that they have ceded, they are empowered at that small-scale to fight it at the council-level or simply vote with their feet and leave.
Furthermore, as it stands we don't live in a strong property rights regime. The YIMBY movement is trying to fight that, and doing an admirable job at it, but history has shown there will always be people who fight for keeping their place the same by exerting their will on others. And up to this point we have let them do it at the city level, which has led to the slow decline of our cities and country. And even if we succeed in getting the land regs in the right spot to deal with our current housing crisis, it maintains the same regime, and we'll have to do the whole thing over again when the next crisis comes around. I would rather strengthen property rights again by appeasing the NIMBYs, and then let the system consistently respond to market forces so that we are always building the supply of residential and commercial real estate that we need.
I think we basically agree, then. I'm just wary of systems that implicitly favor the people most willing to spend time arguing, because this leads to arms races and is unfair to people who don't have that time or dislike the process. Wikipedia and the current public comment process are the obvious examples.
And empowering the ones that want to argue or fight is indeed something we should not be looking to do. But I suspect that bringing responsibility of (most) land-use decisions, service delivery, and public space management down to the neighborhood level will decrease the power of the natural shouters.
In our current system yelling at city officials in town halls is the encouraged way of getting what you want. This is because those outside a neighborhood don't have enough familiarity with it to recognize or be able to effectively argue that the people showing up to these meetings don't represent that neighborhood in any meaningful way. When the people making the decisions are at the neighborhood level though--and when its up to them to actually execute on getting what they want/need--then it would seem that the people that want to argue and hold up productive business will quickly be recognized and disregarded as real contributors to governance.
This is the way
You wrote “As we pursue progress in a democracy we have to work with people who want things we don’t want. If our proposals require us to overcome what other people want, to force them to accept our preferences instead of their preferences, we have a much, much harder road ahead of us, especially when they have the status quo on their side.”
I really, really think you would get much further limiting the geographical scope, rather than pursuing statewide de-regulation of zoning. Geographically, the large majority of land in almost all states is relatively lightly regulated agricultural or wilderness land, and in most states, they have limited political power because agricultural land is not dense. The problem you are addressing is essentially for people who live in or work in urban areas, not insufficient dense growth in far flung small communities.
Those non urban areas have been growing faster, not slower, than cities. They have very little flexibility in their budgets. They generally do not have elasticity in their infrastructure and growth is typically hard limited by lack of public water, public sewer, roads, etc. Removing all local control and expecting urban planners to know how best to regulate agricultural use is pretty horrifying.
Many people care about having gardens, dogs, and horses. They like having a big kitchen garden. They are not going to want to live in an Amsterdam clone no matter how charming it is.
Thanks, Lisa. For what it’s worth, I agree, and I think your argument rhymes with what I’m trying to say in this post. One-size-fits-all doesn’t usually work very well and in large cities that’s part of why things have ended up in a bad status quo.
I think your comment is also referencing a note I posted the other day. FWIW I’m not advocating for state preemption, I’m generally skeptical of state preemption. But then I have the case of states removing parking requirements at the state level, which I think is a great outcome with no real downside. So I’m wrestling with, can I come up with a coherent “first principles” rationale for when I would and when I would not support state preemption? And where I think I’m leaning right now, is that if the state action is defining the limits of government power, that seems appropriate. In fact that’s something that can only really happen at the state level. But if the idea is to replace local control with state control, then I’m very skeptical, because I agree with you that moving the authority from the community to the state has a lot of downside.
Separately from that, I personally am skeptical of zoning as practiced today, and would rather see our cities take a different approach to development regulation. But I’m not advocating for just moving where today’s zoning system is administrated - I don’t think moving a bad system would solve much and I see a lot of downside risk.
Thanks for your comment, and for giving me a chance to unpack that a little bit.
Removing all so-called local control makes control as local as it can possibly be: that of the individual property owner deciding what to do with his own land. Markets know better than government how best to use land, regardless of whether the government is that of the state or a rural county.
Not necessarily. Markets being turned loose without regulation resulted in summer camps built in flood plains and houses being uninhabitable from failed septic tanks. At some point, regulation is a good idea.
https://www.ksat.com/news/2019/09/18/residents-suing-developer-home-builder-over-sewage-nightmare-in-far-north-bexar-county/
https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-land-rules-allowed-camps-operate-flood-prone/story?id=123649157
As a libertarian, I hear this kind of argument a lot, but every specific example of needing regulation can be trivially refuted.
No one held guns to the heads of the parents of those kids and forced them to send the kids to a camp in a flood-prone area. If this was something they should have been concerned about, they should have made decisions accordingly. That they did not is probably related to the general mentality in our society that it's the government's job, not your own, to keep your kids safe. Further, this was a freak incident, and you can't prevent every untimely death by freak incident without destroying all human freedom and flourishing. Note that more Americans die every weekend in car crashes than died in the Texas floods.
And your article's title refutes your second point: they are suing, and will presumably receive compensation for the defects as ordered by the court, no regulation needed. If the concern is that malicious or incompetent actors can avoid paying out by being broke or pretending to be so, require liability insurance or posting bonds, instead of trying to patch every possible destructive act with a specific rule without basis in market-driven cost-benefit analysis.
You haven’t refuted my argument, but the fact that you think you did is kind of telling.
Camping in a flood plain is a predictable risk, not a freak accident.
Having your house uninhabitable, with a mortgage you have to pay while your house is uninhabitable, plus having to pay rent somewhere else, is what most people consider to be a failure of regulation
There are a lot of flood plains in the United States. Some of them have summer camps in them. But what happened in Texas was newsworthy precisely because it was unusual. And this is not a response to my core point: no one forced any of those people to camp in a flood plain, nor the parents to send their kids there. Freedom necessarily includes the freedom to do risky or stupid things and suffer the consequences.
The court will presumably order the septic tank/construction company to pay compensation for costs like that. If they don't, fix the laws around which costs are included in damages, instead of trying to specify rules against every single thing a construction company could possibly do that could cause harm.
As a matter of fact, nuisance regulations have not worked in the City of Houston and within the region. Railroad facilities and industrial facilities located near or within subdivision are numerous, exposing many residents to poisons. Some of these are legacies of the pre-regulatory era, such as in the Second and Fifth wards, especially the neighborhoods near the Inglewood and Settegast rail yards in the Fifth. Other former towns later annexed to Houston have similar problems, including Harrisburg and Manchester.
I don't take this counterexample as proof that nuisance regulation cannot be effective, only that Houston is not a good example of effective nuisance regulation.
Unfortunately almost every city has facilities like that, especially around the original freight rail lines, which predate environmental regulation and are fully or partially exempted from it. It is a problem, but not really one that most cities could afford to “solve” since it would require paying to relocate industries, which is very expensive.
You are right, the railroad legacies are tough cases.
Any post-modern post-modern facility is a counterexample, and there are plenty of those in Houston.
I also think we are right to question how well zoning handled those nuisances, too. The Germans have the best zoning scheme: isolate industrial uses, and prevent other uses from co-locating.