As a commercial real estate appraiser with a pretty good understanding of land economics, I completely agree. When land is pricy, there is no other logical option than to go up. The only thing zoning serves is the uberwealthy and those with political influence.
There should be no zoning at all. None. Just look at the best cities in the world including pre-zoning America - their growth was dictated by pure economic need, not by nimyism. To use startup jargon, zoning makes it difficult and costly to iterate real estate to the 'highest and best use'.
It's quite possible to enforce anti-growth NIMBYism without municipal zoning. Houston has no zoning, and yet is completely sprawling and full of contractually agreed development restrictions, which are not zoning and do not involve a government but produce the same effect.
Say you're buying a nice suburban house in Houston. It has no zoning, so you're worried your neighbors might sometime in the future replace their house with a loud bar, or a factory, or subdivide it into rental housing. An enterprising subdivision developer realizes they can get more money if they can assure you that none of these things will happen. So when they're building the subdivision, they don't just sell you the property unrestricted. Instead, they draw up a set of rules governing future use of the property, and they require anyone who buys a house in the subdivision to sign a contract agreement to be bound by them. Now they can promise you that your neighbor won't build a factory on their land, because the subdivision rules don't permit it, and your neighbor has signed a contract agreeing to the rules.
The rules you agree to typically along the lines of what you'd normally get from suburban, Palo-Alto-style zoning regulations: you agree not to subdivide the property, not to redevelop it into anything other than a 1- or 2-story single-family house, not to build a structure on the property that doesn't meet certain design and land-occupation percentage requirements, not to operate an industrial or commercial facility on the property, in some cases not to rent it to tenants, etc., etc.
Houston claims not to have zoning, but substitutes regulations that produce the same sprawling effect as zoning that mandates sprawl.
Houston uses building line setback rules, huge minimum parking requirements, street width minima, block size and platting rules, fire code regulations, and the whole panoply of laws that mandate sprawl everywhere else with the sole exception of Euclidian zoning. The result is mandatory sprawl.
Market based land use would not have built Houston. It would never have created $3000 basic studio apartments in Palo Alto either. Markets aren't a panacea but what we've mandated instead is a disaster.
Exactly! This example of private contract law is really the right way. To be fair, Houston really developed post-car + cheap land which explains the low density.
What's the advantage of it? It's just a municipal government by another name, but with fewer safeguards, and a throwback "votes only for landowners" style of voting. I'd personally prefer to be regulated by a proper local government than the strange quasi-governmental abomination of an HOA.
Had this been the norm last century, Palo Alto would've been developed with these kinds of restrictions, and instead of the Palo Alto city government with its NIMBYism, you'd just have the Palo Alto HOA doing the same thing. You actually see that in one part of SF currently: the least dense neighborhood in SF, Forest Hill, is the least dense in part because it was developed by one of the country's early HOAs, the Forest Hill Association, which works hard to keep it suburban and "small-town".
When conditions change, and the community would be better served if some of those restrictions were changed, is it easier to change municipal zoning codes, or to change individual contracts and deed restrictions?
From what I've seen, it's nearly impossible to change deed restrictions; even restrictions like "you can't sell to african-americans" stay on the books, but just become unenforceable. At least with zoning laws, it's possible (if hard) to de-clutter them.
What happens on the edges of said subdivisions? If there is open land that the subdivision owner doesn't own, someone can put in a chemical plant next to it no?
visiting the outskirts of houston is surreal. planned neighborhoods float like islands amidst prisons, industrial plants, farms and just plain undeveloped land. it's totally alien to someone like me who grew up in areas with relatively high density
The problem with completely dropping zoning is you end up with situations like the West fertilizer plant, where a building stuffed with explosives was placed next to a two schools and a retirement home.
Well, when you give up a little liberty/property rights for a little 'safety' you get a whole lot of inflexible shit in return. Zoning and its inflexibility hurts the people on the bottom of the totem pole the most as the article indicates. With no zoning, you can still have a lot of shit, but at least you're not married to it.
Good point. But one thing to note about Kowloon was that there were questionable/weak property rights. That was the issue with that more so than no zoning.
Rare. The market typically sorts this stuff out. You'd be surprised by the amount of due diligence is required for a bank to lend on a property or an insurer to insure it.
Can you really build efficient/reliable mass transit systems and other related services without zoning?
I agree that some part of zoning is pure conservation (skewed towards status quo and the interests of the majority of current owners) whereas no-zone is closer to plain economical interests and favors individual cases.
Please, take a trip to Istanbul sometime. While there are zoning rules, they are easily subverted by a bribe or two. The architecture looks positively ghastly in many areas because of this.
On the contrary, make everything mixed use. Bottom floor (at the minimum) is business use, and above that is housing.
For short-term yes. For long-term, how do you deal with overbuilding and/or large groups of people moving away to the next up-and-coming city, leaving behind a ghost town of empty high rises?
Some overbuilt cities in China or Eastern Europe have that issue.
Zoning and urban planning are very closely interrelated. Zoning (obviously) is an instance of urban planning - and it's very hard to plan a city if you don't have a way of enforcing your plan (zoning).
The China and Eastern Europe ghost-cities are slightly different because the distinction between the zoning authority (government) and the developer is more fluid, but I still think it applies.
Those cities we're built by bureaucracy, not the market. In fact, what you mention is a great example of failed social planning which is taking zoning to the next level.
There should be no zoning at all. None. Just look at the best cities in the world including pre-zoning America - their growth was dictated by pure economic need, not by nimyism. To use startup jargon, zoning makes it difficult and costly to iterate real estate to the 'highest and best use'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Egm0j_p1A