It sucks living in a beehive. I don't particularly want to share walls with random people unless I have to. There's no virtue in being crowded unless that's your thing. Suggesting that everyone should be crowded to fit some urban planner's idea of efficient is the real idiocy. The people making the rules don't live in 400sf apartments.
Efficiency isn't just a global "urban planner's" idea. It actually is a different type of life.
Increased density, for me, means that my commute is a 5-minute walk as opposed to an hour-long drive. There is a small grocer in the middle of the commute, where I can stop in and make a 2-minute effort to buy a fresh chicken breast and broccoli to cook for dinner.
Being able to live without owning a car is a plus. Owning a car is a pain in the ass, with regards to maintenance and expense. Between Zipcar and easy access to taxis, I have no problem getting from Point A to Point B, and I never have to get my oil changed or a tire fixed.
Having a yard can be a plus (beautiful, room for kids to play tag, etc.) or a minus (mowing the grass is either a chore or an expense).
It is disappointing, as another example, in that I can't call some friends, plug in some guitars and rock out.
Choosing a place to live is a series of tradeoffs. There's a reason why, even at the extreme high-end, there are still options. Given an 8-figure housing budget, one can still choose a farm with room for horses, a suburban mansion, or an urban penthouse. Growing up, I could drive a half hour and see all 3.
From a policy perspective, the US probably overly subsidizes suburban living, but there's no reason to declare one style of living as best for everybody.
There's a big difference between making your own choices and forcing other people to make your choices, which is what density restrictions do. Housing markets reflect the collective desires of people that live in an area, and SF housing markets are begging on their hands and knees for density. It's the urban planners that are standing in their way.
The most maddening thing for me about this issue is that removing density restrictions in inner cities actually makes it easier to live in a detached single-family unit with two cars, since more people living downtown means fewer people competing to use space and freeways out in the suburbs.
I don't think it's purely the urban planners, as if they've usurped power against residents' wishes. The desire of would-be new residents may be for density (which is what markets would reflect), but in much of the SF Bay Area, the desire of current residents is in the opposite direction, which is what their elected officials and planning boards therefore implement. So that's another kind of collective desire, but of a different collection. Places like Palo Alto, for example, retain rules requiring single-family homes with certain minimum lot sizes, because that's what Palo Alto residents want their city to be like.
You actually get that in the private sector as well, if a municipality doesn't set such rules. The neighborhood I grew up in in Houston had minimum lot sizes and restrictions on subdividing houses for rental, all implemented via contract law. When the subdivision was built, all buyers agreed to set up a homeowners' association and certain rules, which are now conditions attached to the deeds. In an alternate world where Palo Alto had been set up that way N years ago, with subdivision organizations and contract law mandating lot sizes, rather than municipal government setting them, the end effect seems like it would be largely the same, so it doesn't really seem like a government vs. market distinction (at least, unless you restrict freedom of contract enough to make this kind of private-sector zoning impossible).
These sorts of restrictions are all wildly inefficient. Buying property doesn't buy you the right to control how the composition of the area changes with time. If you've got 10 people in a neighborhood with single family homes, and 100 people who want to move into the neighborhood into high density apartments, why should the minority be able to override what the market demands?
But the market is what set up the restrictions in the first place, in Houston's case! They're just private-sector agreements in contract law that you agree not to do X/Y/Z to your property, in return for your neighbors agreeing to the same.
Is the argument that people shouldn't be able to agree to a contract saying, "I will not subdivide this land, and will only sell it to someone who agrees to the same condition"? I'm not entirely averse to that, but it seems like it's a more complex issue than just allowing whatever the market demands, because there's market demand for these restrictive covenants (people really do sometimes want reciprocal agreements with their neighbors about what each will do with their land), which would have to be prohibited by restricting what kinds of contracts people are allowed to sign.
Just because something is achieved contractually does not mean it doesn't undermine market mechanisms. Cartels are contractual but that still undermines the market.
There is a proposition in the law of property that restraints on the alienation of land are to be avoided whenever possible. restrictions on alienation reduce the fungibility of property and increase transaction costs, reducing efficiency. In some states, e.g. NY, there are limits on what sorts of restrictions on alienation courts will enforce when written into deeds.
If you don't like living in a high rise, don't live in a high rise. But don't force the market to build single family homes by zoning choice land areas as single family residential. The point of zoning is to keep industrial areas separated from residential areas. When you use it to prevent multi-family development, you're foisting some urban planner's idea of the character of the community on everyone else.
Zoning is a local government issue, not "some urban planner's" issue. If a community wants its own zoning to change, it can get its own zoning changed. What zoning prevents is someone from buying a piece of land in a community and foisting unwanted change onto it.
Edit:
As an addendum, I'm not referring to the "wrong kind" of people. I'm referring to too many people, or a facility with drastically different traffic patterns. Ignoring the "wrong kind" of people thing entirely, I could knock down a few suburban houses, and replace them with super-luxury furnished condo-townhowse-type things that would sell for the exact same as the surrounding neighborhood. This still would be a major change to the community, both in appearance and lifestyle.
There is a key asymmetry you're missing: people who already live in a community and people who want to live in a community are all stakeholders, but zoning boards are controlled by the former. People who want high-density housing in a neighborhood can't get on the board to change the zoning.
People who want to live in a community have their say in getting to pick the community in which they live. If you have already made the commitment to move (which comes at a pretty significant cost), you are in a much better position of being able to pick a place to live than if you were to make changes that impose on others a desire/need to move.
> People who want to live in a community have their say in getting to pick the community in which they live.
They don't have any power in the zoning boards. 100 people could want to buy and build high-density housing in Palo Alto, but 10 people who already own property there could defeat their intentions via the zoning board. There is no reason why the desires of the few should outweigh the demands of the market.
If you don't want to live around high rises, buy up the land around your house. You shouldn't get to achieve the same effect by preventing other land owners from developing their property as they see fit. The zoning laws that allow this sort of behavior just favor existing property owners over future property owners, and lead to globally non-sensical development choices.
But they have plenty of power in deciding which zoning board governs the land in which they plan to settle. The community regulations are part of choosing a community in which to reside. If they don't like the regulations that govern Palo Alto, they can suggest that Palo Alto change its regulations, and otherwise are perfectly free to settle in, well, anywhere but Palo Alto.
> If you don't want to live around high rises, buy up the land around your house
How does this scale? Here's a scenario: 100 people who don't want to live next to high rises but are perfectly fine living next to other single-family dwellings buy up 100 acres of land in LibertarianUtopiaLand and chop it up. They then sign a contract amongst themselves requiring community consent if any of them are going to drastically change their property, and require that any transfer of the land be accompanied by the same provision. Sounds quite familiar.
There's no national regulation saying that every community must use the same planning methods. It just so happens that there's a pretty good model for how the process works so implementing it requires less lawyers.
It is far worse than this. For the better part of the history of the world, basic arithmetic is 1 man and 1 woman produce > 2 kids. Those kids grow up and even if one of them is happy to live in their parents' home, the norm, hell, the EXPECTED norm in american society is that the adult children go out and make their own home. How are they supposed to do that when there are no homes available because all their neighbors sitting on the local board decided that you can't build any new homes? This kind of selfishness is infuriating and utterly indefensible. A system that allows such situations to occur is undemocratic and un-civil.
Single-family residences aren't "idiocy", or "bizarrely 1950s". Some people simply prefer to live that way. For instance, I cannot picture my father living in a downtown high-rise.
In the past 10 years, I've lived in a suburban single-family home, a college dorm, a suburban "new urbanism project" apartment, two urban neighborhood houses-that-were-converted-into-apartments, two urban neighborhood apartment buildings built as such, and a downtown high rise.
All of these places have had their pluses and minuses. Depending on what I'm doing at the time, I may prefer one to the other, and I'm happy they all exist (and most certainly, are allowed to exist).
I didn't say that single family residences were idiotic. I said zoning for single family residences is idiocy. It keeps the housing market from efficiently responding to demand and building what people want. Just zone residential and let people build what people want to live in.
If someone bought a couple adjacent houses in the neighborhood where I grew up, knocked them down, and built an 10-unit apartment building in it's place, it would have certainly rented, but it would have imposed unwanted change (traffic, appearance) in the community in which it sits.
I could see replacing "single family" with some sort of density restriction (people per acre?). What a home entails is not simply a dwelling + piece of land to its borders, but the community in which it belongs. Communities have generally decided that a predictable nature here is desirable, and thus have enacted zoning restrictions.
Communities use zoning restrictions as a way to purchase rights they don't want to pay for up front. The people who first move into a neighborhood could bargain for and purchase the air space around surrounding properties to ensure they continue to have a view. Instead, they achieve the same result without paying for those rights by implementing zoning requirements that have hight restrictions.
I largely agree, even though I don't like the decisions overall here (in my own opinion, the Peninsula could benefit from more high-density areas of housing, especially near Caltrain and BART stations). I think it's actually not even that far from what the market would produce without zoning, at least under some circumstances. If you abolished zoning today, then lots of things would change, but if the area had been initially developed without zoning, private-sector zoning workalikes would likely have taken its place.
If you look at Houston, the largest city with no zoning laws, the private sector has effectively re-implemented zoning via contract law in huge sections of the city, in the form of subdivisions where the initial developer set up a homeowner's association, empowered via deed restrictions, that implement similar rules about not only density, but even things like what color you can paint your windows. People clearly seem to like living in that kind of community-managed neighborhood. At least doing it via the actual government, rather than these weird quasi-governments, is more transparent and democratic.
> Zoning for singe-family residences is so bizarrely 1950's
I find that a ridiculous statement when dealing with a country with one of the lowest population densities in the developed world.
Perhaps it's not the best solution for the Bay Area, or perhaps it is (changing it would surely drastically change the character of the area), but that's a far cry from denouncing the very concept.
Country-wide population density is a shit metric for what we are talking about. If the US annexed Antarctica tomorrow population density would plummet but it would be almost entirely meaningless in the foreseeable future in the context of a discussion on zoning laws.
The point is that this turns into a discussion of zoning laws because of an obsession of increasing density in hotspots, despite the fact that you have vast areas of viable land that is cheap, with few zoning restrictions, and far more viable to built extensive infrastructure to/from/in.
High property prices is not all that much of a problem unless your goal is the highest population density possible, or for you personally if you're dead set on living there. Rather, it is a market mechanism that if left to work will push the population further out, and benefit people in a much larger region that way.
Zoning is a problem mostly seen from the outside: Of people not living there who don't like that the locals believe the character of their neighbourhoods is more important than opening up for higher population density.
As much as I can sympathize with the desire to live somewhere that is "taken" at a price suitable to you, that's never something you will be able to do without some restriction or other. And the reality is that for a lot of people, those places would be ruined forever if there was nothing holding back rampant development.
The population density is so low because the country is so damned big. China's pop density is 24th in the world. The US has a greater density than Sweeden.
> The population density is so low because the country is so damned big
Eh. Yes. That's the point. There's plenty of space. Somehow places with vastly higher population densities still manage just fine.
The problem is not lack of space, nor that zoning regulations prevents you from putting up highrises in someones backyard in Menlo Park, but the focus on concentrating more and more people in tiny little parts of it.
The more ridiculous part of it is that a lot of the reason why those specific locations are attractive to a lot of people is exactly the character that would be irreversibly altered if you were to massively increase the density.
> "The more ridiculous part of it is that a lot of the reason why those specific locations are attractive to a lot of people is exactly the character that would be irreversibly altered if you were to massively increase the density."
Ah yes, as evidence by the endless subdivisions with idyllic countryside names: "Brookfield Estates", "Pinstream Brook", "Riverside Meadows" and the such. I don't see any brooks, meadows, fields, or pines. I just see row after row of cookie-cutter houses connected by meandering asphalt.
The modern suburb has never made much sense to me. You've taken out all the benefits of urban life, and the benefits of the rural lifestyle and what remains is the worst of both worlds.
Note that I'm not some hyper-urbanist who wishes everyone would just live in towering steel contraptions. There is plenty of room for redefining suburbs into something that actually makes sense and is substantially less awful than the subdivisions we have now.
