Your book would be a lot more useful if it included some real life examples.
Certainly, if the profit margin on this project is high enough, there ought to be enough leftover to bribe the fat guy with glasses or lobby local politicians for exemptions. The fat guy seems a lot more gleeful about all this then most zoning board people I've met. The ones I dealt with at townhill were helpful, flexible, and probably more pro-growth then the residents.
Examples:
In a nearby city there is an old trailer park in a prime central location. It was built before the city really took off. Now the land under it is worth a lot, but the residents don't want to move. It's likely that to buy housing they could afford they would need to move out of city center, probably far enough away that they would need cars, which would be a big expense for them.
Now, economically speaking, I'm sure building luxury townhomes there makes the most utilitarian sense for society. I support it. But it's certainly clear that the current tenants will lose out. It's no surprise why they oppose it. There are a lot of them and they are politically organized. I don't really think the zoning board has it out for the developer, but they know how it will fair in the next election.
So far, the developer hasn't been able or willing to cough up enough to change the politics of it all.
Basically, Oak Park avoided the white flight/crime death spiral of neighboring communities by imposing a blatantly illegal racial quota system. They use all those zoning tricks you mention to bully local landlords into following the racial quota scheme. As a result Oak Park has remained 20% middle class black for decades and its home values have grown.
In order successfully skirt the Fair Housing Act, they need to have a lot of unrecorded face to face conversations with small time landlords. If you built a huge new commercial building, there is no way they could get away with this backdoor stuff.
So of course when you examine the population statistics in Oak Park you find they have been completely stagnant forever. You couldn't have high growth and maintain this system.
I guess you could accuse these people of being racist, but Oak Park is overwhelmingly progressive and its residents take pride in the "diversity" of their community. If they didn't do what they do, it would just end up like another all black or all white neighborhood.
In fact community like that in my old state was starting to have a lot of problems because new development had brought in enough blacks that the local schools were past a "tipping point" and they ended up with raging school zoning battles to try and redistribute the blacks.
Or take my town. Where both mayoral candidates are running on "slow growth". My town doesn't have issues with diversity nor with poor people trying to squat on prime real estate. People just don't like crowding and traffic. They moved to a small town to get away from that, and they just feel like a 2,000% increase in housing over the last twenty years is enough for now. None of them appear to be motivated by property values.
I can easily make a case that none of the above are good enough reasons for zoning. But it's also obvious to me that the stakeholders in these cases have real stakes in why things are the way they are, and its going to be very hard to fit them all into "racist rich white people that want their home values to go up because they are greedy sociopaths".
Personally, I think the best path forward to toning down on zoning is to try to tone down the social drivers of peoples resistance to change and growth. School Choice will limit how much people care about school zones and what gets built in them. Effective crime control and public order will make them worry less about the underclass. Lower immigration will itself lower demand but also lead to less of a kind of ethnic competition for dominance of certain spaces.
And while I'm probably dreaming, I think the entire Fair Housing Act just needs to go. At a minimum we've got to stop trying to enforce it. A lot of zoning seems like an attempt to use pricing people out as a back door way to keeping the underclass out. Calling people racist won't make them any less likely to want to keep undesirables out. I would prefer if communities could just write explicit rules to try to enforce good behavior rather then indirect passive aggressive stuff like price.
I was really looking forward to this book to have on hand as an easy primer to get friends up to speed on the housing crisis, but the art style is so ugly that I don't think I can buy it as planned. :(
In the UK there is a related debate on fracking. We are resuming it, under the proviso that local communities agree to it, and share in the money made. One of the objections seems to be that agreeing to such a thing for money is in some way immoral.
So overcoming the moral framework that the natural beauty of an area is something outside of trade and money, is an additional impediment.
Here in Israel, where there are dilapidated small apartment buildings, that don't use the land they're on, they can be torn down and built higher. The apartment owners benefit from a newer, larger apartment when it is done; and the developer pays their rent in the meantime. (A special majority, but not 100%, of apartment owners is needed to approve this.) Amazingly, the legal protections seem to be in place that apartment owners don't get ripped off in the process, or at least I have not read about complaints.) The developer is "paid" by getting the extra apartments on top. And I see this happening a lot. https://www.buyitinisrael.com/news/urban-renewal-in-israel-pinui-binui/https://barlaw.co.il/blog/real-estate/pinui-binui-the-full-legal-guide
Where the full tear-down is not justified, developers can add an elevator, strengthen the building against earthquakes, add a room to each apartment, and again get paid by being allowed to build and own new apartments on top. https://jerusalem-real-estate.co/tama-38-construction/
Your book would be a lot more useful if it included some real life examples.
Certainly, if the profit margin on this project is high enough, there ought to be enough leftover to bribe the fat guy with glasses or lobby local politicians for exemptions. The fat guy seems a lot more gleeful about all this then most zoning board people I've met. The ones I dealt with at townhill were helpful, flexible, and probably more pro-growth then the residents.
Examples:
In a nearby city there is an old trailer park in a prime central location. It was built before the city really took off. Now the land under it is worth a lot, but the residents don't want to move. It's likely that to buy housing they could afford they would need to move out of city center, probably far enough away that they would need cars, which would be a big expense for them.
Now, economically speaking, I'm sure building luxury townhomes there makes the most utilitarian sense for society. I support it. But it's certainly clear that the current tenants will lose out. It's no surprise why they oppose it. There are a lot of them and they are politically organized. I don't really think the zoning board has it out for the developer, but they know how it will fair in the next election.
So far, the developer hasn't been able or willing to cough up enough to change the politics of it all.
Another example from Steve Sailer.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/how-oak-park-il-social-engineers-stable-demographics/
Basically, Oak Park avoided the white flight/crime death spiral of neighboring communities by imposing a blatantly illegal racial quota system. They use all those zoning tricks you mention to bully local landlords into following the racial quota scheme. As a result Oak Park has remained 20% middle class black for decades and its home values have grown.
In order successfully skirt the Fair Housing Act, they need to have a lot of unrecorded face to face conversations with small time landlords. If you built a huge new commercial building, there is no way they could get away with this backdoor stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gsz7Gu6agA
So of course when you examine the population statistics in Oak Park you find they have been completely stagnant forever. You couldn't have high growth and maintain this system.
I guess you could accuse these people of being racist, but Oak Park is overwhelmingly progressive and its residents take pride in the "diversity" of their community. If they didn't do what they do, it would just end up like another all black or all white neighborhood.
In fact community like that in my old state was starting to have a lot of problems because new development had brought in enough blacks that the local schools were past a "tipping point" and they ended up with raging school zoning battles to try and redistribute the blacks.
Or take my town. Where both mayoral candidates are running on "slow growth". My town doesn't have issues with diversity nor with poor people trying to squat on prime real estate. People just don't like crowding and traffic. They moved to a small town to get away from that, and they just feel like a 2,000% increase in housing over the last twenty years is enough for now. None of them appear to be motivated by property values.
I can easily make a case that none of the above are good enough reasons for zoning. But it's also obvious to me that the stakeholders in these cases have real stakes in why things are the way they are, and its going to be very hard to fit them all into "racist rich white people that want their home values to go up because they are greedy sociopaths".
Personally, I think the best path forward to toning down on zoning is to try to tone down the social drivers of peoples resistance to change and growth. School Choice will limit how much people care about school zones and what gets built in them. Effective crime control and public order will make them worry less about the underclass. Lower immigration will itself lower demand but also lead to less of a kind of ethnic competition for dominance of certain spaces.
And while I'm probably dreaming, I think the entire Fair Housing Act just needs to go. At a minimum we've got to stop trying to enforce it. A lot of zoning seems like an attempt to use pricing people out as a back door way to keeping the underclass out. Calling people racist won't make them any less likely to want to keep undesirables out. I would prefer if communities could just write explicit rules to try to enforce good behavior rather then indirect passive aggressive stuff like price.
looking a bit better but still bad
I was really looking forward to this book to have on hand as an easy primer to get friends up to speed on the housing crisis, but the art style is so ugly that I don't think I can buy it as planned. :(
In the UK there is a related debate on fracking. We are resuming it, under the proviso that local communities agree to it, and share in the money made. One of the objections seems to be that agreeing to such a thing for money is in some way immoral.
So overcoming the moral framework that the natural beauty of an area is something outside of trade and money, is an additional impediment.
Here in Israel, where there are dilapidated small apartment buildings, that don't use the land they're on, they can be torn down and built higher. The apartment owners benefit from a newer, larger apartment when it is done; and the developer pays their rent in the meantime. (A special majority, but not 100%, of apartment owners is needed to approve this.) Amazingly, the legal protections seem to be in place that apartment owners don't get ripped off in the process, or at least I have not read about complaints.) The developer is "paid" by getting the extra apartments on top. And I see this happening a lot. https://www.buyitinisrael.com/news/urban-renewal-in-israel-pinui-binui/ https://barlaw.co.il/blog/real-estate/pinui-binui-the-full-legal-guide
Where the full tear-down is not justified, developers can add an elevator, strengthen the building against earthquakes, add a room to each apartment, and again get paid by being allowed to build and own new apartments on top. https://jerusalem-real-estate.co/tama-38-construction/