Was one’s single family home a naturally occurring building? What gave one the right to build it? Your both sides argument sounds plausible but it’s not-sensical.
That's sorta just how private property works. At some point, land was unowned, structures were unbuilt, etc. Ever since then, we've put the "rights" in the hands of the current owners and/or the government they live under...
Short of arguing from a purely socialist or communist approach, saying the current owner's preferences matter less than the hypothetical would-be future occupants of the area is the non-sensical part, I think.
And who was compensated when those rights were taken away from property owners by the invention of zoning in the early 1900s and down zoning in the mid 1900s? In addition, you are confusing owning a particular plot of land with rights over all neighboring plots. The latter is distinctly not your private property.
Yes, that's where the government aspect comes in. But again, what you decry as "non-sensical" instead seems like it could also just be called "response of a community towards potential market failure modes." You are ascribing moral blame to just one side of a more complicated situation. It would be like if all I was talking about is how big developers bribe local governments to get permits to build their shit - neither side is blameless, both sides are understandable, there isn't a clear easy answer to "reduce harm."
I really don't understand your both sides argument. One side takes advantage of the fact that zoning is a local matter to advantage incumbents at huge expense to society at large. It also creates the bureaucratic infrastructure that favors large developers who can pay bribes informally (literal bribes) or formally (impact fees).
The other side is all future residents who might want to live in a quadplex where a SFH exists today. Those people usually pay a large percent of their income in rent and "commute til they qualify."
How are both sides understandable? My claim is simply that a private individual should be able to buy a lot of land in almost any American city and build a quadplex on it. This was legal until very recently in our history. How will this be the end of the community as we know it?
If you want to change their minds, and change housing policies in major US cities... you may want to try harder to understand why people want single family homes, and why they don't see zoning as evil. You've got a lot of minds to change!
Both sides are understandable to me because those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from. I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want. Yes, it's what they want versus what other people want... that's unavoidable! It's the other side of the "if you want to continue living in a less dense area, go move somewhere more rural (until we pick it for densification too)" coin.
Some folks think the tiebreaker here is that cities are more sustainable, but that doesn't avoid the problem that if you want to move more people into denser housing, some people aren't going to be able to get what they want.
I find both sides understandable because I don't expect anyone to be happy when people more powerful than them tell them they can't have what they want.
Can you really not understand why someone would be unhappy with someone else coming in and saying "I have the right to change your life?" Why "well you better be rich enough to own the land for the entire neighborhood" is a hollow response?
Yes, because I think it's absurd to claim that someone building a small apartment building on property they own down the street is changing my life. In fact, in your last claim, the property owner who is exercising control over their neighbor's building is the one unfairly "changing lives." In addition, developing on my own property has little to do with relative power imbalances. Who really holds power when I have to bribe my neighbors to get a variance to build an ADU in my backyard?
> those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from
This is kind of a silly claim because it suggests that the country is an undifferentiated landmass and there are no relative benefits of a particular geographic location. There are clearly relative advantages to living in a place, so telling people they can choose anyplace else is not really a choice!
> I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want.
This is only barely a coherent argument at the international levels ("Middle Eastern refugees shouldn't be able to decide where to settle in Europe!"). When you live within a country with freedom of movement, this is a very difficult argument to make. Should I only be allowed to vote in places where I am a property owner?
For what it's worth, there are plenty of developing legal arguments _against_ local zoning, and California is on track to solve its housing issues by having the state take control of zoning away from cities.
I'm not aware of this. I thought it was a huge expense to people who wanted to move to an area at any price, and the absence of a huge windfall to people who want to build massive apartment buildings in neighborhoods where the vast majority of the residents don't want them.
When government takes away our property it must pay us for the property. this right is recognized in the 4th amendment. "Zoning" is just a sneaky way of taking
