Seems like another symptom of the age demographic imbalance. Old people have taken over the political power and have seized all the land exclusively for themselves.
It’s a symptom of endless government regulation, bureaucratic overreach, and NIMBYism.
One of the worst developments in the history of government is this incessant creep of regulations and codes that specify, in excruciating detail, how residential land must be developed. How wide the streets are, how many lanes of traffic there are, how far the sidewalks are from the road, how far the front door is from the sidewalk, how much of the back yard is visible from the sidewalk, how houses must be arranged, how wide a house must be relative to the property width, how short/tall a house must be, how many separate entrances are allowed, … and on and on and on the regulations go. This has the effect of making old style neighbourhoods (with real character) impossible to build in the modern day. It also highly restricts the usage of the land and the number of structures in a way that make it impossible to have multi-family dwellings, studio apartments above houses, artists’ cottages in the back yard, coach houses, small used book stores or cafes in residential neighbourhoods, etc.
The new urbanist movement [1] talks a lot about this. They’ve argued for the return of streetcar suburbs [2] and I agree with them. These places are extremely beautiful to live in. They foster a far deeper sense of community than modern suburbia. They are wonderful spaces for humans to live in rather than places for urban planners who want to play SimCity in real life.
I don’t blame old people or any other particular group though. This is a widespread phenomenon of cultural and regulatory evolution by people who did not anticipate the final result. Now we’re stuck with this morass and the political will to fix it is still in its infancy. There’s also simply the hard problem that we can’t just bulldoze whole neighbourhoods to rebuild them the old way.
This doesn’t really make sense as a counter argument.
I’m pretty sure none of these came about by random happenstance, they all had either specific reasons behind them or specific lobbying groups pushing for them, or both.
Of course there’s no guarantee that the whole amalgamation was reasonable or even coherent… but that applies to everything ever that involved millions of people and interests.
Is there a specific reason why your “fix” wouldn’t just make it even more incoherent, given real world constraints like limited will, political influence, credibility, etc…?
Oh absolutely all these rules came about by explicit lobbying from special interest groups. As much as it is the "government regulations" that is to blame, the government is us lol, elected by the people and servants of the people.
The root cause of these problems has been classism and racism and people trying to gate off their communities from "undesirable" people, via the zoning code.
Defacto banning apartments for example is a very effective way to eliminate everyone who can't afford a single family home from your neighbourhood. etc
As much as I love to kick sand at the boomers, I'm sad to say that I've seen the exact same sort of behaviours from my millennial cohort that have been lucky enough to get their foothold on the housing ladder.
All of this sort of NIMBYism stems from a deep core problem of exclusivity seeking behaviours, classism and even racism.
Comments
Seems like another symptom of the age demographic imbalance. Old people have taken over the political power and have seized all the land exclusively for themselves.
It’s a symptom of endless government regulation, bureaucratic overreach, and NIMBYism.
One of the worst developments in the history of government is this incessant creep of regulations and codes that specify, in excruciating detail, how residential land must be developed. How wide the streets are, how many lanes of traffic there are, how far the sidewalks are from the road, how far the front door is from the sidewalk, how much of the back yard is visible from the sidewalk, how houses must be arranged, how wide a house must be relative to the property width, how short/tall a house must be, how many separate entrances are allowed, … and on and on and on the regulations go. This has the effect of making old style neighbourhoods (with real character) impossible to build in the modern day. It also highly restricts the usage of the land and the number of structures in a way that make it impossible to have multi-family dwellings, studio apartments above houses, artists’ cottages in the back yard, coach houses, small used book stores or cafes in residential neighbourhoods, etc.
The new urbanist movement [1] talks a lot about this. They’ve argued for the return of streetcar suburbs [2] and I agree with them. These places are extremely beautiful to live in. They foster a far deeper sense of community than modern suburbia. They are wonderful spaces for humans to live in rather than places for urban planners who want to play SimCity in real life.
I don’t blame old people or any other particular group though. This is a widespread phenomenon of cultural and regulatory evolution by people who did not anticipate the final result. Now we’re stuck with this morass and the political will to fix it is still in its infancy. There’s also simply the hard problem that we can’t just bulldoze whole neighbourhoods to rebuild them the old way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism
[2] https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0?si=Xw_E04B5q7HjpV7p
This doesn’t really make sense as a counter argument.
I’m pretty sure none of these came about by random happenstance, they all had either specific reasons behind them or specific lobbying groups pushing for them, or both.
Of course there’s no guarantee that the whole amalgamation was reasonable or even coherent… but that applies to everything ever that involved millions of people and interests.
Is there a specific reason why your “fix” wouldn’t just make it even more incoherent, given real world constraints like limited will, political influence, credibility, etc…?
Oh absolutely all these rules came about by explicit lobbying from special interest groups. As much as it is the "government regulations" that is to blame, the government is us lol, elected by the people and servants of the people.
The root cause of these problems has been classism and racism and people trying to gate off their communities from "undesirable" people, via the zoning code.
Defacto banning apartments for example is a very effective way to eliminate everyone who can't afford a single family home from your neighbourhood. etc
That's quite the popular and facile argument.
As much as I love to kick sand at the boomers, I'm sad to say that I've seen the exact same sort of behaviours from my millennial cohort that have been lucky enough to get their foothold on the housing ladder.
All of this sort of NIMBYism stems from a deep core problem of exclusivity seeking behaviours, classism and even racism.