> But zoning restrictions are incredibly difficult to rewrite.
I really want to know how they got written in the first place. It seems clear that somehow, zoning regulations is one of the biggest issues we've got. But everyone has these onerous zoning regulations that make life worse... where did they come from?!
It has it roots from the 20's/30's, but was reinvigorated into what is it now in the 60's/70's as a lot of suburban America was becoming desegregated and redlining was made illegal (redlining is a real estate tactic of marking a red line around an area of town that is the "black" neighborhood, and only showing black customers homes in that neighborhood, etc).
As redlining and segregation had a lot of old white people shaking in their boots complaining about property values, old white people who worked for local government (who were also largely landowners) began implementing zoning regulations that effectively banned any sort of housing being built that was affordable to many citizens. Such as apartment complexes, townhomes, quadplexes, smaller homes, etc.
In today's world, we're now dealing with the continued effects. Wealthier areas of town that do not allow ANY multifamily house. Less wealthier areas of town that do not allow homes to be built off-site, or to have under a certain square footage, effectively ensuring homes there are more expensive than they should be. And then the poorer areas of town only allowing multifamily housing right next to industrial/commercial zoning areas. Effectively preventing anyone (outside of property investors) from affording to own a multifamily property, let alone even be able to legally build a single-family home.
As the separations between middle class and lower class begin to blur, it makes the situation worse for everyone, outside of the financially well-off who either made it big with a business, or have owned property for decades at that point.
Zoning was redefined from a health and safety perspective, to a legal, local government tool to artificially inflate property values by unfairly limiting the types of homes that could be built, and putting the poorer workers and "undesirables" in unsafe communities full of industrial factories, low-wage jobs, and no vertical movement for the community to grow.
I think most zoning regulations came as a backlash to the crime waves in the 60s/70s and were intended to keep "safe" neighborhoods "safe". This uses house prices as a tool to separate people into "desirables" and "undesirables" (roughly). China (and the former Soviet Union) did/does it more explicitly via the hukou system - if you don't have a hukou, you can't live in a given city nor attend the school/use the city's resources.
The process in the Soviet Union might not have involved financial capital, but it involved human capital (i.e. if your profession was not "respectable", or if you were ever convicted of a criminal act, you might not receive permission to get an apartment (or even a room) in a top tier city like St. Petersburg or Moscow)
Industrialization led to many dirty cities especially before sanitation technology was deployed. Restrictions on more than e.g. 8 unrelated people per house, minimum window requirements, separating the meat packing district from a pure residential neighborhood were in response to tenements which were deathtraps in fires.
I really want to know how they got written in the first place. It seems clear that somehow, zoning regulations is one of the biggest issues we've got. But everyone has these onerous zoning regulations that make life worse... where did they come from?!