Beautiful, clean writing. Too bad a lot of Americans happily embrace authoritarianism if it means free parking!
More seriously, this is a powerful entry in the ongoing Substack urbanist nerd debate over local control vs state preemption. It’s not really a question of which level of government should best decide residential land use decisions, it’s a question of whether any level of gov should have any decision-making authority at all
Concise - You are right! I believe there are better ways, and your voice on the matter resonates with my thoughts. Thank you for drawing a few parallels of clarity which pair nicely with the image you have chosen for the article. _ I was had at 'No Kings'.
I could not agree with this rant more. Two things are absurd and defeat the whole premise of the article. First, land use laws don’t upend the premise that someone is innocent until proven guilty. How stupid! Innocent until proven guilty guilty is a criminal determination. Land use decisions are civil decisions where guilt or innocence is not part of the equation. The health, safety and general welfare of people is at the core of zoning and land use. Under that premise one should not be able to build or change the use of a property until such time that it is determined it will not harm the health, safety and welfare of individuals impacted by those changes. Pretty tough to get rid of something once it’s done, which is why these decisions are done prior to the deed being done. This guy tries to upend settled law and common sense; don’t buy it.
Second, he tries to assert that this is an abuse of the police powers. Wrong again. Zoning and land use laws have evolved from the original Euclid decision to incorporate both the carrot and the stick. This guy ignores the carrots and whines about a special interest group being held accountable. Communities need to grow according to what’s best for the community; not what’s best for that nearly sacred developer class that has literally taken the money and left disaster in their wake time after time. Don’t buy the rant; think community.
I get where you're coming from, but this is a deeply inadequate analysis. Land, homes and neighborhoods are just not fungible commodities like food or cars. I agree that the more consistency and clarity we can introduce, the better. But building a tall building on a residential block does incur a complex heat map of costs on the people around, in a way that's hard for policy to approximate in simple ways. We could have better processes for how to represent these costs, and score them in advance, and provide prices for various types of costs borne by neighbors. But to think that we can just cleanly write this once and then sit back is to fundamentally misunderstand how democracy works, and why complexity makes its way in. Some complexity is the result of misunderstandings, or rent-seeking. But much complexity is a reflection of the actual complexity of communities, their various needs, and how these change over time. Oh, that tower is going to be near a senior center that already has parking issues that keep people from seeing the visiting clinicians who come there? Well, we need some sort of process to surface that, even if officials didn't think of it, and to press the developer to adjust to it. If we don't, we're not somehow magically being more fair because our list of rules is shorter, or because there are fewer mandatory conversations involved; we're just shifting the unfairness around.
Your hypothetical senior center was built by a private land owner who apparently didn't plan for adequate parking. Somehow the solution is to usurp the property rights of his neighbors? The fact that even your example involves this kind unjustified rent-seeking certainly doesn't help the case for this sort of local review process.
Ummm, Ryan, you’re a great writer. And these days, it’s so tempting to write things like this when government and societal norms are not doing what we want them to. In more normative times I taught law to planning students for many years and maybe I was caught up in a broken system. But tell me about the role of the Constitution and due process in all of this. Aren’t you collapsing a complex body of constitutional doctrine into a false binary of liberty versus coercion, ignoring that American law seeks—not perfectly, but purposefully—to reconcile individual rights with community obligations, including in the land use arena?
Beautiful, clean writing. Too bad a lot of Americans happily embrace authoritarianism if it means free parking!
More seriously, this is a powerful entry in the ongoing Substack urbanist nerd debate over local control vs state preemption. It’s not really a question of which level of government should best decide residential land use decisions, it’s a question of whether any level of gov should have any decision-making authority at all
Thank you, Jeremy!
Absolutely right. This is why property rights were so foundational to our country that they were written into the constitution.
Cheers to you Ryan,
Concise - You are right! I believe there are better ways, and your voice on the matter resonates with my thoughts. Thank you for drawing a few parallels of clarity which pair nicely with the image you have chosen for the article. _ I was had at 'No Kings'.
This is the best thing I’ve read in awhile.
I could not agree with this rant more. Two things are absurd and defeat the whole premise of the article. First, land use laws don’t upend the premise that someone is innocent until proven guilty. How stupid! Innocent until proven guilty guilty is a criminal determination. Land use decisions are civil decisions where guilt or innocence is not part of the equation. The health, safety and general welfare of people is at the core of zoning and land use. Under that premise one should not be able to build or change the use of a property until such time that it is determined it will not harm the health, safety and welfare of individuals impacted by those changes. Pretty tough to get rid of something once it’s done, which is why these decisions are done prior to the deed being done. This guy tries to upend settled law and common sense; don’t buy it.
Second, he tries to assert that this is an abuse of the police powers. Wrong again. Zoning and land use laws have evolved from the original Euclid decision to incorporate both the carrot and the stick. This guy ignores the carrots and whines about a special interest group being held accountable. Communities need to grow according to what’s best for the community; not what’s best for that nearly sacred developer class that has literally taken the money and left disaster in their wake time after time. Don’t buy the rant; think community.
I get where you're coming from, but this is a deeply inadequate analysis. Land, homes and neighborhoods are just not fungible commodities like food or cars. I agree that the more consistency and clarity we can introduce, the better. But building a tall building on a residential block does incur a complex heat map of costs on the people around, in a way that's hard for policy to approximate in simple ways. We could have better processes for how to represent these costs, and score them in advance, and provide prices for various types of costs borne by neighbors. But to think that we can just cleanly write this once and then sit back is to fundamentally misunderstand how democracy works, and why complexity makes its way in. Some complexity is the result of misunderstandings, or rent-seeking. But much complexity is a reflection of the actual complexity of communities, their various needs, and how these change over time. Oh, that tower is going to be near a senior center that already has parking issues that keep people from seeing the visiting clinicians who come there? Well, we need some sort of process to surface that, even if officials didn't think of it, and to press the developer to adjust to it. If we don't, we're not somehow magically being more fair because our list of rules is shorter, or because there are fewer mandatory conversations involved; we're just shifting the unfairness around.
Your hypothetical senior center was built by a private land owner who apparently didn't plan for adequate parking. Somehow the solution is to usurp the property rights of his neighbors? The fact that even your example involves this kind unjustified rent-seeking certainly doesn't help the case for this sort of local review process.
Ummm, Ryan, you’re a great writer. And these days, it’s so tempting to write things like this when government and societal norms are not doing what we want them to. In more normative times I taught law to planning students for many years and maybe I was caught up in a broken system. But tell me about the role of the Constitution and due process in all of this. Aren’t you collapsing a complex body of constitutional doctrine into a false binary of liberty versus coercion, ignoring that American law seeks—not perfectly, but purposefully—to reconcile individual rights with community obligations, including in the land use arena?