The government prevents someone from opening a lead smelting plant next to a school (hopefully). They also force homes to have two exits from every room in case of fire, etc.
But they also discovered manufacturing housing scarcities and _also_ making massive, lifelong loans available for housing are a GREAT way to keep your population working really hard to just barely keep a roof over their head. Want to work part time and pursue art? Want to stay home and watch your child grow up? Too bad, there's 10 more people who'll outbid you for your house, so you have to design your life around income maximization.
These scarcities are created with zoning, parking minimums (maybe the most horrible part), green space (aka yard size) requirements, ridiculously large streets, density restrictions, etc.
The escape is to leave the city and work remote (honestly it's amazing what having no mortgage and no rent does to your sense of agency) but that's an option open to rather few people, and probably not for long as it becomes normalized and wages adjust as a result.
Yep. There's a difference between my example and proper fire exits. I didn't capture that in my original post, but I fully agree. Unfortunately the power to regulate these things has been abused to keep the poor out of housing permanently.
> manufacturing housing scarcities ... are a GREAT way to keep your population working really hard to just barely keep a roof over their head.
This guy gets it.
The urbanists' hearts are in the right place, but in the end they're getting used. The only way to win is not to play.
Source: bought a rural foreclosure and licensed wholesale dark fiber from the electric utility. My internet bill is ten times my property tax bill and it's worth it.
Urbanism works except we need to address a century of pent up demand and every time someone says "well you're just building for the rich" but the whole point is that it's to scarce so obviously only the rich can afford the first nice homes to be built in a century!
But yeah, houses are cheap. Very nice log cabin style ones (manufactured parts, assembled on site) can be sub 100k. In a scarcity house prices rise to match the debt available. Incidentally, if you like a project look for houses no bank will lend on.
I find this a very weird thing to be upset about. The cost is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the price of a house, and I imagine plenty of people would like having an outlet there even if they don't drive an electric car. I'm sure there are lots of pernicious regulations, but this doesn't seem like a great example of one.
Electric cars are up against a vicious cycle: no one will build houses to accommodate electric cars until a lot of people have them, but most people won't buy an electric car if they can't charge it in their garage. So if you want people to drive electric cars, which the government rightly does, it makes sense to require that new houses are built with electric cars in mind. Yes, Teslas are expensive, but the expectation is that the houses will still be around once electric vehicles are more affordable, and it's cheaper to prepare for them now than to retrofit later on.
The cost is a drop in the bucket, but there are enough other drops to overflow the bucket. When we take offense at substandard living conditions and then regulate them away, we price out the poor. We often even excuse it as some benefit to the poor, saying that they deserve good things too, but of course the totality of the regulations ends up pricing them out of the market.
I think it’s a red herring in areas with expensive housing. If you could save a bit of money with cheaper building codes, the land cost would increase by the same amount, because land is capturing all the surplus.
Land only captures all the surplus when construction that increases density is prohibited. What people are really paying for living space, not dirt. A thousand square feet in a ten story building is pretty much just as good as a thousand square feet in a single story building, but the ten story building has ten times as much of it, so at scale more supply lowers the price.
There is also demand for "smallest available unit of housing" which naturally costs more if it's required by law to be larger.
Even taking that as a given, it's eminently reasonable to expect new home construction to last long enough that for future residents, electric cars will instead be a normal fact of life.
I bought a NEW Leaf for $16K (after tax credit) in 2017 when they were liquidating the 1st generation models. It has 30 kWh of battery and a range of about 120 miles.
Right now, you can buy a USED Leaf under $5K, but it probably has a worn out battery with 60-70 miles of range usable:
The regulation you cited only applies to new construction, and according to link you gave adds about $50 to the cost of the house. This is not going to stop anyone from becoming an owner--poor people tend to by existing house, not new construction.
A level 2 charger is not much different from an electric clothes dryer as far as your house electrical infrastructure is concerned, so when putting in support for the later it is cheap and easy to put in support for the former, too.
That was just one example of the many new requirements that make houses more expensive. Solar panels will now be required on all new homes. Also fire sprinkler systems are required, adding somewhere between $5k-$10k in costs. Each new regulation might seem okay on its own, but all of these things add up.
Speaking of building regulations and solar, I stayed in a house that was completely powered by solar and wired with DC for lights and electronics. You can't just add an AC outlet in the kitchen for a coffee grinder, though. If you have even one AC outlet, you have to wire the entire house to code -- useless and unused AC outlets every few feet along the hallways, AC outlet in the bathroom even though the inverter can't handle most of the things (e.g. hair dryers) that would be plugged in in a bathroom.
Coffee grinders are ten bucks and beans last longer if they're not ground.
Also, everyone has the things that they choose to splurge on, even a poor person. When I was dirt broke in college I still bought 2 ply tp because dammit life is too short to deal with anything less. I don't regret it.
Huh? Whole bean coffee doesn't cost any more and some grinders are quite cheap? The vast majority of poor people have smartphones, and those are much more expensive.
Basically nobody buys a house outright, so they're not paying the upfront cost anyway, they're taking out a loan. Taking out a larger loan so that you have a larger loan payment when the increase is less than the amount the panels save you in buying electricity from the power company doesn't cost you anything, it turns a profit.
Being forced to pay for a parking space even when you don't own a car costs you rather a lot.
How much of the $700,000-$1,500,000 price of a 15-year-old house in a coastal city is due to all of these requirements adding up?
2%? 5%? It's not the reason why I was stepping around a homeless person sprawled in the middle of the sidewalk on my Monday commute.
The reason housing is unaffordable is the cost of land, availability of credit, and the self-fulfilling expectation that houses are a good investment that will grow in price.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. We have building regulations because buildings before regulations were dangerous or unusable to such a degree that citizens banded together to outlaw such buildings in the future. Communities don't want homes built in their neighborhoods which lack plumbing or electricity.
Also, we don't build housing for the poor, we build housing for the wealthy and middle class, which later becomes available to the poor due to depreciation. I live in a city where literal mansions have been carved up into apartment buildings over the years and where poor people live in Italianate apartments with beautiful stonework.
Complaints about regulations always ring hollow to me, because they always seem to imagine that regulations spring into being ex nihilo. Regulations are practically always written in response to something going wrong -- frequently, involving somebody ending up dead.
So often it just seems callous: this regulation is inconveniencing me, so let's remove it. If that harms other people, that's their problem.
That doesn't mean that the regulations were well designed, or even if they were, that the reasons remain the same. But that's the point: regulations are removed by the same processes that create them, and they don't get into place lightly, either. So if you want a regulation removed, you need to figure out what caused it to be created in the first place. Only then can you create a better regulation that solves the problems that need to be solved.
> So often it just seems callous: this regulation is inconveniencing me, so let's remove it. If that harms other people, that's their problem.
Given that the rules are nominally in place to benefit occupants, I don't see where you're getting a conflict of interest. It's offering to suffer the alleged harm yourself in exchange for not having to pay significantly higher housing costs.
> But that's the point: regulations are removed by the same processes that create them
The problem is that they're not. As you say they're often imposed following some fatality. But even if the new rule is ineffective garbage, it's unlikely to be traceable to any specific deaths. The way regulations kill people is much more indirect, e.g. by making housing more expensive so that people who can no longer afford it freeze to death on the streets, or die in car crashes because they have to live somewhere with a longer commute and the additional vehicle miles turned them into a statistic.
What that means is that there is a process for getting individual rules added in practice but no equivalent process for getting individual rules removed, so they accumulate over time.
> Only then can you create a better regulation that solves the problems that need to be solved.
A huge part of the issue is that some problems don't have cost-effective solutions. If you can prevent one death every ten years by raising housing costs by $1/month, notice that in a city with a million homes you've just spent $120M to save one life. If the value of a statistical life is something like $10M, well, we just overpaid by >1000%. And we may not know of any way to prevent that death for the less than $0.10/month cost increase it would take to make it cost effective. (You also need to verify that the rule is actually effective and not just speculate that it might work when it might not.)
But local zoning boards are hardly doing that kind of cost benefit analysis every time they add a new rule to their thick book of rules, so consequently huge swathes of the existing rules come out on the wrong side of it.
And since nothing ever really gets people excited about any given individual minor regulatory inefficiency until they stack up to be killing thousands of people on net, fixing that problem characteristically comes in the form of a mass culling of existing rules.
Did you just make an argument for trickle-down housing? I think we’ve established that it didn’t work for money. I think it’s a bit too optimistic to assume that it will work for real-estate.
What will actually happen is that the children of the original owners rent out the place for extortionate amounts, and people will pay it, because they have nowhere else to go.
A friend is remodeling (drastically) their house in Mountain View. Some of the code stuff seems crazy. Bathrooms must have motion sensor and humidity sensor enabled fans? Bathroom lights must be motion sensor enabled?
I’m sure there’s something driving all of this that has some basis in a real concern (similar to sprinkler systems and networked smoke detectors) but it seems like the complex and higher cost code-driven housing requirements is basically unbounded.
Why do I want a motion sensor in my bathroom? Every time I find a house where that is the case I have to keep waving my arms about when having a dump :(
While this stuff can be cheap, it sounds insane. I understand that it can vary from state to state but American building code and zoning sounds so over regulated to European countries. I wonder why there isn't more pushback from people since Americans tend to prefer liberties and freedom.
That and practically disallowing the sale of incandescent light fixtures. It's all typical California insanity. You don't have to deal with that in a lot of other parts of the country.
LED and CFL lights use the same fixtures as incandescent which are not banned in California. In my experience, the number of people spreading FUD about California far exceeds the craziness coming from the state itself.
We never have enough outlets, and it is a good thing mandating enough of them in new constructions.
In fact, at least in France, where I live, it is a common annoyance in old houses: not enough outlet. Some people add them later on, and it is not always pretty... or safe. There is now rules mandating a minimum of outlets and light fixtures for new constructions, and it is a good thing.
Electric car or not, a high enough amperage outlet is good to have. And you have to think long term too. Electric cars are mostly luxury vehicles now, but things are evolving. And consider that the next owner may have an electric car if you ever want to sell your house.
Of course, you can install the outlet later, but generally, doing things later in a house is a huge pain in the ass. For example, you want to drill holes and make a mess before painting and furnishing.
These regulations actually make things cheaper, because you don't have to rebuild things later.
I can still see some value to building codes and regulations, but I really don't see what benefit the very strict zoning regulations are bringing to the table.
If my neighbor and I decide to sell our land to a developer so they can build a small apartment complex we should be allowed to. If the neighbors don't like the idea of having an apartment nearby they can see if they can get in on the deal too (probably turning a tidy profit on their lot) or they can suck it. It's my land I should be able to sell it to whomever I want or build whatever I want provided the structure doesn't pose a physical risk to my neighbor or their property.
But when your neighbors bought the land they bought it priced with the knowledge that their neighbors (you) could not do that, so to them, you can suck it.
(I'm for relaxing zoning laws but if you ever wanted to convince anyone this kind of argument is like the last approach you should use.)
Yeah I don't usually find "suck it" to be a compelling argument it's more expressive.
They didn't quite price in the current zoning restrictions in that they were as changeable then as they are now. If I was particularly motivated and persuasive (or let's be honest good at grift) I could still convince my local city council to rezone my neighborhood to allow said sale. My formulation just doesn't force me to go through a middleman who, most likely, really doesn't care about my neighbor's concerns are just what their cut will be.
Agreed. If you have enough money to own a house with a garage and electric car, you can probably afford to have an electrician run an outlet to your garage if it doesn't already have one. Similarly, I doubt anyone who owns a house and gasoline car is going car shopping and saying "Oh, honey, this car is electric, and we don't have an outlet in the garage... we can't get this..."
You have the qualifier of "probably" - but money may not be the only thing holding someone back.
For instance, I want a 220 outlet in my garage so I can have a proper welder out there. I don't have an electric car (and even if someday I do own one, it won't fit in my current garage, due to various reasons - chief one being it's a conversion from a carport).
That all said - I am not sure I can get such an outlet. Money isn't the issue - but it could become the issue.
Because I would need an additional 220 circuit added to my existing circuits in my breaker box. But the panel is full. So I would probably need to either get a larger panel, or add on an auxiliary panel (likely the latter). But that also depends on my service from the main transformer.
I might not be able to get an extra circuit if my service isn't large enough to support such an extra circuit. The only way to change that would be to have a larger capacity transformer installed. That transformer is shared between my house and the neighbor's house. I don't even want to contemplate what it would cost to change that out (thinking somewhere in the 5 figure range - but where?).
So money isn't an issue - until you have an electrician come out and tell you that to run an additional line is going to require major changes to your current electrical service.
This was my thought on seeing the regulation as well. Although it may have been better to mandate panels leaving room for expansion instead of mandating a 240v outlet.
Fitting in additional breakers is not usually a problem and adding an expansion panel isn't either.
If the supply from the transformer isn't enough, then I don't see a regulation requiring a 220v in your garage affecting that. Whether it's new or an an upgrade later, you are going to have the same problem.
They make 120v breakers that have two switches on them and two hot terminals in order to save space in the panel. That sounds like exactly what you need.
what does the average guy do in this situation? exactly, get an extender, plug it into a random outlet in the house, attach it with duct tape, job done. Regulations have made our lives safer once again
> "Oh, honey, this car is electric, and we don't have an outlet in the garage... we can't get this..."
I have that problem. It will probably cost me $3000-$4000 to install the wall charger and then in 10 years they will probably rip it out and replace it with a whole set of wall chargers with central load balancing for a much lower cost because the cost of running a wire doesn't increase with the number of chargers. (Underground garage of an apartment complex if it wasn't obvious)
> Nobody should be forced to have an electrical outlet in the garage for an electric car and the government has no business requiring that.
> This is just my favorite example of thousands of silly regulations that are put in place to keep the poor from becoming owners.
That one regulation is marginal compared to the effects of very restrictive zoning for density and transit, which is usually a tool most effectively implemented by highly exclusive locales.
This smacks of the No True Scotsman problem - were all the regulations good, we wouldn't have this problem. And yet, governments are by and large incompetent, and most regulations they pass are bad. Almost all have significant unintended consequences. The ways to fix this are to minimize regulation at all levels and make regulation as hyper-local as possible.
Governments are not by and large incompetent, nor are they responsible for craft commonly-used electrical wiring standards. That is, in fact, written by a private organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Electrical_Code
Local governments (the ones in charge of zoning) adopt this because it's easier to adopt an existing standard than to try and write one's own. Any homeowner who's discovered wonky wiring done by a previous handyman will appreciate the existence of standards like this.
So many people argue against regulations, not realizing how much absolute shit they'd be up against now without them. People being electrocuted by their homes used to be a routine thing, for example.
It's like how we have anti-vaxxers now that the memories of what the vaccines cure are so distant.
In what way? There are many regulations that are critical to a functioning society. Seeing a set of bad regulations and saying "that's it get rid of all of them" smacks of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> There are many regulations that are critical to a functioning society.
I disagree vehemently, and believe there are very few that are necessary, aside from enforcing the harm principle and a few basic functions (i.e. diplomacy & military). Rather, most people use laws to attempt to enforce upon society their visions of how it ought to look and operate (i.e. drug bans, zoning). My motivation for getting rid of _most_ regulations is ideological (I can think of no ethical justification for the state to compel, by force, a home-owner to install an outlet in his wall), and I was attempting to illustrate a practical aspect of why; I don't believe there's much "bathwater" to be thrown out that wouldn't have been provided through other means.
Your motivation may be ideological but it is not in anyway practical.
If you look worldwide, places with minimal levels of regulation and enforcent tend to be more impoverished and almost no countries with a functioning government have the level of regulation that you advocate. The evidence strongly suggest that regulation tends to increase economic efficiency (at least up to a point).
Perhaps you can redirect your ideological distaste to find ways to help systematically determine which regulations are effective/necessary and expediently remove those that are harmful rather than advocating for a state of affairs that ignores reality.
Hong Kong and Singapore certainly have zoning and land use regulation. They have consumer safety regulations. They have much more strict drug law penalties. Thereay be areas where they have less regulation but they are hardly the poster children for "minimal regulation" countries.
I am not at all saying that our level of regulation is perfect. There are lots of bad regulations that exist to protect industry profits or simply remove citizen choice out of fear.
Those poorer nations with less regulations don't enforce what they have. See, for instance, the post about massive sand theft in India; rampant corruption enables anyone to bypass the law amd cause harm to others. Passing more regulations won't fix that; said nations have tried that and failed.
> Rather, most people use laws to attempt to enforce upon society their visions of how it ought to look and operate (i.e. drug bans, zoning). My motivation for getting rid of _most_ regulations is ideological
Do you not see that, were you to get your way, you'd be doing precisely the same, just with a different vision?
If I want 'drug bans and zoning', for example, I'll be cross that you've used (perhaps lack of) laws to force your own liberal vision upon me.
And that's essentially how we've (in much of the world) arrived at multi-party democracy.
Not passing a law does not force you to do anything. It still leaves individuals the freedom to make choices; i.e. I support removing drug restrictions but don't use them myself. Let everyone make his own choice. Your position is the restrictive one, the one where you seek to force me to live as you see fit; not passing a law allows everyone to live according to his own choices. On the other hand, if I transgress against your governmental club, policemen bust down my door at 3 AM and haul me off; there is no such occurrence without a law.
(to be clear 'my' position is just assumed for argument's sake)
It's still the laws or not that govern society, it still affects me. You'd like some minimal laws too, as you said, such as preventing people killing each other - that also is restricting other people, for the benefit of the others.
Absolutely, I believe in some very basic stuff, like what you described (enforcing the harm principle). But, someone's drug abuse (for instance) does not harm me, unless I have to pay for the rehab; a lack of zoning may lead to an ugly house, but the closest that comes to harm is failing to provide visual or aesthetic pleasure to me.
However, you claimed restricting one from killing another is for the benefit of the one. Not so, rather it is to prevent undue harm to another. Conceptually, it is the difference between you stealing $100 and me giving you the same.
I also believe in remediating externalities, i.e. no one gets to dump toxic sludge in the river. I simply don't see an ethical case for laws that tell a landowner what he can and can't do with the property.
> However, you claimed restricting one from killing another is for the benefit of the one. Not so, rather it is to prevent undue harm to another.
I'm not really sure what you mean, I think we're in agreement here. I said:
> preventing people killing each other - that also is restricting other people, for the benefit of the others.
--
I'm not arguing that your views are wrong or unethical, just that they can't stand on natural superiority, it's all up for debate, it all impacts others.
(Drug use absolutely impacts others beyond hypotherical tax paying for rehabilitation - there's potential for anti-social behaviour, littering, and smell/noise/etc. in public spaces. I'm not making a judgement on whether that should or shouldn't be available for individual choice, I just don't see that it's ultra vires for a legislative body to rule on it.)
> How to solve the housing crisis: get the government out.
It’s not just government; private contracts often prohibit homeowners from serving more residents. In Zoning Rules! (https://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulatio...), William Fischel describes how zoning can substitute for private CC&Rs, which are worse than zoning in that amendments often require supermajority of all property owners in the neighborhood instead of simple majority. Property rights that are too strong can be just as big of a problem as government regulations that are too restrictive.
There are a lot of places in the world that have little government regulation and a huge housing crisis. What’s the evidence for government being the problem, or for getting rid of it being the solution?
Nobody is being forced to have a car charging outlet in the garage. From your link: “The rule specifies that one- and two-family dwellings have a service panel with capacity for a 40-amp circuit--enough for a 32-amp charging station--and conduit that can support wiring for an 80-amp circuit.
“The estimated cost of compliance is reportedly around $50, a fraction of the cost of adding the appropriate electrical service and wiring later on.”
And you know Teslas aren’t the only electric cars, and that more brands are on the way, right?
Be careful - a lot of these "quick, solve the housing crisis" invite in sketchy developer practices that cut the most ridiculous corners when building.
Prewiring new homes for solar or electric cars probably costs $100 when building a house. Romex is that cheap and pulling the wires before the walls have drywall is trivial.
Doing it after the house is built is several orders of magnitude more expensive, and a great barrier to homeowners.
I think the point is more that you are already paying them $2000 to run some wires from roof to ground, running an additional wire while they’re doing those only costs you an extra $100.
A new trace for 3 to 8 gauge cable depending on load from roof to ground isn't a five min job nor are they cheap, both wire and labor. Hell, I charged 80/hr for low voltage pulling. High voltage is a whole different set of concerns and fire risk. This isn't something to hand wave as incidental and throw numbers around putting silly ideas in people's heads.
“We do have a lot of land-use regulations,” Festa said. “We still have a lot of stuff that looks and smells like zoning.”
To be more precise, Houston doesn’t exactly have official zoning. But it has what Festa calls “de facto zoning,” which closely resembles the real thing. “We’ve got a lot of regulations that in other cities would be in the zoning code,” Festa said. “When we use it here, we just don’t use the ‘z’ word.”
The article's title: Did Huston Flood Because of a Lack of Zoning?
The article's actual content:
>All the same, it doesn't seem that tight regulations, or less development, have prevented flooding in other cities. When New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it had far less impervious surface than Houston does now; in fact, its population had been declining in every decade since 1970. Alas, the tragedy wasn’t about that anyway, but about infrastructure that collapsed and spilled water into a flood plain--a flood plain that had been developed despite New Orleans' strict zoning laws. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, it damaged a metro area that, overall, is both denser and more regulated than Houston. In the last decade alone, flooding has also hit Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Colorado, and various other regions with diverse geography and regulations.
I've been to places with more and less regulation. I've noticed that while California is significantly more regulated than Kansas, I'm much more likely to see a "quirky", "fun", or "exotic" domicile in the former than the latter. The government has a much greater capacity to hinder than promote legislatively; we have seen a hindrance of normal housing and a promotion of very little in its place.
Different areas/regions/countries have such different norms.
Where I'm from if someone said a property for sale had no power in the garage I'd be genuinely surprised and wonder what went wrong during the build. The same level of surprise as if there was no roof. Power in the garage is so useful. 240 volt power at a minimum as well. That level of expectation goes back several decades.
This. People miss the broader picture when they support “safety” regulations. Politicians will often amplify the outliers in order to gain public support to enact regulations that further monopolize returns for their buddies.
I would include things like home owner's associations as government. They only thing they are good at is maintaining shared resources. Everything else about them is counterproductive. They lock neighborhoods into being the same forever.
Nobody should be forced to have an electrical outlet in the garage for an electric car and the government has no business requiring that.
This is just my favorite example of thousands of silly regulations that are put in place to keep the poor from becoming owners.
No poor person can afford a Tesla, yet: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-n...