Uhh, have you heard about the housing affordability problem in many states? The zoning regulations have created cookie cutter cul-de-sac neighborhoods that have contributed to unnatural sprawl. It's very difficult to even innovate in housing and commercial design due to these restrictions.
In Houston, the same thing has happened without zoning. Have you perhaps considered that there is a massive market for "cookie cutter" suburban housing? HOAs have also largely taken the place of zoning, on a hyper-localized level. Furthermore, lots of other stupid rules apply, aside from zoning, that limit the ability to build new housing.
That market was deliberately stoked by FHA and mortgage lending restrictions. The thread itself points out that these issues are not soley the result of zoning.
> While single family zoning was reserved for homeowners (read: White), multi-family housing was seen as being for renters, (people of color).
> State, federal, and local governments all conspired to limit homebuying and lending to whites for decades.
You're not providing any causal link. You are effectively positing that a whites-only neighborhood will spontaneously organize into suburbia, but an integrated one will not? Would you please provide some evidence or background reading to support that?
I won't speak to the race issues but as a former realtor I dealt with FHA loans and they have asinine restrictions on them. I had to get local ordinance exceptions on a number of issues to get a loan approved for some buyers. It was a mess. They required certain lot sizes and certain dimensions. And while FHA has lost its luster a bit over the decades, it used to be a much more common type of loan, as it was one of the few ways to buy without putting a lot of money down.
I was quoting the Twitter thread to show that it discussed alternate causes beyond zoning, not making any of the claims that you seem to have taken issue with.
Uhh yeah. It’s not because of setbacks or hurricane structural requirements or parking spaces. The “cookie cutter cul-de-sac” neighborhoods are the affordable neighborhoods built to fight that. What you present as evidence contradicts your thesis. I lived there. And affordability is why.
A section of publicly owned and maintained road that only 5 families ever use and only for residential use is not a good use of resources and is affordable only if you live there. It is being subsidized by people that live in denser areas unless the roads are paid for by an internal home owner's association.
