[HN Gopher] Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houst...
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Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houston (2020)
Author : jseliger
Score : 45 points
Date : 2021-05-03 20:45 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mercatus.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mercatus.org)
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| For a long time, Georgism and other land-centric ideologies were
| dismissed as out-of-date holdovers from a far more agricultural
| area. But in recent years, it's been great to see a widespread
| rediscovery of the fact that, yes, land really is still
| paramount, even though society and the economy have greatly
| changed.
|
| Related was the discussion in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26994175 the other dya of
| land appreciation underwriting fast food and small businesses.
| Very nice to see.
| minikites wrote:
| Land is like attention: finite and there are no substitutes.
| Both are critical components of the economy.
| Semiapies wrote:
| Georgism is not so much a solution looking for a problem as a
| problem looking for an excuse to be inflicted.
| leafmeal wrote:
| It sounds like you disagree with Georgism. Personally, it
| makes a lot of sense to me, so I was wondering if you
| wouldn't mind elaborating on your complaint.
| u678u wrote:
| Here in NJ we're getting screwed by property taxes. 2-3% per
| year! Try doing that when you're out of work or on social
| security. Its one of the main reasons people leave.
| photojosh wrote:
| Other comments have alluded to this; but land value tax is
| very different from property tax in what it incentivises!
| Property tax just says your house is worth a lot, therefore
| you can obviously afford to pay a lot of tax, whereas land
| tax drives efficiency by encouraging density.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Are you in a single family home? If so, I have 0 sympathy.
| Downsize.
| erentz wrote:
| NJ has the highest property tax (I think). Note it's
| property tax not land value tax so while it has some effect
| on real estate prices it doesn't quite create the same
| incentive for more efficient land use.
| nine_k wrote:
| I'd say it may have an inverse effect.
|
| Build a nice house on your lot, pay a ton every year.
|
| Stay in a shack on that same lot, save a ton every year.
| u678u wrote:
| No I'm in an 2br apartment with my wife and teenage
| daughter. Taxes are $1600/mo. Still cheaper than the
| suburbs with good schools.
| woofyman wrote:
| You're apartment is valued at $700,000?
| closeparen wrote:
| That's not a lot for a 2BR with a reasonable commute to
| New York.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| $700k+ is objectively a large amount of money to spend on
| housing, more than double the median US home price. Even
| if it's a middle class home in its local market.
| u678u wrote:
| Probably higher. I'm not saying I'm struggling, I'm just
| trying to get some push back on property taxes and how
| toxic they are. When I was laid off the taxes are a huge
| burden. I have a mortgage that fixed for 30 years, but
| property taxes keep going up every year.
| minikites wrote:
| Does your comment imply that people who are out of work or on
| social security are better off renting? A property tax seems
| manageable like any other expense if you live within your
| means.
| snidane wrote:
| Economy hasn't changed much for what matters. Real estate/land
| is still the dominant market.
|
| Economics changed however. Land is no longer a factor of
| production like it used to in classical economics. Real estate
| market, despite its size and 99% people involved with 50% of
| their salary in it, is just an afterthough for a modern
| economist.
| foota wrote:
| I don't think I'd say it's an afterthought for economists, I
| would argue that it's not talked about because it's pretty
| simple, but politics is out of touch with economics.
| erentz wrote:
| A common misconception about Houston is it doesn't have zoning.
| Which is true. But it effectively achieves the same thing with a
| number of city ordinances and with covenants that subdivisions
| place on their land use which are enforced by the city.
| afrodc_ wrote:
| It goes into that in the article and states it was one of the
| ways to make the liberalization of zoning digestible by
| allowing concerned communities being able to opt out under
| certain democratic conditions.
| skilesare wrote:
| Trying to find examples of optimized land use in Houston seems to
| be a bit....um....what is the word for "absurd beyond the point
| that reason and logic would allow"?
| nights192 wrote:
| Could you expound on this, please? I'm not too familiar with
| Houston's milieu, and I think hearing a reason why you believe
| this'd be really interesting.
| vkou wrote:
| Houston is 700 square miles of low-density sprawl, with what
| feels like 400 of them occupied by roads and parking lots.
|
| That pattern of development optimizes for... Well, a couple
| of metrics, but most of them don't have much to do with
| efficiency or optimization.
| alistairSH wrote:
| This is mentioned in the article. The city did reduce the
| minimum lot size considerably in the late 90s. But, that
| wouldn't have undone decades of too-large lots for SFH and
| lot size so large THs were completely untenable.
|
| All that said, it sounds like Houston could be a good
| "experiment" for something more efficient/optimal than the
| normal US city/suburb zoning scheme. Reduce the lot sizes a
| bit more, remove parking minimums, etc.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Yes getting rid of zoning and things (which as the
| artificial nicely points out means going beyond what
| Houston has done) is still not enough.
|
| Cars are still uniquely terrible. I'm beginning to view
| them re development like a gene drive is to geneics: a
| single piece of technology that upends the careful balance
| from before and takes over everything.
|
| Public transit + anti-car urbanism, while much more fragile
| due to today's rich hating it, still also has increasing
| returns though. Do a LVT and Carbon tax too to accelerate
| that.
| jcranmer wrote:
| One example I vividly recall when visiting Rice University
| (in Houston):
|
| Literally across the street from my hotel room, on the 16th
| story, was a single-family detached house.
| parineum wrote:
| What's the problem?
| Pfhreak wrote:
| If you are placing 16+ story housing buildings down, it's
| because you need the density. No one puts an apartment
| building down that size in a ghost town.
|
| Odds are good that density is still desired across the
| street. Or maybe one step down into something more mid-
| rise. A single family home uses an entire lot to house a
| single family, maybe just 1-2 people.
|
| It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and
| artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.
| parineum wrote:
| > If you are placing 16+ story housing buildings down,
| it's because you need the density
|
| Who is "you"? The way your sentence is structured is from
| the perspective of a city planner zoning a city or a
| powerful central authority actually building these
| structures.
|
| In Houston, "you" is an individual and if you are placing
| a 16+ storing housing building down, you're doing it
| because you think you can make money renting or selling
| the units. The idea of relaxed land use regulations
| (zoning) is to allow demand to plan the city.
|
| > It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and
| artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.
|
| Efficiency isn't the most important thing to all people.
| If it was, we'd all live in dormitories and eat in the
| cafeteria because private bathrooms and kitchens are
| wasteful. I don't understand what you mean by
| "artificial" inflation of prices, what's artificial about
| it?
| lokar wrote:
| This illustrates the issue (IMO) at the heart of all of
| these discussions:
|
| Is personal ownership of land like other property
| ownership (like a chair), or is it somehow different? To
| what degree does society at large retain some ownership
| rights to all land, and a say in how it should be used?
| Pfhreak wrote:
| It's different, but similar. We do actually care about
| other property ownership -- we tax various parts of its
| production to encourage the outcomes we want. That might
| be taxing based on country of origin, of materials used,
| of cost to dispose of, etc.
|
| But land is intrinsically tied to housing and food
| production. We should be strongly discouraging allowing
| usable land to lie dormant because someone wants to
| speculate on it. Land should be taxed in a way that
| encourages maximizing housing/business/service
| utilization. A city block dedicated to surface parking
| provides almost no utility compared to placing a forty
| story mixed use residential building on the same lot.
| Even worse are property speculators who purchase
| abandoned sites and do nothing with them for years in
| hopes that property values will rise considerably in an
| urban core.
| nine_k wrote:
| The land under the single-family home might carry a tall
| building that would bring much more business into that
| city block. A city might incentivize that through a land
| value tax, which would be high for this lot.
|
| But Houston has relatively little urban fabric; to me it
| looks mostly like a really large suburban agglomeration,
| a place where you cannot get anywhere without driving a
| few miles in a car.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Land taxes are one of the few taxes that don't disincentive
| productive activity.
|
| Are there any others like it (aside from externality taxes)?
| minikites wrote:
| Taxes on financial transactions, e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax
| fighterpilot wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. This only doesn't disincentive
| productive activity if you think that secondary financial
| markets (including speculation and market making on those
| markets) aren't contributing anything productive.
|
| I'm of two minds about this but I lean towards the notion
| that speculation is a net value add.
|
| Think about the trillions raised in the secondary market,
| which is all contingent on valuations set by supply and
| demand, where these valuations are determined by speculators.
| The more accurate the speculators are, the more productive
| the capital is that's injected into the secondary market.
|
| So I think we definitely don't want to disincentive the
| institutional speculation that happens, which is what a tax
| would do.
|
| On the other hand we want to disincentive retail hype bubbles
| like GME, which lead to the opposite to the above - capital
| going the wrong way. However it's not clear to me that the
| tax would achieve that. Retail hype seems rather price
| inelastic. The bitcoin craze in late 2017 was good evidence
| of this, since fees for trading crypto are very high.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| They really are excellent taxes. If you are a Keynsian though,
| other distributive are also good as they "unlock" more demand
| which is the bootstrapping tension for the everything else.
| [deleted]
| canada_dry wrote:
| Had family that lived in Houston region for a couple decades... I
| would _not_ hold it up as a template to follow! I recall them
| pointing out to me day-care centres beside buildings storing
| industrial chemicals. Many more absurd examples.
| afrodc_ wrote:
| While it's fair to criticize components of the exact zoning and
| regulations they have, you can take a lesson from this as an
| effective system and make adjustments as necessary. It's not
| perfect but better than the single-family zoning in a lot of
| cities causing massive sprawl and increased expenditure in
| roads for commuters.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The important thing to note about Houston is that it has grown
| 20-60% per decade over the past half century and now has over
| 7,000,000 people and is still growing rapidly.
|
| It really doesn't matter how many anecdotes or criticisms from
| urban designers get posted here, because the important part is
| that an enormous number of people want to and do live in Houston,
| which is tautologically better urban design than any city which
| to which people have been unable or unwilling to move.
| pchristensen wrote:
| You can tautologically say that living there is more attractive
| than cities with population stagnation, but not that it's a
| better urban design. Would the current built Houston still be
| growing if the energy industry were in a different region?
| Doubtful.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| This is borderline "no true scottsman". Lots of people live
| where they need to not where they want to.
|
| Just because a city holds more people at a lower price doesn't
| make it intrinsically better planned.
| parineum wrote:
| What better metric is there?
|
| If you ask people, they're bound to lie to you. What people
| do is much more indicative of their priorities than what they
| say.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| People will happily move to heavily polluted cities to get
| a job. Should we infer they enjoy pollution?
|
| You're absolutely right that people won't always answer
| polls seriously or honestly, but it's fairly clear people
| will put up with awful situations if it will help their
| family out, so looking at their actions isn't a reliable
| indicator either.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Better is pretty subjective. But there are quite a few I'd
| say are also reasonable to consider. How healthy is the
| average person living there? How happy is the average
| person living there? Is the development sustainable or will
| it create problems in the future?
|
| Many gold rush boom towns pulled a lot of strings to get
| enough housing, tents, taverns or tenements to house their
| populations. Would we call most of those towns well
| planned? Even successful?
| alistairSH wrote:
| It's probably a reasonable metric. But, it doesn't
| necessarily tell us why.
|
| Picking a place to live is a balancing act. Houston might
| have a strong enough job market to offset several other
| negatives (long commutes, lack of green space). Money is a
| strong motivator, but doesn't always make for a better QoL
| or healthier existence.
|
| Put another way, given the option between two suburban
| hell-scapes, people will pick the one that pays better.
| But, it's a still a suburban hell-scape.
|
| Personally, I find Austin a much more palatable place to
| live than Houston (though I continue to remain in DC).
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I don't really understand this. Houston didn't grow because
| of natural population growth (at least, mostly not).
|
| It grew because people wanted to move there, jobs were good,
| and housing was (relatively) cheap. It's what people wanted.
| How could you possibly indict this?
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| > wanted to move there
|
| Correction. It grew because lots of people did move there.
| People move despite their personal feelings all the time.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| Re: Georgism. I ran across the wiki article on this a few weeks
| ago (I only recall George as being an also ran candidate for NYC,
| like Roosevelt). There is utopian quote after utopian quote about
| both George the man and what Georgism could accomplish.
|
| Basically, you tax land value (unincorporated) and therefore
| business/people are encouraged to pay for the most valuably
| located lots while still encouraging development elsewhere and to
| discourage land speculation. The modern version is land value
| tax.
|
| I recently saw sama proposing what sounded a lot like it (though
| he didn't directly cite it as an influence) and it is certainly
| something that would be popular among the tech elite because
| another component of this is those taxes could theoretically fund
| UBI.
|
| Houston does seem like one of the best places in the world to
| test this out (exploding population, tons of existing value,
| zoning laws) but in the progressive era when this was but one of
| a lots of idea trying to gain traction, it was ruled
| unconstitutional by the state.
|
| It's something I'd love to see more discussion about.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
|
| Geoism seems to be the modern cultural correct identifier.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| I wonder if a place like Houston would experience pretty
| dramatic shifts in culture as a result, particularly around the
| usages of cars and transit. IIRC, there are parking lots
| everywhere in Houston. A LVT would presumably make putting in
| denser uses more valuable or drive up the cost of parking. A
| lot in Downtown would surely bring in more rent as
| offices/housing/retail than just a surface lot.
|
| But then this applies pressures to those who commute in single
| occupancy vehicles, reduces the amount of available parking,
| and generally makes the downtown less desireable for those in
| the suburbs.
|
| To me, this is what we should be doing -- making driving into
| city centers for work quite unpalatable relative to transit --
| but I wonder if Texas is culturally ready to even consider a
| change like that.
| photojosh wrote:
| I'm in the eighth largest city in Australia (similar car-
| oriented like the USA, public transport is poor unless that's
| your #1 priority in housing). It's absolutely ridiculous that
| there can be large surface lots of parking right in the
| centre of town.
| nerdkid93 wrote:
| Related video from City Beautiful on YouTube:
| https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k
| laactech wrote:
| I've lived in Houston the majority of my life, and my anecdotal
| experience is reinforced by this article. Over the past 5 years
| Houston has seen a lot of development specifically with clusters
| of vertical townhomes. This seems to be happening all over inside
| the 610 loop with concentration in specific areas such as east
| downtown.
| tyingq wrote:
| Houston also let a lot of people build on areas that were almost
| sure to flood later, without any accompanying regulation around
| insurance or meaningful notification on subsequent sale. So some
| of that more liberal policy didn't work out well.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > or meaningful notification on subsequent sale
|
| I'm never buying a house that isn't on a hill. I want to
| literally be able to see where any water would run away. I
| don't know why anyone would buy a low-lying house now, except
| if they were financially constrained.
| giantg2 wrote:
| There are a lot of areas and regions that are very flat. It's
| hard to build on a hill if there aren't any hills around.
| It's similar to telling people not to live in overpriced
| areas like SV. If that's were the jobs are and there are also
| people that want to live in that environment/area, then they
| keep moving there and driving prices even higher.
| evancox100 wrote:
| There are no hills in Houston
| tyingq wrote:
| And if it seems like a hill, you're just next to a huge
| ditch. Like this: https://www.uh.edu/news-
| events/stories/2012/october/Easement
| criddell wrote:
| Don't lenders require flood insurance for high risk areas?
| giantg2 wrote:
| The federal government requires flood insurance, even if you
| own your house outright. They also expanded those flood zones
| substantially over the past decade or so.
| drone wrote:
| Yes, they very much do. I'm not entirely sure how to square
| the GP's comment.
|
| Most of the issues as-of-late have been areas that didn't
| previously flood. The areas which flood change as development
| increases.
|
| Houston also has pretty substantial regulation around flood
| mitigation and such these days. I'm not sure how that relates
| to this article in any way, which is focused on zoning,
| minimum lot size changes, and neighborhood-based opt-out on
| loosened regulations.
| tyingq wrote:
| >Yes, they very much do. I'm not entirely sure how to
| square the GP's comment.
|
| It happened. Lots of the flood plain homes that were
| destroyed in Hurricane Harvey were not flood insured. One
| of the reasons cited was lax updating of maps, another was
| builders gaming the system, another was loopholes for land
| near flood management reservoirs, etc. Things that happen
| less often if the local government is active around land
| use regulations.
|
| And, in fact, Houston and Harris county did enact a bunch
| of new ordinances around all of this after Harvey.
|
| https://archive.is/XxhE
|
| https://wga-llp.com/blog/city-of-houston-adopts-new-
| floodpla...
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| The federal government provides flood insurance when
| private insurers won't.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "I'm not sure how that relates to this article in any way,
| which is focused on zoning, minimum lot size changes, and
| neighborhood-based opt-out on loosened regulations."
|
| Most flood mitigation regulations are essentially
| zoning/planning/building permit related. They include
| restrictions on impermeable surface area, lot grading, etc.
| Let's say you cut lot size in half and are essentially
| doubling impermeable surfaces. That water has to go
| somewhere. This can increase the amount of run off and the
| chance of flash flooding. It can also complicate grading
| since existing houses might have been graded on the
| assumption that their runoff can go to the other side of
| the lot... where the new house now exists.
|
| So they are connected.
| evancox100 wrote:
| In theory, but a) many properties are owned outright, for one
| reason or another, b) the flood maps assume flood control
| measures all work properly (e.g Harvey necessitated
| intentional release of water in order to prevent dams/levees
| from failing), c) over a 30 year mortgage you have a 26%
| chance of experiencing a "100-year flood", d) 100 year flood
| definition is inherently imprecise in the first place, not to
| mention climate change issues...
|
| I could go on, not sure how much of this is really Houston's
| fault, the only flood insurance program is federal and they
| exert so much influence because they do establish the
| requirements for ~everyone who has a mortgage. Feds should
| probably take the lead on this.
|
| Also Houston is just really flat to begin with, basically at
| sea level.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Houston does have unique local situtations, such as "we're
| going to allow you to build homes inside of our flood
| management reservoirs [1] and not require you to disclose
| to buyers that they're in a flood management reservoirs."
|
| [1] i.e., the land that is intentionally flooded to prevent
| worse floods from happening downstream.
| Edman274 wrote:
| They do, but most people get their flood insurance through
| the National Flood Insurance Program, which makes
| determinations of risk based on data collected back in the
| 80s, and doesn't have premiums that cover the actual risk,
| which means it doesn't really dissuade people from building
| in flood areas.
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