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"Zoning" is a city function. It was urbanists imposing zoning to begin with! Don't have to worry about zoning outside city limits. Easing zoning restrictions (which were city-based to begin with) does not address problems with restrictions imposed by restrictive covenants regardless of whether you are in a city or not.
Um, no.
First, there really weren't "urbanists" as we now understand the term back when the first zoning codes were implemented in the first years of the 20th century. Yes, suburbs had begun to rise on the fringes of a bunch of cities, but their role was clearly as "bedroom communities" for people who worked in the city but wanted a little more grass, trees and quiet. No one then questioned the economic primacy of the city, even if they did question its suitability as a place for children to grow up.
However: The descendants of the freed slaves were also beginning to pour into cities outside the South (and in it as well) in the first years of the 20th century, the first streams of what would become the flood known as the Great Migration. And (Second many of those first zoning codes had as their goal making sure whites and blacks lived nowhere near each other. Are you familiar with the Supreme Court case known as Buchanan v. Warley? That 1917 decision was one of the rare victories for blacks in the years following the Slaughter-House Cases (1883), when the Supreme Court worked to constrain the freedoms and (implied) equality of status the Civil War Amendments granted the former slaves.
The decision struck down a zoning ordinance in Louisville, Ky., that would have mandated that integrated blocks at the time eventually become all-white or all-black, and in such a way that blacks would be herded onto one side of town and whites on the other. (And that's the settlement pattern not only in Louisville but in several other large US cities today. In the other cities, including my hometown of Kansas City, the segregation and ghettoization came about thanks to the drafting of racially restrictive covenants that ran with the land, a "solution" to the "Negro problem" promoted by the real estate industry's chief trade group. BTW and FWIW, covenants are also how famously unzoned Houston keeps certain land uses out of certain parts of the city; you could call these "private zoning" or "zoning by other means.")
It's almost impossible to avoid having race enter any discussion of American society or history.
First, there really weren't "urbanists" as we now understand the term back when the first zoning codes were implemented in the first years of the 20th century. Yes, suburbs had begun to rise on the fringes of a bunch of cities, but their role was clearly as "bedroom communities" for people who worked in the city but wanted a little more grass, trees and quiet. No one then questioned the economic primacy of the city, even if they did question its suitability as a place for children to grow up.
However: The descendants of the freed slaves were also beginning to pour into cities outside the South (and in it as well) in the first years of the 20th century, the first streams of what would become the flood known as the Great Migration. And (Second many of those first zoning codes had as their goal making sure whites and blacks lived nowhere near each other. Are you familiar with the Supreme Court case known as Buchanan v. Warley? That 1917 decision was one of the rare victories for blacks in the years following the Slaughter-House Cases (1883), when the Supreme Court worked to constrain the freedoms and (implied) equality of status the Civil War Amendments granted the former slaves.
The decision struck down a zoning ordinance in Louisville, Ky., that would have mandated that integrated blocks at the time eventually become all-white or all-black, and in such a way that blacks would be herded onto one side of town and whites on the other. (And that's the settlement pattern not only in Louisville but in several other large US cities today. In the other cities, including my hometown of Kansas City, the segregation and ghettoization came about thanks to the drafting of racially restrictive covenants that ran with the land, a "solution" to the "Negro problem" promoted by the real estate industry's chief trade group. BTW and FWIW, covenants are also how famously unzoned Houston keeps certain land uses out of certain parts of the city; you could call these "private zoning" or "zoning by other means.")
It's almost impossible to avoid having race enter any discussion of American society or history.
Serious question. Not trolling I promise. Don't want this to get hyper-political.
I spent a little time on this board when I first moved to Cobb County in 2007. At that point and for a few years following, the constant push-pull was between folks like me (grew up in NYC and lived in MA before moving here) who preferred a suburban lifestyle to folks who advocated for a more urban lifestyle everywhere.
We saw thread after thread about "sprawl" and "density" with one camp wanting high rise living, heavy rail transit everywhere, and holding up NYC as the pinnacle of enlightened existence. Those of us who made the case for suburban places like Cobb were often portrayed as backward thinking, not knowing what's good for us.
So the question for everyone is: has this pandemic and the impact on NYC influenced your thinking? The impact of all politicians aside, its fact that riding on the subway, pressing the same elevator buttons, and all the other impacts of being in close proximity in a crowded urban area adds to the risk and in this case, the body count.
Has the current situation made you question or change your decision to live a more urban lifestyle?
After spending a good 35 years of my life in overcrowded LA, I moved to a rural area and could not be happier. Completely done with urban living.
Why should they be paying into school taxes in Newark? They have school taxes to pay in their own jurisdiction - and regardless of whether they have any kids to be educated. Is Newark educating West Orange residents' kids? No? Then why should West Orange residents be paying school taxes to Newark?
Maybe not school taxes specifically(since throwing more at the city's public school system rarely works and the charters are much better anyways), but since these commuters don't bring anything to the city except crazy traffic, maybe they should be taxed higher than the 1% rate(but residents should not be taxed). Or put tolls on Route 280's 2 Newark exit ramps and the one in Harrison. That could force them to take NJT or drive through the hoods to get downtown if they want these high paying jobs.
Maybe not school taxes specifically(since throwing more at the city's public school system rarely works and the charters are much better anyways), but since these commuters don't bring anything to the city except crazy traffic, maybe they should be taxed higher than the 1% rate(but residents should not be taxed). Or put tolls on Route 280's 2 Newark exit ramps and the one in Harrison. That could force them to take NJT or drive through the hoods to get downtown if they want these high paying jobs.
On the parkways leading into New York City from Westchester and Long Island, there used to be toll booths at the city line.
I don't know whether they proved sufficient to steer drivers on those parkways onto the Metro-North (Harlem/Hudson/New Haven) and Long Island railroads.
Given that congestion charges are a Thing now, though, maybe the New York MTA should work something out with the New York State and Long Island parkways authorities to bring those tollbooths back. (EZ-Pass gantries this time, of course.)
First, there really weren't "urbanists" as we now understand the term back when the first zoning codes were implemented in the first years of the 20th century. Yes, suburbs had begun to rise on the fringes of a bunch of cities, but their role was clearly as "bedroom communities" for people who worked in the city but wanted a little more grass, trees and quiet. No one then questioned the economic primacy of the city, even if they did question its suitability as a place for children to grow up.
Um yes.
Zoning ends with the city limits and the poster was complaining about the demographics in "suburbs" outside of the city. The residents outside of the city have nothing to do with the zoning within the city. The city residents (such as the poster) have any or all responsibility for zoning where he resides.
As far as restrictive covenants are concerned, I'm pretty well versed and one of the few commenters that routinely points out how urbanophiles routinely ignore restrictive covenants in their drive to turn everywhere into fresh crushing density.
As specifically noted in a prior post, a city or state elimination of its own zoning limitations has ZERO affect on restrictive covenants. The lifting of a prohibition against multi-family housing or certain commercial activities imposed by government does not eliminate similar prohibitions imposed by restrictive covenants. Restrictive covenants are a problem to be dealt with everywhere.
Virtually all urbanophile housing development for many decades isn't in any way "traditional". Instead it is heavily burdened with restrictive covenants and involuntary membership housing. Changing zoning does not in any way alter the restrictions. Local government was and is often complicit in imposing the restrictions as part of the development approval process.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
It's almost impossible to avoid having race enter any discussion of American society or history.
You can make it part of a discussion if you want but when it contributes nothing or reveals you as simply perpetuating discrimination or "punishing" others because of their race (or worse what you perceive the racial makeup to be) you are going to lose every debate. It's quite easy to see the the prior poster's logic was that because people living outside of the taxing jurisdiction where he was were white they somehow owed him or the area he lived in money. His repeated justification was apparently that it was okay to impose these additional costs on suburbanites because they were mostly white.
Race was easily avoidable in the discussion and should have been completely irrelevant. Instead it became the obviously race-biased poster's primary justification and that isn't going to fly.
You can make it part of a discussion if you want but when it contributes nothing or reveals you as simply perpetuating discrimination or "punishing" others because of their race (or worse what you perceive the racial makeup to be) you are going to lose every debate. It's quite easy to see the the prior poster's logic was that because people living outside of the taxing jurisdiction where he was were white they somehow owed him or the area he lived in money. His repeated justification was apparently that it was okay to impose these additional costs on suburbanites because they were mostly white.
Race was easily avoidable in the discussion and should have been completely irrelevant. Instead it became the obviously race-biased poster's primary justification and that isn't going to fly.
Because race is literally why inequality between suburbs and urban cities exists.
Also, you seem to imply that white people owe me something...because I'm not white? Bro. I'm white. I just don't blindly follow along with racist policies that have caused and perpetuate suburban/urban inequality.
And I hate how suburbs are so lauded by people who are incapable of understanding how they are the product of racism, and continue to promote inequality and racism. And they are literally massive burdens on society. Not only do they destroy natural habitats, but they increase pollution and and increase unhealthy lifestyles. The social isolation can also lead to mental health problems. They can be much more burdensome for the elderly. They rely on giant tax subsidies, but don't even notice or acknowledge it, and then yell about their tax money being stolen when it's going to fixing things such as public transit. If I had a dollar for every article or social media comment from a suburbanite complaining about the cost of running and improving transit while ignoring how their lifestyle is a massive tax burden of road/gas subsidies, I'd have enough money to lobby all of Congress to ban SFH.
And you'd probably be shocked to learn that almost all of my white friends have the same feelings as me.
I'm not advocating for everyone to live in NYC-style housing. But this SFH fetish that the US has is completely unsustainable and horrible for our future. There are plenty of in-betweens that are not cul de sac suburbia, but are also not Manhattan. Suburbanites like to complain that urban city living is some horribly disastrous mentally traumatizing experience for children, but tell that to like all of Europe and East Asia.
Zoning ends with the city limits and the poster was complaining about the demographics in "suburbs" outside of the city. The residents outside of the city have nothing to do with the zoning within the city. The city residents (such as the poster) have any or all responsibility for zoning where he resides.
Keep in mind that those turn-of-the-20th-century suburbs came on the heels of a great wave of municipal consolidations and annexations that lasted for 44 years (from the consolidation of Philadelphia County's 33 townships, boroughs and districts with the City of Philadelphia in 1854 to the creation of the five-borough City of New York in 1898) that saw most of today's largest US cities incorporate their "suburban" growth within their boundaries and that a good number of our newer large cities (Denver, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Houston, Phoenix...) enjoyed liberal rights of annexation that (at least for a while, and still in some cases) enabled them to incorporate their suburban growth as well within their boundaries, the phenomenon David Rusk describes in "Cities Without Suburbs."
(Edited to add: And the city-county consolidations that have taken place in a number of cities since 1961, when Indianapolis and Marion County, Ind., merged with each other, are also manifestations of this same phenomenon.)
What you say above is true but does not refute my statement that "urbanists" as we now know them didn't exist at the time zoning became widespread. And the Supreme Court case that legitimized cities' zoning power in 1923 involved a Cleveland suburb to boot. Suburbs as we know them now exist in many metropolises because either (a) state laws prevented municipalities from expanding across county lines* or (b) residents of the newer fringe communities beyond the city limits opted to incorporate as separate municipalities in order to avoid eventual absorption into the city that was their reason for existence. (And there are also some "suburbs" that were once separate cities or towns — urban centers in their own right — that were overrun by the expansion of the nearby metropolis.)
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As far as restrictive covenants are concerned, I'm pretty well versed and one of the few commenters that routinely points out how urbanophiles routinely ignore restrictive covenants in their drive to turn everywhere into fresh crushing density.
As specifically noted in a prior post, a city or state elimination of its own zoning limitations has ZERO affect on restrictive covenants. The lifting of a prohibition against multi-family housing or certain commercial activities imposed by government does not eliminate similar prohibitions imposed by restrictive covenants. Restrictive covenants are a problem to be dealt with everywhere.
Virtually all urbanophile housing development for many decades isn't in any way "traditional". Instead it is heavily burdened with restrictive covenants and involuntary membership housing. Changing zoning does not in any way alter the restrictions. Local government was and is often complicit in imposing the restrictions as part of the development approval process.
Have you really followed the work and advocacy of the Congress for the New Urbanism?
The best-known development of its two leading founders, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany, is indeed a neotraditional American Small Town on the Florida Gulf Coast, a town that is such a picture-perfect recreation of that type of urban settlement that it played a massive stage set in the movie "The Truman Show." Much of what CNU advocates is far from "crushing density" and more like retrofitting the monocultural Auto Age suburb to more closely resemble the American Small Town. (Though I will grant that there's probably more fondness for low- to mid-rise apartment buildings among this set than among the defenders of the status quo.)
Yes, lots of urbanophiles love very dense, lively urban centers like those of our legacy cities. And all of them would like to see denser development than what has obtained in most Auto Age suburbs. But as I've noted elsewhere, the simple act of legalizing accessory apartments on single-family house lots potentially doubles the unit density of a given area (assuming every property owner grabs the opportunity to add a "granny flat" or "in-law suite," which is far from a safe assumption). And many of us, myself included, have no problem at all with those very walkable, small-town-ish "railroad suburbs" that sprang up along railroad lines emanating from those same cities from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.
And as for the covenants, they're a common feature of traditional suburban development as well. Yes, they're most closely associated with garden-townhouse-style condominiums, but they also come attached to many planned suburban communities with nary an apartment in them.
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You can make it part of a discussion if you want but when it contributes nothing or reveals you as simply perpetuating discrimination or "punishing" others because of their race (or worse what you perceive the racial makeup to be) you are going to lose every debate. It's quite easy to see the the prior poster's logic was that because people living outside of the taxing jurisdiction where he was were white they somehow owed him or the area he lived in money. His repeated justification was apparently that it was okay to impose these additional costs on suburbanites because they were mostly white.
Race was easily avoidable in the discussion and should have been completely irrelevant. Instead it became the obviously race-biased poster's primary justification and that isn't going to fly.
Steering this back to one of the central issues having nothing to do with race: Rusk's argument in "Cities Without Suburbs" is that the growth that occurs on the urban fringe is the offshoot of the urban center's presence, and thus is properly understood as part of urban growth. Since it would not have happened were the city not present, it's not at all illegitimate to argue that the city borders should expand to encompass it. (And yes, that goes for "edge cities" too, even though they are a new form of urban center.)
California suburbs are far more densely built than those in the other 49 states, and yes, the density of those suburbs is a result of policies enacted by state and local governments. Do you find those suburbs "crushingly" dense?
Racism may not be the sole reason our cities and suburbs developed the way they did, but to say that there are areas of US housing policy where it played no role is IMO also ignorant of history.
We have a long tradition in this country of giving popular prejudices or sentiments of a minority (or a majority) the force of law, in everything from housing to education to employment to whether or not we could order wine with a meal. (We amended the Constitution on that last one, with disastrous side effects.)
And especially since the country became industrialized on a large scale with large enterprises to match, there have been feedback loops between sectors of industry and the government that often result in those sectors' stated preferences becoming law. The real estate industry promoted covenants after racial zoning was ruled illegal, and the assumptions underlying the covenants were later adopted by the Federal government in drawing up its standards for issuing government-guaranteed mortgages. That last affected who could buy, and who couldn't, even in neighborhoods where houses were unencumbered by covenants.
A book I recommend you read if you haven't, IC_deLight, is "The Color of Law: The Hidden History of How Our Government Segregated America" by Richard Rothstein. I think he overstates the role the government played in this, but that's only because the book kind of glosses over the public-private feedback loop that kicked in after Buchanan v. Warley.
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many of those first zoning codes had as their goal making sure whites and blacks lived nowhere near each other. Are you familiar with the Supreme Court case known as Buchanan v. Warley? That 1917 decision was one of the rare victories for blacks in the years following the Slaughter-House Cases (1883), when the Supreme Court worked to constrain the freedoms and (implied) equality of status the Civil War Amendments granted the former slaves.
