What is the Austrian view on residential zoning laws?
To give an example, near where I live the local government has ruled that certain suburbs be rezoned so that buildings up to five stories may be built. Such buildings would be completely out of character since most of the existing homes are detached on large-ish blocks of land with big lawns and leafy streets, etc. In other words, typical middle to upper middle class suburbia. Residents are complaining that large apartment blocks will devalue the area, increase noise and traffic, reduce privacy (apartment residents can overlook their backyards), etc. The usual complaints.
The govt says that, due to population growth, they need to allow for higher density living.
But I think it is deeply wrong to create artificial shortages and make housing more expensive for people until they are paying half their salary towards housing payments, just to make neighbourhoods prettier or meet the purposes of people who bribe governments.
Did you know that the “sudden increase in millionaires” in North America in 2008 that many magazines talk about actually came about due to a large number of people suddenly having to sell their houses for millions of dollars in that given year just to pay back their huge housing loans? After which, these “millionaires” barely broke even and live in small apartments or even in their cars.
It’s because zoning laws pervade in nearly every part of this continent.
As a property, a city needs to regulate what its tenants can or cannot do or build there. But regulation is also an economic good, and without private property and a market for economic calculation, it is impossible to determine what kind of regulation is or isn’t necessary outside of whim.
That implies that the city owns all the land, and that the “homeowners” within the city are, in fact, nothing of the sort.
Am I right?
You can own property within other property. For example, a website hosted on a virtual server is not owned by the host by the fact that it is hosted there. Likewise, a car parked in a store parking lot is not owned by the store.
It would be right to say that homeowners own land within a city, while still having to follow the regulations of the city for this right, just like one follows the regulations of a web hosting service or store parking lot.
The only way for that to make sense is if I own my house*,* but I don’t own the land that it sits on. Is that what you’re saying?
You can own a garden while not owning the land the garden is embedded in. A garden or a porch or a lobby are just spaces, they don’t have a special quality of being land.
I very much doubt that land is specific enough of a good to be owned, anyway.
Furthermore, who owns the city?
At this moment, same people who own the Post Office and General Motors.
So you think all land is (or would/should be) unowned? Can you expand on this?
You misunderstand me. I don’t think that land is something. There is no point arguing over it.
So you see the state as morally legitimate? Otherwise, in the absence of the state, who do you think would own a city?
The state is legitimate by pure power. In the absence of the state, I have no idea who would own a city, but more than likely there would emerge a capitalist class of specialist owners in this area, as in any other private industry. The capital market, in its broadest sense, would own cities.
I’m intrigued. Could you explain to me why you think that way?
Just so I’m sure, you’re saying that, in your judgement, the state is morally legitimate by pure power? Otherwise, what sense of “legitimate” do you mean?
I’ve read your blog posts and found them very interesting. What I’m curious about is how a city is distinct from the land it occupies. After all, if a building inside a city can be owned by someone other than the owners of the city itself, how is a city really any different from a certain area of land? The same question goes for other “territorial entities” (which you refer to as “states”). Furthermore, how can such “territorial entities” be homesteaded in the first place?
Firstly, I don’t think morality has anything to do with right or justice, so don’t bother pushing me on it.
Secondly, the reason it is hard to distinguish cities and states from land is that, as I am trying to point out, it is hard to distinguish land from anything. Land is too abstract a notion to be appropriated. A farm is something tangible, with boundaries and people acting upon it. Even a ranch has some natural limits, even though they tend to exist only a map. But land qua land makes no sense to me other than as taxonomy.
So the question remains, how can we homestead “land”? Well, it is easy to homestead a farm - just build one. The same thing is true for a city, unless someone builds streets, there can’t be houses. (How did people get there?) But appropriating something more “natural”, like an oil field, is a point of contention amongst libertarians, and I’m finding out that it is deeply connected to the appropriation of intellectual property. I’m writing something on this subject at the moment. Will post it soon.
Under the common law concept of a bundle of rights, land is the earth and the earth’s atmosphere. A parcel of land is defined by geographic boundaries on the surface of the earth. These geographic boundaries extend down to the core of the earth and up to the limits of the atmosphere. The owner of these surface geographic boundaries has all of the rights to this volume of earth and air (we’ll leave aside how these rights are acquired for now).
This rights concept is alodial title. It is “freehold property held in absolute independence and not subject to any rent, service, or acknowledgement of superior rights” (The Dictionary of Real Estate Appraisal). At some point in the past, the governments took the rights of taxation, eminent domain, police power, and escheat for virtually all land in the U.S., leaving property owners with, at most, a fee simple interest. Police power is “The right of government through which property is regulated to protect public safety, health, morals, and general welfare” (ibid.) Prior to the first zoning laws in 1916, this was the state of land ownership. Essentially, as long as you paid taxes and didn’t jeopardize the health and safety of someone else, you had unlimited rights to your land.
In the 1926 U.S. Supreme Court of Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., the ruling was that zoning was a form of police power. Given this history, it is my opinion that when someone purchases a property, they are purchasing all of the rights associated with that property at the time of purchase. If additional zoning restrictions are imposed on the property after the purchase, they constitute a taking and the property owner is entitled to “just compensation” under the U.S. Constitution.
Two of my friends and I are preparing for a run for city council, and I have to tell you reading through this zoning info is tiring.
But it seems to be essential, because that’s one of the main thing a city does.
One thing that’s been useful to me is the work of Andres Duany:
His most influential work seems to be to me on the artistic side, how to create a sense of unity and place within a neighborhood.
He’s also an advocate (or was) of ‘smart growth,’ and what I’ve seen so far that doesn’t seem to be a great idea.
Randal O’Toole makes some really convincing arguments against it:
His presentation starts about 25 min in.
I’m trying to consider something that loosens the development restrictions (and trust me there are a lot of them), while trying to incorporate Duany’s idea of New Urbanism.
I think you make an interesting point, because if you suddenly remove the strictures of zoning you could wind up with a situation like you describe where something completely anomolous and possibly damaging to people’s property values could be constructed. So, I think there should be a kind of drastic loosening, while still taking a kind of neighborhood unity into place. (I’m not saying that I think zoning is a good idea in a new place. The problems caused in these neighborhoods were caused by zoning, not the free market.)
I’m also going to pick up ‘Zoned Out’ from the library today, but if anyone knows of good resources on zoning, such as the economic costs caused by them, please let me know.
Out of curiosity, what do you think morality has to do with?
When you write of building a farm, surely you mean more than just building the house and barn. I don’t see the tilling and planting of the fields as a construction activity, but that’s just me.
It seems to me that, in order to build a farm, the land that will make it up has to already exist. And since it already exists, it must be already owned before anything can be (legitimately) done with it. Likewise for building a city (so to speak) – the land that it’s built on has to exist and be owned first. Therefore it seems that land is indeed ownable.
