>This. Once people are rich enough to have no real problems the setback of someone else's shed on someone else's land and the spacing of outlets in the walls of other people's houses suddenly start looking like things worth caring about.
Worse yet, the seeming backbone of the US real estate market is that homes are your biggest investment. They're seen as both a place to live and an asset that is a portion of your net worth.
For it to be both, means owners will always incentivize the asset increasing in value and as we see, the result is most home owners will fight zoning de-regulation tooth and nail. Its worth noting that this is true regardless of which political party is in power locally, assuming we're talking about the US.
As a result land use reforms are some of the hardest to get through legislatures in the US. For example, it took years for California to pass a law that simply allows people to rent secondary dwellings on their property, and this was heralded as a big deal because it usurped local regulations banning such practices. Keep in mind, this does relatively little to move the needle on real estate pressures (there's only so many places that have excess capacity of this nature to begin with and there aren't a ton of incentives to create more, as the law is still limited in a variety of ways). This took many years to get through, and its a very very very small reform!
I am both a land owner (I have a niche farming operation, but don't live on that land) and a home owner, and I find this obsessive behavior among other land/home owners to be misguided at best and appalling at worst.
The simple truth is it can be either an asset or a commons good, but it really can't be both. Thats a major part of the issue to begin with, and why I'm an advocate for the Land Value Tax
Worse yet, the seeming backbone of the US real estate market is that homes are your biggest investment. They're seen as both a place to live and an asset that is a portion of your net worth.
For it to be both, means owners will always incentivize the asset increasing in value and as we see, the result is most home owners will fight zoning de-regulation tooth and nail. Its worth noting that this is true regardless of which political party is in power locally, assuming we're talking about the US.
As a result land use reforms are some of the hardest to get through legislatures in the US. For example, it took years for California to pass a law that simply allows people to rent secondary dwellings on their property, and this was heralded as a big deal because it usurped local regulations banning such practices. Keep in mind, this does relatively little to move the needle on real estate pressures (there's only so many places that have excess capacity of this nature to begin with and there aren't a ton of incentives to create more, as the law is still limited in a variety of ways). This took many years to get through, and its a very very very small reform!
I am both a land owner (I have a niche farming operation, but don't live on that land) and a home owner, and I find this obsessive behavior among other land/home owners to be misguided at best and appalling at worst.
The simple truth is it can be either an asset or a commons good, but it really can't be both. Thats a major part of the issue to begin with, and why I'm an advocate for the Land Value Tax