I have a house in Costa Rica where there a lot of expats living in communities need to self organize because zoning and permit laws are slow, bureaucratic, and basically unenforced.

I cannot tell you how insanely inefficient and impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something like a communal security system or a communal garbage can where all participants all fairly contribute and consume those services. And this is all done on a WhatsApp group over txt messages where nuance gets lost.

People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.

Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways while locating all of the toxic pollution producing manufacturing to the remaining lower-income minority neighborhoods, obliterating walkability and pedestrian safety everywhere.

I think if you follow actual development stories, you'll see a lot of this continuing to hold true. Seeing NPUs as being actually effective at curbing development is very naive. NPUs rarely push back against development, and it takes a lot of organizing to even get something up for a vote at City Council. And even then, most councilmembers are taking campaign funds from private-equity backed developers.

A lot has been written about this. In my city, we call it the Atlanta Way (derogatroy). There's a recent book covering this that's a great read: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/red-hot-city/paper

There are multiple ways of imposing this structure, laws, and trade-offs between various stakeholders. For example, Japan has a national top-down system where municipalities have little control over development, and therefore by necessity the system is mostly rules-based - if you meet the hopefully well-crafted requirements, you build. Whereas in North America, housing is a top-down and centrally planned economy at the municipal level. In Britain and a lot of North America, decisions are 'discretionary' and subject to reviews and debates and NIMBY tantrums (otherwise known as democratic control by taxpayers). Various bandaids are applied over the North American system to attempt to stop it from becoming a Kafkaesque bureaucratic mess where nothing gets built, and at times those efforts even partially succeed, even if the whole thing has an air of reforming the Gosplan.

I don't mean to be pedantic but aren't democracy and zoning laws completely orthogonal and neither entail the other. You can have zoning laws without democracy and democracy without zoning laws.

Like Japan, being a democracy, seems to have a completely different zoning system than the US. We have the zoning system we have because we created it.

> But yay, democracy?

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…” – Winston Churchill

It's very easy to throw stones through windows. But before discounting one of our greatest creations, one which is so annoying and yet has brought us so much prosperity, what alternative do you propose?

In the US we have insane bureaucracy as well as lazy, incompetent, and corrupt politicians. Never let them say you can't have both

> I suppose this is the result of a hundred years of democracy, aka having to keep everyone happy all the time.

Sounds like you don't really understand what a "democracy" is.

Sure, our system is not working currently. Doesn't mean that the principle of "democracy" fundamentally doesn't work, does it?

It evolves. Laws, rules, regulations accrue but are very rarely re-evaluated to see if they serve their original purpose. It's easier for most lawmakers to leave things alone. Eventually, the state declines or fails under the weight of a century of well-intentioned (maybe) laws that have outlived their usefullness.

Knowing human nature, the best plan for a state that wants to survive is to set a 20 year expiration on laws. Broadly accepted laws would easily be renewed, but obsolete ones would be allowed to die.

Don't forget all the entrenched interests, both inside and outside government, that benefit from the status quo and are willing to fight to maintain it.

Everyone wants to be the one with the power to remake the world according to their own designs. Everyone also doesn't want to be the one being remade according to the designs of others.

I first heard this on the Omega Tau Podcast [0], where the guest discusses an article he wrote [1] discussing, in part, the book "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter [2].

> [1] Human societies historically act as problem-solving organisations that tend to develop ever-greater organisational and technical complexity in order to solve the social, economic and political problems they are confronted with. As their complexity increases, the problems they have to deal with become more difficult to solve, requiring growing investment in further economic and societal complexity. According to Tainter, however, investment in socio-political complexity eventually tends to reach a point of diminishing returns, where the marginal beneficial returns (i.e. problems solved) of additional complexity begin to decline, leading to a lowered capacity to solve the new problems that arise and to deal with their consequences. These returns may even turn negative, at which point societies struggle to uphold the level of complexity they have reached and may have to move down to a lower complexity level. This, says Tainter, is the pattern behind the rise and fall of most civilizations in human history.

[0]https://ota.skadi.cloud/en/episodes/040O0P0C0P2C180H2B3z1W1N...

[1]https://paularbair.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/the-crisis-of-co...

[2]https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/477.The_Collapse_of_C...

would you rather a china where 996 is technically against the law but you have to suffer it and no protection at all for your property rights and you can be moved for the three gorges dam for little compensation? i would much rather amtrack then the wenzhou crashing bullet trains from china where the executed's bullet fees are charged to the parents.

> But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.

Prospective residents and transit riders are harmed.

Rules and hearings overwhelmingly favor existing residents. If an existing resident opposes construction nearby due to noise, traffic, etc., the city will probably grant his wish. Because that piece of land is off limits for denser housing, now prospective residents face a smaller housing supply, higher prices, and longer commutes.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

This is a particularly Western democratic trend. Japan and Singapore both have their own models for democracy. Each builds differently, in their own way, and gets it done.

> But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.

USA harms a lot under the orange clown. So first that term you use must be defined - what IS a democracy?

Russia and North Korea also claim to have some kind of democracy some sorts.

There are just too many differences in the term here.

> And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.

Many are corrupt. Many are incompetent. Many are lazy.

By the way, at best you describe indirect democracy. This one has more limits than democracy, which - conversely - requires more effort.

It's not just democracy, but also huge population growth and population clustering. People moving from the country to the city as jobs increasingly moved into the city.

"But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed."

Seems more like a flaw of high density than democracy if you look at democracy in low density areas and citizen happiness in other types of government in high density areas.

I guess you prefer this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Triumphal_Arch

> No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained.

I spent the last couple years trying to get contractors out to pave our private road. They'd either no-show, or ghost. It didn't make any sense since these were all 5-figure jobs. I'm trying to give you money, what gives? I learned from the contractor who did end up taking the job that our city is absolutely brutal with contractors... which can be a good thing for quality of work, but too much in this case means many contractors just refuse all work in the city. They're big enough that it's no great loss.

The point is to slow things down, so only the things that truly matter get done. Otherwise growth for growth's sake leads to chaotic hellscapes where no one is at rest, everyone is confused and scared. Slower is better.

Reminds me of a book I read, The Master of Harmlessness, by Ingo Swann. The book is supposed to be this treatise on how to live peacefully, but it accidentally serves as a demonstration of how any rule, taken to an extreme, becomes absurd.

Or when things get done it is because of corruption? And the constraints are put in place to protect $, aka not democracy but actually plutocracy.

We don't live in a democratic country. We live in a plutocracy. We explicitly allow money to influence our democratic process.

It's really weird that in "the last of the free" it's considered completely normal for the government to tell you that you can't build a shed bigger than a certain size.

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> We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.

Sigh. Democracy is going to hang itself with the bike lanes and public transit, isn't it?

Density increases and ubiquitous transit result in HIGHER levels of housing shortages. Just ask France.

"but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport."

The only people who don't like low density are the poor, and this is why most of America is car culture, and owns their own houses. "Housing shortages" is another way of saying that existing home owners are earning strong equity.

Yeah, I do want no traffic and lots of parking, so low density please!

Communities should have a say in their community. The issue is lack of new towns being built with high speed rail / transportation to bring people into central hubs. All the good land is taken. Build further out with tiny homes and build public transportation lines. Let people build affordable communities that suit them. No, they aren't going to have beach views or anything like that. But YOU will own it. We already know from the mouse utopia experiments that increasing density is a terrible idea for humans. Expand out.