Zoning implemented by top of the capitalist food pyramid.
Zoning is not divine mandate. It comes from people.
We can’t fix zoning without going through capitalists at the top who work tongue their way into owning all that they do. They’ll fight it as a violation of their right to turn us all into serfs
I tire of the technical euphemism. It’s like Soylent Green; just people hallucinating BS about themselves all the way down
As someone who wants a lot more to be built in a lot more places, not so.
The UK doesn't use zoning, and still has expensive (and small) housing. When I lived there, there were a lot of relatively ordinary people going door-to-door collecting signatures petitioning against "affordable housing" because it will attract "the wrong kind of people to our neighbourhood".
Now I'm in Berlin, completely different system to the UK, lots of rentals and it has rent controls to keep the costs down… and yet homes are still expensive.
The real reason, quite bluntly, is overpopulation. Our natural population density is what the land can support from hunting and gathering; even in places that are particularly good for that, like temperate rainforests (Salish PNW, Jomon-period Japan) this only scales up to the level of large villages. Coincidentally, this is why intertribal warfare at this level is so constant and so brutal - the resource everybody wants is the land and its riches, and every extra mouth is "stealing" from that, so extreme xenophobia and genocide is par for the course.
Then we started doing agriculture, and population densities started coming up. And because agriculture produces a surplus of food wrt the number of people involved, it's a positive feedback loop: more food surplus -> more people who can spend their time on something other than growing food, like say trading or inventing things -> higher productivity -> more food surplus -> ..., with higher and higher population densities on each iteration. The end result is the anthill cities that we consider the norm today.
Our monkey brain is still not adapted to such an environment, though, and wants to reduce the density to what it expects; hence NIMBYism, anti-immigration, zoning, race covenants etc - which all boil down to the same basic idea that if we drive out "them", then "us" will have all the (obviously abundant) resources of this land for ourselves. Of course, that's not how our modern economy actually works, but the monkey brain does not operate on a rational level.
> The real reason, quite bluntly, is overpopulation. Our natural population density is what the land can support from hunting and gathering;
That would be 10 million humans globally.
The invention of agriculture, and the gradual improvements until the 1750s (The Wealth of Nations essentially invented/formalised the foundation ideas now called capitalism in 1776), took us up to a 791 million.
Capitalism (mixed with ongoing feudalism) took us up to about 1.2-1.7 billion, then a mixture of capitalism and communism took us to about 5.4 billion.
The examples you're giving of food shortages are mostly in the past (certainly in developed nations with the highest house prices), specifically because of the heavy industrialisation that allows us to over-produce almost all years, which is why we've got large scale issues with obesity rather than hunger.
> The end result is the anthill cities that we consider the norm today.
No, "anthill" is a choice. Look outside your own city, and you see large swathes of countryside, with hardly anyone in it. Or look at a different city — I've visited the Bay Area, and that's mostly houses, with a few zones of towers; I've visited Manhattan, and that's concrete canyons; I've visited Athens, and that's a mix of densely-packed narrow lanes and broad avenues, surrounded by low-rise apartments; I live in Berlin, whose inner city is almost entirely low-rise, and whose outer zones are a mixture of detached houses, farms(!), and woodland; I used to live in Cambridge (the original one), where cows are frequently found grazing in the inner-city fields (and yet people still complain about it being 'over-crowded' rather than making a pun like 'over cow-ded'); I grew up in the South Hampshire conurbation[0], which is "the most populated part of South East England excluding London" and… well: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8550817,-1.0769807,3a,75y,10...
> Our monkey brain is still not adapted to such an environment, though, and wants to reduce the density to what it expects; hence NIMBYism, anti-immigration, zoning, race covenants etc - which all boil down to the same basic idea that if we drive out "them", then "us" will have all the (obviously abundant) resources of this land for ourselves. Of course, that's not how our modern economy actually works, but the monkey brain does not operate on a rational level.
That, I agree with. Though I am also saying you (and, to be fair, I) also have monkey brains thinking monkey thoughts — we didn't evolve to know a world beyond what we could easily reach on our legs, and for many of us the countryside a few tens miles away may as well be on the moon.
As it happens, I live in what is still essentially countryside (albeit surburbanized) myself, and in my home country I had a rural branch of the family, so I'm well aware of how it works.
When I said "anthills", I didn't mean any particular city design, but the overall population density. Those example that you gave are still incredibly dense by monkey brain standards, even with all the interspersed farms etc.
And you can, of course, spread out even more, a la American suburbia. But that doesn't work out in a sense that our economy is still built around the notion of dense hubs, and can only be efficient in their presence, so it just ends up with people commuting back and forth. Thus our economy - which is what makes that many people sustainable in the first place - requires density.
> When I said "anthills", I didn't mean any particular city design, but the overall population density. Those example that you gave are still incredibly dense by monkey brain standards, even with all the interspersed farms etc.
Well, I misunderstood your metaphor, but I think we agree on this — at least, mostly. I'd still say that the bucolic countryside in the google street view link I gave you is not dense, even to our monkey brains.
And on further reflection, I'm not sure if that "monkey" part of our mind responds to people directly, or to places we think people might be lurking (houses as caves and windows as their entrances, because what is seen by the part of our mind pre-trained by genetics is not necessarily the same as what we learn from experience).
> Thus our economy - which is what makes that many people sustainable in the first place - requires density.
Bit yes, bit no. It benefits from density, but it's also globally distributed. I'm not sure what we would choose, cities or countryside, in some hypothetical world where most humans could predict and follow their own long-term preferences over their entire lives. Cities have always been attractive, even in ancient times, because cities hold so many wonders for our monkey brains; and yet, many were (and others still are) just plain bad places to be, for various different reasons in different cases.
I looked up the specific numbers and found this quote:
“Based on the preceding calculations, a family of five would require an estimated 200 ha of habitat from which to gather animal and plant food. This estimate is based on an ideal ecosystem, one containing those wild plants and animals that are most suitable for human consumption. Researchers report that, in fact, modern-day hunter-gatherers need much more than 40 ha per person. For instance, Clark and Haswell (1970) estimate that at least 150 ha of favorable habitat per person is needed to secure an adequate food supply. In a moderately favorable habitat, these scientists estimate that 250 ha per person would be required. These estimates are four to six times greater than those in the model presented earlier. In marginal environments, such as the cold northwestern Canadian region, each person needs about 14,000 ha to harvest about 912,500 kcal of food energy per year (Clark and Haswell, 1970).” [David Pimentel and Marcia H. Pimentel, ‘Food, Energy, and Society’, third edition, (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), p. 45-46.]
Just based on that alone I'd say that even the place you linked to is still too crowded from the "monkey brain" perspective. In hunter-gatherer societies, the only places that matched the density of our rural environments are extremely productive areas such as Pacific Northwest (temperate rainforest + elk + salmon). But even then the entire population of Coast Salish prior to European arrival is currently estimated to be under 15,000 people, living in several dozen longhouse villages spread across what's basically most of Western Washington and much of British Columbia today.
