Zoning Laws: Power and Goals for Government to (try to) manage and balance impacts of construction and Architecture on the health, financial and aesthetic factors of the city. Zoning puts restrictions on an individual landowner’s use of a property by regulating use, bulk, and valuations.
Infrastructure assets like roads, sewer, water, electricity and telecom are shared expenses of a community. As such, a city government should regulate the properties within a community.
Zoning can be a “Golden Goose”, as people choose to invest in an area that is conducive for growth. If zoning is used as a means of making profit for cities instead of investors, then the investors will take their investments to a more hospitable environment.
Jobs, scenic beauty, and connectivity are all factors in making a place attractive. Taxes, economic imbalance and social discord or crime are factors that make a city decline. Cities are technological machines, and must be balanced by either the visible hand of government or the invisible hand of market forces.
Real estate development is a long-term process taking place within the framework of macro economic, political and design factors. Each company or team uses precedents from the past to find future value. Since the process is somewhat secretive, imbalances are inevitable in a market.
2010: No new office buildings were built in NYC. By 2020, the pipeline of new and converted buildings was significant. Many developers simultaneously started the multi-year process of design and planning not realizing that others were starting the same projects as well. This independent micro decision-making as each team thinks that their product is unique and timely creates a cycle of booms and busts. 10 developers start to build offices when they see that demand for 3 exists- but they do not think about the excess 7 teams simultaneously working.
As in nature, abundance is often followed by scarcity. Central planning tries to smooth out “high-beta” supply changes, but it runs the risk of missing key triggers for growth that are traditionally seen best by entrepreneurs rather than bureaucrats.
“Smart Cities” are a new generation of monitoring technologies that tries to use algorithms to predict, monitor and optimize behavior within cities. In the current world of smartphone and camera self-surveillance, many of the concerns of privacy, psychology and control are becoming a tradeoff between convenience and security.