"Like everyone else, I would prefer there to be less traffic on the street that I live on. If you left it up to me to make a rule, I would say “only the residents of this street are allowed to drive on it.”
This seems to be exactly what you get when almost all neighborhoods are cul-de-sac subdivisions.
I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, which (as far as I can tell) doesn't have any parking minimums. It also had essentially zero cars until very recently. That's starting to change as the middle class emerges. I am pro everything Matt talks about but living here I can also see the appeal of parking minimums.
I don't really know *why* but people with cars seem to have an extreme amounts of entitlement when it comes to stopping and parking their cars. I live in an alley that is technically wide enough (barely) for two cars to pass side-by-side. It is described as a "two-car alley". Yet both sides of the street have cars parked from employees of local businesses. (Vietnam also lacks zoning, so businesses and residential mix.) The result is that street is (barely) wide enough for a single car.
It is common to see cars simply stopped in a lane of traffic because the owner is waiting for someone inside a local business. Cars will also park in front of people's houses and businesses nearly blocking them in. There was a fairly well-known incident a few months back where someone parked a car in front of a business and left a sign saying "please call me and I'll come move my car". The business owner instead spray painted the car and the ensuing online fight was about whether the business owner was justified or not. (Many wondered why the onus was on the business owner to call the car owner, instead of the car owner preemptively calling the business owner and asking permission.)
On the one hand you could say: All of this just means illegal parking needs to be enforced. Which is one of those things that is true but not very useful. Even in America parking enforcement has long been one of the most hated things there is. Movies have been complaining about it for 40+ years. And it isn't just America: parking enforcement is despised in nearly every country.
So I guess what I'm saying is: I see parking minimums as a legislative run-around dealing with this reality. If a local government *actually* rigidly enforced parking laws they'd almost inevitably deal with tremendous amounts of backlash. Sure, eventually, after many years, the strict enforcement might engender a new cultural norm. But all the politicians and bureaucrats would have been fired, condemned, picketed, recalled, etc.
Or....you can pass laws mandating parking minimums and fix 80% of the problem of illegal parking and get effectively zero pushback for over half a century except for Donald Shoup.
Fun fact: most of the suburban (and not a small number of urban and rural) parking minimums come from the ITE's green book, which based it's recommendations on the number of parking spaces in use at single use, green field developments, and often based on low single digit number of observations. In other words, they looked at home many parking spaces would be necessary if there was just one place, and no way to get there besides driving. For even a strip mall style development, in the real world people might park in the lot and visit more than one store, but the parking minimums assume they need a separate spot for each adjacent establishment.
Minimums are also often based on the* maximum* number of spaces an establishment might need, eg how many cars might park at Walmart in Black Friday? That's typically the number required to be there year round.
There are huge benefits to be had in reducing minimums outside of urban areas too.
What's interesting is how RPZs are all over the map in terms of pricing. Portland, OR charges close to $300/year for some zones, and will deny you a permit if your building has off-street parking available, whereas Seattle charges $60 *every two years*, regardless of the zone or off-street availability. They've been wanting to update the pricing, but "political will".
I work right in between the two, and it was really difficult to jack up the prices (from $10/year), because on-street parking is seen as a Right. Unfortunately, that right comes with all this need to enforce the area, to keep spill over at bay. A particular problem is the State's Capitol Campus, which habitually underbuilds parking (to meet its CTR goals/make the projects pencil), thereby pushing its visitor parking into the historic neighborhood to its South. Residents there would appreciate aging in place, yet are flooded each year with lobbyists and protestors. The city has historically enforced this area, but it is a big resource suck and it seem(ed) justifiable to charge more for the right to park near your front door (read: privilege of having your streets enforced with special outsider-excluder time limits). Boy was I wrong about that!
Anyway, yeah, I think DC even gives their RPZ permits away for free. Get a clue guys.
Matt's parking externality argument is not persuasive, imo. On-street parking is so hard to find in some areas already that it's a top-of-mind issue for many. Matt wants to end zoning and end parking requirements. You might be able to talk people into the first if you dropped the second, but enacting both at the same time? That's not going to happen in most places. So really you have to choose.
All of the allegedly progressive opposition to AB1401 in Los Angeles came from people who had the opportunity to support a bill that did tie upzoning near transit to affordable housing requirements, Scott Wiener's SB50, yet they all opposed that bill as well. It's almost as if the leadership of these organizations is actually more concerned about something else other than their stated goals.
My understanding of why progressive groups oppose changes like this that make housing easier to build by-right is that they see these restrictions as bargaining chips they can trade away for other priorities they're interested in. Labor groups can get prevailing wages in exchange for giving up parking spots, climate groups can get green buildings, etc.
I don't think it's a good idea, but whenever a rich place like California or New York permits a new house it creates a ton of economic surplus. Interest groups are really interested in getting a chunk of that surplus, and the more restrictions there are to trade a way the better chance each group has at getting something in exchange.
In the 5th paragraph of ":Mandates hobble innovation and change" there is a somewhat hilarious typo that suggests that innovation makes people careless instead of carless.
"But if an e-bike or an electric scooter expands your range of carelessness"
Funny, I didn't read that as a typo but assumed "range of carelessness" was a way of referring to easy, spur of the moment trips that don't need to be carefully pre-planned around mass transit schedules, aka "range of carefreeness".
There is a trade off as there always is with people deciding to use what the current occupant of a house such as yours sees as a better use of unneeded parking space. Especially if it is an ADU. That just becomes a tear down for the majority of people who prefer to own cars. Why do most people prefer to own cars? I use to use transit when I was young and could not afford a car. But then I could and my time was way to valuable to waste going slowly to places other people needed to go instead of where I needed to go. While at the same time severely limiting what I can carry on public transit. Once you grow up and have to start lugging home groceries for a family of four and get your kids to to sports practices and such public transport becomes a giant waste of time.
That seems like a problem for the homeowner, who needs to make a bet about whether an ADU or a parking space is more attractive to potential buyers (and to what extent that's a thing they care about vs their current needs.)
I don't see why the government needs to make that decision for them.
The difference is that we're subsidizing the *storage* of automobiles. We subsidize roads for people who want to drive and we subsidize public transit for people who want to take the train/bus, and we can argue about the correct way to balance those infrastructure subsidies. But parking mandates are different--they're effectively a land use policy that requires people who buy/rent housing to pay a premium for a fixed amount of parking spaces, regardless of whether the people who live there plan to use it. (The really perverse thing about the parking-minimum premium is that it's higher in more dense areas where the cost of land is more expensive and a car is usually less necessary.)
If we force car owners to internalize the cost of owning a vehicle, it's probably the case that many people will no longer see owning a car as necessary (or at least may cut costs by using two cars instead of one).
Driving is a system. The roads, the parking, the gasoline supply, the auto repair shops. All are part of the same infrastructure that makes driving work.
Right, but—to my point—most cities don’t require commercial developers to build gas stations and repair shops at a certain level of density. Those places appear because there is demand. We should expect there will still be demand for parking, and hence parking spaces, in a world free of parking minimums.
Only if parking is required to be an open market, and the development market is active enough to produce garages upon demand. In practice the market will produce parking shortages much more readily than parking spaces. Which is why parking minimums (which I'm not defending) were put into zoning codes in the first place. It may be a bad policy, but ignoring the reason for the policy is itself bad policy.
You talking to me? I don't use public transport. But if we're talking about subsidizing, roads for cars and trucks are hugely subsidized by general funds.
Would I be right in thinking you like to eat? Or occasionally buy stuff? Or maybe even move? Or have access to emergency services? Most people do. That's not exactly a subsidy. That's actually building what everybody needs.
Everybody needs to get around, but everyone doesn't need to get around by car; that's a choice. Everybody needs to eat and most people buy things, but those don't have to be delivered by long-haul trucks. That's a choice. We don't have to subsidize roads more than we subsidize other forms of transport. That's a choice.
...but bear in mind these figures are by the tonne, and so heavily skewed by transport of heavy goods such as coal and iron ore.
The truth is there is no practical alternative to getting goods to the supermarkets than road transport, and larger trucks are more fuel (and therefore, CO2), and labour, efficient (per tonne-km), than smaller trucks and vans.
A useful fact is that one parking space in a multifamily building takes up 350 square feet. So two parking spaces are the same size as a small apartment—and in some jurisdictions, that 700 sq ft apartment has to have the two parking spaces. I prefer homes for people to homes for cars.
Parking mandates clearly have to go so as to make room for charging station mandates. I have seen no one take that issue seriously. This is something that I guarantee will become an issue of much discussion. Can an on street "parking space" with a charging station be used my a conventional vehicle? Here's another question. Who expects any car sharing service, or Uber or Lyft or any similar service to use EVs that will require frequent access to charging facilities?
Not because it's bad in principle. It isn't: we need and want to get people out of their cars if they live in denser housing near transit. It's because in their pigheaded way the Legislature was oblivious to the unintended consequences, likely meaning we'll wind up in a worse situation overall here in California.
Why? Because the people moving into this new housing won't give up their cars. They'll simply get residential parking permits in the surrounding neighborhood. And so they'll compete with all the other residents for the limited amount of street parking. In other words, we'll just get some slightly cheaper housing (because building underground parking is costly) with a degraded quality of life for *all* neighborhood residents.
And these new residents can get local parking permits because of the State Attorney General Kamala Harris's decision on the matter (https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/opinions/pdfs/14-304_1.pdf). But that could have easily been reversed if only the Legislature had put an appropriate clause in this legislation. But they simply didn't, whether from sloth or ignorance or whatever.
Trust me, as this is implemented, this will increase opposition to future efforts like this. Dumb dumb dumb.
They should obviously limit the total number of permits to the size of the street frontage, and then sell the permits at market price. But there's no reason they should ban apartment dwellers from buying those permits.
Whenever someone says "Trust me," that is inevitably going to be followed by some unsupported claim that I don't believe. In this case, I don't believe it because I already know what the present opposition to AB 1401 is. The people who you think would be swayed by the results of AB 1401 already oppose it.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument that government should take place at the most local level as functionally possible, the main exception being where the local regulation would cause negative externalities. So in this case, sure, there's some argument the pro-parking regulation is causing pollution, but if the main problem is housing scarcity, to what degree is that a local problem that should be addressed locally? And if addressing it locally is not politically feasible, doesn't that mean that the people who are suffering from the problem prefer the status quo?
Possibly the argument that could be made is, the local ordinance is causing housing costs to increase, which causes poverty, which takes state resources to correct, so the state has a financial interest in the local regulation.
The people who live in tents in Cupertino, CA, or sleep in their cars in Mountain View, are not the same people as the NIMBYs who are preventing housing being built there. The support workers for tech companies in Silicon Valley and live in unsafe dense housing in San Jose, the teachers and nurses who can't afford to live in Palo Alto and have to move far away, and the young people who grew up in Los Altos but are forced to move to Austin to find a place to live, are not the same as the Palo Alto and Los NIMBYs who are preventing housing from being built in their cities.
I don't deny that there's a lot of people who are suffering, I'm just trying to work through the argument that the proposed solution (state overrules local regulations) is consistent how we would like to see local and state politics interact. We see Republican-controlled state governments do this with things like minimum wage law or pandemic restrictions, so it just makes me want to step back and think, are we sure this is cool?
The core problem with housing shortage is that the people who would benefit from new housing can't vote for it. They can only vote after it's been built, and voters are not noted for their gratitude.
That applies to people moving from outside of a community, but less so to people already there. I've moved once to the metropolitan area in which I currently reside, and several times around that area.
This relies on a theory that municipalities have a sovereign right to wield state power in the interests of their residents at the expense of non-residents, and they don't.
As a matter of law the smallest entity in the US with any sovereign rights is State governments.
As a matter of morality, I can't see an argument for it either - municipalities are arbitrary lines on a map draw by the state for administrative simplicity. What gives them the right to prevent others from coming in?
The municipality isn't forbidding non-residents from coming in, it's a building code, which constrains supply, which increases price. So the state government determines the ordinance is causing undesirable price levels in a locality, and passes a law that overrides the local building codes. If that's ok, then ok. But, I live in a state with a more or less permanent Republican state legislature, so part of me is a little defensive about the benefits of local government.
I agree with you in principle, but would be interested in understanding how you distinguish between municipality and state as a matter of morality?
Take St. Louis, Cincinnati, Kansas City, etc. All of them are cities that spread across state lines. What makes the states a more moral place to make the rules as opposed to the city governments when the state boundaries even more just "arbitrary lines on a map" than the cities boundaries?
"Like everyone else, I would prefer there to be less traffic on the street that I live on. If you left it up to me to make a rule, I would say “only the residents of this street are allowed to drive on it.”
This seems to be exactly what you get when almost all neighborhoods are cul-de-sac subdivisions.
Is any city ever going to try parking cap and trade?
I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, which (as far as I can tell) doesn't have any parking minimums. It also had essentially zero cars until very recently. That's starting to change as the middle class emerges. I am pro everything Matt talks about but living here I can also see the appeal of parking minimums.
I don't really know *why* but people with cars seem to have an extreme amounts of entitlement when it comes to stopping and parking their cars. I live in an alley that is technically wide enough (barely) for two cars to pass side-by-side. It is described as a "two-car alley". Yet both sides of the street have cars parked from employees of local businesses. (Vietnam also lacks zoning, so businesses and residential mix.) The result is that street is (barely) wide enough for a single car.
It is common to see cars simply stopped in a lane of traffic because the owner is waiting for someone inside a local business. Cars will also park in front of people's houses and businesses nearly blocking them in. There was a fairly well-known incident a few months back where someone parked a car in front of a business and left a sign saying "please call me and I'll come move my car". The business owner instead spray painted the car and the ensuing online fight was about whether the business owner was justified or not. (Many wondered why the onus was on the business owner to call the car owner, instead of the car owner preemptively calling the business owner and asking permission.)
On the one hand you could say: All of this just means illegal parking needs to be enforced. Which is one of those things that is true but not very useful. Even in America parking enforcement has long been one of the most hated things there is. Movies have been complaining about it for 40+ years. And it isn't just America: parking enforcement is despised in nearly every country.
So I guess what I'm saying is: I see parking minimums as a legislative run-around dealing with this reality. If a local government *actually* rigidly enforced parking laws they'd almost inevitably deal with tremendous amounts of backlash. Sure, eventually, after many years, the strict enforcement might engender a new cultural norm. But all the politicians and bureaucrats would have been fired, condemned, picketed, recalled, etc.
Or....you can pass laws mandating parking minimums and fix 80% of the problem of illegal parking and get effectively zero pushback for over half a century except for Donald Shoup.
This is a really smart analysis, and a little depressing.
Fun fact: most of the suburban (and not a small number of urban and rural) parking minimums come from the ITE's green book, which based it's recommendations on the number of parking spaces in use at single use, green field developments, and often based on low single digit number of observations. In other words, they looked at home many parking spaces would be necessary if there was just one place, and no way to get there besides driving. For even a strip mall style development, in the real world people might park in the lot and visit more than one store, but the parking minimums assume they need a separate spot for each adjacent establishment.
Minimums are also often based on the* maximum* number of spaces an establishment might need, eg how many cars might park at Walmart in Black Friday? That's typically the number required to be there year round.
There are huge benefits to be had in reducing minimums outside of urban areas too.
100
What's interesting is how RPZs are all over the map in terms of pricing. Portland, OR charges close to $300/year for some zones, and will deny you a permit if your building has off-street parking available, whereas Seattle charges $60 *every two years*, regardless of the zone or off-street availability. They've been wanting to update the pricing, but "political will".
I work right in between the two, and it was really difficult to jack up the prices (from $10/year), because on-street parking is seen as a Right. Unfortunately, that right comes with all this need to enforce the area, to keep spill over at bay. A particular problem is the State's Capitol Campus, which habitually underbuilds parking (to meet its CTR goals/make the projects pencil), thereby pushing its visitor parking into the historic neighborhood to its South. Residents there would appreciate aging in place, yet are flooded each year with lobbyists and protestors. The city has historically enforced this area, but it is a big resource suck and it seem(ed) justifiable to charge more for the right to park near your front door (read: privilege of having your streets enforced with special outsider-excluder time limits). Boy was I wrong about that!
Anyway, yeah, I think DC even gives their RPZ permits away for free. Get a clue guys.
Matt's parking externality argument is not persuasive, imo. On-street parking is so hard to find in some areas already that it's a top-of-mind issue for many. Matt wants to end zoning and end parking requirements. You might be able to talk people into the first if you dropped the second, but enacting both at the same time? That's not going to happen in most places. So really you have to choose.
All of the allegedly progressive opposition to AB1401 in Los Angeles came from people who had the opportunity to support a bill that did tie upzoning near transit to affordable housing requirements, Scott Wiener's SB50, yet they all opposed that bill as well. It's almost as if the leadership of these organizations is actually more concerned about something else other than their stated goals.
My understanding of why progressive groups oppose changes like this that make housing easier to build by-right is that they see these restrictions as bargaining chips they can trade away for other priorities they're interested in. Labor groups can get prevailing wages in exchange for giving up parking spots, climate groups can get green buildings, etc.
I don't think it's a good idea, but whenever a rich place like California or New York permits a new house it creates a ton of economic surplus. Interest groups are really interested in getting a chunk of that surplus, and the more restrictions there are to trade a way the better chance each group has at getting something in exchange.
In the 5th paragraph of ":Mandates hobble innovation and change" there is a somewhat hilarious typo that suggests that innovation makes people careless instead of carless.
"But if an e-bike or an electric scooter expands your range of carelessness"
Funny, I didn't read that as a typo but assumed "range of carelessness" was a way of referring to easy, spur of the moment trips that don't need to be carefully pre-planned around mass transit schedules, aka "range of carefreeness".
I was also a little unsure whether to read it as a typo or as Allan has suggested.
"Range of carelessness" is a cool turn of phrase if intended though.
There is a trade off as there always is with people deciding to use what the current occupant of a house such as yours sees as a better use of unneeded parking space. Especially if it is an ADU. That just becomes a tear down for the majority of people who prefer to own cars. Why do most people prefer to own cars? I use to use transit when I was young and could not afford a car. But then I could and my time was way to valuable to waste going slowly to places other people needed to go instead of where I needed to go. While at the same time severely limiting what I can carry on public transit. Once you grow up and have to start lugging home groceries for a family of four and get your kids to to sports practices and such public transport becomes a giant waste of time.
That seems like a problem for the homeowner, who needs to make a bet about whether an ADU or a parking space is more attractive to potential buyers (and to what extent that's a thing they care about vs their current needs.)
I don't see why the government needs to make that decision for them.
Fine, we get that you like car storage, but why do you expect me to subsidize your car storage just because you want it?
Why do you expect me to subsidize your public transport? I don't use it.
The difference is that we're subsidizing the *storage* of automobiles. We subsidize roads for people who want to drive and we subsidize public transit for people who want to take the train/bus, and we can argue about the correct way to balance those infrastructure subsidies. But parking mandates are different--they're effectively a land use policy that requires people who buy/rent housing to pay a premium for a fixed amount of parking spaces, regardless of whether the people who live there plan to use it. (The really perverse thing about the parking-minimum premium is that it's higher in more dense areas where the cost of land is more expensive and a car is usually less necessary.)
If we force car owners to internalize the cost of owning a vehicle, it's probably the case that many people will no longer see owning a car as necessary (or at least may cut costs by using two cars instead of one).
Driving is a system. The roads, the parking, the gasoline supply, the auto repair shops. All are part of the same infrastructure that makes driving work.
Right, but—to my point—most cities don’t require commercial developers to build gas stations and repair shops at a certain level of density. Those places appear because there is demand. We should expect there will still be demand for parking, and hence parking spaces, in a world free of parking minimums.
Only if parking is required to be an open market, and the development market is active enough to produce garages upon demand. In practice the market will produce parking shortages much more readily than parking spaces. Which is why parking minimums (which I'm not defending) were put into zoning codes in the first place. It may be a bad policy, but ignoring the reason for the policy is itself bad policy.
You talking to me? I don't use public transport. But if we're talking about subsidizing, roads for cars and trucks are hugely subsidized by general funds.
Would I be right in thinking you like to eat? Or occasionally buy stuff? Or maybe even move? Or have access to emergency services? Most people do. That's not exactly a subsidy. That's actually building what everybody needs.
Everybody needs to get around, but everyone doesn't need to get around by car; that's a choice. Everybody needs to eat and most people buy things, but those don't have to be delivered by long-haul trucks. That's a choice. We don't have to subsidize roads more than we subsidize other forms of transport. That's a choice.
Agreed that not everyone needs to get around by car (though some do).
The second assertion re delivering goods by truck is a bit more questionable.
The US actually has a high proportion of freight moved by rail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usage#Freight_modal_share_for_rail
...but bear in mind these figures are by the tonne, and so heavily skewed by transport of heavy goods such as coal and iron ore.
The truth is there is no practical alternative to getting goods to the supermarkets than road transport, and larger trucks are more fuel (and therefore, CO2), and labour, efficient (per tonne-km), than smaller trucks and vans.
In case you were wondering people like me have you outnumbered.
Right. As do people who think this whole climate thing is a bit overblown.
We'll see, won't we? We'll see if AB 1401 passes.
A useful fact is that one parking space in a multifamily building takes up 350 square feet. So two parking spaces are the same size as a small apartment—and in some jurisdictions, that 700 sq ft apartment has to have the two parking spaces. I prefer homes for people to homes for cars.
Parking mandates clearly have to go so as to make room for charging station mandates. I have seen no one take that issue seriously. This is something that I guarantee will become an issue of much discussion. Can an on street "parking space" with a charging station be used my a conventional vehicle? Here's another question. Who expects any car sharing service, or Uber or Lyft or any similar service to use EVs that will require frequent access to charging facilities?
This California law is so, so stupid.
Not because it's bad in principle. It isn't: we need and want to get people out of their cars if they live in denser housing near transit. It's because in their pigheaded way the Legislature was oblivious to the unintended consequences, likely meaning we'll wind up in a worse situation overall here in California.
Why? Because the people moving into this new housing won't give up their cars. They'll simply get residential parking permits in the surrounding neighborhood. And so they'll compete with all the other residents for the limited amount of street parking. In other words, we'll just get some slightly cheaper housing (because building underground parking is costly) with a degraded quality of life for *all* neighborhood residents.
And these new residents can get local parking permits because of the State Attorney General Kamala Harris's decision on the matter (https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/opinions/pdfs/14-304_1.pdf). But that could have easily been reversed if only the Legislature had put an appropriate clause in this legislation. But they simply didn't, whether from sloth or ignorance or whatever.
Trust me, as this is implemented, this will increase opposition to future efforts like this. Dumb dumb dumb.
They should obviously limit the total number of permits to the size of the street frontage, and then sell the permits at market price. But there's no reason they should ban apartment dwellers from buying those permits.
Whenever someone says "Trust me," that is inevitably going to be followed by some unsupported claim that I don't believe. In this case, I don't believe it because I already know what the present opposition to AB 1401 is. The people who you think would be swayed by the results of AB 1401 already oppose it.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the argument that government should take place at the most local level as functionally possible, the main exception being where the local regulation would cause negative externalities. So in this case, sure, there's some argument the pro-parking regulation is causing pollution, but if the main problem is housing scarcity, to what degree is that a local problem that should be addressed locally? And if addressing it locally is not politically feasible, doesn't that mean that the people who are suffering from the problem prefer the status quo?
Possibly the argument that could be made is, the local ordinance is causing housing costs to increase, which causes poverty, which takes state resources to correct, so the state has a financial interest in the local regulation.
The people who live in tents in Cupertino, CA, or sleep in their cars in Mountain View, are not the same people as the NIMBYs who are preventing housing being built there. The support workers for tech companies in Silicon Valley and live in unsafe dense housing in San Jose, the teachers and nurses who can't afford to live in Palo Alto and have to move far away, and the young people who grew up in Los Altos but are forced to move to Austin to find a place to live, are not the same as the Palo Alto and Los NIMBYs who are preventing housing from being built in their cities.
I don't deny that there's a lot of people who are suffering, I'm just trying to work through the argument that the proposed solution (state overrules local regulations) is consistent how we would like to see local and state politics interact. We see Republican-controlled state governments do this with things like minimum wage law or pandemic restrictions, so it just makes me want to step back and think, are we sure this is cool?
The core problem with housing shortage is that the people who would benefit from new housing can't vote for it. They can only vote after it's been built, and voters are not noted for their gratitude.
That applies to people moving from outside of a community, but less so to people already there. I've moved once to the metropolitan area in which I currently reside, and several times around that area.
This relies on a theory that municipalities have a sovereign right to wield state power in the interests of their residents at the expense of non-residents, and they don't.
As a matter of law the smallest entity in the US with any sovereign rights is State governments.
As a matter of morality, I can't see an argument for it either - municipalities are arbitrary lines on a map draw by the state for administrative simplicity. What gives them the right to prevent others from coming in?
The municipality isn't forbidding non-residents from coming in, it's a building code, which constrains supply, which increases price. So the state government determines the ordinance is causing undesirable price levels in a locality, and passes a law that overrides the local building codes. If that's ok, then ok. But, I live in a state with a more or less permanent Republican state legislature, so part of me is a little defensive about the benefits of local government.
I agree with you in principle, but would be interested in understanding how you distinguish between municipality and state as a matter of morality?
Take St. Louis, Cincinnati, Kansas City, etc. All of them are cities that spread across state lines. What makes the states a more moral place to make the rules as opposed to the city governments when the state boundaries even more just "arbitrary lines on a map" than the cities boundaries?
"Mandates hobble innovation and change"
It warms my heart to see a progressive admit that.