Opposition to Whole Foods

No, my beef is with the needless zoning regulation and the push back against a reasonable proposal. I have worked hard for my money. If brooklyn wants a community with no box stores, its citizens should bear the tax consequences of that; I shouldn't.

 

What if someone wants to put a rendering plant next to your brownstone? Should you have to bear that burden?

That said, the length of this process is stupid. Make a decision and let the company do what it needs to do, whether build or sell the land.

 

How are size restrictions "needless zoning regulation". They're commonplace -- nearly every municipality has them.

I once covered a zoning meeting after a board likely got greased and a beef processing plant got approved as a commercial property and granted a waiver to build in a residential area. The residents -- overwhelmingly Republicans -- were not very happy. And that plant never did get built.

Seriously, we had this fight at the turn of the last century. The crazy people lost, then.

 

That's

that's why I focused on a "reasonable" proposal. Still, there is something inherently problematic with shared costs when localities can place restrictions on their local economies. Neil Siegel's collective action theory (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1692835) suggests that this is a good way to understand the commerce clause and why Congress has authority to override local regulations. He's super liberal (even clerked for Ginsburg) but fully believes that the shared-cost problem can merit federal takeover of certain economic policies.

 

1. I don't think it's a reasonable restriction in a nonresidential area.

2. Even if it were, the collective cost spillover problem remains. If you want to have full control over your economy, there's at least some problem when youre asking me to bail you out. You want full control over the local economy but also you want to share the costs.

 

Zoning areas for residential or industrial use is one thing. This is not a residential area. It's commercial/industrial.

What I object to is regulations that are in place only so that concessions can be extracted in return for approval.

This is likely going to get approved. But, at what cost? How much money, time, and man hours have been wasted placating a zoning board, elected officials, "community groups", etc.?

And, what kind of chilling effect does that have on future investment and job growth?

They could right regulations that required a certain number of parking spaces based on the square footage of a store. That could be done reasonably. They could require a traffic plan.

Instead, it becomes a drawn out process of kissing the ring. And hiring friends and former employees of political big wigs who can arrange for you to kiss the ring -- because you can't do it without an appointment.

 

Feel free to disagree. But the Supreme Court sided with me. In 1926, for fuck's sake.

Unless the zoning law is discriminatory or has no rational basis, they're allowed. What's "reasonable" to your mind doesn't enter into it.

The citizenry of a given area is perfectly free to vote in commissioners who will either change the zoning laws OR grant waivers at the drop of a hat, or both.

Isn't that the local control that conservatives are always in a tizzy over?

 

<b>Reading comprehension: "It's not reasonable" =/= "It's illegal."</b>

I'm not arguing the ability of locales to do this. I'm arguing that this is a reason we should then also decentralize unemployment benefits to some extent to reflect the fact that local communities play a large role in determining their local employment rates. That's a policy argument.

Show me where I said communities don't have the ability to enact these regulations, and I'll happily retract it. However, "local control" means more than just control -- it means also taking responsibility for the control's actions. I bet if Brooklyn had to pay for all of its unemployment benefits, it would think twice about enforcing this zoning regulation in that place for this company.

As a legal argument, Congress could step in and limit zoning relations because of the effect on interstate commerce. The Supreme Court sided with me on that in 1937, "for fuck's sake."

 

The Supreme Court does not decide what Congress should "step in and limit". Not its function.

Your unemployment nonsense is a red herring. Zoning regulations are up to the municipalities and said municipalities have a wide berth on how they are written.

Edit, now that you've edited: Reasonable isn't the legal standard. That's the point. Rational basis is a different standard. See above.

 

Yeah, I'm not saying the Federal Government should be able to approve this store over local objection.

I'm objecting to the local obstacles put in the way of such development. New York City might be the worst for something like this, but Chicago is nearly as bad, and your hometown is probably a mess too.

Now, could the Feds do something like they did with highway fund and the drinking age to encourage fewer local regulations? Maybe. Could their be some sort of incentive? Maybe.

The real incentive should be the fact that folks -- and jobs -- have been moving from the Northeast and the Midwest to the South and Southwest for a generation.

Jobs continue to move overseas. Companies continue to look at foreign markets for growth.

That should be enough, But, too often, Government double down at their own peril. And their tax base continues to erode.

 

Here's the thing with your "I shouldn't have to pay their unemployment" argument. The majority of big box retailers -- and Whole Foods may well be an exception to this, though I have my doubts -- pay such shitty wages that their employees will qualify for a host of benefits anyway. And don't forget that a substantial portion of their employee base will be part-time. So effectively, you're subsidizing Whole Foods/Wal-Mart/whoever's bottom line through your generous support of their employees. And again, the fact that this particular example is Whole Foods does not invalidate the larger argument.

That, by the way, is why conservatives should be opposed to Wal-Mart in particular. By giving its employees no or substandard health insurance, it effectively forces them onto Medicaid. So again, you're subsidizing billions in profit for Wal-Mart, which also happens to fuel a trade imbalance with China.

But yeah. Brooklyn's zoning laws are the issue here.

(And yeah, I know. The problem isn't multibillion-dollar corporations paying substandard wages. The problem is the refusal of the earners of those substandard wages to just shut up and eat their gruel.)

 

The whole point is that communities can do this, but we should also make policies that force communities to bear the burden of their choices. And we have the right to do so.

I didn't say the Court should step in; I said the Court has said that Congress is within its powers to step in.

I'm posting remotely, which is why I'm editing. The iPhone has been acting up.