Imagine Orem Station Workshop

This evening, Orem’s Planning Commission hosted an Imagine Orem Station Workshop, which I attended as a thoughtful observer.

This workshop’s purpose was to invite Orem’s residents to provide their input to the commission as part of its “visioning” process to devise central plans for Orem’s land-use surrounding the UTA FrontRunner’s Orem station. And, so, its participants got to play at central economic planning, imagining where local homebuilders might construct what sorts of houses, where local businesses might operate what sorts of stores, where local politicians might provide what sorts of recreational facilities, et cetera, after which they presented their land-use maps for consideration.

I understand that this visioning exercise was funded by the Mountainland Association of Governments (MAG), by the way, which is a local regional-planning organization. Although this meeting’s hosts generally favored zoning for high-density housing served by heavily-subsidized mass-transit, which is often favored by those who prefer overgrown government for various reasons, most participants favored zoning for single-family housing instead, an an exercise of political power to try to preserve Orem’s current character as Family City USA. Which is very understandable.

But I favor a third option, which I believe is even better, which is to end zoning entirely. Although I like municipal planning for expanding public infrastructure to keep-up with municipal growth, I assert that municipal planning goes too far whenever it dares to oversteps those limits (including via zoning) to infringe upon land rights. Respecting private property rights decentralizes power and enables property owners (within the limits of their rights) to make their own plans about their own property—and the plans of the many are generally far superior to the plans of the few.

Sadly, municipal zoning has become so commonplace that most Americans don’t question it—but we should! Zoning’s alleged benefits involve forcing markets to do what they’d generally already do freely on their own, but at a terrible price. Zoning’s burdensome costs are that it curtails development, reduces competition, reduces housing supplies while raising housing costs, mandates false “order” and/or aesthetics over genuine needs, excludes “undesirables,” wastes people’s valuable time with needless paperwork, retards economic progress, and lowers standards-of-living.

Zoning laws, combined with other burdensome regulations, are causing America’s housing costs to skyrocket into a so-called “housing crisis,” which is driving Americans from single-family homes to high-density alternatives, whereas reducing such regulations would reverse this trend. And this explains why Houston, which enjoys virtually no zoning laws, also enjoys some of America’s most affordable housing, while highly-regulated Los Angeles’ skyrocketing costs-of-living are driving away its middle class in droves to more-affordable cities like… unzoned Houston.

Let’s please render Orem more like Houston and less like Los Angeles in this regard! Please read my webpage about Zoning for more.