How do you collectively make political decisions about what gets built where?

It sounds like the planning system. The planning system is a big part of why house prices are so high. The suburbs are not allowed to have anything but single family zoning. Commercial areas are not allowed to be built in residential areas. Why? Because people keep making rules to protect their land values. NIMBYism is a huge constraint to the supply of housing whether present at local hearings for a specific building or when making land use plans. One problem is that landowners (which most homeowners are), are severely overrepresented in a system where plans are decided collectively. Even if all the renters in the city also showed up, these collective plans will never include potential people wanting to move to the city cause they will not be part of this. This creates a bias towards plans that don’t allow for new housing because the residents are more likely to already have their living situation covered. This hurts: people seeking to move, renters, anyone wanting to move to the city, newer generations who don’t own property.

There are a number of other problems with this:

It’s impossible to plan for the future. People’s needs, wants and desires change constantly and you can’t plan for that. Even collectively. Cause what is planned collectively now, will not be the same decision if the plan was made a year later cause wants and desires have changed.

It also inhibits the optimal functioning of development. A plan may have height restrictions to prevent views from being interrupted or from shadows being cast, but this plan assumes that the value of these views and sunlight will in perpetuity be worth more than the supply of housing being prevented. Let’s say a plan includes the appearance of buildings in building codes. This missed all the individual creativity present in local communities. The people who know best what their community needs are the individuals living there. A lot of creativity is lost when one plan takes over the plans of many individuals. The historic centers that we love so much everywhere that we make them indestructible legally are all designed by individuals with unique ideas in ways that couldn’t be planned.

It also goes against the rule of law. Laws should be predictable, simple, and general. Planning laws are neither of those. Their lacking predictability increases the risk of every building project. Their lacking simplicity increases the legal costs for any developer making it hard for smaller players to compete with the big ones. Their lack of generality makes it possible for officials to give preferential treatment to certain owners. Do you know how much a plot of land increases in value if a planner decides that it’s suddenly allowed to have more stories built there? Let’s say these plans are created with a 51% majority vote. What about the 49%? None of this would have been necessary if people had more freedom.

This is not advocating for neoliberal society. You can make the rules more general. You can say buildings are not allowed to be 50% taller than its neighbors. Simple, general, predictable. You can say industrial areas are not allowed less than 400 meters from residential areas. Etc. You can have local land trusts.

Cities are so complex, that it cannot be planned top down. And bottom up approaches that attempt to democratize top down planning, is still top down. It’s authoritative and prone to corruption. Jane Jacobs argued that what makes the city are the millions of interactions and actions of its citizens, not a planning board.

Of course you need coordination. You can plan infrastructure, and the rules that filter out what are undesirable outcomes, but don’t plan the life.