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Depends on what you mean by property rights. You bring up nuisance but that really involves a situation of conflicting property rights. A wants to use its property for X which conflicts with how B wants to use its property. How do you solve that? Well the law of nuisance. Or if you like law and Econ read The Problem of Social Costs by Coase.
That is fundamentally a different kind of regulation compared to rent control. In the first, there is a conflict in property rights. In the second, there is no conflict.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. If you tried to build a factory in a residential neighborhood, what would stop you is zoning laws. Are you saying that society could or should get rid of zoning laws and just stick to the concept of common law nuisance? (I agree that would let you stop a cement factory, but I'm not sure it would help if someone built a two-family house in an area which was zoned for single family houses.) Not trying to trap you, I genuinely don't understand your point.
Zoning law is kind of a shitty version of common law nuisance. You won’t find defending zoning qua zoning. But it is an out growth of common law nuisance and is getting at something inherently different than rent control (ie what do you when rights are incompatible). Thus comparing the two is a category error.
FWIW, I would get rid of zoning and permit restrictive deeds including racial.
I think you have that backwards. I'll never understand why libertarians and others persist in the belief that the civil court system is a kind of frictionless plane. Granted, if you have an actual dispute to resolve, it's indispensable and better than a lot of alternatives I've heard proposed, but if you can pass regulations to cut lawsuits off at the pass, you should. Imagine you want to build a cement plant. You have two options:
Build it and hope that nobody complains. You have nothing to go by ahead of time. If someone doesn't like what you're doing, or thinks it's too noisy, or complains about dust, you can pay your attorneys to spend several years litigating the definition of "reasonable" to a jury that is probably going to have more people sympathetic to noise and dust complaints than it does people who own industrial plants. Repeat this situation for every use that anyone could find remotely objectionable, which is any use you can think of. Be prepared to suspend your operations throughout the duration of the suit. Be prepared for the court to rule you have to shut down permanently, or pay ongoing damages in an amount that makes it economically unfeasible to continue.
Look at the municipalities ordinances for zoning and noise and dust abatement. Make sure you comply with the ordinances and obtain formal exemptions if you can't. If nearby homeowners want to litigate, they can do so before you've spent any serious money, and they won't be suing you so much as they will the municipality that granted the exemption. If the use is allowed by right and you are complying with the regulations, it's going to be a tough row to hoe for the plaintiffs.
These days, almost every private nuisance action I've seen has been based on independent studies showing that the defendants violated a municipal regulation that the governing body has failed to enforce; the arguments boil down to whether or not a standard was violated. The system you'd prefer is a system where both parties have to argue their version of what the standards should be. Maybe ya jury is convinced that 90 dB at the property line is an unreasonable amount of noise. We know nothing about whether 85 is okay or not. Actually, we know nothing about whether 90 is okay in another case because a different jury might see things differently, or maybe the guy suing is a huge asshole and they all agree that he deserves to live next to a hog rendering facility.
Which brings me to my second point, which is that zoning regulations were not an outgrowth of common law nuisance, at least not as we'd recognize nuisance today. Traditional common law nuisance laws, i.e. things actionable under an Assize of Nuisance, almost exclusively related to water runoff and land support. The idea was that nuisance was a counterpart to trespass; where in trespass I damage your land by entering onto it, in nuisance I do something on my own land that causes your land to be damaged. The distinction between the two was always fuzzy and by the 19th century they were all trespasses and nuisance was practically a dead letter. The doctrine as we know it today to apply to noises, smells, and the like was part of a 20th century revival that went hand in hand with the development of zoning regulations. Courts and municipal governments were looking for way to mitigate the negative effects of development, and these were two of the things they came up with.
This is why I'm not sure what you're talking about when you act like nuisance has something to do with "rights" while rent control doesn't. All rent control legislation—which coincidentally arose around the same time as zoning legislation and the modern conception of nuisance—does is create a right of a tenant to not be charged rents in excess of a specified maximum. It's no different than any other right a tenant has, whether derived from statute or common law. And if you think that there's something about common law rights that make them superior to statutory rights, keep in mind that the right to sell your property was created by statute.
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Thank you for clarifying that. I think the line is blurrier than you are making it out to be.
For example, it's very common for zoning laws to mandate minimum lot sizes and maximum numbers of units per lot.. Even though the developer (and eventual landlord) would prefer to have a larger number of units so as to maximize revenue, the municipality limits what he can charge, albeit in a roundabout way. The unstated purpose of these types of requirements is to keep out the riff raff, so to speak.
To be sure, you could argue that the neighbors of this developer have a property interest in limiting the intensity of use of neighboring lots, you could just as easily say that rent-control tenants have a property interest in being able to stay in their apartments while paying a reasonable rent.
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