I was cruising through my daily RSS feed and came across this article. I was enjoying the articles until I came across this photo and read what followed. I was hooked. Something I've never thought about. Do you have it in your community? Does it even come to public attention and do they hold meetings about it. Take the time to check this out @ http://www.newgeography.com/content/004918-land-use-regulations-and-social-engineering
Zoning is always a big political issue. Fortunes can be made or broken by it. There are business people that camp out at zoning hearing board meetings. Quick profits often win out over other considerations, but it depends upon the people in political control. One big issue that will be affecting many in the future is water scarcety. Even in areas where adequate planning was occurring, the plans were sometimes not implemented because it was more profitable to sell the land required for dams, etc for other purposes. A favorite tactic was to "inspire" environmentalists to attack and defeat the water projects; then, later, the land was quietly obtained and used for more profitable endeavors. Since that was often housing for people that would eventually need more water, you can see the problem. One issue I have is that the chopped up living situations enforced by much housing design makes cooperative child care, etc extremely difficult. I have always liked the type of housing plan in which several generations share a large home with a central courtyard. For people that really don't care for a lot of "alone" space, large bedroom-only apartment houses with central cooking, recreational, and social spaces would be nice--similar to that found on some college campuses or senior assisted living setups. The usual styles can be very constraining to people they are not suited to.
One of the big problems in many communities is zoning, much of the commercial area is too far away from the residential area. But part of the reason they have the zoning laws in the first place is because car traffic, no one wants that many cars driving past where they work. Which in turn is caused by high population densities, and everyone using a car because they have to because nothing is close. In some ways it is a self reinforcing cycle: people need cars to get places because the commercial areas are too far away, but the commercial areas are too far away because they would draw too many cars. But then the higher population density is a significant contributing factor here. I have seen some studies that suggest the optimal size of a city is about 10,000-15,000 people. When I refer to "density", that can be a tricky word. Local high density buildings can encourage people to walk and use bicycles because the distances are less. This basically means the city is not very big, but most of the city is located within a small area. So basically plenty of wide open space surrounding everything, and then a small higher density core in the middle. This used to be the common urban layout before cars were in common use, and is why older cities are often much more pleasant than cities that were planned and built in modern times.
Not in my town but many cities in SoCal have adopted the mixed use retail-residential use concept, liberal local city councils, those who hate cars and PC activist and developers saying it's so European, it so politically correct. WARNING !!! It's Wikipedia, it's not a reliable source, please read Wiki's disclaimers before thinking if it's on the internet, it must be true.
