The major my suburb recently sent out a survey asking people what kind of building projects people would like to see. The granularity of what was being asked for was shocking. It should not be the government's task to decide if we need to build single family homes or multi family homes and if they are allowed to be town houses etc. I felt like I was in the Soviet Union.
The point is that you have to apply common sense to zoning, which given the countless comments about US zoning seems to be the difference.
Common sense (zoning, and other things):
Japanese Zoning :: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
The value that zoning provides is to segregate and disenfranchise the bulk of the populace, while spreading them out during the Cold War so as to make the US more resilient towards bombings supposedly. This is the same culture that thought sidewalks were bad.
https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youv...
>Matthew Festa [is] a land use professor in Houston...
>For all that’s been made of Houston’s infamous lack of zoning, Festa said it increasingly seems that reputation isn’t deserved or even accurate.
>“We do have a lot of land-use regulations,” Festa said. “We still have a lot of stuff that looks and smells like zoning.”
>To be more precise, Houston doesn’t exactly have official zoning. But it has what Festa calls “de facto zoning,” which closely resembles the real thing. “We’ve got a lot of regulations that in other cities would be in the zoning code,” Festa said. “When we use it here, we just don’t use the ‘z’ word.”