You are right that this is part of what helps drive local diversity and character, but it's also one of the principal drivers of NIMBYism. It has tremendous impacts from high density zoning to proper infrastructure development and effects hundreds of millions of people in very real, very daily, negative ways.

These problems are greatly reduced in places with larger scale control of the zoning laws and in many of those places you also end up with lovely, highly diverse cities as well. Given good governance, neighborhoods and areas can be designated for various "character" initiatives as well and you end up with lovely places like Tokyo, Kyoto, Seoul and so on.

Not having this kind of larger scale vision is why it takes an hour to cross over a single river from West New York to Manhattan or from McLean, VA to Seneca, MD and 5-10 minutes to cross the river in Seoul from Gangnam to Geumho or between two points on the Sumida in Tokyo in 5-10 minutes.

This will not be a popular opinion, but whenever I see protection of privilege in the US these magical words are somehow involved:

    > have the right

While it might be ideal to have local control, cities such as my city of NYC respond to special interests -- in this case wealthy landlords. The local government serves wealthy landlords by making land artificially scarce and scarcity is reflected in higher prices. In microeconomics this is called "rent-seeking" which in this case is using politics to create profits far, far higher than costs. Thus Donald Trump and other wealthier landlords are getting huge sums of money from renters who are paying far, far more than they would in an efficient market. By responding to the campaign donations of wealthy landlords the local city councils have created a regressive tax and this is also a major form of inequality.

The local city councils respond to lobbying on the part of wealthy landlords by 1) zoning density restrictions, 2) overregulation and amount of red tape needed for approvals, and 3) overuse of historic landmark status.

Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser has written extensively about these problems. For example: Build Big Bill http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....

See also: 40 Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

The solution is to use the one in used by Japan which is to have the federal government override the "rent-seeking" local city councils. The honest truth is that these city councils make renters and younger people pay far, far more for housing while giving Donald Trump and his fellow wealthy landlords far, far more money than their costs.

I wonder how this would practically work in somewhere like America, where the cities are so diverse. I have a hard time believing that the rules that are the best for a big city like LA and San Francisco are the same rules that would work for middle of nowhere Iowa.

I don't see why we can't just make some modifications to Japan's model. There may be a smaller population and land area, but how many cities of 13 million people with 43 million people in the metro area do we have?

I think the only problem with adopting Japan's model is we are so established with the current one.

There are just a few major metro areas in the US where much of the rent-seeking for wealthy landlords is much of a problem starting with SF, LA, SD, Boston, NYC, DC. Not all cities bow to the wishes of wealthy landlords by making land scarce through artificial political means with the resulting huge financial windfall for wealthy landlords at cost to renters and millennials trying to buy a home.

And the Japanese zoning model mitigates more than just the problem of exploitative rentiers buying and corrupting local government