It doesn't make any sense to assume that someone would want to buy Home A, tear it down, and build a paper mill there, but that nobody could ever want to buy Home B next door and build a profitable venture there as well. Often in these situations, housing values go up, because the opportunity exists to build something more valuable than a house.

Furthermore, when you buy a house, you are a taking a risk. You're making an investment. I don't see why the rest of the world should be bending over backwards and living in stasis to protect your investment. If you want absolute control over what happens on your block, buy your block.

I think if you look a little harder you can find entire neighborhoods of homes becoming worthless because of industrial ventures nearby but I guess your theory sounds nice on paper.

That doesn't contradict my point, as I never claimed that was impossible for housing values to depreciate, only that the alternative happens "often". Specifically:

You're treating all real estate as if it's the same, but the world is more complex than that. We're talking about dense metro areas, where development primarily happens to support growing populations and an influx of businesses. How many expensive homes in downtown SF have become worthless because of industrial ventures nearby? Far, far, far less than have become extremely valuable, if any. This isn't just some theory on paper.

Are we? I was responding to a claim that property owners should have absolute rights to build whatever they please on their property. Nobody builds big smoke stacks in the middle of major cities anymore but you could refer to some 19th-Century writing about London to see how that could be bad as well. Or you could read about the time the Thames stank so bad Parliament all had to leave and was finally compelled to do something about waterway pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink

In short there are a lot of reasons to want to regulate what people build.

As far as I can gather from jeffbax's comment, yes, that's what he was talking about. Not giving property owners absolute rights to build whatever they please. I don't know how many people would seriously support going to that extreme.

The exact question I was answering was "Why shouldn't land owners be able to build whatever they want on their own property?" I imagine he must be a hardcore libertarian because there are a bunch of them here and that is the question he asked and not some other one about mixed zoning.

Oh I see. Yes, he did say that further up, and I think your reply to that was correct. However when he got specific in his next comment and talked about dense metro areas, I don't think your reply was valid, and that's what I've been responding to.

I think, given the context, that what I said is equally true of dense metro areas and suburban neighborhoods that happen to be near shale gas.