Most of the US (including most US cities) dont have strict separation. Every US city has multiple dozens of buildings of mixed live/work spaces. (These are inherently expensive to build and operate, and therefore expensive to rent, so there aren't lots more of them, only because there aren't enough wealthy residents to justify it)

And even many affordable neighborhoods of 1960's-looking-suburbs and such, have lots of dental offices / daycare centers / insurance offices / chiropractors / photography studios / private tutors / etc in them. Most people never notice, because they look like any other random ranch house. But they exist, and are permitted by zoning.

Historically, some places in the US have family-housing-only zoning laws, not to enforce a "strict separation", but to protect housing affordability or protect public transportation. If you could put 'anything' on that land, it would cost more, preventing people from being able to afford to live there. And if you could put 'anything' there, you might build a superstore or a theme park or similar (which would block other residential residents from using the public transportation network)

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Berlin has strong renter protections, rent control (freeze + cap), more widespread alternative forms of public transit, and substantial public housing. So the threat of private equity breaking the whole town is a little bit less pressing. The vast majority of America has nothing even remotely close to that. Zoning protections like these are basically the only thing preventing housing prices and transportation availability from being even worse in the US.

Americans learned that they can use zoning laws to put restrictions on their neighbors’ properties, mainly to keep their own property values high.

Unfortunately, American city planners have a lot of bad ideas of what a city should look like. For some reason, stadiums are unreasonably popular ( http://www.hatrack.com/cgi-bin/print_friendly.cgi?page=/osc/... ).

Oops: wrong link. It should have been http://www.ornery.org/cgi-bin/printer_friendly.cgi?page=/ess... .

That’s common in many places in the US, especially in older areas like New England.

Nice to hear.

Imagine you park on the street and don't pay for it. Now imagine I open a restaurant next door. Diners park on the street. All of a sudden you can't mooch off of public land to store your private property! Time to go shout at your planners about traffic and parking!

What strange invective. Residents of a city who own private property pay property taxes, sales taxes, and fuel taxes to build and maintain roads. The people they are "mooching off" are themselves.

Likewise, if your city has set you up with some amenity like parking, and you plan your property purchase around it, and they take it away to give to someone else, it's quite reasonable to get mad — even if the use of that amenity was not specifically deeded to you as private property. There may be other concerns in a city to which they must yield, but it is hardly as if they are entitled freeloaders.

Why is it I can fill my garage with junk and park on the street, but not park in my garage and plop a hot tub in the street?