It's a crazy rabbit hole that I've gone down recently.

It feels so unamerican... Did you know there are only a handful of counties remaining nationwide where you can build a home without a permit? And even those counties will probably change soon due to statewide zoning codes.

I'm not against the building code, it's mostly a safety code written in blood, however the zoning code is a whole other matter. Basically you get to dictate what your neighbor builds on his property because at some point we decided that ever increasing property values is the only thing that matters.

Zoning is a relatively new concept, and really doesn't get discussed as much as it should. Most people are totally clueless about the laws that dictate so much of our built environment.

Here is a great article discussing it further:

https://reason.com/2022/06/21/abolish-zoning-all-of-it/

"The very first zoning code turned 100 years old in 2016—a zoning code predicated on keeping poor Jewish factory workers away from the posh Fifth Avenue shopping district. The Supreme Court decision that deemed zoning constitutional will turn 100 in 2026—a decision that infamously referred to apartments as “parasites” and tacitly endorsed class segregation."