I enjoy talking about and learning about the great European and Asian countries and cities like Austria, Japan, the Netherlands, and Singapore. I know they are good and people in countries like America and Australia would like the built environment to be structured more like them. I agree.

However I'd want to see some examples for two types of situations:

I want to see an example of a place that once has restrictive zoning (let's say only allowing single family homes, no business in a residential neighborhood, only allowing strip malls with one floor, no multi family housing allowed, no front yard buisnesses allowed, etc) that changed their rules and created more varied housing types. I want to see if this has lead to lower housing costs and less homelessness. Apparently one person told me this happened in Auckland New Zealand (studies were done on housing construction but not homelessness).

I'd also like to see an example of a piece of suburbia or a built environment that's very car dependent that became more dense and non car commuter friendly.

I want to see some examples of this because while I know the Asian and European cities have great design, for the most part these places did not start out as car centric and changed, they were built with non car travel in mind or before cars. I want to see an example of a great urban area being crafted from a car centric space because I think it would help create a good development roadmap for poorly planned communities in America, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (the 1st world countries that are the most car dependent). We could learn from what they did well and improve upon what didn't. Washington State recently passed a bill allowing middle housing in single family zones, so I am hoping in 15-20 years the housing prices will go down, but yah I want to see examples of places that made these kind of changes and actually improved.

Apparently compared to the rest of Europe the UK is pretty car dependent outside of London