[bane]

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.