[spenczar5]

It seems like this would depend a lot on the industry, and on scale. If somebody is, I don't know, assembling board games, I think that sounds fine next to a school. If they're refining crude oil, well, that sounds more likely to have the problems you describe.

But "zoning" attempts to resolve those issues by carving territory up, not by requiring a particular physical distance. Zoning maps have boundaries which still have the problems you describe, right?

It seems a lot more reasonable to target the specific issues (noise, air pollution, etc - the stuff you descibed) rather than attack this via zones.

Of course, you said a similar thing too, so we probably 80% agree. But can you explain the remaining 20% - when is zoning ever a good way to solve these problems?

Further - is there a case to be made for zoning aside from moving really heavy industry away from really residential neighborhoods? My city has dozens of zones, carefully segregating walkable retail regions from single-family homes, which doesn't seem so defensible.