[imtringued]

Americans haven't heard about hierarchical zoning. For them zoning means you can only do one thing and nothing else. This means you have a dedicated residential zone, dedicated commercial zone and dedicated industrial zone.

Everything is far apart because the zones aren't mixed use. In most sane countries you can build low impact buildings in every zone, medium impact buildings (commercial real estate) in medium impact zones and above and high impact (industrial real estate) buildings in high impact zones.

Yes, you can build your house near a factory but the factory can't be built near your house.

[wrycoder]

This is not the case. We have mixed zoning in most communities.

Industrial zones are usually reserved for industry. There are good reasons for that, primarily to keep noise, dust, and heavy traffic separated from residential areas. It's best not to allow residential use in an industrial zone, because it tends to promote very low quality housing.

The zone I live in is residential-agricultural with a manufactured home overlay district. Permitted uses include farms, home businesses, and professional offices in homes. The major limitations are density, height, and setback restrictions. There's a moderate amount of conservation land due to wetlands and streams, and the local residents are pretty active about protecting the watersheds and quality of life. You can't open a restaurant, grocery store, or auto repair business, but there are a few grandfathered uses like that near me.

As population in an area increases, the normal course is for zoning to change to permit increased density. I think most communities are best served by having areas of higher density surrounded by lower density, rather than making a uniform sprawl. Around here, the higher density, low setback zones are about three miles apart. That's where the stores are.

Speaking as someone who served on a planning board for a decade: you shouldn't try to stop development - you should ease it in. If you don't it, it tends to catch up with you all at once, which is very disruptive.

[cperciva]

It's best not to allow residential use in an industrial zone, because it tends to promote very low quality housing.

Presumably nobody wants to live in "low quality housing", and no developer wants to build housing which they can't sell; so this reads to me like a policy statement of "we'd rather that people are homeless".

Historically this has definitely been as thing -- American cities have prohibited low-income housing as a covert effort to enforce racial segregation, and in the early days of Victoria, Canada, free land grants were available to anyone who brought at least six servants with them -- but I'm not sure that such a policy has any place in modern society.

[wrycoder]

In that paragraph, I was only referring to industrial zones.

[mint2]

While the overall point is good, For more pollution prone industries it would be very risky not to prohibit housing next to it, otherwise it’s dooming poor people and their kids to health issues and early death. For example, battery recycler in the past have lead to massive heavy metal pollution in the vicinity.

So for the most risky industrial facilities housing should be prohibited, but for all others yeah it should be mostly hierarchical.

[ClumsyPilot]

in Many EU contries a house has to meet sone limits on noise and other pollution or it will not be allowed to be sold as a residential property.

[clairity]

rather than arbitrary zoning rules and an implicit pass for such obvious and wanton pollution, those businesses should be regulated and heavily punished (too bad the supreme court made things like this harder not easier recently). that's a literal externality. it's the kind of thing where the corporate veil should be pierced mercilessly, and the executives and owners all held personally culpable.

then it wouldn't matter who lived next door.

[mint2]

Theoretically and on paper that would be a nice proposition. Unfortunately we are humans. That will not work