Zoned in the USA

Hirt’s title might make you think it is just about the United States, but her well-written book is one of the rare instances of an insightful comparison of zoning policies in the other high-income nations of the world. Zoning actually started in Germany in the late nineteenth century and was imported to the US at the beginning of the twentieth. It was seriously modified on our shores. Rather than orchestrating the orderly development of mixed-use neighborhoods, Americans isolated the single-family, owner-occupied house on a zoning pedestal that it rarely enjoys in other countries.