"My illegal neighborhood"

"Not far from the school was a senior center and some subsidized housing for families of modest means. Scattered here and there in the nearby blocks were grand old houses—some beautifully maintained and very expensive, other cut up into legal and illegal apartments.

Three blocks away was an arterial street, but it wasn’t too much wider than the street in front of my apartment building. I often walked there to buy groceries from a small grocery store and drop off my dry cleaning. Another block or two farther along the arterial was a branch library. Across the street from the grocery store was a small sheet metal fabrication business.

Once, when I was explaining to a reporter how our neighborhood had every possible kind of use and service, I gestured to the sheet metal company to illustrate the presence of light industrial uses. It was then that I realized is was called Schmeer Sheet Metal Works and Fabrication. “See,” I said, “we have the whole schmeer.”

That neighborhood is typical of many older neighborhoods in American cities. And in almost all of American cities and suburbs, that neighborhood would be illegal...

It is illegal to build an apartment building in a district of single family homes. Residential zoning was adopted in order to prevent single family neighborhood property values and families from being degraded by the presence of apartments where immigrants and low-class people lived"

http://cityobservatory.org/my_illegal_neighborhood/

This whole thing is fascinating and a good point. Zoning! Ridic

He goes through why almost everything in his neighborhood would be illegal.