[mountainboy]

I blame government zoning laws. These prevent entrepreneurs from opening restaurants and markets near to where people live.

In a truly entrepreneurial society, anyone can operate a small business open to the public right out of their house. Not so in the US states/counties I've ever been to.

[mschuster91]

Zoning laws came to be because of the classic "tragedy of the commons" - enough people were too greedy and built polluting, noisy or traffic-intensive businesses right adjacent to people's homes.

Letting "the market" do whatever it wants will only lead to one thing, and that is greedy people scalp up the cheapest land they can find (usually, in quarters where poor people live) and build extremely polluting stuff there. Zoning laws exist to guarantee even the poorest of the poor at least a basic standard of protection - although I do admit that there exist a lot of cases where zoning laws are abused to protect the interest of the elites primarily.

Fun fact: Back in early Roman times and for a long time until the 18th century, that also had a public health aspect - burial sites, slaughterhouses and similar businesses were banned from the inner city and, if there was a river, placed on the downstream end so that the risk of pollution was reduced.

[Ma8ee]

And in a car centric society, even a supermarket becomes noisy and polluting since all their customers use heavy machinery (cars) just to get there. I certainly don’t want to live next to a large parking lot.

[ericmay]

I wish that were the simple fix, but Houston exists. No zoning laws (I think/read) that would prevent better urban planning.

[ryukafalz]

Houston doesn’t call what they have “zoning”, they just have a bunch of other laws on the books that have basically the same effect. It’s certainly not an urbanist’s paradise.