Zoning laws

Mises:

Zoning laws are a violation of property rights. They destroy the sense of community in neighborhoods, increase crime, increase traffic congestion, contribute to urban and suburban air pollution, contribute to poverty, contribute to reliance in government — and, thus, reduce self-reliance — and contribute to the ruin of our schools. Most of our urban and suburban problems arose with zoning and other antiproperty laws, to which welfare programs and public housing projects have contributed. Each of these policies came out of the idea that society could and should be engineered from the top down to give rise to efficiency, community, and prosperity. What in fact resulted was the opposite outcome.

[...]As people get to know each other, there will be more respect for the neighborhood community. It is one thing to spray graffiti on the front of a grocery store, but it's another thing to spray graffiti on Chuck Johnson's store, where you went growing up and where Johnson used to give you a piece of candy when you were little.

Sure, this sounds like a romantic dream of the 1950s, but that era was more that way precisely because neighborhoods were communities. Zoning laws and other anticommunity government policies were not yet in place to atomize people, making them less dependent on each other and, thus, more dependent on more distant government bureaucrats. It's amazing what you can do by simply preventing someone from opening up a store in a "residential area."

[...]Zoning laws force you to have your business only in certain locations. This drives up the price of property for businesses, making it harder to start a new business. If I wanted to sell cookies (and I do make some good cookies), I would have to either buy some expensive commercial property or rent a place in a shopping center, get the proper permits and licenses (another barrier to entry into the marketplace), buy stoves and mixers, etc.