For a minute there I thought there was Chris, Chris, and Brian and that a table of Vikings was about to start chanting “Krebs!”

You mean Brian Krebs?

I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.

Or the '50s, '60s, or '70s. Maybe not even the '40s.

And that’s the problem: because it was illegal to build for like half a century, there’s a huge pent-up demand unmet by supply, and that’s what makes it very often inaccessible as per the meme.

It would not be “easy!” You would be severely limited in your choice of location due to lack of availability compared to other housing types, and what places you do manage to find would have an inflated cost per square foot compared to other housing types because they’re bid up by demand outstripping supply.

Maybe there are certain cities where it’s common enough to be “easy” in that particular city, but you can definitely not extrapolate that to claim that it’s easy on average in the US as a whole.

That’s possible, but not a given. Unfortunately, it would be complicated to calculate (and perhaps not even possible unless Chicago’s GIS system has good data for how many housing units are in those Planned Developments).

Even then, Chicago is probably close to a best-case scenario, not representative of the norm.

And they build new ones all the time in cities across the US.

I don’t think you fully understand or appreciate the fact that roughly sometime between the 1920s and 1950s mixed-use building was almost entirely outlawed almost everywhere except central business districts, and only recently (in the last decade or so) started getting allowed to be built in many places again.

And that’s only in some cities and towns, not all of them. Some of the more backwards places still haven’t gotten the memo, so your sentence is flat-out untrue. There are definitely cities that still do not allow mixed-use today.

Second, even in the cities that have recently begun routinely allowing mixed-use again, they’re not building it anywhere nearly fast enough to make a dent in the huge, 50+ years worth, of pent-up demand.

There is absolutely nothing that stops him from owning one of those stores and living over it.

Except the the fact that fewer of those housing units exist than the number of people who want to live in them.

Have you never played musical chairs? Not everybody gets to live in places like this; some people lose.

It is most certainly not “mostly not allowed”.

Again, “most” residential areas are zoned single family only. Being zoned single family means mixed use is “not allowed,” because zoning defines what is and isn’t allowed and mixed use is different than single family. Mixed use is “mostly not allowed” because most residentially-zoned areas do not allow mixed use. The concept of being legally prevented from building mixed use in an area not zoned for it is called it being “not allowed,” and that applies to “most” areas. Hence, mixed use is “mostly not allowed.” You are “not allowed” to build mixed use in areas not zoned for it, and “most” areas are not zoned for it.

How many more times do I have to restate it before you comprehend what words mean?

Now who is overblowing their position? One building?

It was your fucking strawman argument in the first place! Don’t blame me for taking your argument to it’s absurd conclusion!

It’s not, even in Chicago.

41.1% of land area is single-family only. Mixed-use, non-single-family + planned development is 33.8% of land area. The majority of residential land area in Chicago is zoned single-family only.

Update: Down voted, but no response. Sad.

Okay, asshole, you want a response? Fine. Let’s go back to the initial premise of the thread:

They won’t let you live that Bob’s Burgers life!

When I was a kid, I dreamed about owning a store and living above it. When I was a little older, someone told me that’s mostly not allowed because of something called “zoning,” which I trusted must be a good reason.

Imagine my horror upon learning that it’s NOT a good reason!

Key phrase: “mostly not allowed”

You claim that “the person in the post doesn’t have a clue WTF they are talking about” because “most towns have at least one building that is mixed use.”

You really think one measly building per town is enough to be a counterexample to "mostly not allowed? That’s just fucking objectively ludicrous, end of!

ITT: people who think mixed-use housing is way more common than it actually is.

You just gave the most famous outlier in the entire country as an example.

There are lots of places with apartments on the 2nd floor and businesses on the 1st floor?

Yes. You may not believe it from the incredulous-sounding question as you’ve written it, but ‘mixed-use’ is the standard for new buildings here, for instance.

There’s a vast difference between mixed-use being “standard for new buildings” and having “lots of places” (measured relative to the decades upon decades worth of existing housing stock, which is almost entirely Euclidean-zoned and single-family only) be mixed-use.

So your point was vacuous, got it.

No, I rejected your point because it was trivial, at best, if not outright wrong.

Sure, there’s usually a little bit of mixed-use housing in most towns, mainly in areas that were built before zoning laws existed, so it isn’t completely unknown to most people. But if that’s what you think counts as “normal,” you’re making the most vacuous argument you could possibly do.

Alternatively, if you agree that “normal” means “constituting a norm” as it usually does – i.e., that it’s usual, or typical, or common – then you are just flat-out wrong because the vast majority of housing in the US is single-family detached houses, not mixed-use.

Almost every small town’s main square is surrounded by mixed use buildings

Pick any of those towns and actually look at it from an aerial view. You’ll see that that development pattern extends for a few blocks, at most, and is surrounded by a desert of single-family houses.

Yes, a little bit of mixed use exists in each town. But to say that it’s “really common” in the US overall is absolutely false.

In cities it is very common for lower level of condo towers to have shops and things.

In cities, it is very common for everywhere except for the actual downtown core to not be condo towers at all in the first place, and instead be mostly single-family homes.

Yes, in cities-proper. Not just whole metro areas including suburbs and exurbs; even the core cities themselves are mostly single-family.

For example, here’s the City of Atlanta (not Metro Atlanta; just the core city in the middle of the metro area):

The entire light-yellow area is only single-family houses. (Note: using light yellow for single-family zoning is a common convention among city planners, so all the maps below are going to use that color scheme too.)

Here’s Los Angeles:

Here’s Austin, TX:

I could go on all day. There are only a tiny handful of cities in the United States that aren’t like this.

Here’s the context of your example (I had to make a rough guess myself because I couldn’t find a proper zoning map.) Note that I was generous with how much of the town might actually match the land use you claim is so “normal:”

“Bob’s Burgers”-style buildings are almost certainly prohibited by law everywhere that’s not highlighted red. Frankly, they’re probably also prohibited in the areas that are red, and only exist where they’re grandfathered in.

I can say that with confidence because that’s typical of almost every town and city in the entire United States. Places that actually have decent amounts of mixed use, relative to the amounts of single-family houses, are very much the exception.

“Not completely unknown, but still relatively rare” is not the usual definition of “normal.”

Let me put it this way: if you saw somebody commuting to work on a unicycle one day, would you then claim that unicycling to work is “normal?” After all, you found “at least one” example of it…

Sure there are miles and miles of suburbs around the city

Which means it’s going to be decades before enough redevelopment happens before mixed-use can be considered “common” compared to that sprawl.

Is this actually illegal in the US? If so, where is it legal?

It varies by city, but typically the vast majority of land used for housing (upwards of 90% in some of the worst cases) is zoned for single-family detached houses only.

Small live-work places like this, with a single business on the ground floor and a single dwelling unit above, are likely typically in the single-digit percentages, in terms of land area zoned for that use.

(Even the vast majority of non-single-family detached housing wouldn’t usually allow stuff like this, but would be medium to high-density apartment/condo buildings instead. The phenomenon of having a gap in housing density is so prevalent it even has a name: “missing middle”.)

No, it’s not normal. In almost every US city, the vast majority of housing is single-family homes.

I mean, I get that suburban sprawl is bland and forgettable, but that doesn’t mean you can literally forget it exists when making an argument like that!