There's the view that its an intrusion on personal liberty and choice. Should they also democratically decide what car you should drive? What to name your kids?
Democracy is another kind of oppression, when taken too far.
"Should they also democratically decide what car you should drive?"
It depends. Most western european countries have fairly strict regulations on maintenance, road-worthiness, emissions and sound. Here in California we have relatively strict emissions regulations.
These regulations were, essentially, decided by a democratic process. Presumably if they attempted to regulate color it would fail at the polls.
That's an almost comical level of reductionism concerning exclusionary zoning.
If I lived in a suburban neighborhood I would not want a 7-11 nextdoor. Or a steel fab shop. That is exclusionary zoning and it has nothing to do with race or class discrimination.
It disappoints me to see democracy - and democratic outcomes - embraced only when it produces results we like.
People who run factories aren't going to tear down a house and try and wedge a factory there. That's not the sort of thing anyone wants to eliminate, anyway.
You ought to have a look at this book, which makes the link between exclusionary zoning and flat out racism pretty clear:
I am willing to stipulate that exclusionary zoning (like many other pieces of our laws and jurisprudence) has been used many times in bad faith and to ill effect.
As a literate person versed in current events, of course I am aware of this history.
That does not mean, however, that exclusionary zoning should not and should never have existed.
"People who run factories aren't going to tear down a house and try and wedge a factory there."[1]
When your starting point is well organized, well planned, well intentioned environments it's very easy to underestimate the effects of loosening these restrictions that never made any sense to you and why can't we have a cute little pub right here anyway ?
On the other hand, if you have actually grown up in a place where people had horse corrals next to light industrial with a smattering of houses in-between and oh, look, that's an auto-shop on the back of their residential lot ... you would know that the bullshit people pull in absence of these rules is incredible and fascinating.
When they started enforcing some rules there[2] it had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the fact that one quarter of the town was running unpermitted septic systems because, by god, they were not going to pay for city sewer. Also, llamas.
