I don't mean to be pedantic but aren't democracy and zoning laws completely orthogonal and neither entail the other. You can have zoning laws without democracy and democracy without zoning laws.

Like Japan, being a democracy, seems to have a completely different zoning system than the US. We have the zoning system we have because we created it.

Yeup. People often like to conflate things that aren't directly related. Doesn't mean their observations or experiences aren't valid, but it does also lead to lots of going in circles.

It doesn't help that buildings are likely to be the most expensive thing a person will create or own, and they have a very high impact and demand. You need electricity, water, sewage, access to make it usable, then you need to make sure all of that was done right to make it safe, and then you want to make sure it's not put in a spot that'll just piss people off... and so on.

Obviously we do tend to come up with similar solutions for these systems because I don't think there's some clear and obvious "well just do that" living out there. Yes it's better in communities that are small with lots of space, lots of funds, and like minded members, but the moment everyone wants to live on the beach in the 70-80F weather you're going to start running into lots of issues.

It's unfortunate because people like to imagine it's just "Them" doing it. "Them" being the perfect mental image of an adversary who we all have 100% dealt with. The petty neighbor breaking out technicalities to stop you from getting something you'd like for no better reason than "fuck you". Unfortunately it's hard to design systems with that kind of person in mind, because when you're dealing with 100/1,000/10,000 people, it's a lot harder to just say "you're just being an asshole, no one cares if you're correct, you lose"