this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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Come to England! This is normal here!
Also New York. And a lot of places, actually.
You just gave the most famous outlier in the entire country as an example.
It's normal in the US too. The person in the post doesn't have a clue WTF they are talking about. There are mixed use buildings everywhere in the US. Most town squares and new apartment complexes are mixed use.
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!
It's not "normal" as in most housing is mixed used. It's "normal" in that most towns have at least one building that is mixed use. At least county seats that have a courthouse square. It's certainly not like they are hard to find in the US.
An example, here's a pretty typical square in a small Midwest town surrounded by shops with apartments on top: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1348819217/photo/aerial-shot-of-small-town-salem-indiana-town-square.jpg?s=612x612&w=is&k=20&c=X3FM9YL2K9CEikXer7pmxC_imF2bx8VE5mMAU8qq_d4%3D
"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...
I'll not engage in an argument over semantics. I don't care what you qualify as "normal". Regardless, mixed housing doesn't seem to me to be significantly rarer here than it is in the UK, and it's becoming increasingly more common with new developments too. The person I responded to referred to it as "normal" there, and so I used the same term because i think it's nearly as common here. If you have a problem with that, bite me.
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.
Fuck me, you're good at missing the point.
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.
Towns that have them are normal, then, right? You hardly go to a town where you don't see them right? So they are normal in that they are a part of each town. If they are only normal if they constitute some mass percentage of the buildings than almost nothing is normal. Most buildings in cities aren't courthouses, police stations, fire stations, schools, etc. But they do exist in damn near every town. Hell, there are even fewer of those buildings than mixed use buildings in most town. But those things are still normal. If you want to claim otherwise, cool, be the pedantic weirdo.
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:
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!
You cannot build mixed use housing in places zoned against it. Obviously. But as you said, mixed use buildings exist in nearly every single town. And they build new ones all the time in cities across the US. There is absolutely nothing that stops him from owning one of those stores and living over it. It is most certainly not "mostly not allowed".
Now who is overblowing their position? One building? Where is there only a single mixed use building in a town? I would be more shocked to see a single mixed use building than an entire block or more of them.
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.
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.
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?
It was your fucking strawman argument in the first place! Don't blame me for taking your argument to it's absurd conclusion!