Comments by "" (@josephfisher426) on "Can We Fix Zoning By Tweaking a Few Numbers?" video.

Single-family housing generally has front setbacks because single-family housing was originally designed for children, in an era when children actually wanted to play with random neighbors and parents were comfortable with them being out on the street side where everyone could see them. It was a selling point. Also it was an era when people opened their windows, and some distance from whatever noises/smells the neighbors were making might be welcome. The front setback also in the past often served the purpose of being space in which to make up changes in grade, so that a street-efficient layout could be continued rather than leaving gaps where terrain was inconvenient.
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@Kasiarzynka Limits on business in residential zones are actually more likely in the denser ones. In my city, many corner townhouses can have a storefront, but no one else can so much as put up a sign. Partly it's a function of having more people who MIGHT report you. In single-family housing, as few as five neighbors are seeing what is going on at your house... in attached housing it could be 50. There can also be more stringent fire code issues with home businesses in attached housing.
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It's unusual that a street needs to be future proofed... OTOH, it is hard to have street trees without setbacks, so everything needs to work together.
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@barryrobbins7694 The assessed value is usually less than the purchase price everywhere... but California's special arrangement has surely done a lot to drive up their prices...
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@Descriptor413 Are these common cases in which new acre-sized housing gets utilities? Doesn't happen in my part of the world (east coast). It's either service or not, and the zoning is almost always aligned to the service map. Acre lots are septic and well... and as much as many local governments are charging to modernize the sewer and water, their owners probably wouldn't want to connect even if they could... Making the roads gravel is an interesting idea, but probably too much like West Virginia for most people!
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@Descriptor413 But the South is growing, so they don't have the same maintenance funding problem. I think where the South has had the most problems is in poorer areas, probably systems that were done by the WPA.
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@briankelly1240 Most of those sorts of streets are going to be set up for car parking anyway and/or be already be too narrow for "good" traffic flow. A setback makes the front yard usable in the sense that there is some privacy, and space to do something. The convention of 25 feet was developed early on in US urban planning, 1910s or 20s... cars played into it, but they weren't yet a dominating force (hence the streets were often only 30 feet wide).
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