>Maybe there aren't enough street parking spots for all the businesses, and then the market fails: No business wants to spend on on-site parking in order to free up parking for everyone else.
Or it could be parking is a low value land use and little parking is truly optimum. Oftentimes when streets are closed to car traffic permanently there's a boost to business in dense cities.
Many cities don't have parking minimums and they have minimal parking but yet function well. Manhattan for instance is like that.
I lived in Japan and I don't think auto centric Okinawa where I lived had Parking minimums. It had less parking, but from what I recall more private paid lots and higher utilization (no seas of unused parking because a random bureaucrat decided malls needed exactly 2.5 spaces per 1000 square feet).
>Did humans live better before 1947?
In some ways, yes. There were obviously planning failures, but mostly zoning was put in place to exclude the poor and minorities without passing an explicit ban. Just build a place they can never afford and it'll be all great, or so they thought.
IIRC a majority of wealth inequality is due to housing costs. These zoning laws prop up the cost of housing and make it more and more difficult for the young to buy.
Used to be you'd have like a 5 or 10 year loan to buy a house, which might cost 3x the average salary. Not anymore.
>Do you have anything to back it up?
You can compare US zoning with that of other nations and compare cost of housing, transportation, and other metrics.
I think you'll find that on many metrics we do quite poorly.
Also: mobility is decreasing as the cost of housing has increased, which in turn has GDP growth ramifications as workers cannot seek out the highest paying jobs.
This is why some countries like Japan handle zoning at the national level.
>Vote them out of office
Good thing in many cities these planning guys are unelected. Voting out, say, the mayor or city councilman is also ineffective as a majority would be needed.
Incentive wise it's in each district's best interest to ban new housing as that gives land owners more and more money as the population rises and chases the same housing stock.
Add in rent control and rent stabilization and a slim majority are incentivized to keep things as they are.
>Democracy is a proven, effective tool.
Democracy is effective at not rounding up dissidents in secret police raids, but in cases like this it breaks down. Zoning acts as a ban on people, and those people can never become voters, thus perpetuating the system.
Choosing the voters is almost as good as not having a vote at all.