From what I’ve seen in and outside America, my gut feeling (I don’t claim expertise) is that zoning can make things worse.

The apartment directly under mine is used as an office. Down and to one side is a psychiatrist. Ground floor is a cafe and a pizza takeaway. The apartment opposite me has a grocery store on the ground floor, an office on the second, a dentist on the third, and it looks like the rest of the units are residential. I may be missing something important about the rules here because I can’t read German well enough, but it feels self-balancing.

America… well, this is a tourist perspective, but I didn’t realise how realistic SimCity was before I visited.