alt Hacker News> You're advocating central planning.
Central planning is the status quo. That's essentially what zoning rules are, and why everything is such a mess. You want to open a shop and live above it? No, sorry, not zoned for residential; banned. Operate the shop out of your house instead? Haha, banned. What if your shop really doesn't need very much space at all, so something the size of a closet would do as long as it's in the right location? Nope, minimum unit sizes or similar, prohibited by law. And so on.
If they want to stop doing this that would be great, but if they're not going to stop doing it then having the rules be things like "no chains" instead of "no small units" would certainly be an improvement.
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The article is from the UK where two stories buildings with a shop on the street front and accommodation above is very common.
Planning is such a strange thing. "You're not allowed to build homes unless you also build a creche (daycare)" - OK... but I'm a company that builds homes, I don't know anything about running a creche "well then nobody gets to have a home unless you pay up buddy"
Zoning in the American sense doesn't exist in the UK, outside of Local Development Orders and (maybe, if you squint a bit) the system of Brownfield Land Registers.
Outside those very limited exceptions, planning in the UK is done on a discretionary basis, and both the discretionary system and the LDOs are overseen by Local Planning Authorities made up of elected local councillors.
There's no central planning authority, and the system is designed to be flexible at the cost of providing less certainty to developers. Mixed use developments are the norm here, and most new residential blocks will have some form of commercial or social space on the ground floor.