Munich is where I grew up, by the way, so I'm all too familiar. And yeah, I have no idea of the history here, but it would not surprise me if a lot of what happ

Munich is where I grew up, by the way, so I'm all too familiar. And yeah, I have no idea of the history here, but it would not surprise me if a lot of what happened in the Bay Area (and maybe other places in the US, though admittedly I don't really know them) was not intentional. Where I'm pretty critical however is zoning laws. That just seems unnecessary to me. The fact that even in a city I have to travel a large distance just to go to the nearest supermarket, to get a haircut, or to even just sit down in a café, is a bit maddening. This means I literally have to take my car just to go to Safeway here--which is weird at least to me. As for the cafés, I'm not even sure whether zoning laws would prevent them from popping up in residential areas, but I suspect even if they were allowed, they would be sparse because of the overall effect of zoning. Residential areas mostly only consist of homes, and you are pretty much either in your specific home of that large zone, or out in another zone anyway. So there would probably be little incentive.