Re: One Bromfield (28-story DTX tower) | 1 Bromfield Street | Downtown
Bad, out of date zoning is stifling. Good zoning is enabling. Like a lot of things in life. Rarely black or white. Lots of gray.
Largely depends on the process that created the zoning. It is simply a tool. Tools can be used well, or they can be abused.
Also, stifling is a matter of opinion. We here typically try to stifle hazardous chemical storage next to apartment towers and schools (through rational zoning), unlike in Tianjen China (or Texas). Laissez faire development tends to allow those things -- which many do not believe is a good idea (unless you are a chemical industry lobbiest).
You're being a-historical in your description of zoning. Zoning was not some tool like a hammer that got invented to accomplish a general task that used to be done with rocks or other things that could bash an object. Before zoning in the US, we did not have laissez faire development in any real sense of that phrase. Zoning in many places was explicitly created to create a new-fangled way to exclude poor renters of any color and black people of any income out of "proper" residential neighborhoods. "Proper" being defined as white, above some income level, living in single-family houses.
The need to keep hazardous chemical storage away from schools was very often a smokescreen, albeit one that quickly morphed into a goal in and of itself: and often a good and worthy goal for low-income rents. Consider how the lack of zoning tied in to the Great Molasses Flood here in Boston.
Before zoning existed, poor people and black people were excluded from "proper" neighborhoods by flat-out terror and state-semi-sanctioned violence. As for smelly industrial uses, they were kept out of "proper" neighborhoods because wealth was even more concentrated then than it is now, and it was quite easy and obvious to have various gentlemen's agreements about where not to put the smelly stuff.
As US society became more complex and the economic elite began having less ability to use unspoken but clearly understood rules, they shifted over to zoning. And, subsequent to the creation of zoning, all sorts of other non-racist and non-elitist people have attempted to use zoning for entirely good and worthy purposes.
So, I am not completely disagreeing with you: zoning can be used for good or ill, and there is no longer any simple breakdown between who's on what side. Powerful eco-forces can be either pro or con on a particular zoning law or idea, and populists can be either pro or con. It's all messy now, politically.
I am generalizing quite a lot here. The specifics vary wildly across different times and places. But there is a lot of dirt to the early history of zoning. It was a weapon of social control, used by people who despised many of their fellow Americans, especially the recently-arrived and the dark-skinned. And that dirt is not gone entirely from zoning. Best example in the suburbs: demanding large minimum lot sizes. In public those nice suburbanites go on and on about traffic and density and overcrowding in schools - all of which may be true and which they may well actually also care about. But lurking beneath that is the perfectly clear understanding that keeping to those large lot sizes in a mostly built up suburb will "keep out the undesirables" - which can and often is phrased in a more ugly fashion behind closed doors.
The street in Boston we're discussing is far from a suburb, so that example is not pertinent here. But zoning history in Boston is not neutral.
Or as you put it: "tools can be used well, or they can be abused". Yep, and I'm sure we can find at least one zoning change proposal that I would define as an abuse and you would define as using zoning well. Who's right? (why, me, of course!! - this is my post) The decision point for me on good or bad isn't whether a zoning rule is old or new. It's: what embedded bias does this zoning law steer towards?
/rant
