I was walking with a friend through my neighborhood which is quite historic. On some of the busier streets some of the old houses have become doctors offices and things like that. We began wondering when zoning regulations first came into being.
Obviously probably as long as people have been living in close proximity to each other they have preferred not to live next door to the tannery, but how old is the modern system of zoning regulations that most cities have and what lead up to it?
Prohibitions on particularly noxious land uses that might endanger health (such as pig farms near the water supply) go back centuries, but modern fine-grained zoning has its origins in late 19th century German laws. In the 1920s, the US Dept. of Commerce promoted the Standard Zoning Enabling Act, under which states authorized zoning regulation by cities and counties, and the US Supreme Court upheld the practice in the 1926 case Euclid v. Ambler Realty.
The practice spread pretty quickly among big cities and exclusive suburbs, but many small cities and rural counties didn't have zoning until the 1970s.