In the Midwest, suburbs are designed and developed around the car and the "local shops" are generally located in a series of strip malls off the major roads. On the coasts and in denser populated areas, there seems to be a renewed push for more walk-able areas, public transit and such though.
I'll tell you the real, but awful, reason why we have such restrictive zoning in the U.S. The idea behind zoning is to make sure that different classes and races don't have to see each other if they don't want to. Putting commercial retail in a residential area would give outsiders an excuse to be there. The whole "white flight" from the cities has left it's mark on zoning ever since the 1960s. IMHO, this is also the reason for really bad public transit.
Don't get me wrong, Portland has excellent transit. However, a very large number of people who work in Portland actually live in Vancouver, WA. Those commuters strenuously object to running light rail over any proposed replacement bridges for the more than 100 year old trestles that currently handle all of that traffic. In addition, commuters to the south of the city limits also strenuously object to light rail running into their neighborhoods.
Zoning was invented as a reaction to the Equitable Building in NYC, which was built with no setbacks, effectively bricking over all of its neighbors' windows.
That was the camel's nose under the tent, and organizations influenced by the Ku Klux Klan used zoning laws as a tool for enforcing segregation at a municipal level.
Zoning has been leaving its dirty mark since the 1920s.
Nowadays, you can probably just mentally substitute "colored" wherever you see "multi-family" or "high density", to get a sense of the original wording of the laws. The zoning map for my municipality actually uses the color brown for multi-family residential zones, and a light peach color for single-family & detached residential!
That may be an unfortunate coincidence. Zoning is probably much more about class boundaries than race now. Rich people don't want poor people walking past their houses. Or driving past them. Or seeing them. Or knowing they exist.
