Planners like to describe neighborhoods with both homes and neighborhood-friendly businesses as mixed use. Our ancestors would have simply called them neighborhoods. Little has done more to atrophy our neighborhoods than the planning profession’s fixation on a building’s use instead of its architecture, style, or form. Likewise, planners often refer to single-family homes that are less than 1,000 square feet as “tiny homes.” Again, these were just “homes” to the people who came before us.
