They couldn't if they tried, zoning laws, local labor costs, and the hyper-consolidation of the meat packing industry make that a complete non-starter. You're trying to goad me into admitting obnoxious neighbors are obnoxious which is self-evident. Generally there are ways to deal with obnoxious neighbors that don't require entitling the rest of the neighborhood to make decisions about one's property. Ironically I've taken the starch our of more than one asshat neighbor by threatening to build a hog pen next to their house, so there is that I suppose.
Zoning laws are a combination of unelected civil servants, elected legislators, and the legal system establishing a minimum set of guardrails to prevent shit like building strip clubs and toxic waste incinerators in inappropriate places. They're far from foolproof, are frequently gimmicked to the benefit of wealthy political donors, and they're not something the public gets any kind of real say in. There's no relationship between zoning laws and HOA covenants around what color your mailbox can be or how many cars you can have in your driveway (for example). Some kind of minimal social contract is provably necessary to prevent society from devolving into some kind of libertarian Mad Max you-keep-what-you-kill hellscape, but that hardly requires granting the people around me authority to make arbitrary decisions around trivial aspects of how I choose to maintain my property.
Oh sure yeah. That's actually a very old strategy I learned from my (now 94) year old grandfather. My impression is that was one of the intermediate steps on the continuum between trying to sit down with a neighbor and work things out and exchanging sporadic small arms fire. Country life was wild back in the day.
