how should smoking be regulated in residential areas?

well, ideally, it would reduce to democracy, and you'd essentially see self-segregation. people that don't want to live amongst smokers would come together and ban smoking in their buildings, thereby evicting people that don't want to quit. and, people that don't want to be told they can't smoke in their homes would come together, to live in buildings that non-smokers would not want to go in.

this would also work at the community or neighbourhood level, with certain areas banning residential smoking and certain areas allowing it.

that is the ideal; it is how things would work in a utopia. in reality, two things rear themselves to interfere with utopian democracy: market theory and class relations, which both act to make it harder for a lot of people to get into the environment they want to get into. unfortunately, a non-smoking environment is currently a privilege for the upper middle class and the elite, not something people have a democratic right to choose to create; the less educated and the poor seem to see restrictions on their "right to smoke" as draconian, and the majority rules in working class neighbourhoods.

ideally, what we'd do is get rid of class and let democracy work, but the society is built around property and that would require a deep revolution. so, unfortunately, a more practical solution is that we need some kind of government to come in and distort the market, in order to undo the class relation and let democracy approximate itself.

frustratingly, the legal system seems intent on undoing this, as it interprets smoking & non-smoking residential buildings to be discriminatory, based on the division by class. the legal system is essentially trained to see the world from the top down. so, it is concerned about abolishing rules that keep rich smokers out of the wealthy apartments, rather than abolishing rules that lock poor people into environments where they are exposed to second-hand smoke. the non-smoking poor ends up locked in place, collaterally, due to rules designed to prevent discrimination in class mobility. this entire paradigm needs to be revisited, and to an extent already has, but the system is strongly lagging behind the shift.

so, we should just be able to leave it up to democracy and let the people decide, but we can't because of the prevalence of class - instead, we need some kind of special government program to help the poor avoid the smoke, if they want to.

i hope that's clear.

(sorry for the multiple attempts, i'm pre-coffee this morning)