Something that turned me on to these issues in the first place was reading through the P&Z committee minutes for my rural New England hometown, where simply opening a hair salon in an existing, vacant commercial space in the village center has been a multi-year affair because their variance for not having off-street parking expired when the previous business closed.

It's in a 150 year old commercial building and has had a variety of even higher-traffic businesses in it for decades, but now the town has created this artificial barrier to filling the existing space, which clearly functioned just fine before (the town has plenty of parking), and is dragging the process out through meeting after meeting. It's frustrating to watch.