Neither is voting a law of nature, and nor is property ownership. So what's your point? That we don't have to do it this way? Well, sure. But what's the actual alternative?
It's not really weird at all. It's a big enough country with enough different conditions that it does make some amount of sense that there is a heirarchy of levels of control. That looks something like:
|+-- incorporated municipality
Federal -> state -> county -+
|+-- unincorporated land
In the case of an incorporated municipality, the people who live there have a political process to make decisions about planning/zoning/construction, but these (in general) cannot override the rules from the county, state and federal levels.
In the case of unincorporated land, the county makes the rules, and so these are controlled by a political process involving the entire population of the county, rather than just those who live on a particular piece of land (because "there is no there, there"). Again, the county generally cannot override rules from the state and federal level.
In general, the state doesn't really set planning rules that affect specific placement of things. There may be environmental and health regulations that would prevent X being built in a particular location, but the state doesn't normally control whether single family only zoning (as an example) should be used in a given neighborhood - that's up to the incorporated municipality to decide.
The federal level really doesn't set any planning rules other than high level environmental and health regulations.
