zoning issue

[metasilk]

Nutmegger, care to comment? ...the most serious fault in our zoning laws lies in the fact that they permit an entire area to be devoted to a single use.
[unknown first name] Raskin, quoted in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jane Jacobs. p299. Viewed at Amazon (see link)

Comments

[nutmegger]

There are many, many problems with what is known as "Euclidean" zoning. (For you math people out there, the name comes from the town in Illinois which adopted zoning and had it upheld by the Supreme Court in 1924. It is not the same as Euclidean geometry, although there are similarities.) The one cited by Raskin is really half of one, and maybe not the most serious. The serious issue underlying the Raskin statement is really this: once an area is zoned for uses, it then falls upon the land owners within the zone to decide what goes where. Essentially, you are delegating your planning responsibilities to people who only own a small slice of property and want to maximize *their* benefit, even if this is not the best thing for the town. So, for instance, you may have a "B-1 Business Zone" which allows shopping malls. Ideally, the mall would be right at an off ramp for a highway, but that site may already have a different use on it, so the vacant property further up the road, which has not yet been developed because it was too far from the highway, now applies instead. Well, it's hard to say "no", but the traffic will now not flow optimally because everyone has to drive past the lesser-developed site to get to the mall. Ideally, what is needed is a plan which can tailor within a zone what should go where, but that is called "spot zoning" and is considered illegal.

Anyway, that's your lecture on zoning law for today. Come back tomorrow and we can review eminant domain and the Kelo v. New London case.

[metasilk]

I'll be happy to come back tomorrow for more, actually. I think it's fascinating, in a twisted-but-useful sort of way.