Reason.<\/em>) This is one of the organizations to grow out of the original “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) movement of San Francisco Bay Area residents who got fed up with spending more and more of their money on increasingly scarce housing. Beginning in the mid-2010s, they launched a crusade against the zoning restrictions they blamed for the Golden State’s astronomical rents and home prices.<\/p>\nYIMBYs face an uphill battle in most urban areas, where long and extensive zoning codes ban apartment buildings across most of the city. The movement has nevertheless won over a lot of converts in these expensive cities with a message that housing would be cheaper if it were legal to build more of it.<\/p>\n
Policy makers across the country are increasingly talking like they agree with that idea, and even adopting policy reforms designed to allow for more building.<\/p>\n
Three states, including California, have passed laws legalizing at least duplexes statewide. A handful of other states will probably follow suit this year. President Joe Biden’s White House has called out restrictive zoning laws in strong terms. (Biden’s actual policies don’t do much to address the problem.)<\/p>\n
Gray himself wrote a book arguing that zoning should be not just liberalized but abolished. That’s a radical position even within the YIMBY movement. It can seem hopelessly utopian when you consider how expansive and restrictive the average city’s zoning code already is.<\/p>\n
But the message resonated in Caroline, where residents don’t live under zoning now and many want to keep it that way.<\/p>\n
After discovering Gray’s book, some of the town’s anti-zoning activists reached out and asked if he’d take a look at Caroline’s proposed draft code. What Gray saw was a restrictive mess that would bring to Caroline problems that zoning had created everywhere else.<\/p>\n
“It’s untethered from any actual impact that’s facing Caroline,” he says.<\/p>\n
The code’s requirements for site plan review and special use permits would be incredibly burdensome for the low-impact small businesses that would likely open in the town. The minimum lot sizes and density restrictions would drive up housing costs. Even if a restriction wasn’t in the code now, it could easily be added later.<\/p>\n
“Once these codes are adopted, it’s a one-way ratchet that only gets stricter, that only gets more exclusionary, that puts jurisdictions in a tighter and tighter straitjacket,” says Gray.<\/p>\n
At the invitation of Caroline’s anti-zoners, Gray went out to the town in November 2022 to make the case for why adopting zoning would be a mistake.<\/p>\n
The night before the 2022 midterm elections, he gave a presentation to a packed community center where he laid out the general case against zoning and what it would do to Caroline specifically.<\/p>\n
He pulled up a map of the town dotted with red-colored parcels. Members of the audience gasped when he explained that each red parcel was a property that would be made nonconforming by the draft code. That meant even minor changes to the property would have to go through site plan review and more substantial expansions or changes of use might be banned entirely.<\/p>\n
Next, he brought up pictures of businesses and buildings in town, and explained how the draft zoning code would make their various features illegal too.<\/p>\n
“So much of what’s in this code is stuff other cities are trying to get rid of,” said Gray during his talk. Caroline need not make the same mistakes.<\/p>\n
Gray’s talk was meant to be a calm presentation of zoning’s problems. It quickly became a venting session for the assembled crowd of mostly anti-zoning residents.<\/p>\n
The first question in a Q&A session was from one man who asked Gray what the penalties would be for “civil disobedience” with the zoning code. Another woman asked whether you could keep zoning code officers off your property if they didn’t have a warrant.<\/p>\n
When Katherine Goldberg, a town board member considered to be a moderate on the zoning code, stood up to urge people to trust the process, many responded with angry shouts.<\/p>\n
Caroline’s anti-zoning activists had planned to have Gray speak during public comment at the town board meeting a few days later. That meeting was abruptly canceled just before his visit. The explanation was that Witmer, the pro-zoning town supervisor, was taking a long-planned trip to Hawaii but had neglected to inform the town clerk ahead of time.<\/p>\n
For anti-zoning residents, it was just one more piece of evidence their government was totally uninterested in hearing their concerns.<\/p>\n
On the night of the now-canceled board meeting, they braved the freezing cold weather to make their case heard in front of the empty town hall.<\/p>\n
Morse got in front of the crowd and hoisted a thick petition of 1,200 signatures demanding that any vote on a zoning code be delayed until after Caroline’s 2023 municipal elections. Zoning was not what people wanted, he said.<\/p>\n
Next came Schickel, who earned cheers when he informed the crowd that two anti-zoning town board candidates had won their election in the nearby town of Hector, which was having a similar fight over whether to adopt a zoning code.<\/p>\n
The crowd periodically broke out in chants of “no zoning.” Some people in the back cracked open beers. Across the street, a large trailer bore a huge display of lights and illuminated letters reading, “Caroline Forever Unzoned.”<\/p>\n
It was an oddly emotional scene for a rally about zoning. Most people save their passionate advocacy for issues like abortion or gun control, not special use permits and setback requirements.<\/p>\n
The general view of zoning as a dry, technical, apolitical issue is one reason it’s persisted unquestioned for so long. That probably explains why Caroline’s officials were blindsided by the huge, angry reaction to their zoning code proposal. To this day, it seems like they don’t quite understand the emotions they’ve kicked up.<\/p>\n
One person at the town hall rally who did understand them was Amy Dickinson, even if she thought some of the anger expressed by anti-zoners wasn’t always productive.<\/p>\n
Dickinson is a nationally syndicated advice columnist who makes a living helping people work through interpersonal problems. She’s also married to Schickel\u2014and like her husband, she’s dead set against zoning.<\/p>\n
Dickinson grew up on a dairy farm in a nearby town where, as in Caroline, most of the farms gradually went out of business. For farmers losing their livelihood, the ability to hold onto their property and leave it to their children becomes all the more important, she explains. So the idea that the town would then slap a bunch of rules on the one thing you still control felt both threatening and offensive.<\/p>\n
“People take it personally,” she says. “Your land is all you have.”<\/p>\n
Zoning Kills Dreams<\/h2>\n
Houston, Texas, is the one major city in the United States that never adopted a zoning code. Three times Houston has put zoning up to a referendum, and three times voters have rejected it.<\/p>\n
In Gray’s anti-zoning book, Arbitrary Lines<\/em>, there’s a picture of a Houston activist from one of those referendum campaigns, marching with a sign that reads “Zoning Kills Dreams.” That would become Caroline anti-zoners’ rallying cry, much to the frustration of those who support zoning.<\/p>\n“There’s a sign that says ‘Zoning Kills Dreams.’ Well, what is the dream you have that you think is not allowed? They don’t say,” says Harrison, the review board member.<\/p>\n
It speaks to a difference in mentality and material circumstances of the two sides.<\/p>\n
Caroline’s zoning supporters are typically either active or retired professionals. They live in the town and love it as much as anyone. But they also have no need to make a living there. That position lends itself to more restrictive notions of what should be allowed in Caroline: some homes, some businesses, some farms, and a lot of protected views and open space.<\/p>\n
For these people, a zoning code is a pretty straightforward way of protecting the things they like about Caroline while banning the things they think will spoil it. And if anti-zoners are worried about losing the ability to do something on their land, they should say as much, and come to the table to get protections included in the draft code.<\/p>\n
Things aren’t so simple for Caroline’s anti-zoners. The necessity of making a living from their land means they have to be pretty open and adaptable to change. They often don’t know what the future will bring. It’s often impossible for them to know how they might want to use their properties in the future.<\/p>\n
Morse notes that his wedding venue had a couple of slow years right before the pandemic. If business dries up, he’ll have no choice but to sell Celebrations and move on. The more restrictions a zoning code puts on the use of his property, the fewer buyers there will be for it. That will tank the sale price of his land, leaving him with less to start a new business or retire on.<\/p>\n
Freedom to do what he wants on his property is a valuable asset all on its own, and that freedom can’t coexist with zoning.<\/p>\n
Caroline’s zoning debate is ongoing. The zoning commission approved a final draft code at the end of March 2023. The town board has started to hold hearings on it. Anything they approve will also have to be reviewed by the county government and various state agencies.<\/p>\n
New York state law forbids zoning from being put before voters as a referendum. Peter Hoyt, a former town board member who opposes zoning, tells Reason <\/em>that if a referendum were possible, it would probably be a pretty close vote.<\/p>\nWhatever the outcome, the zoning debate raging in Caroline is revealing. It shows how even in a small community without major enterprises or serious growth pressures, planners can’t adequately capture and account for everything people might want to do with their land.<\/p>\n
There’s a gap between what zoners can do and what they imagine they can design. That knowledge problem hasn’t stopped cities far larger and more complex than Caroline from trying to scientifically sort themselves with zoning. They’ve developed quite large and complex problems as a result.<\/p>\n
Caroline’s anti-zoners see the problems zoning has created elsewhere. They’re committed to fighting tooth and nail to preserve a freedom the rest of the country has lost.<\/p>\n
They have dreams, and zoning might kill them.<\/p>\n
The post The Town Without Zoning<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Can Caroline, New York, resist the imposition of its first-ever zoning code? …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[19,9,48],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92885"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}