Zoning Boards in Action in America
From: The Future of Freedom “Zoning: The New Tyranny” Foundation, Freedom Daily by James Bovard, August 1996
While many people conceive of zoning as government simply preventing sharply conflicting land uses, such as building a munitions plant next to an apartment complex, zoning has become far more invasive and arbitrary in recent years.
In Flosmoor, Illinois, in an act of legislative snobbery, banned pickup trucks from its streets — and even from private driveways.
Coral Gables, Florida, charges residents $35 to get a permit to paint the bathroom in their home — or the living room, or any other room. Local building inspectors patrol the streets looking for painting trucks parked at homes that have not paid the permit fee.
Los Angeles prohibits freelance writers from working out of their homes in residential neighborhoods, fearing that the tap-tap-tap of their keyboards could devastate the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Chicago issued a cease-and-desist order to a couple using two personal computers in their home to write software and magazine articles. Virtually all of the city's 200,000 home-based businesses or offices are in violation of the city's zoning code.
Guilford, Connecticut, bans takeout windows at any restaurant or food-service place within town limits.
Connecticut bureaucrats issued a $1,500 citation to a resident of Branford, Connecticut, after he scattered grass seed on his backyard. The bureaucrats claimed that the grass seed somehow disturbed a government-designated "wetland".
Local governments have invoked zoning codes to require builders of apartment buildings to install whirlpool tubs and special electric ranges (in one case identified a brand name).
In Skanesteles, New York, the local government responded to one couple's zoning violations by sending in sheriff's deputies to drag out and jail the owner's wife and raze their $350,000 lakefront home.
The Office of Code Enforcement in Alexandria, Virginia, sent certified letters to twenty-two homeowners in June 1993 threatening to condemn their properties unless they fixed chipping paint on their windowsills or doorframes.
A Princeton, New Jersey, storeowner was threatened with a 90-day jail sentence in 1993 for the crime of having a few barbecue grills lined up in front of his hardware store. Though the owner had put the grills and other goods outside his store for 57 years, a new zoning ordinance banned anything in front of the store — except books, flowers, plants, vegetables, and newspapers.
East Hampton, Long Island, issued a warrant for the arrest of a food-shop owner guilty of an unauthorized exhibition of large orange gourds. The co-owner of a local market had a few dozen pumpkins stacked in front of his store. Village bureaucrats ruled that the pumpkins were the equivalent of a sign advertising the sale of pumpkins, and thus the owner needed a sign permit.
Carol Stream, Illinois, rigorously polices the roofs, windows, home colors, and building materials of homes to insure that they are not too similar or too dissimilar to their neighbors.
Boston bureaucrats, invoking historic preservation regulations, banned a Catholic church from altering the lighting, windows, paint scheme, doors, finishes, and a painting of the Assumption of Mary inside the church. The bureaucrats decreed that the interior of the church "has major aesthetic importance independence of its religious symbolism" — and thus that they themselves were justified in proclaiming themselves pope.
A 1991 zoning ordinance allows the city of Camarillo, California, "to abate any problem that diminishes property values," as The Los Angeles Times reported. The Camarillo City Manager explained: "It's broad enough to cover virtually anything. But we are very judicious in what we go up against." Little's remark exemplifies how zoning to protect property values gives government officials almost unlimited power to restrict the use of property — thereby defeating the whole notion of property rights.
Government abuses of zoning laws were clearly foreseen back in 1926 by Supreme Court Justice Willis Van Devanter. In his dissent to the Euclid vs. City of Ambler decision — the case that opened the floodgates to zoning — Van Devanter wrote: "The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all property in a strait-jacket. The purpose to be accomplished is really to regulate the mode of living of persons who may hereafter inhabit [the community]."
Planning bureaucrats, like the pettifoggers that they actually are, consider their petty edicts to be above challenge. Newtown Borough, Pennsylvania, requires citizens to pay a $10,000 nonrefundable fee in order to challenge the constitutionality of the local zoning ordinance.
The essence of zoning is the shotgun behind the door — the pending call on police to drag someone away in handcuffs and bulldoze their home. Zoning is not simply a question of bureaucrats and local politicians coming up with Byzantine ordinances — but of the full force of government waiting to fall on the head of anyone who violates one of the constantly changing local land-use decrees.