Monthly Archives: December 2007

Yesterday, one of the Antiplanner’s loyal opponents left a comment comparing land-use regulation with the abolition of slavery, implying that it would just as absurd to compensate landowners for such regulation as it would be to compensate slaveowners for ending slavery. The comparison is apt. Those who make it in favor of land-use regulation apparently think the solution to land-use debates is to have a civil war and kill hundreds of thousands of people.

I’ve heard this comparison before with regard to endangered species. Slavery was immoral, so we didn’t compensate slaveowners. Making a species go extinct is equally immoral, so we shouldn’t compensate owners of habitat when we regulate away their right to use it.

This attitude betrays a profound misunderstanding of both history and economics.

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Dorothy English will probably never get to subdivide her land. She and her husband bought 20 acres of land outside of Portland in 1953, when there was no zoning on the land. After her husband died, she wanted to divide it into eight parcels to give to her children and grandchildren.

By that time, however, the Oregon legislature required counties to zone all land, and Dorothy’s was outside of Portland’s urban-growth boundary. She fought hard for the right to subdivide, once testifying before the legislature that, “I’m 91 years old, and I plan to live to be 100 because there are some bastards I want to get even with.”

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How do we fix planning and zoning laws that make housing unaffordable and give planners the opportunity to impose their utopian ideas on unwilling neighborhoods? One answer has been offered by Robert Nelson, a University of Maryland professor of public policy. In various articles and books, Nelson has proposed that states allow neighborhoods to opt out of zoning and write their own zoning codes in the form of protective covenants.

Houston already has a system like this, albeit without zoning. Anyone who lives in a neighborhood that doesn’t already have protective covenants can petition their neighbors and, if a majority agree, create a homeowners association and write such covenants. Nelson has essentially proposed to allow this in all cities, and to slowly replace zoning with such covenants.

But what about rural areas? Should people be allowed to opt out of rural zoning? Since the Antiplanner is not too fond of such rural zoning, clearly my answer would be “yes.” And a law recently passed in Missouri effectively allows this to take place.

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