A prominent environmentalist in Lane County, Oregon, has persuaded the county commission to rezone forest land at the urban fringe to allow him to put a house on it. His argument is that, since there are houses on the land next to his land, he should be allowed to put a house on his land too.
By that reasoning, urban-growth boundaries should be expanded whenever a landowner adjacent to but outside the boundary is ready to build a home. Sounds like a good policy to me.
Tom Lininger, a board member of Oregon Wild (formerly the Oregon Natural Resources Council) purchased 242 acres of land in 2005 from a timber company that was clearcutting it. It is nice to see environmentalists putting their money where their mouth is. He then subdivided the land into three 80-acre parcels.
Now he wants to build a house on one of the parcels that isn’t zoned for a house. The county planner says the land was miszoned and should have been zoned to allow a house. Some of Lininger’s neighbors are happy to have him build one house as long as he doesn’t build a dense development. But others would rather the parcel be left undeveloped.
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To be fair to Lininger, Oregon Wild is not 1000 Friends of Oregon; where the latter fights to keep urban-growth boundaries intact, Oregon Wild focuses mainly on federal land issues. In addition, one of the other 80-acre parcels is in a zone that would allow a house, but Lininger says it is too steep to build. But that doesn’t mean that he or someone else won’t build on it later.
Still, the whole process of zoning creates opportunities for favoritism and hypocrisy. People in coastal communities fight vacation rentals then rent their homes to vacationers. Developers who contribute to the right campaigns and don’t protest rules are more likely to get their permits approved than those who speak up against land-use regulation. A former Oregon governor fought hard to keep Oregon’s land-use laws intact knowing that he owned a 10-acre parcel well outside of any urban-growth boundary on which he planned to build a retirement home.
I remember visiting a prominent environmentalist who lived a few miles outside of Yellowstone Park. From his house we could look down into a valley that had a number of homes on five- to ten-acre parcels. “None of those homes should have been built,” he said; “they are all on prime elk habitat.” After a pause, he added, “Of course, our house is too, but we didn’t know that when we built it.”
This kind of a system doesn’t belong in America. Zoning didn’t always have these problems, but since the opportunities were always there it is bound to end up with them. This is why the Antiplanner opposes all zoning. Covenants are not perfect, but at least they avoid large-scale problems of corruption and preferential treatments.
“the whole process of zoning creates opportunities for favoritism and hypocrisy”
Planning was originally intended to be an objective, “scientific” process. In reality, planning is and has always been a “political” process, with some scientific aspects.
I should add that decisions on zoning and rezoning are typically not left to planners, but rather to city councils. It is the rare planner who has the authority to approve or deny a zone change request. With that in mind, give blame where blame is due. The only “favoritism and hypocrisy” that really counts is ultimately that of elected officials. In its ideal form, planning is devoid of politics. But politicians don’t want to cede enough authority to planners for that to happen, and thus we end up with a planning function that is actually non-planning.
Yeah how dare elected politicians cede authority to unelected bureaucrats.
Try this again:
Covenants are not perfect, but at least they avoid large-scale problems of corruption and preferential treatments.
Except when they don’t.
Humans, being imperfect, do not make perfect institutions.
So the small minority doesn’t like the institutions that the vast majority in this country finds lends certainty to investment and psychosocial wellbeing. Ah, well.
DS
“Yeah how dare elected politicians cede authority to unelected bureaucrats”
It’s fine if you don’t want planners to have power. But if that’s the case, then blame politicians for “planning”, not planners.
I don’t think he was “blaming planners”. I think he was opposing zoning.
So was its ideological parent, communism. Objective, Scientific plans draw up by Smart, Right Thinking People to meet the population’s needs. None of the nasty chaos of a “market” to deal with, having been eliminated through Intelligence and Science. The problem with land planning is the same problem communism always had, which is that its practioners are not, and all their arrogance to the contrary cannot be, smart enough or well-informed enough to meet the myriad needs and wants of the population the way the free market does.
That is quite aside from the totalitarian implications of planners trying to exempt themselves from political interference through the pretense that it would improve the objectivity of the planning process. What it would really do is render land planning the personal fiefdom of the planners, their personal canvas as it were. That’s exactly why progressives like barely accountable bureaucracies, they allow the imposition of Right Thinking Policies without oversight. Then when Wrong Thinkers get control they whine about the department being hijacked to score political points (as if progressives are somehow innocent of political motivations), when the truth is the apparatus the progressives put in place shouldn’t have been created in the first place.