Your thoughts on zoning?

Every place that I've ever seen has what is called a Grandfather clause. If you have 100 chickens, any zoning restrictions would not be enforceable because it was existing. Same for setbacks, industry in residental areas, etc.

The important thing to remember is that zoning rules are set up by a township for each township area. The people within those townships get to decide what the rules will be. The only rub is when you want to come into a community that restricts what you want to do with your land. If your township wants to limit all new garages to one stall, go for it. If you want to limit the size of houses, fine. That's one way to keep the McMansions from your view.

So, if you have your chickens on 5 acres and most of your community is sick of listening to the roosters, they can make a zoning restriction excluding chickens. But, wait, that's a good thing. Now as interest increases for localy grown, free range eggs, you'll control ther market! You are grandfathered in.

You should've bought my old house, Max!

Actually the hog operation wasn't really a problem ... we'd get an occasional whiff when the wind was right, or maybe they were pumping out their pit or something.

As far as the zoning question, I guess it would depend on what I had. If it were only a broken-down singlewide on a couple acres, I'd probably favor no zoning. But if I'd invested all my money into a half-million-dollar McMansion, I sure wouldn't want something objectionable being built next door and ruining my property value.

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"I love all of this mud," said no one, ever.

I figure that if you want to control your neighbors property, you should just pony up & buy it.

I'm with BostonLesley, I despise zoning.

While it can be argued limited zoning has it's benefits to property owners and values, it's not the whole story. As zoning ordinances increase, so does the cost to oversee it.

My town of 292 people has zoning bylaws (a map and 20 page bylaw book), but no enforcement and I hope it stays that way.

We own an investment property in the city with the strictest zoning in the state and it's impossible (not to mention expensive) to get anything done.

Wanna change the color of your house? Need a permit.
Wanna put up a fence? Need a permit.
Wanna put in a new walkway to the front door? Need a permit.

It's so bad that you cannot park cars on grass (what the city refers to as "green space") without getting a variance from the review board.

No thank you.

I am originally from Michigan; a very small rural town on the Lake Michigan shore. I still own land there and since the area has become a playground for the rich in the summer and a year round retreat for those who have million dollar or more homes on the lake shore, our zoning has spread far beyond the township limits.

Every zoning law is intended and strictly enforced solely to keep it "pretty" for the tourists. The zoning laws are so extreme that you are not allowed to park a travel trailer on your property and use it for guests or whatever reason; no un-licensed cars on your property, among other property rights and individual privacy invasions, even if you live on a farm three miles from town.

Zoning is just another long arm of the law.

Vote against it and rally your neighbors to do the same.

digApony

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"Of course there is a light at the end of the tunnel; another train is approaching there". ~ Slavoj Zizek

Zoning? Just say no.

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"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

Zoning is very much a double edged sword. Here in New Jersey which is probably one of the most zoned places on earth there was once a Ford plant in Mahwah, at the base of the Ramapo Mountains. Back in the old days Ford needed a place to get rid of their paint sludge (this was the 50s so it was full of lead and other goodies)-they didn't have to look far. They just went up into the mountains where all of the poor people lived and there was no zoning ordinances, etc... There were plenty of old mine shafts left over from New Jersey's early iron and copper mining days to dump the stuff down. Now the stuff is seeping out of the ground, contaminating whole aquifers, and causing all sorts of health problems. The rich folks at the base of the mountain (where there is zoning) are doing just fine though.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/bu...ewanted=1&_r=1

Michigan's tourist industry is huge. Many people's jobs depend on tourists. People don't often visit dumpy areas. Most folks prefer to live in clean, well kept, green communities.

Way up here in the boone docks, we have zoning. One part has a rule against turning your yard into a salvage yard. But some folks junk is another's treasure. What might look like an eye sore, could be a car I want to fix up, "someday". Some people like to keep a similar model vehicle as a ready source for spare parts. Then, there is the excuse, " Hey that's not junk, I'm driving that car."

The only fair way they were able to come up with was that if it has sat around long enough for the plates to expire, it is time to get it out of your front yard.

60 years ago,this community was over run with tar paper cabins, but most people wanted to encouraage families, not hermits. So anything you built had to be 700 square feet. That helped. But then people hauled in old travel trailers and let them set, not much better than the shacks that they were trying to avoid. So, if your camper isn't licensed, it can't stay. That leaves home owners alone and insures the old trailer won't become an eye sore as it melts into the ground, unattended.

In town, there are many old homes. Most are on small lots. It was common to chop those houses up to 4 or 5 rentals. But the driveway didn't work for the 6 to 8 cars that needed to park there. So, everybody just parked on the lawn. In the winter, the snow had to be plowed somewhere, often piled up in the neighbor's yard. In the summer it was a muddy mess.

So often times what looks at first blush as invasive to your property rights, have evolved for a reason.

When a community is kept "pretty" for the tourists, it also tends to be greener and easier on the environment, something we all want.

Besides, the more rich folks in a community the more taxes that are collected and who's going to buy those $3.00 a doz eggs or $3.00 a pound tomatoes ? It ain't the poor folk.

I bought my property so I would have a place to live as I see fit, If my neighbors dont happen to agree...... thats fine, they have their own property to live on..... as they see fit.

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"Nothing so needs reforming as other peoples habits." Mark Twain

Zoning is a necessary evil in built up areas. When the houses are so close together if one catches fire there's a good chance it will spread to another you need rules to protect you from your neighbor's stupidity. But as with most things the rules must be kept in check.

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the police are just MINUTES away!

Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. . .Davy Crockett

Walmart not bothering with small towns. How about a population of 2,700? Yes, Walmart, K-Mart, Tractor Supply.

Case in point... one issue when I was in the office was a prospective gravel pit that wanted to go in a rural residential area. The pit would have meant blasting throughout the day, increased dust from operations, increased (and much larger than passenger vehicles) on a tiny rural road and possibility of damage to area homes from the operations. Obviously the request was denied, because of zoning.

Another one- strip club wants to go in another rural res area. Property not zoned for commercial, particularly that type of commerical enterprise. And yes, there are different levels of commercial zoning. No go on the club.

Another- people apply for kennel permit and want to keep fifty or so breeding dogs on two acres in rural res again, with a hollowed out mobile home as the dog's only area. Can you imagine the stink? I know how the people smelled, living in the house with about half that number of dogs already. Not to mention, as it backed a cattle field, local farmers were concerned about the bitches in heat pulling predators in to go after their newborns and birthing mamas.

How can you think zoning is just another way to control people? It's a way to keep the things that would be determental to an area out.

The zoning board is made of people who live in the specific area. You don't like the zoning? Get on the board and work to change it.

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" It's better to ride even if you get thrown, than to wind up just wishin' ya had."

Chris Ledoux

+1,000

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Thank you for all your replies.

This has been a very interesting thread to read. Like I said in the OP, I am not knowledgeable on the subject. Thanks for the education.

The only people I have met who were in favor of zoning regulations were those who wanted to control what others did with their property. Either they were people from high density urban/suburban areas or they were politicians wanting to do something special for their well heeled election supporters, very often real estate or development company owners.

It doesn't matter whether it is rural or suburbs, zoning is about control. Those with money and political influence dictate what they want and they get it regardless of what the people affected by it want.

You want to protect property values, fine. The value of your home is determined by those who wish to buy it. If it is located in a strict subdivision where everything is codified, your home has zero value to me. It might be worth something to someone who is OCD and loves micromanagement.

We have a neighbor beside us who has a magenta colored home and her yard is full of potted flowers, shrubs and other nice plants. Other neighbors turned her in because of her house color and how many plants, but lack of the "obligatory" green lawn they expected her to have. She won. They still gripe about what she has on her property, even if the only way to see some of it is if they trespass onto her lot and go behind her house. Neighbors like that are vermin.

It takes a great deal to bother me and my neighbors on either side are not problems to my mind. If they don't bother me I do not bother them. If we were to be reported because someone was in a snit, I would make certain to find out who that person is and report every possible annoyance I could find and make their lives hell.

Additionally, the more control government has, the more taxes they want for the benefit of telling you what you can and cannot do. That is not an area I want to live in. If I must, it is only for as long as it takes to get out of that hades.

As for the protection of zoning, all it takes is a company to find a location where zoning is in their favor and they can encourage sprawl. It happens all the time in Lawrence, Kansas. Businesses build industrial parks and apartment/condominium over prime farmland as fast as they can payoff the city for approval. This city has more vacant dwellings of all kinds than there are people. There is little high paying industry or business, mostly call centers and warehouses. While there is the University of Kansas here, that is the only major employer. Most people commute to Kansas City or Topeka for work.

I have not seen any positive results of zoning regulations, just sprawl, stratification of economic classes and control over how people live. I have also seen the decay of neighborhoods and commercial districts because of zoning.

I also have to question the wisdom in telling specific industries where they can and cannot be. In the western Lake of the Ozarks region of Missouri where I used to live, a small town told a quarry that it could not use land it owned on the other side of the highway from where they were quarrying because it had expired its grandfathered status. Then a city on the other side of the lake told the quarry it could not continue to use its existing facility because of property owner complaints, people who moved in decades after the quarry had already been there. Now those quarry locations are winding down and any needed rock for local building or construction use must be trucked in from other quarry locations many tens of miles farther away and increases the material cost three times or more depending on the material and distance.

If people want to zone themselves into utopia, that is their business. However, they may want to think about the unintended consequences of their actions. Zone quarries and farms out of existence along with other less desirable industries like cement and asphalt plants to the far reaches of nowhere and you will be no better than any other NIMBY and you will pay the extra costs, directly or indirectly. You will also be left with perfect homes and meddling neighbors and little freedom.

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I would challenge anyone here to think of a question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one. – Sam Harris

Golly. This topic is near and dear to my heart. I live in one of only 6 towns in NH that do not have zoning. Every time thus far that the town has proposed a zoning ordinance, the voters have rejected it. Our town is not much bigger than yours, with a lot of long-time residents but also a lot of newcomers (including myself and my husband).

We ended up moving from the town we lived in previously, in upstate rural NY, precisely because of bad zoning. It was a rural farm area. Lots of hay/soybean/corn fields, and acres upon acres of orchards. Lot of horses. Lots of small hobby farms. Only two small depressed cities, one at either end of the county. And yet the town we lived in had written their zoning such that to own poultry, you had to have a farm. And to have a farm you had to own at least 10 acres. However, if you only owned 5 acres, you could have a horse. So, effectively, to own a single chicken you needed twice as much land as to own a horse. The regs were written in such a way as to imply that the word "farm" meant a business - IOW, running a farm for profit. So you could infer then that owning a backyard flock of chickens, or a backyard flock of sheep was permissible, as long as you weren't farming as a business, which is how we read it. We were further lulled by the fact that the previous owner of the property had raised turkeys.

You might have guessed that we got in trouble for having sheep and chickens on less than 10 acres (we had just under 4 acres). Well, I don't think anyone cared about the chickens, but a couple of neighbors cared that we had sheep, and made anonymous phone calls to the zoning officer. He said he wasn't one to drive around looking for zoning infractions, and he wouldn't worry except that he'd gotten these calls within a short span of time and was obligated to let us know. The zoning officer admitted that he tended to read the regs conservatively, yet a lawyer might successfully rip them apart if someone wanted to fight it. The lack of clarity and lackadaisical enforcement meant that the zoning regs were essentially arbitrary. You could do what you wanted, as long as no one complained, but then they could beat you over the head with them.

So, we moved. Granted, we didn't know we were coming to NH at first, and had no idea that there were places here that didn't have zoning, but we were delighted when a suitable property (we specified more than 10 acres!) turned up in this town. We even had our buyer's agent call the town to verify that there was no zoning and we could bring our small farm here without getting harassed.

Currently our town has a committee that is drafting a "land use regulation" ordinance. Call it zoning for short. But they are not looking at zoning in the traditional way of "this area only for business, this area only for residential", etc. They are basing it on something called performance standards, the idea being that new businesses or new housing must meet a certain number of criteria out of a larger list (if adopted, the zoning cannot be applied retroactively so existing uses are grandfathered). Any property can potentially be for any use, as long as the minimum number of performance standards are met. They are also working on a consensus basis. If the whole committee doesn't agree on a particular thing, it does not go into the ordinance. Then it goes to the planning board, then public hearing, then gets reworked if necessary, until finally it goes to the town for a vote.

Personally, due to getting burned in the past, I lean towards less is better. Of course, this is the Live Free or Die state. Most people here do not appreciate government telling them they can't use their own property as they see fit.

I can see both sides of the argument. I don't like stupid regulations, and sometimes enacting zoning just gives someone a stick to beat their neighbor with. Yet others say that businesses may more readily come to a town where they know there are rules in place that will support them and protect them.

As for the Walmart thing, we did have a large business (not Walmart or anything like that) try to come in and the thing ended up in court, costing the town quite a bit of money and it's still not resolved. Arguably, if we'd had a zoning ordinance, we could have potentially told them to kiss off, or alternatively said, "you can't meet the performance standards on that piece of land, but try this one over here." Or maybe they wouldn't have tried to come here at all. Who knows?

If you're still reading, congratulations. I hope I answered your question without boring you to tears.

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Karen
Birchtree Homestead Farm
http://birchtreefarm.com
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