Bypassing zoning logjam — owner initiatives
Patrick H. Hare
September, 11, 2008
Private landowners are taking land planning into their own green hands. In places like the Florida Panhandle, Chatahochee County outside Atlanta, and San Luis Obispo County, California, landowners are creating concentrated communities and, in the process, large areas of preservation. Why? And how?
First, “Why?” Small-town residents fear developers, but what they should fear most is their own town zoning. It is a Fickle Angel. The Fickle Zoning Angel protects us from disasters like go-kart tracks next to homes, and lots with bad septic systems. Then she requires large lot residential sprawl that destroys the landscape and its history.
Some people don’t have to fear either Fickle Zoning Angel. In a few parts of Litchfield County, homes are on jointly owned large tracts of land, bought in the thirties. The homes are off a central road in one case, or on the periphery of the tract of land in another. The homeowners live in self-created nature preserves.
But so do most of us. Aerial photos of Connecticut’s rural communities show homes dotted along irregular loops of road around large unbroken tracts of land. The homes back up to forests and fields. We enjoy in them in common, with little regard to property boundaries. Very often, our backyards open onto naturally occurring nature preserves.
Except for the invisible presence of the Fickle Zoning Angel. She plants time bombs. Adult children will inherit land too valuable to keep. The bombs’ explosive force is not developers. It is our single-family zoning. It creates financial value that can only be released by building sprawl. It will not allow the building of new villages like the old ones we know and like.
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What our towns need is Spandex Zoning, one-size zoning that covers all problems. Spandex Zoning has to protect intact natural areas by concentrating new homes in small areas, without being unfair to the people who will have new homes concentrated near them. Spandex Zoning also has to make the future of the landscape near people’s existing homes secure and predictable, with out upsetting the same people’s (or their heirs’) reasonably predictable financial rewards from radically changing that landscape through subdivision. There is no Spandex Zoning.
Zoning was initially developed about 85 years ago. Back then, zoning supported a fantasy of “moving out to the country” on a magic carpet. But, as suburban landscapes show, the same zoning carpet bombs the country with homes. When lots tend to be 10 or 20 acres each, as they now are here, the carpet bombing looks slow. But gradually the magic gets destroyed, especially when little bombs of development start dropping near you, and when you know that virtually no place in Connecticut or the nation has been able to stop the bombing.
Zoning from 85 years ago has turned towns into Wimps In Waiting. They stand and watch their landscapes slowly destroyed by their own zoning. But the system also offers landowners the right to propose new and better land-use patterns. As noted earlier, landowners are starting to do that elsewhere.
Here, neighbors in or around naturally occurring nature preserves could become shareholders in joint “slow-development” companies. Land-owners in a valley or along a road could keep their own land untouched, while combining their financial rights to build homes and concentrating them in one small area. With planning consultants, they could propose and create new small villages, designed like old ones people love, with a variety of small lots, surrounded by preserved land, staged for slow development, hidden in forests.
Many New England villages are so hidden only the church steeples show from a distance. Landowners would preserve most of their landscape, continue to own their own parcels, and still get all the financial value of their development rights, including the developers’ substantial profits.
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A big component of most rural housing markets here is people looking for the isolated house in the deep woods. I grew up in the pines, on Popple Swamp Road, in Cornwall. I loved the summer smell of the pine needle carpet in the columned hall of huge cabbage pines behind our house. And I loved the silence. But often I would have traded it instantly for someone to play with, or a game of baseball. Too often. Now, initially at my wife’s insistence, we live in the village of Cornwall Plains. My kids not only have friends to play with, but also public forests and playing fields they walk to and love, thanks to gifts of land from local families like the Calhouns and the Footes.
For most people, life near other people is better, especially in a village surrounded by hills that haven’t gone up in houses. Homes in hamlets, many views out over a preserved landscape, will attract many buyers. Probably more than they lose because buyers can’t get the houses they want deep in the woods... that in any case are zoned for future houses.
If adjacent landowners worked together, as they are starting to do elsewhere in the country, to plan and propose planned hamlets that concentrated their development rights, the Zoning Angel would be a much better Angel, and not so Fickle. Landowners would have more money in their pockets, and most of their open land and landscapes, and, best of all, trust that the landscapes they love was not likely to be sold for large lot sprawl by the children of neighbors and friends, not to mention their own children.
Part 1 of 2
Patrick H. Hare is a land use planner who lives in Cornwall, CT. He is vice-chair of the Cornwall Planning and Zoning Commission. The opinions expressed are his own.
© Copyright 2008 by TCExtra.com
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