Legislature should reject assault on zoning laws

WHEN A HOUSE subcommittee meets today to consider a bill limiting regulatory takings, it will no doubt hear horror stories about zoning laws that cost innocent property owners untold millions of dollars, by preventing them from putting their land to its most productive use.

Out of context, those stories will sound unfair.

But just as “location, location, location” is critical to the value of any property, context is critical to the evaluation of complaints about land-use regulations.

The flip side of the person who wants to sell his family farm for a lawnmower assembly plant is all the people in the subdivision across the street who would see their lives disrupted and their property values plummet if trucks started rumbling in and out at all hours of the day and night.

The flip side of the bank that wants to sell a foreclosed golf course for condos and a shopping center is the homeowners on the fairways who would end up selling their homes for half what they paid for them if it were allowed to do that.

The flip side of the company that wants to build up levees to develop a stretch of prime riverfront property is the neighborhood across the river where all the homes would be flooded if the new levees send floodwaters crashing over the other shore.

Those in the so-called property-rights movement acknowledge all that, but argue that if society benefits from a government restriction on an individual, then society should compensate that individual. But that argument is at odds with the very notion of civilization, which cannot exist unless individuals agree to be mutually bound by collective, or governmental, restrictions.

The trade-off of society is that we give up something to benefit others in return for other people giving up something to benefit us. We don’t run red lights; the people coming on side streets don’t run red lights while we’re in the middle of the intersection. We don’t break into our neighbor’s house; our neighbors don’t burn down our house. Or at least the laws that we agree to live under say we don’t do any of those things.

Even people who appear to be sacrificing for the good of the community benefit by the rules, because the restrictions prevent someone else from hurting them as much as or more than their actions would hurt others. In return for letting our neighbors tell us we can’t turn our house into a strip club, we earn the right to tell our neighbors they can’t convert their yard into a toxic landfill.

The benign-sounding “Just Compensation of Land Use” act would take that protection away from land owners, by requiring cities and counties to pay property owners if zoning or other rules reduce the “fair market value” of their property.

The legislation doesn’t take into account how much zoning or other rules (or streets or police and fire service, for that matter) have enhanced the “fair market value” of the property to begin with. And it offers no compensation to property owners whose property is diminished in value when the government refuses to protect them from inappropriate land uses nearby.

Some communities may prefer few or no restrictions on land use. But that should be their decision — not one forced on them by a Legislature that is pretending to protect individual “rights” by ignoring the notion we learned as children: Your rights end where your neighbor’s rights begin.

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