Reply to Baltimore Sun article about Howard County rezoning

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Your post is utterly rubbish. [b]Land use naturally evolves[/b] through the individual actions of people, whether developers or buyers, over the years and in reaction to market forces. Population changes greatly affects the character of an area over the years and decades and quite often there's little a jurisdiction can do about it. Baltimore, for example, cannot rezone its way out of poverty. But zoning does help to play a role by laying the predictable frameworks for land use in a stable way (which is the point of [b]zoning, it was actually introduced to prevent unexpected and unpredictable rapid changes affecting long term stability and property values, such as opening a factory in the middle of a residential area[/b]). This is why the county is guilty if we are to accept your definition of zoning reach because if it allowed a zoning and districting to exist for decades, which people used to make their decisions in good faith of what to buy and where to live and what to build. "good faith" may mean nothing to you but is actually a valid legal understanding. The county is suddenly changing the rules without advance warning, creating instability and badly affecting market conditions (which in Howard is driven heavily by schools). A government exists because people have faith and confidence in the said government. But when the government becomes arbitrary it creates market instability. The government does not exist to impose your views on other people.

The difficulty of imposing zoning on an unwilling population is neatly observed in the Baltimore Sun article by the person who commented that the River Hill families will most likely just sell and move to stay in the River Hill district. [/quote]

No, it doesn't. Land use happens within a regulatory framework imposed by the government. As you say.

And no, zoning wasn't introduced for that reason. Zoning was introduced to keep undesirable land uses (industrial, commercial, apartments, poor people, black people) away from middle-class/affluent white people in single-family-detached homes.

I'm impressed, though, that you think it's "suddenly changing the rules without advance warning" for a duly elected school board to propose to change school boundaries.[/quote]

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