Up and Down, Left and Right: A new look at zoning
Local control takes a sinister twist, as elite Left and elite Right unite
This is the first post in a new investigative series about zoning both in Wisconsin and nationally — its negative impacts on affordable housing, its role in the redistribution of wealth, its subversion of property rights and the environment in the name of environmentalism, and its use as a class-based barrier for protecting the prerogatives of the elite at the expense of the middle- and lower-incomes classes.
For much of the last decade, America has been in the middle of a deep and accelerating political realignment, spurred on by the excesses of economic Goliaths, by the excesses of government regulation, and by the excesses of social-control authoritarians in Big Tech and in the Democratic Party. That realignment is not taking place in society’s institutional power centers—once upon a time those pretended to joust with each other—but is coalescing within diverse and dispersed demographic groups that increasingly see these power centers as monolithic and are uniting against them.
That same realignment is ongoing in the arena of property rights, zoning, and land use, and it has been producing some strange bedfellows.
On the one hand, in many traditionally affluent communities, residents who typically align with Republicans are now lining up with environmentalists in intense efforts to erect a rather severe regulatory scaffolding within local land-use laws and ordinances. On the other hand, on the state and national level, both left-leaning and right-leaning policymakers are now beginning to join forces—on one of the few issues around which they can truly come together—to battle restrictive zoning laws, otherwise known as exclusionary zoning, albeit for different reasons.
That, in turn, has shifted the terrain of zoning battles. A decade ago, property-rights advocates who opposed more restrictive zoning fought their battles on the grassroots level, while enthusiasts of exclusionary zoning sought to impose rules and regulations from above, primarily in state natural resources’ agencies, though sometimes various state legislatures helped them out. Even federal entities, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, pitched in.
The battle was seen almost exclusively through the lens of a Left versus Right prism. That is no longer the case. In zoning, down is now up, and Left and Right have moved closer together.
Advocates of exclusionary zoning are now often fighting state agencies more frequently than allying with them, especially in a state such as Wisconsin, where shoreland zoning is ground zero and proponents of more restrictive local zoning cannot exceed the restrictions of the state. Here, the exclusionists bill themselves as local-control enthusiasts who favor more restrictive regulatory settings than they do individual rights, and they often present as a coalition of environmentalists and affluent Republicans eager to preserve the intregty of their neighborhoods and who assert zoning as a property right.
At the same time, property-rights advocates—many of them small businesses, entrepreneurs, small farmers, and the working class—have made huge gains in state legislatures, and they are using their new-found power to rein in both state agencies and local governments that pursue exclusionary zoning agendas. They also have some left-leaning and libertarian national think tanks—newly skeptical of exclusionary zoning and the current nature of local control—rooting for them along the way.
As mentioned, the state’s shorelands are one of the major gravity centers in the titanic land-use struggles now taking place in the state—all exposing the same detrimental impacts, even if expressed within different regulatory schemes. Not that all land-use mechanisms are bad, it should be stressed, when used to balance property rights interests—no one wants a chemical manufacturer next door, or a large livestock facility—but zoning itself is particularly vulnerable to being hijacked by special interests who want to, and do, use zoning districts not to balance the property rights of all but to usurp the rights of others, principally by quarantining the less well-off in zoning districts whose lines are but the symbolic representations of jail bars.
Shoreland zoning in northern Wisconsin provides a quintessential example of how the elite wall themselves off, most often around lakes, in the empty name of water quality protection, which their preferred zoning does not protect (which I will demonstrate in a later post), and drives up housing costs throughout the region. Let’s take a look.
Pull the DNR zipper, out jumped Jack the Ripper …