Zoning out
WASHINGTON is a city that is crippled by poor zoning regulations. I grew up there, and I know this to be true. There was, for example, not a single commercial establishment of any kind within a mile of my house in northwest DC. Peace and quiet. Utter tedium. Or, actually, there was one. Broad Branch Market, a little family-owned grocery catty-corner from the elementary school, had been established in a saner time, the 1920s I think, and was, to judge by its lonely commercial presence in an all-residential neighbourhood, grandfathered in.
Now, here's how bad zoning restrictions in DC are. I started this post expecting to write a response to another blogger's missive on DC zoning regulations, so I wrote that schlocky intro. Then I looked up Broad Branch Market to find out whether it really had been grandfathered in. I quickly found that the market closed down in the recession of 2002, and that the property was bought in 2004 by a developer named Lewis Bloom who clearly realised that having the only grocery store in a half-mile radius is a solid proposition. And, when he tried to renovate and expand the grocery in 2006, Mr Bloom had to wait eight or 18 months (the article isn't quite clear) to get approval from the DC Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, and he's furious at them. (The DCRA says its process wasn't the holdup.)
I get the sense that I could basically look up any significant building from my childhood in DC, and the first thing I'd find would be an article in the Northwest Current complaining about zoning restrictions. Perhaps this is not that unusual in developed cities. But on to my next point.
Since leaving Washington I have lived in a number of other cities. One of them was a large, historic and attractive city in a poor country with an extremely rapidly-growing economy. (During the years I lived there, per capita GDP nearly tripled, and I'm not that old.) The other thing about this country was that, like many poor countries, it effectively had no zoning regulations, or really any construction regulations at all. The regulations existed, but they were almost universally ignored. Your neighbour could decide to build a 15-story office building that abutted your house and have the construction crews work on Sunday mornings at 4am: no problem. I lived in a house in what had been a flower-growing village next to a lake, before the city gradually absorbed it. The village had been there since at least the 1700s, and when I moved in, some of the houses were art-deco stucco fusion architecture from the 1930s-50s.