Americans are probably more obsessed with decorative mulch than any other civilization has ever been. Every spring, America’s big box stores pile up plastic bags of colored wood chips in their parking lots so that suburban homeowners can try to sculpt the perfect lawn. A perfect lawn, a perfect house, a perfect neighborhood — is it really too much to ask?
When it comes to shaping a community, the tool that Americans use is even less exciting than mulch: it is zoning. Zoning is a topic so boring that it is inherently funny, as The Onion has proven time and time again.
And yet, the ability to decide, as a community, what can be built and where it can be built, is clearly very important. If you own a house on the edge of a residential zone, you care what the next “zone” over is. Living next to an industrial zone might mean that your new neighbor will be an odor-spewing factory. Living next to a farm that gets re-zoned as housing can mean that you now have 2,000 new neighbors, all coming and going with mulch-laden minivans.
Where zoning is really used as a hammer is in determining, albeit indirectly, how much it costs to live in a place. A community cannot really control the cost of a house — if the seller wants to sell it for a dollar, the seller can do that. But a community can say: you cannot build a home on a piece of land smaller…
