St. Jude's Free Lunch and Land Planning in Northwest Corner

An allegorical meeting: The first selectmen of some Northwest Corner towns recently asked St. Jude to lunch. He is the patron saint of hopeless causes, and they wanted to talk to him about land use planning and about how to make it work here. They chose a good restaurant. At the end of a great lunch, and a not-so-great discussion, the selectmen left. In fact, they left quickly, and stuck St. Jude with a big bill. They also left a note they had obviously prepared ahead of time. It said, "We wanted you to understand that in planning, there are no free lunches. There are only expensive ones. And even then it may be hopeless."

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Almost everybody has hopes that planning in the community will create jobs, affordable housing or protection of land and landscapes. But without the planning staff to craft difficult compromises, somebody’s hopes usually lose badly. Yet no towns expect to spend more than the bare minimum of tax dollars, if any, for planning capacity. Why do we assume our towns are like magic restaurants where you can expect to eat very well and pay almost nothing?

Perhaps the inherent optimism in the idea of planning makes us blind to the hard work of cooking up a good Town Plan. Glib optimism is often mis-marketed as planning. Public hearings are one way to see deception in planning dressed up as optimism. A public hearing on a sprawl subdivision sounds like a good time to object to sprawl. It isn’t. Public hearings give people a chance to object to specific details of subdivisions. If they object to big issues, like the zoning that not only permits but also requires sprawl subdivisions, they are out of order.

Think of public hearings on subdivisions as courtrooms in which judges are required by law to ignore the impact of sprawl zoning on the land. If people actually understand the game well enough to say they object to the zoning that requires sprawl, they are met with patronizing politeness, because they don’t yet understand the game well enough. Everyone is too embarrassed to tell them the basic issue of permitting sprawl was decided long ago. But hearings where people can’t be heard are not the only false optimism in planning.

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Planning retains its optimistic ring in spite of the fact that most land in every town in the Northwest Corner is already zoned for residential sprawl. Another problem completely submerged by the false optimism of planning is property boundaries. Virtually all decisions about where new homes go in small towns originate with a landowner’s decision to build, and that owner’s individual property boundaries. If those boundaries have anything to do with what is a good location in the town for new homes at any given time, it is pure coincidence.

Imagine an old heavy fish net of residential sprawl zoning laid over a town, and then add another, even older and heavier fishnet of property boundaries laid over the first. Then imagine the town’s land use staff, if any. That would be the starving 90-pound weakling, trying to plan under the weight of two knotted and heavy nets of decisions woven for reasons buried back in history.

Our towns’ real planners are antique zoning and the even more antique property boundaries. They are what run things. Both the generally poor reputation of planning, and the reason towns are unwilling to pay for it, may be due to the fact that those two nets are so heavy that towns have a history of getting next to nothing in improvement for their few planning dollars.

In spite of the planners’ best and typically underpaid efforts, towns still remain trapped under those two heavy, obsolete nets that control planning decisions. We take for granted both obsolete sprawl zoning and the controlling role of property boundaries as the major factors in deciding where new homes go. As a result, we cannot see that a high price must be paid to get planning that does more than just coordinate new homes so that they are built precisely as required by two fishnets of antiquated decisions that have nothing to do with good planning today for jobs, affordable housing, or land preservation.

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In planning, the problem is not just that there is no free lunch. It is that even a barely edible lunch is much more expensive than we feel it should be. We don’t even see the heavy nets of past decisions our towns are trapped under.