AT THE END of 2021, John Morse hoped he could breathe a well-earned sigh of relief.
It had been two tough years. The pandemic had pushed Celebrations—the wedding venue he and his wife Laurie had owned and operated for two decades in rural Caroline, New York—to the brink of ruin. But with public health restrictions disappearing and with brides and grooms planning nuptials once again, the Morses were ready to resume business.
“We have a beautiful piece of property. But we’re not a castle on the lake with marble columns,” he says. “There [are] wedding venues out there that are booked three, four years in advance. That’s not us. We’ve always had to work hard for the business that we have.”
Morse hoped that 2022 would be a normal, relatively drama-free year. That hope was dashed in November, when a little blue postcard arrived in the mail. Caroline’s zoning commission was inviting him to an informational meeting on its draft zoning code.
The card took Morse by surprise. He wasn’t aware that the town had a zoning commission. Caroline, after all, had no zoning code.
That makes it an extreme outlier in the United States.
Almost every other community in the country has a code that assigns each property in town to a zoning district and then lays out a long list of rules describing the kinds of buildings and activities allowed (or not allowed) there.
Proponents see zoning as an uncontroversial means of keeping glue factories away from homes, keeping strip clubs away from schools, and generally protecting things everyone likes: open space, property values, the environment, and more.
But ever-mounting home prices and a growing number of stifled small business owners are prompting a critical rethink of just how useful or necessary this mess of red tape and regulation really is.
Once an afterthought, zoning has become the hot-button issue in city halls and state capitals across the country. The debate is increasingly about how best to liberalize the rules that are on the books.
But in Caroline, that national debate is now playing out in reverse.
This was ostensibly a dispute about traffic, environmental protection, sightlines, and neighborhood character. It quickly became a conflict over class and class aesthetics. The pro-zoning residents were, in many cases, current and former employees of nearby Cornell University. They had a very specific vision of what the town should look like, and that vision often clashed with what people were doing, or might one day do, with their property. If Caroline’s special character needed legal protections or legal limits on landowners’ property rights, they reasoned, then so be it.
But for Morse, the freedom to do what he wants on his own land is part of what makes Caroline special. Far from protecting the town’s character, zoning is a threat to it. He’s not
