More Dogs on Main: A modest zoning proposal

Opinion Opinion | Aug 25, 2023

For the last year, I’ve been involved in a low-level zoning skirmish with a neighboring land owner. The neighbor bought 40 acres and built a spectacular home on it. It’s a huge house, so for several years, the construction traffic has been at an industrial level, with a parade of cement pumpers and cement trucks, excavators, cranes and delivery vehicles pulverizing a shared dirt road. The sound of the back-up beepers was almost incessant for a while. But the house is finally finished, and the traffic flow is now down to a steady stream of service vehicles because a house like that seems to require an engineering staff to operate.

The friction has been over his helicopter. He commutes by helicopter. He usually takes a kind of circular route and comes in over national forest, rather than flying right over the neighborhood, but it’s still loud and obnoxious, echoing throughout the valley. The zoning doesn’t allow helipads. Despite the industrial scale construction going on, with building inspectors in and out frequently, nobody noticed the concrete helicopter landing pad in the front yard. Or the chrome fuel tanker truck full of jet fuel parked there in a densely forested neighborhood with no fire department.

Complaints started rolling in from an adjoining cabin HOA. So he petitioned Wasatch County to change the zone to allow it. That dragged on through the process and recently hit the County Council agenda for action. The arguments in favor of the helipad were mostly that the applicant is rich, and he already bought the helicopter so what’s he going to do with it if the zone change is denied. Then the coup de grâce was this: Allowing helicopters to land in residential areas would attract a more affluent buyer which would be a general improvement to the area. he Wasatch County Council wasn’t having any of it and denied the application. One of the council members said it was “asinine.”

Among the various problems in my neighborhood, a lack of affluent buyers is not one of them. Within a stone’s throw there are several owners who are extremely, obscenely, wealthy. A hundred million here, a billion there, and a sheep herder in a double-wide over there. I’m not sure what the correct term of that is these days. Rich #&$@* is pejorative. I see the term “high net worth individuals” used a lot. But you would never describe a person sleeping under a freeway bridge as a “low net worth individual.” So I think the currently acceptable term is “people experiencing wealthiness.”

Whatever the term, they are suddenly everywhere. I think it’s the “Yellowstone” effect, where every rich guy who watched too many episodes of “Yellowstone” dreams of being John Dutton and buys a Stetson hat and ranch in Kamas Valley. For every person experiencing Dutton-ness, a local family experiencing normal-ness is disrupted, and the old ranching families are out of business, albeit with a wad of cash in their pockets. I don’t think the gush of affluence has improved anything, though it is now possible to buy a lobster roll lunch from a food truck in the Ace Hardware parking lot in Kamas.

People experiencing wealthiness need to spend, and when you have that kind of money, it’s hard work burning through it. So we have private jets double parked in Heber, helicopters, private submarine trips, and private space flights because if you’re rich enough, climate change and pollution aren’t your problems.

For decades, zoning has been effectively used to zone out poor people. That may not have been the stated objective, but large lots, minimum house size requirements, complicated regulations on grading and landscaping all push the prices up, making houses in those areas unaffordable.

What if we tried zoning that blocked out the super-rich? What would it take to zone them and their helicopters and commercial-scale trophy homes out?

To start with, how about requiring at least one major household appliance in the front yard? I’m picturing the avocado Kenmore washer, but it could just as easily be an imported La Cornue eight-burner range. The key is that it has to be on the front lawn and not operational. Then we would mandate at least one car up on blocks per acre. Again, the properly planned junker would be Uncle Bob’s 1950s DeSoto, but the wealthy might find compliance with a wrecked Range Rover, with density bonuses if the transmission is on the ground.

Proper zoning could shrink house sizes to something less than shopping mall-sized trophy homes. Imagine the indignity of life without a bowling alley in the basement. No hyper-wellness modalities at all. There could be a requirement to have a snowmobile trailer parked in the side yard. People experiencing wealthy-ness would move on.

Forty years ago, one of my first assignments when I started working as the Park City attorney was preparing an ordinance for impounding and removing junk cars from Old Town. They were everywhere, and gave the place some character and grit. It felt like a mistake to me at the time, but the city spent a summer dragging the abandoned cars off of the vacant lots. There’s a pretty straight line between that and rich #&$@* thinking the rest of us are improved by listening to their helicopters landing.

Aug 25, 2023

What if we tried zoning that blocked out the super-rich? What would it take to zone them and their helicopters and commercial-scale trophy homes out?

Aug 25, 2023

Aug 25, 2023

Aug 25, 2023

Aug 25, 2023

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