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By Bayard L. Catron
Rappahannock Newa
Contributing Writer
This is the first in a series of opinion pieces on planning, landuse and property rights.
Property rights are inalienable.... Growth is good.... Public planning threatens individual freedoms.... Development is best left to the exercise of the free market.... These ideas are entrenched in American culture, and fit the ideology of many liberals and conservatives alike.
In the abstract, restricting what people may legally do with their property might seem almost un-American.
In reality, however, controls on land use are well established, and have been widely used in this country for a long time. Court cases early in this century (Welch v. Swasey, 1909; Hadacheck v. Sebastian, 1915) established the right of local governments to regulate development, and zoning has been a standard tool since 1926, when the Supreme Court upheld it as a valid form of regulation (in Euclid v. Ambler Realty).
Communities like ours all over the country have decided that not all growth is good, and that planning and managing development, far from being dirty words, are needed to preserve their other precious
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