The Raleigh City Council is considering an ordinance that would amend current zoning regulations so that residents could no longer park on grass, dirt, or loose gravel in their own front yards.
Property rights lawyers say the proposal could be an unconstitutional taking of private property. Landowners with rental properties that cater to college students say the ordinance would force them to pay for costly renovations, making rent too expensive for current tenants. Meantime, homeowners living near Raleigh’s campuses say the ordinance would clean up cluttered properties in mature neighborhoods.
It’s a scuffle over property rights, aesthetics, and the appropriate role of land-use regulation that has led to tense moments at public hearings in the capital city.
The ordinance would give all owners of single-family home one year to construct driveways meeting the following standards:
• Driveways must be made of non-erodible surfaces of concrete or crushed stone, four inches deep, with defined permanent borders.
• They must be 12 feet wide and include a parking pad covering 425 square feet or 40 percent of the front yard, whichever is greater.
• Parking pads must be surrounded with vegetative screening.
“Homeowners who cannot afford to retrofit driveways or parking areas to the new construction standards would be restricted to single-file parking in front of the residence’s driveway curb cut,” the city’s website states.
But single-file street parking would not be an option for homeowners who live on thoroughfares that ban it — such as Creedmoor and Leesville roads. And some neighborhoods require residents to obtain permits to park on the street; the city issues permits only for vehicles registered to homeowners, meaning tenants can’t get permits.
City Councilman Thomas Crowder, who lives near N.C. State University, wrote the ordinance more than a year ago to appease constituents who complained the front yard parking was trashy and brought down the value of their homes.
Jerome Goldberg owns five rental homes near the N.C. State campus. It’s not uncommon for three or four students to rent a single-family house in the neighborhood, or for one or more of them to park on the lawn.
The wooded front yards of Goldberg’s properties have only partial driveways leading to hard-packed dirt parking areas. He complained at a Comprehensive Planning Committee meeting Sept. 15 that it would cost $4,000 per property to build driveways that would meet the city’s standards.
“It would take years to make that money back,” Goldberg said. “I’d have to raise the rent significantly.”
Higher rent would force his tenants — students and minorities — to move, he said.
He asked the committee to consider the elderly, some of whom had been annexed to the city and had lived for decades without driveways.
“People can’t afford this,” Goldberg said. “We’re in a depression.”
City Planning Director Mitch Silver noted the ordinance would give homeowners a year to save up and pay for renovations. He also said people who couldn’t afford hiring a contractor to pave their driveways could “do it themselves.”
But the burden of compliance shouldn’t fall on homeowners, said Tim Sandefur, a property rights lawyer with Pacific Legal Institute in San Francisco.
Sandefur says any backward-looking ordinance could violate the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; it prohibits uncompensated takings of private property for public uses.
“If they pass a zoning law that prohibits you from using your property in a way that you’ve always been using your property, that can be a taking of property that the government owes you just compensation for,” he said.
To avoid taking property, Sandefur said, cities usually “grandfather in” pre-existing uses when they change land-use rules.
When it comes to new development, however, “there are very few restrictions on zoning powers,” Sandefur added. “Zoning intrudes heavily on private property rights,” he said. “It’s about time we rethought the entire idea.”
Homeowners associations provide a private alternative, he said. They give homebuyers the opportunity to voluntarily enter into covenant communities, where they have a voice in what the neighborhood will look like. Zoning, on the other hand, can impose the will of a minority on the majority, he said.
“It responds to the noisiest constituency,” he said. “People who like to tell their neighbors what to do with their property just go down to city council and get them to pass a zoning ordinance. Meanwhile, those of us who have lives are going about our daily business.”
Committee members are now studying the economic impact of a similar ordinance Greensboro passed in 2008 before the issue goes to the full council for a vote.
“I don’t know if I could support it at this point,” Councilman Bonner Gaylord said at the Sept. 15 committee meeting. “There are too many unanswered questions.”
Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.