Environmental Legislation: An Alternative to Minimum Acreage Zoning

Abstract

Traditionally zoning has been the means of regulating the use of land and controlling the development of a city. The favorite tool to do this has been minimum acreage zoning. However, minimum acreage zoning does not usually achieve its objectives. Clearly zoning cannot forestall the growth of a metropolitan area, but the area can be affected by the zoning in communities that surround it. Minimum acreage zoning serves as a focal point on the one hand to illustrate the inadequacies of traditional Euclidian zoning as a planning tool and on the other hand to show how its objectives can be met with new planning devices. Examples of new planning techniques are the various statutes to protect the environment that recently have been enacted by the federal, state, and local governments. This environmental legislation warrants careful consideration by planners not only because it sometimes uses a novel approach to old planning problems, but also because it may be an alternative to traditional zoning that achieves basically similar objectives in a less controversial manner.