Zoning Zoo: North Ogden McMansion Melee

The Standard Examiner this weekend had a very interesting story about a North Ogden resident wanting to use his suburban home as an auto shop. 

[The resident] lost his job approximately two years ago and started to do small car repairs in his home garage to make ends meet.

-snip-

Soon word spread and [the resident] was fixing more and more cars, but minimum repairs such as brakes and oil changes...

Just as a reference, here is a photo of the home and neighborhood in question.

Obviously, this is not quite what you think of when you think of a neighborhood appropriate for an auto shop.

There are two interesting things to take away from this story.  The first is on how to behave as a good neighbor.  Rather than talking to the offending neighbor, the other neighbors simply reported him to the city.  And yet, the offending neighbor tells the paper "he had worked on nearly all of the complainers cars on the last year."  Beautiful. So much for friendly neighborly relations.

Secondly, and even more surprisingly, the North Ogden City council seems to have no clear direction on this issue.  In the face of public pressure in support of the offending resident, they created a compromise of allowing him to run his auto shop business but with OSHA standard ventilation and more insulation to prevent noise.  Councilman Carl Tanner states: "This is a hard issue and it's awful hard for us as a city council to tell someone they can't have a business."  Really?  The city council shouldn't be telling him he can't have a business, but what they should be telling him is where he can have a business.  That is exactly why we have zoning laws so as to prevent this type of craziness from occurring where it is not supposed to.

The camel might get his nose under the tent on this issue and you may see more suburban neighborhoods declining because of it.  Look for more auto shops springing up in a cul-de-sac near you.