So, my wife decided to open a massage therapy office in our house. To do this, we needed to add space. A new addition seemed like a good plan, but I missed a detail about the zoning of our neighborhood. It turns out the house was built 30 years before the zoning ordinance was written, and the ordinance indicates that the house is 7 ½ feet too close to the street running alongside our corner lot. That’s not a problem—unless a person wants to add to the house. Such an act would be—in clear bureaucratic English—“expansion of an existing non-compliance.”

“You can’t do that,” said the City Hall official, “unless you get special permission.”

“OK, how do you get special permission?”

Well, first you write a check for $250. Then you fill out a bunch of paperwork, draw up a site plan, write a letter to the planning commission explaining why your plan is the greatest idea since Edison’s invention of the light bulb. Then you wait three weeks. 

During that time, the city uses part of your $250 to plant a big yellow sign in front of your house warning the neighborhood that you want to change the zoning on your property. The city also sends each of the neighbors a letter written in the same bureaucratic English. About all the neighbors get from the letter—since most don’t take the time to read it carefully—is that something bad is probably about to happen to their neighborhood.

So, you start knocking on the doors of your neighbors’ homes, hoping to explain the project in such a way that they’ll agree it’s the greatest thing since indoor plumbing.

One of the neighbors, to whom you have not spoken, phones City Hall, and another one sends the city a letter, stating why they’re against the project. The city uses more of the $250 to inform you that these neighbors are objecting to the plan. As a result, the proposal will not be sliding through as a mere formality; it will now be discussed by the planning commission in a public hearing. The neighbors have the right to show up to argue against your plan.

So, you call the dissenting neighbors, whom you’ve never met because they don’t actually live nearby; they just own those two houses, and rent them to the people who actually are your neighbors. You are hoping, of course, to convince these absentee neighbors that the plan to improve your property is, if not the greatest thing since indoor plumbing, at least the greatest thing since air conditioning.

~

Now you might think I was frustrated by all of this, and there probably were moments when that was the case. But the whole experience, coming as it did just a couple of weeks before Fourth of July, actually made me glad I live in America, where democracy works—at least quite a bit of the time.

It turned out the bureaucrats at City Hall were genuinely helpful people. They were also smart—a particularly good thing, in view of my ignorance of City Hall. The absentee neighbors—once they understood what we were up to—turned friendly, and gave our project two thumbs up. So the planning commission voted the special permission, the pleasant neighborhood was saved from potential ruin and degradation, and—without too much pain for anyone—we are now moving ahead with our addition.

Would it have been more convenient for us if we hadn’t had to deal with this annoyance? Sure. But would I want to live in a neighborhood that was not protected by a good city zoning ordinance? No.

A few years back our family lived for seven years in another country nine time zones away from our current Nebraska neighborhood. We lived on a school compound that was well planned, but a nearby neighborhood had streets running wherever property owners had decided to put them. The property owners built houses any way they pleased and anywhere they pleased. Applicable government regulations, if there were any, were ineffective. Perhaps you can imagine what that neighborhood looked like. So it’s not hard to convince me that, despite the frustrations, good zoning, carefully enforced, is a good thing.

The same is true about a general system of democracy that allows neighbors to work together peaceably to sort out issues affecting their neighborhoods. A simple local zoning ordinance may not seem like a big deal—unless it’s not there when you need it. Everyone should be fortunate enough to live in a place where duly elected officials and their staffs work responsibly to maintain a good city government based on good laws.

Are there other great reasons to be an American? Sure: the freedom to speak your mind without fear of retribution, the liberty to worship as you choose, the freedom to pursue whatever you think will make you happy. And not least, the opportunity to hear John Philip Sousa’s Washington Post March and Stars and Stripes Forever in town greens all across the country. During the past month, though, I just happen to have been reminded that it’s also a pretty good thing to be blessed with a decent city government. This does not happen everywhere.

Are there other great places to live in the world? Of course. As a matter of fact, we thoroughly enjoyed the years we spent in that East African country. One can find both the good and the not-so-good nearly everywhere, and citizens of other countries are right to value their homelands as I do mine. But during America’s most patriotic season, I am glad to reaffirm my own allegiance. I am grateful to be an American.

B.W.