REACHBook

It's time to hold a conversation on the elephant in the room: land use regulations, a.k.a. zoning. And building codes. These constitute a major obstacle to the creation of viable and affordable communities of the sort many of us long to be a part of.

Current land use regulations in the USA and elsewhere constitute an expensive and time-consuming obstacle on the road to creating new intentional communities, and the result is often quit-inducing frustration. When the obstacle is finally leaped, it is often leaped at great financial expense -- which fundamentally alters a crucial design feature for such communities: It makes such a way of life prohibitively expensive for most of the sort of folks who would like to live in this way.

Worse, any successes are basically isolated, one-by-one, county-by-county, project-by-project successes. The wheel must be constantly reinvented
in each new project.

The elephant in the room is the POLITICS of the matter. But it goes unrecognized as a political problem because there exists no organized political
response to this problem, no movement for change.

Worse, there isn't even a conversation to enter. There are a few scattered articles here and there that mention this obstacle. But, apparently, there is no organization, book, or website which address this matter in anything near to a comprehensive way.

When are we going to begin to handle this differently?