You'd think that a blog about land use and zoning law would be, well, dry.  Maybe you'd be right, but when you stop to think about it there aren't many things people get more emotional about than what happens to their stuff, and the most important "stuff" they own is their land/house.  Trust me, if you want to fill the city council chambers just propose opening a landfill in the middle of a neighborhood, or changing the zoning from residential to commercial near an existing neighborhood.

Attorney Tom Terrell writes a very good blog about land use and I really like his most recent post, Getting Emotional Over Dirt.  An excerpt:

Land use, like the political cauldrons in which land use decisions are made, does not always follow logical and linear decision-making processes.  We study the legal and logical aspects of land in our universities, but the critical decisions that affect its development and changes are propelled, more often than not, through emotional decision-making.  I’ve written and spoken about this relatively unexplored phenomenon on many occasions.  The world of litigation is full of studies on how and why juries do as juries do.  Although they probably exist, I’ve never seen similar academic studies of how and why elected officials make certain decisions on land use following presentations at public hearings.

When we do study the emotional aspects of land use, chances are the fears and anxieties are hidden behind surrogate issues and the fearful and the anxious are elevated in stature by calling them “stakeholders,” almost as if they had an equal right to the use of the land as the person who owns it.

This past Sunday New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof blogged about public decisions being made because of fears of Islam (“Is Islamophobia the New Hysteria”), much the same as actions that were taken over the decades and centuries against Catholics and Germans and Mormons and Irish and Jews and Japanese where “fear spread in part because of misinformation.” When we are scared, he reminds us, we can do unconscionable things.