Column by George Sibley
Land Use – March 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
EARLY IN JANUARY, the Gunnison County Commissioners finally signed off on a new improved “LUR” — a 450-page Land Use Resolution to guide land use decisions in the unincorporated parts of the county. This document has been under revision for almost seven years, and as one member of the county planning commission said, “has the fingerprints of almost anyone who walked into this room and made a comment,” including “the fingerprints of people who now object to it.”
And many people in the county do object to it. A group called “People for Responsible Planning” gets downright apoplectic about the LUR, but almost everyone objects to some of it. For some people, it doesn’t have enough guidelines and restrictions; for others it has too many. Jokes were made at the signing about binding it in three-ring binders “for the changes to come.”
Most of the disputes have revolved around the basic issue of private property rights versus what might be called “community sensibilities” like open space or affordability. Property rights are about as sacred as sacred gets in the West, but community sensibility is coming on strong these days, too — especially in places where there are lots of new people with strongly felt æsthetic perceptions of what they want their surroundings to look like.
Some of the disputes over the LUR were not resolved, and await the loose-leaf phase of its evolution. One of these was “house-size.” The Upper Gunnison is getting a lot of ostentatious starter castles and bobo* showplaces crowning what once were scenic hillsides. These monster mansions cause rashes of envy and disgust in many, or perhaps most, of the valley’s residents. But when it came down to it, efforts to limit house-size were just too much interference with those sacred property rights.
But this makes me wonder why we don’t apply a little Republican orthodoxy here — ’tis the season — and try a “market solution.” Instead of trying to regulate and control things, let’s just say that you can do anything you want with your private property, or at least anything that you can afford. Then we could develop a community-values tax policy that would test what the market will bear.
We could start with a progressive luxury tax on house size.
So what’s a reasonable size house for that all-American unit, the family of four? 2,000 square feet? 2,500? Heaven knows. In this valley a lot of the respected elders were raised in much larger families, in much smaller homes than that.
But times change and families need room for the computers, and the security system, and all that exercise equipment because no one ever seems to get outdoors any more. So let’s be generous and say anything above 3,000 square feet or larger is pure ostentation and luxury. We’ll create a luxury tax for a 3,000 square-foot house that doubles for every additional thousand square feet. For a house up to 4,000 square feet, it’s twice the tax; for 4,000 to 5,000 square feet, it’s four times the tax; for 5,000 to 6,000 square feet, eight times the tax; etc. etc.
At that rate, even the wealthiest bobo should come to a point where he or she would think twice. And it wouldn’t take more than one or two of those 24,000 square-foot menopause mansions that are going up in the valley to enable us to finance a few new units of affordable housing every year.
SINCE EVERYONE AGREES that “sprawl” is a bad thing, a similar market solution could also be applied to discourage sprawl. For every mile beyond the nearest town or city limit, the luxury tax would double — on top of whatever tax doubling had already been assessed for house size. In other words if you built a 5,000 square foot house more than a mile but less than two miles outside the Gunnison city limits, then you would pay eight times more property tax than you’d owe for a 3,000 square-foot house inside the city limits. If you go out 2-3 miles, then it’s 16 times as much.
More doublings could be assessed for breaking a ridge line, or abutting public lands, or for building in one of Ed Quillen’s “Stupid Zones.”
This strikes me as a very American solution that doesn’t impinge on anyone’s right to do whatever damn thing one wants with one’s private property. And though it may sound extreme, judging from some of the houses going up in the valley today — one reportedly has an indoor waterfall — we are dealing with people who don’t really have to ask “how much.”
This might serve as a good democratic process to bring even the wealthiest citizens to the point of gulping when presented with a bill. If we can’t legislate sanity, then maybe we can at least make ostentation unaffordable.
But at the very least, we could provide a new form of ostentation. The tax bills could be artfully designed, professionally engraved, and suitable for framing and hanging over the mantel — a real show piece.
George Sibley teaches, writes, agitates, and organizes in Gunnison, where he will appear on stage in the Son-of-a-Gunn..
* “Bobo” is a term coined for “bourgeois bohemians,” the educated ex-hippies who got rich in spite of themselves and became the economic upper class they once despised. See Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks.
