|
Tuesday, August 03 2010 00:00 |
|
Last December the Liberty Township Trustees put the capstone on a two-year project to update and improve our township's 20-year old zoning resolution. With the help of citizen volunteers, township zoning and zoning appeals officials, and the expert guidance of the Fairfield County Regional Planning Commission, and during many public hearings, a new code was hammered out and is now a reality. The new code is a vast improvement over the old one and brings our township into compliance with state law and best zoning practices.
Why is this important? For that matter, why are zoning ordinances important to us?
Through township zoning, citizens create and manage the type of community they wish to have. Without zoning rules, disputes between neighbors arise and those disputes will be settled either by the law, or possibly by violence, the unpleasant alternative to the rule of law. Without a zoning ordinance, outsiders, particularly the courts and outside land developers, will dictate what our neighborhoods will look like, how we may conduct ourselves and what we can do on our own properties.
|
|
|
Tuesday, August 03 2010 00:00 |
|
On March 28, 2010, the Columbus Dispatch devoted its front-page story to the dramatic fall in residential property values in Central Ohio from 2005 to 2009. This article listed the 53 Metropolitan areas in the vicinity of Columbus with comparisons of their 2005 and 2009 average home selling prices and the percentages of declines between those years. Those decreases are stunning. The worse hit were the “newly developed suburban areas“, according to the Dispatch.
The article further reveals the reason for such losses in home values in 51 of those 53 districts: the irrational over-development of residential construction, fueled by overly optimistic projections of home values increases, and mortgage lending devoid of any sound financial analyses on borrowers’ abilities to repay their loans. As those many new homeowners began to default on their mortgages they abandoned and neglected their homes. As the real estate market began its free fall in 2008, so that many borrowers found themselves “upside down”, owing more on their homes than the their values, they abandoned those properties at an even faster rate and hastened the deterioration of surrounding properties. Like a ripple in a pond, value loss extended further until entire districts were devalued wholesale.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Page 10 of 10 |
