Cape Girardeau County is the only first-class, non-charter county in Missouri without countywide planning and zoning. That fact, reported recently by Rick Fahr in the Southeast Missourian, is often cast as a deficiency waiting to be corrected. It shouldn’t be. It’s the result of voters being asked directly, more than once, and saying no both times.
Cape Girardeau County had a zoning framework once. Voters approved county planning in 1972, and officials spent the next two decades building it out: subdivision and mobile home park rules in 1975, a master plan for unincorporated areas in 1977, a setback ordinance in 1988. Then, in 1992, a proposed zoning ordinance failed at the ballot box, and its failure voided the planning structure built since 1972 along with it. When county leaders tried again in 2000, voters rejected it a second time, by 69%. Twice, nearly a decade apart, the county had this exact conversation and reached the same conclusion.
Missouri isn’t the only place this has happened, and the country’s best example of it working out fine is also its most extreme: Houston. Voters there rejected zoning in 1948, in 1962, and again in 1993, and Houston is now the fourth-largest city in the country. In his book Arbitrary Lines, planner M. Nolan Gray makes the case that most people, including many local officials, quietly assume zoning and land-use planning are the same thing. They aren’t. Houston handles the genuine conflicts—a slaughterhouse next to a school, a concrete plant near a hospital—through targeted nuisance ordinances and privately negotiated deed restrictions, not a citywide permission system. Gray argues zoning was never really designed to solve those problems in the first place; it was designed to inflate property values and slow the pace of new development by giving existing residents a formal veto over what gets built near them.
That’s worth considering, because the case for zoning usually sounds reasonable on its face. Todd Wiesehan, who runs planning and zoning for Christian County in Missouri, told the Southeast Missourian that zoning provides tools for orderly development and helps a community avoid the friction that comes as an area fills in. That’s a fair description of what zoning is supposed to do. It’s a much less accurate description of what it actually does. Springfield is proving the point this year: city planners and neighborhood residents spent a year identifying roughly 3,600 single-family lots for modest housing—duplexes, small multi-unit homes, and other similar “starter” housing Springfield says it needs. Planning commissioners, facing objections from residents in the affected neighborhoods, scaled that number down to just over 1,000 lots limited to major corridors. So much for “orderly development”—the outcome was decided by whichever property owners were organized enough to show up, not by any neutral planning principle.
Cape Girardeau County is facing its own version of this test right now, albeit without a zoning code. Rumors of data center development nearby have put the question back on the table. At a June candidate forum, all three candidates for presiding commissioner raised real concerns about drainage, infrastructure, and unregulated subdivision growth, and every one of them still leaned against full zoning, grounding their answers in property rights. Asked directly for the county’s current position, the three sitting commissioners gave about as clean an answer as government offers: “There are no plans at this time for planning or zoning.”
That restraint isn’t free. Clinton County’s zoning administrator, Tricia Knight, told the Southeast Missourian her office fields property line disputes, drainage complaints, and neighbor conflicts that would otherwise have nowhere to go. Cape Girardeau County doesn’t have that apparatus, and residents there will have to work out some of those disputes through civil courts or informal means instead. That’s a real trade-off, not an oversight, and it’s one the county’s voters have now made twice, with their eyes open.
Not all heroes wear capes, but plenty of them live and vote in Cape Girardeau County! They didn’t forget to adopt zoning. They considered the question, twice, and to their credit turned it down both times.
For more about zoning in Missouri, read my colleague David Stokes’s report, A Free-Market Guide for Missouri Municipalities, Part Three: Planning and Zoning.
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