General Suburban Updates and Rumours

[ijmorlan]

My old house backed onto farmland that was zoned as commercial.  I knew a business/retail would go in there, but I wasn't expecting the auto shop's bay doors to be facing my house and have the impact wrench going off all day 80' from my bedroom window.  City couldn't help me as it fit the zoning.

Yet another illustration of how badly zoning is done. It nitpicks about whether a business has “picture framing” (quote from the City of Waterloo zoning bylaw; you may take it as given that I don’t believe a reasonable zoning bylaw needs to mention something as specific as “picture framing”), then allows an auto shop to face directly on residential. A lot of zoning should be by impact rather than use. For example, I don’t really care if an auto shop moves in next to me as long as they operate silently and odor-free. By contrast, I would object to marijuana-using loud partiers moving in next to me, even if all they’re doing, from a zoning point of view, is living there.