Rooster Crowing and Zoning

As one who spent a twenty five year career enforcing zoning regulations, and during whose career had occasion to order chickens and a pig removed from residentially zoned areas, I think there is something really nice about being awakened by a crowing rooster while living in the middle of a city. In fact I even found charming the pig, the really cute piglets and the chickens in the back yard of the home where I once stayed in Cuba.

Zoning is most often used in the USA as a means of exclusion, much as regulations requiring the licensing of professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and massage “therapists”, for instance, are used to restrain the trade in such practices. USA zoning regulations exist, I hasten to add, at the behest of the populace, just as professional licensing regulations exist at the behest of the practitioners of such professions.

Zoning regulations in the USA, separating land use districts, are only practicable as it is a nation of drivers. Here most people don’t own vehicles, consequently there are shops in just about every block. Within the block where I live, for instance, there is an internet café; a shop that sells wrestling masks and videos (by the way, there is a “professional” wrestling rink here, the matches in which, for the record, I have not attended); a panaderia where I buy bread (since I don’t have an oven) the aromas of which can be detected a half block away; a meat market where they cut meat and grind hamburger to order; a produce market Tere, a wonderfully gregarious person, operates out of the front room of her home; an office that does typing; and a gym. And this is a fairly typical block. Around the corner there a couple of tiendas that sell miscellaneous goods, two pastelerias, that also emit pleasant aromas, another internet café, and etc. There is even a Chedraui’s in Centro within easy walking distance of the dog pound, as well as smaller stores selling just about everything imaginable.