Central City Gazette City Beat
Sunday, March 7th, 1926
Babs Wells
Gone are the days when you could make your dreams a reality, unless those dreams conform to the realities dictated by the zoning commission.
Central City’s municipal government voted today to implement zoning laws in our state’s capitol, your fine city. You may have thought you’d seen the last of big government’s overreach, but such is not the case. We’re now being told where we can build our businesses, our homes, and how we can’t build both in the same place.
“Who wants to live next to a factory?” Mayor Snively asked at his press conference. “Our forefathers carved this city from the wilderness. They brought civilization to an uncivilized land. We owe it to them to continue their tradition of prosperity, development, and organized expansion.”
None of us may wish to live next to a factory. Perhaps we should be grateful Mayor Snively doesn’t require us to do exactly that.
What, you ask, will the future hold?
Perhaps, horror of horrors, we may one day commute as a herd to a city center devoid of life after the dinner hour. With our homes in one place, shops in another, churches in a third, and work in a fourth, we’ll live lives of quiet migration. Automobiles, though today a rich man’s toy, may become a necessity for the average citizen, and our world will become cluttered with belching exhaust, squealing tires, and the sputtering of the internal combustion engine.
