A growing trend has emerged across the country of raising chickens in residential neighborhoods. A New Yorker article suggests that the 2000 movie The Natural History of the Chicken helped spur the popularity of chicken raising, but media coverage in Utah, Wisconsin, and Kansas indicates that the practice has reached a tipping point this year. Chicken raising is now so widespread that a market for Amish coops has developed.
News anecdotes indicate that most backyard chicken farmers raise chickens as pets or to take part in the environmental and local food movements. Many cities prohibit agricultural land use in residentially zoned areas, so advocates are working with their city councils to change these laws.
Backyard chicken coops have really taken off in Asheville, NC. The Mountain Xpress quotes the city’s Mayor Jan Davis:
We’re a progressive community, and that’s the thing to do right now, so we’re going to keep chickens. But neglected chickens is something I think we’re going to have a big problem with.
Tolerance for chickens in city limits may be growing because of the current popularity of progressive sentiments, and the chicken movement is certainly good news for homeowners’ property rights. However, it is easy to understand that not everyone wants their next door neighbor to own chickens. Chickens most likely come along with externalities worthy of study by Ronald Coase; for chicken owners the right to have livestock at their homes is a benefit, but to their neighbor who smells and hears the chickens, it is a cost.
This issue provides a clear case for regulation at the neighborhood, rather than the municipal level. While it may be too difficult for neighbors to work out this zoning issue on an individual basis, saying “yes” or “no” to chickens in neighborhoods city-wide is also unlikely to be an optimal solution. Here in Washington, DC, for example, it is easy to imagine that residential chickens in Takoma would make residents better off while in Bethesda backyard chicken coops would make most people worse off. If neighborhoods were allowed to permit chickens by a super-majority vote, however, a good balance of individual liberty and social practicality could result.
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Why do we need regulations at all? Chickens are as quiet (or quieter) than dogs and pose less of a threat to children and other animals. The smell of a chicken coop could impact your immediate neighbor more than other animals that are not subject to regulations, but they may not. Really what's wrong with Environmental Ernie baking a pie and taking it over to Corporate Carol's house to talk about his chicken coop plans?
If you're that concerned about Carol's rights, I would propose that there are better, more finely grained mechanisms to protect individual liberty and manage undesirable externalities that neighborhood level regulations. Use renovation permits as an example: in many municipalities they require approval of not just health and safety authorities, but immediate neighbors as well.
Spoken like an Environmental Ernie! It looks as if Ann Arbor has adopted a chicken permit system similar to what you are suggesting: http://www.a2gov.org/government/city_administra...
While I am generally in support of extending homeowners' property rights as much as possible, the housing market does present an interesting case of externalities since the costs of moving, while often not prohibitive, are relatively high and people are highly impacted by their neighbors' behavior. Perhaps a permit system would be the perfect solution for many neighborhoods that did not want to ban or allow chickens outright.
However, if a homeowners' association or similar neighborhood authority thinks that chickens are inappropriate for their area, they should be able to ban them. Such local solutions are much more finely grained than city-wide regulations, and they are a non-coercive way for regulations to be enacted because people willingly live in neighborhoods that have such organizations.
Spoken like an Environmental Ernie! It looks as if Ann Arbor has adopted a chicken permit system similar to what you are suggesting: http://www.a2gov.org/government/city_administra...
While I am generally in support of extending homeowners' property rights as much as possible, the housing market does present an interesting case of externalities since the costs of moving, while often not prohibitive, are relatively high and people are highly impacted by their neighbors' behavior. Perhaps a permit system would be the perfect solution for many neighborhoods that did not want to ban or allow chickens outright.
However, if a homeowners' association or similar neighborhood authority thinks that chickens are inappropriate for their area, they should be able to ban them. Such local solutions are much more finely grained than city-wide regulations, and they are a non-coercive way for regulations to be enacted because people willingly live in neighborhoods that have such organizations.
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