Agenda - Planning Commission - 03/07/1995

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Reasonable or Capricious? The second question deals with the interesting concept of balancing the individual property owner's right to be different- against the community's collective interest in preserving tradition, uniformity, and stability of property values. The individual owner may claim that, through excessive regulation, the government is taking his land without compensation; In Bevan v. Township of Brandon, 475 N.W. 2d 37 (1991), the Supreme Court of Michigan held that, for the purpose of taking analysis, the undivided land must be considered, making taking challenges untenable in lot split cases being reviewed here. Planners can overcome a substantive due process challenge with careful answers to the next question. Why the Number of Sides? There are specific advantages to using the number of sides as a measure of complexity of the shape of a particular lot. Chief among these is that it does not require any special expertise. Everyone can look at the community map and count the number of sides of the lots. Keeping the number of sides low helps decrease the probability of boundary disputes among residents. This benefits not only the residents but the title companies, which invariably become involved in such disputes. 3 i 0:! 18 i;::5~ 0 i:3~ 14 ~ 4 4 i10 498 ~219- 29 i68~ 182 i1006 5 i O~ 42 i 16 2 ~:3;; 32 [;"95 6 ~ 2 24 il 2~ 1 ! 4~ 15 ~ 48 7 i O. 5 ~ 1~ 0 i 3! 4 i 13 8 i 0 1 i '1-~ 0 ~ 0 1 9 i Oi 4 i:'O' 0 i 1~ 0 TOTAL i12:592 1244 32 !82 248 11210: TABLE 2: Distribulion of number o! sides amon the lots within the various zoning classifications in Franklin Village. Keeping the number of sides low decreases the probability of the existence of complicated metes and bounds, which sometimes fail to produce a completely closed boundary due to minuscule imprecisions that accumulate as the number of sides increases. This, too, benefits owners and title companies. 3 ~ 0 0.5 i 018' Oi 4~3.' 2.2i 0.21 4 183.3 87.1 191:?i 90.6 ;.8615 78.9 18614 5 ;83.3 94.1 9812'~ 96.8 i 9011'~: 91.8 1 94.2 6 ;100 98.1 i 99~ 100!94.9'97.8!98.I 7 i1100 98.9 99.4 100 i 98.57. 99.4 i 99.1 8 ~100 99 100 100~98.5 100199.3 9 1:100 100 !100:1001 100~ 100! 100 ~ := i00 i ~" more [100 100 i~00 ~00~=~ , 100 TABLE 23: Percentage of lots within each classification that have sides numbering mess than or equal tO those {ndicated {n lhe first co{umn, Cyrus Motlagh is a former planning commissioner of ?ranklin Village, Michigan, an associate professor of statistics at the University of Detroit Mercy, and a practicing attorney. Fencing lots with many protrusions would create unsightly views. On the other hand, leaving such lots unfenced could invite claims of adverse possession by neighbors in the future. On rare occasions, counting sides can become a challenge. This usually results from natural boundaries such as a meanderingstream or from protrusions and indentations so small compared with the lot as a whole that they can not fairly be counted as sides. Cul-de-sacs pose yet another complication. The cuts from the individual lots are slight compared to the size of the lots and are generally not worth counting as a side. Finally, where a boundary is a curve, ~vhether it is closer to one straight line or two intersecting lines can be resolved by considering the obtuseness of the bend~in other words, the more gentle the curve, the closer it becomes to a straight line. A final deciding factor in classification is to determine whether the lot is' closer to one geometric shape than to another, Because the overwhelming majority of lots in most communities are four- sided, creating a database of the number of sides of lots will not be a daunting task. The Village Franklin Village dates back to 1825. Dubbed "the town that time forgot," its mere 2.26 square miles are organized as an unincorporated village with an all-volunteer government. The municipality was one of the first to require a referendum on any rezoning of land within the village, and it has a master plan that specifically establishes preservation of low density and the rural character as a goal for the village. Its 2,800 residents live in harmony with the.abundant woods and streams and wildlife. TABLE 4: Average lot size within a zoning classification and percentage of lots within that classification that have five or more sides. Many of them keep horses on their property for recreational purposes. They can all, to one degree or another, be characterized as defenders of ~he village's natural, rural, or historic character. There are six different residential zoning classifications in the village, which comprise more than 99 percent of the area of the village. The remainder is office and commercial. Table 1 indicates how many lots, what percentage of total number of lots, and what percentage of total area falls in each category. Table 2 shows the number of lots within each classification with a. particular number of sides. It is immediately obvious that four-sided lots overwhelm all others in numbers and that the R1 zoning classification is the dominant one. Table 3 shows the same information translated into cumulative percentages. For example, 94.2 percent of all lots in the village have five or fewer sides. This is not surprising. What is most interesting, however, is the