The Nation: Another Vote for ZPG

During the first five years of this decade, the placid community of Santa Barbara on Southern California’s Pacific Coast witnessed nearly zero population growth. The head count of residents over the period increased a scant .58% and today stands at 72,500. Santa Barbarans have decided they like it that way. Last week they overwhelmingly approved a local proposition requiring voter approval of any city council moves that would allow the population to rise above 85,000. The referendum, as one resident put it, offered Santa Barbarans a chance “to vote on how big they want this seaside jewel to become or not to become.”

Similar growth-limiting measures have been adopted by other communities, including Boca Raton, Fla., and Ramapo, N. Y., as well as a handful of other California towns. The motive may be healthy—to conserve resources, including simple living and breathing space, that are becoming scarcer all the time. In a country where migration remains a major avenue of social change, it still seems disturbing to throw up barriers against growth and, by extension, the freedom of people to move and change their lives. In several cases the courts have tried to defend this freedom while also approving rationally regulated, nondiscriminatory growth planning.