This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 18th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown. Urban planners design our cities, but they often use that power to attempt to control how we live.

So says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole in his new book, The Best Laid Plans,

How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of life, your pocketbook, and

your future. The book is released today.

What is the intent of zoning?

Well, originally when zoning was first conceived in the early 20th century, zoning was supposed to protect neighborhoods from unwanted intrusions.

If you lived in a neighborhood in single family home, neighborhoods from unwanted intrusions.

If you lived in a neighborhood in single family homes,

you didn't really want to have a factory or an apartment building

or even a grocery store in your neighborhood,

because that would increase traffic and

perhaps pollution and bring down the value of your homes. So zoning was kind of a way

of saying this neighborhood is going to stay a single family neighborhood.

However, over time and particularly after the 1970s,

zoning morphed into, let's use zoning to bring down the value of other people's property in a way that will enhance our property.

Let's use zoning to say that rural people can't develop their land so that urban people can look at that rural land and say,

oh, what a nice landscape and not have to see a house or a factory or a store in the landscape. And so it became a way of taking away people's property values whereas the original

kind of to enhance property values

what type of checks are built into zoning processes that allow people to recover the losses that they might experience in their property?

Well, really none. The Supreme Court has approved just about any kind of zoning imaginable, no matter how restrictive,

no matter how much it takes away the value of people's property, and some states have appeal processes that allow people who object to the zoning that

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