doodledee

There was an interesting column in the paper today about how the Fairfax County (VA) Council has passed a law that makes it illegal to pave your entire front lawn. Apparently immigrants who move to the area for jobs can't afford to live in anything but high-density housing. Because a single house might have like 6 car owners, people pave their lawns to create extra parking places. Naturally, the people who don't have the need to pave their lawns are convinced that others doing so will hurt everyone's property value. God forbid they let them park on the street.

We had this exact situation while living in New Hope. Four guys sharing a house (often with some lady friends spending the night) resulted in up to 8 cars needing to park at our place. Since the city of New Hope has some stupid law that made it illegal to park on the street over night, we weren't sure what to do. Not to worry, we figured, the apartment building next door has parking for 100's of cars and the lot averages maybe 10% full. Bzzzz. After parking there a couple of times, we started getting nasty notes about towing our cars if we made it habit. Seeing as we had no vested interest in the property value of the house we were living in, we just parked our cars all over the front lawn. It looked bad, but hey, what choice did we have? God forbid they let us park on the street.