Wildwood Should Retain What’s Left Of Its Rural Character
The Post-Dispatch has an interesting story in the paper titled; Suburbia, horse country collide.
It seems the Wildwood City Council is considering a measure to limit the size of outbuildings. This is not uncommon as most municipalities have such ordinances. However, most do not have such large parcels of land. A newly formed group, Wildwood Horse Owners & Acreage Association, or WHOA for short is fighting to maintain the rural rights to barns and stables:
The organization opposes a plan before the City Council tonight to limit the size of unattached “accessory” buildings to 1.5 percent of the square footage of a property parcel. It would set a maximum building size of 6,500 square feet without special City Hall permission.
The proposed legislation, bill #1245, can be read here. I can see how people might not want someone building a barn bigger than the house on a 3 acre lot. But on land of say 20 acres a large barn seems like a basic element. I support keeping the rural character of Wildwood and don’t care for all the new McMansion subdivisions.
Still, I’ve seen some awful new metal barns and indoor riding arenas. It is one thing to argue for the right to keep horses and quite another to put up some enormous boring beige metal box. Wildwood probably needs to do some combination of both, limit size for smaller parcels (under 3 acres) and create some design guidelines for structures on larger sections.
Riding lessons are still on my to-do list. Maybe for 2006…
– Steve
IMHO, if a person moves to a RURAL area, they have zero reason to complain if somebody wants to put up a barn–I don’t care how big. If you didn’t want that, you shouldn’t have moved to a RURAL area. This is no different than me, who lives in the Tower Grove Area in the city, complaining that the houses are too close together or that people park in front of my house. Jeeez…you’d think I’d have noticed that before I invested in the area.
The people of wildwood should move to New Town or–shocker–to a city if they want to be all city-fied.
Next they’ll be complaining about the height of the cornstalks.
[REPLY – Agreed! But have you been to Wildwood lately? It is becoming less and less rural every day wtih new subdivisions popping up everywhere. So much for charming countryside.
I’m not sure if they’ll complain about the height of the cornstalks though — their SUVs are big enough to see over them! – SLP]