Zoning Board of Appeals

Imagine a client who falls in love with a pristine corner lot in a residential zone, determined to buy the property only if they can run a small commercial bakery out of the detached garage. The town’s zoning code, however, strictly says "Residential Only." To the untrained eye, the deal is dead. But property laws, much like the laws of physics, have built-in mechanisms to handle anomalies. The zoning code is essentially a rigid grid dropped over a living, breathing, topographically uneven town. Eventually, the rigid rules of the grid and the messy reality of the ground will disagree. In New York, the mechanism that bridges this gap is the Zoning Board of Appeals. By state mandate, every municipality in New York State with a zoning ordinance must establish a Zoning Board of Appeals to handle these exact collisions between municipal planning and private property rights.

Zoning maps divide municipalities into distinct districts, imposing a rigid grid of allowable land uses that must occasionally adapt to a property's unique physical reality.
Zoning maps divide municipalities into distinct districts, imposing a rigid grid of allowable land uses that must occasionally adapt to a property's unique physical reality.