Zoning law rarely makes for compelling storytelling. But Reason's latest housing policy newsletter manages to thread three cases together — a church, a farm, and a collapsing urban birth rate — into something that reads less like regulatory reportage and more like a catalog of bureaucratic overreach at its most tragicomic.
The through-line is not subtle: local land-use rules, as written and enforced, have a reliable talent for crushing things that most people consider self-evidently good. Religious charity for the homeless. A sanctuary for abused animals. The presence of young children in cities. If a zoning ordinance can be found to threaten all three in a single news cycle, the argument that these codes serve the public interest deserves at minimum a harder look.
The Sprinkler System That Almost Closed a Church Shelter
The Ohio case is the most legally resolved of the three, and in some ways the most revealing. Dad's Place, a church in Bryan, Ohio, had been running a nighttime ministry — letting people sleep on its property. Fire Chief Douglas Pool filed a civil lawsuit arguing the church had quietly converted itself into a residential use without the proper zoning approvals, and demanded it either install a full sprinkler system or shut the ministry down.
The pastor, Chris Avell, did not dispute that a sprinkler system would improve fire safety. He argued it would cost enough to effectively end the ministry entirely — and that forcing a religious organization to choose between financial ruin and ceasing its charitable work was not a neutral regulatory act but a constitutional violation.
Williams County Judge James D. Bates agreed. The ruling turned on a principle known as strict scrutiny: when government action burdens the free exercise of religion, it must serve a compelling government interest through the least restrictive means available. The piece notes the decisive detail: the city had waived the sprinkler requirement for nearby hotels but not for Dad's Place. That selective exemption was fatal to Pool's case. As Reason reports, Bates found that the city had "failed that strict scrutiny standard" and dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice.
Avell offered a statement with some rhetorical timing: "We praise God for this decision and the work it allows this church to continue in Bryan, Ohio. I consider it no coincidence that this decision comes during Holy Week as our church joins Christians worldwide to celebrate Christ's victory over death."
The civil dismissal is not the end of the story. The city of Bryan had previously taken the more dramatic step of criminally charging Avell with zoning and fire code violations. He was convicted, and that appeal is still pending. The civil case may be closed with prejudice; the criminal matter is not. Whether the constitutional logic that prevailed against Pool's civil lawsuit will carry over to the criminal proceeding remains an open question — and a consequential one for churches running similar ministries elsewhere.
When Volunteers Become a Zoning Violation
The North Carolina case involves no criminal charges, but the practical stakes for Kimberly Dunckel are comparable. In 2021, Dunckel founded Fairytale Farm on her family's 3.3-acre property to care for neglected and abused farm animals. As the sanctuary grew, she began hosting ticketed fundraising events and accepting volunteers. That combination attracted the attention of Winston-Salem zoning officials, who concluded the sanctuary had become an illegal commercial enterprise in a residential zone.
The city's position, as Reason describes it, was peculiar in its specificity: Dunckel could keep the animals. She could host visitors. She could throw parties. What she could not do was any of those things in service of an animal sanctuary, because that transformed otherwise-lawful activities into impermissible commercial ones. She was also told she could not generally have volunteers on the property to help care for the animals.
Dunckel's legal argument cut to the absurdity directly: none of the individual activities the city was targeting were prohibited under her residential zoning. The illegality arose entirely from their purpose. A fundraising event for a nonprofit animal rescue is banned; a birthday party with the same number of attendees is fine. The distinction has nothing to do with noise, traffic, or odors — her attorneys presented evidence that the farm was generating none of these negative impacts on neighbors — and everything to do with what the activity is called.
Both a lower court and, last week, the North Carolina Court of Appeals sided with the city. The appeals court's reasoning is worth examining. "Plaintiffs' attempts to analyze the discrete segments of a commercial use overlooks the fact Plaintiffs are still using the property in a commercial manner even if some of the negative impacts are not present based on the factual record before us," the court wrote.
Reason's editorial verdict is pointed: "The appeals court's ruling is a good reminder that zoning codes don't directly regulate the negative externalities and neighborhood impacts. They instead play word games about what counts as 'commercial' or 'residential' uses, even if the distinction is completely invisible to the neighbors."
Attorneys from the Institute for Justice, representing Dunckel, have announced they will appeal to the state Supreme Court. The case will test whether courts are willing to look past categorical labels to ask what, exactly, zoning is supposed to protect people from — and whether a nonprofit animal sanctuary that generates no measurable harm to adjacent properties can be treated as a commercial threat to a residential neighborhood.
Critics of Dunckel's position might argue that zoning categories exist precisely because allowing case-by-case impact assessments would create an enforcement nightmare. If every prospective commercial use can argue its particular iteration produces no neighborhood harm, residential zones become effectively unenforceable. The city's interest in bright-line rules is not purely arbitrary — it reflects an administrative reality. Whether that administrative convenience justifies forcing a family to surrender animals they've been caring for is a different, harder question.
"Families are uniquely sensitive to issues like public safety and school quality and are the backbone of functional, tightly knit communities. Losing families in large numbers is a sign that a city is failing to provide the fundamental building blocks of urban life."
The Disappearing Urban Child
The third thread in the newsletter is the broadest and, demographically, the most alarming. A new Manhattan Institute report by Connor O'Brien and Liena Zagare documents what has happened to the population of children under five in America's largest cities since 2020. The numbers are not subtle. As Reason summarizes, "between early 2020 and mid-2024, the population of children under five years old declined by 7% in large urban counties, which is more than twice the nationwide rate of decline." In New York City, the under-five population shrank by nearly a fifth. Cook County, Los Angeles County, and San Francisco recorded similar drops.
The report identifies three root causes: rising child care costs and declining school quality, rising crime, and the rising cost of family-sized housing units. These forces are not independent. Expensive housing forces families into smaller units or further from urban cores. Rising crime concentrates its effects on public spaces that families use disproportionately. School quality shapes residential decisions directly — parents who can afford to move often do, and the direction is typically away from cities with weak or uncompetitive public school systems.
The piece gives particular attention to the housing dimension, noting the report's recommendation that cities "repeal zoning restrictions on new housing" and "provide incentives to construct family-sized, three-bedroom units." The logic is familiar to anyone who has followed the supply-side housing debate: density restrictions artificially compress supply, which raises prices, which makes family-sized units — which require more square footage and therefore cost more — disproportionately expensive or simply unavailable.
The editors acknowledge the tension in the density argument honestly. The densest areas of American cities already have the lowest fertility rates, a pattern that holds globally. More apartments, in this view, may not by themselves make cities more welcoming to families if the underlying economics of urban child-rearing remain punishing. Reason's own editorial judgment lands on school choice as the highest-leverage intervention: "Expanding school choice is cities' best option for attracting and retaining families."
The reasoning offered is a kind of urban agglomeration theory applied to education. Large cities, by virtue of their population density, can support a wider variety of specialized institutions — Montessori schools, STEM academies, Latin programs, multiple Catholic options — that smaller communities cannot. The constraint is not geography or population but policy: most large American cities sit in jurisdictions hostile to the mechanisms, chiefly vouchers and charter expansion, that would let families access that variety.
This is where the counterpoint has real force. School choice reforms shift public funding toward private and charter providers, which creates political resistance from teachers' unions and public school advocates who argue the approach drains resources from already-underfunded district schools. The evidence on whether choice improves aggregate outcomes — rather than simply sorting children whose families have the information and mobility to navigate options — is genuinely contested. Reason's editors are advancing a libertarian-inflected policy preference here, not citing a settled empirical consensus.
There is also a tension in the report's framing that the piece does not fully resolve. If families with young children are leaving cities partly because of housing costs, and housing costs are partly a product of zoning restrictions, then the policy solution — repeal zoning restrictions — might eventually reduce costs enough to attract some families back. But the timeline on housing supply responses is measured in years or decades, and the families leaving now are making decisions in current conditions. A city that is unaffordable today cannot wait for a decade of upzoning to stop its demographic bleed.
The Connecting Thread
Reason's editorial framing — zoning as "the sum of all evils and the enemy of all good things" — is deliberately hyperbolic, a newsletter voice signaling to readers that it knows it is making an argument, not just reporting events. But the cases assembled underneath that framing are real, and the pattern they illustrate is genuine.
In Bryan, Ohio, a fire code enforcement action nearly shuttered a church shelter for the homeless. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a nonprofit animal rescue is being ordered to remove its animals because it let volunteers help care for them. In every large American city, a generation of families has decided that urban life is not compatible with raising children, and zoning policy features prominently among the reasons why.
These are not edge cases. The church case and the farm case are both being litigated at the appellate level precisely because the underlying legal questions — how far municipalities can burden religious exercise through land-use codes, whether residential zoning can ban activities purely on categorical grounds with no demonstrated harm — remain unresolved. And the urban family exodus documented by the Manhattan Institute represents one of the more significant demographic trends in American metropolitan life since the postwar suburbanization wave.
The newsletter format that Reason uses here — three items stitched around a thematic spine — sometimes papers over the differences between cases that have meaningfully different legal, social, and empirical textures. A First Amendment challenge to a fire code is a different kind of problem than a fertility rate decline, and both are different from a zoning board's theory of what constitutes "commercial" activity. Whether a single regulatory framework explains all three is at least worth questioning.
What the cases share is a bureaucratic logic that treats categories as ends in themselves. Dad's Place is not a residential facility; Fairytale Farm is not a commercial enterprise; and American cities are not, by most measures, actually trying to drive out families. But the codes, as written and enforced, produce outcomes that look indistinguishable from those intentions. That gap — between what the rules are said to serve and what they actually do — is where Reason has always found its richest material.
Bottom Line
Reason has assembled three cases that individually would read as local curiosities but together make a case that land-use regulation in America has drifted far from any coherent theory of what it is supposed to protect. The Ohio church ruling is an outright win for religious liberty; the North Carolina farm case is headed to a state Supreme Court test of whether zoning can ban harmless activity on categorical grounds; and the urban family exodus is the long-run cost of letting supply-side housing constraints compound for decades. The counterarguments — that administrative simplicity requires bright-line rules, that choice programs may not improve aggregate outcomes — deserve honest engagement. But the evidence that zoning regularly produces results that bear no relationship to actual neighborhood harm is not seriously in dispute.