After living in Miami Shores for 17 years, and growing vegetables in their front yard for the same amount of time, Tom Carroll and Hermine Ricketts were forced to dig up the garden in front of their home in 2014 when they were threatened by town officials with $50 a day fines if they did not. The threat of fines came only a few months after the Miami Shores Village Council passed a new zoning plan meaning that low-level bureaucrats wasted no time in fanning out amongst residential areas to uproot violators.
The couple is now suing on grounds that the ban on front yard gardens violates the Florida Constitution by imposing improper limits on private property rights as well as violating the equal protection clause. The couple is being represented by lawyers with Institute for Justice, a Libertarian non-profit organization that focuses on free speech and property rights among other issues.
But the politicians and bureaucrats in Miami Shores, however, are not exactly what one would consider reasonable. For instance, Richard Sarafan, argued that the new zoning rule was not irrational and that the couple’s yard should be covered with grass, sod or “living ground cover.” If they want a vegetable garden it should be in the back yard.
What is surprising, however, is that Sarafan would argue that vegetable producing plants are not living ground cover. After all, he and his client were the ones that left “living ground cover” undefined.
Plants are living. They are on the ground. And they cover it.
“There certainly is not [a] fundamental right to grow vegetables in your front yard,” Sarafan said.
Sarafan continued,
Aesthetics and uniformity are legitimate government purposes. Not every property can lawfully be used for every purpose.
Okay, maybe I spoke too soon. Aesthetics and uniformity are legitimate government purposes? What a beautiful world. Nothing sounds better than a world in which everything looks the same and is aesthetically pleasing to the government. It’s also a revolutionary approach of which Sarafan should inform the government. After all their legal battles and semantics to steal property from citizens in the past, they could have just used that “aesthetics and uniformity” clause. It’s so easy, really. It might not exist in the Constitution but so what? Sarafan and Miami Shores says it does, so we can just go with that.
The State is God.
“
Aesthetics and uniformity are legitimate government purposes.“
If we could put his bullshit to use, we could fertilize a good few hundred vegetable growing yards.
The Carving Witch 