A rant about zoning laws

Storage is a crime in College Station

So Ismail, Matthew, and I are opening a makerspace in College Station, TX. We found a phenomenal location where the landlord is fine with our intended use. They’re also fine with us putting a shipping container behind the building (with the cooperation and approval of the other tenants). Unfortunately, that’s not how this city (and the rest of the country) works. We apparently forgot who the real victim of this horrible awful unsightly shipping container was: The city itself. After I called the city to just please let us have electricity approximately 8 times, they started looking into us and determined that while we were allowed to operate by the grace of their benevolent hand, we couldn’t have extra storage.

After digging through the dense web of zoning laws (which limited the size, shape, color, number of windows on a building, and more!), we finally found the passage where they unambiguously banned external storage and temporary buildings (like a shipping container). Why did they do this? I don’t know.

Really, though, who is hurt by us putting a container there? The owner of the property isn’t, the other tenants aren’t, and there are no other buildings around that can even see it past their surrounding fences.

I don’t like zoning laws.