Mixed Use Yards & Urban Chickens
KansasCity.com (what’s with all the KC mentions on this blog as of late?) has an article about urban chickens. Some residents are trying to push Kansas City to join the other cities such as Madison, Portland, Seattle, & New York in allowing residents to keep chickens in their yards.
Their battle seems to be up hill. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that they crawled out of rural backwardness towards a suburban ideal and this would be a rollback.
But Councilman John Weber, 77, said he has seen the city grow out of farmland and sees no reason to go back.I’m not sure how a few chickens negates an area as residential, especially with some basic rules & restrictions (numbers, lodgings, no Roosters, etc). The reaction is part of an increasingly outdated frame of thought largely confined to the last 50 years of the 20th century – that all modes of life must be separated to confined spheres. This is where you live, this is where you shop, this is where you work. Understandable when cities where a mix of smog belching factories and crowded tenements. Ultimately though it wrought other miseries like traffic, sprawl, destruction of countrysides, loss of community, traditional towns and real outdoor space. “Mixed use” is a effort in urban planning to shift the pendulum back to a more happy medium. Most only equate mixed use with the “apartments over stores” model leaving only downtowns and neighborhood centers to participate. As the article touches on, mixed use can even apply to the more suburban areas of the city in meaningful ways like providing locally grown food.
“If we’re going to be residential, we ought to be residential,” he said.
KT LaBadie, an Albuquerque graduate student who started urbanchickens.org, said people are tearing out lawns to grow vegetables, and chickens are a natural next step.Could the central northern ends of Stamford even trade yards of lawn, mulch, and shrubs to vegetable gardens and pens? The Advocate had an article last week on where it is already happening in Stamford.
Are chickens legal in Stamford? I'd imagine so if wine sipping, computer literate chimps posed no issue for sometime.
3 comments :
Chickens are fine, but there are restrictions and the big thing is no roosters. However, if you have neighbors that do not care and do not complain, then nothing will happen.
There were chickens and a roster on the west side for many years before the owner got his neighbors upset (had too much JUNK in the yard) and some one complained to the Health Department. There is a funny story of the inspector chasing the rooster though.
I used to see that Rooster a few times years ago when I was running. He was always on the greenstrip running along the Mill River between Tresser and Richmond. I thought for awhile there was a wild Rooster in town.
I can se why chickens had been banned in cities:
1. Sanitation - they smell bad, partucularly during the dog days of summer
2. Health Concerns - I believe they can carry diseases beyond what most typical pets can carry.
3. They have a tendancy to attract predators
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