One of the challenges of government planning is how quickly it slips from mere rules to compete, to seeking to engineer a quantitative outcome, to seeking to engineer intangible preferences of aesthetics. So one goes from paperwork to start a business, to the number of business types a community may have, to what colors the storefronts of those businesses can be. That’s where comprehensive planning leads — to any number of concerns about wholly subjective matters like color preferences or supposed ideas about which modes of life have ‘higher quality.’
It’s natural that a person, in his own home, might prefer one color of tapestry over another. It’s an audacious stretch, though, for a public body or city to legislate in favor of some preferences, and not others, in color of a sign, etc.
I can well understand that those who are on a planning board are interested in these matters in their own lives; I’ll stipulate that they’re all likely to be very tasteful in their private choices, too. What I don’t believe is that their public role should include limiting your private choices.
If you want a sign of a certain color on your business, so be it. If you choose well, the community will find your establishment more attractive and enticing; if you choose poorly, customers will shun you. You should be free to make your own choice, and I do not believe that a public body should constrain you.
A group of planners will never know or follow aesthetic trends so well as all the community. Rejecting choices, or requiring a great explanation for them, will slow development and use of new styles, color combinations, etc.
That other communities also restrict choices does not mean that we should also — it need not be that way.
We would do well, I think, if we trouble ourselves less about these matters, and if we discourage others from being so occupied and intrusive about them also.