Zoning and other bald-face lies

To me (and apparently NOT to certain members of local government), Zoning is a contract. It says "Go ahead and invest here. We promise that this will remain a residential (or commercial, or light industrial, or whatever) area, so your investment will be safe." But here's the deal. Once they've exhausted the possibility of development in that type of zone, it seems that elected officials feel it's OK to go ahead and change the zone on the remaining land so it can be developed in a different manner.

To me, that's where the zoning contract falls through. Say I invest three years of my salary into a home. It takes me 30 years (most of a lifetime, really) to pay it off. Furthermore, let's say that my new home is on a lot near the edge of the subdivision. There's still some land between my lot and the road, but for some reason, the developer doesn't put homes on it. Probably because nobody wants their lot to border a 4-lane thoroughfare. So he leaves a green space buffer between the subdivision and the road - good idea. It's zoned residential.

Then lets say the Department of Transportation puts a new 10-lane superslab in near the subdivision. Now all of a sudden, there's three times the traffic on the 4-lane road that runs along our green-space buffer strip of land. Sounds like we need to plant more trees to reduce the road noise, to protect the comfort and the investment of our neighborhood residents, right? WRONG. You're not seeing the big picture! There's MONEY TO BE MADE, DAMMIT!

Time to rezone that patch of land as "Commercial". Then get a bulldozer, grade it so it drains right into the subdivision, and remove every piece of foliage on the parcel. Maybe we can sell it to a pork rendering plant, or a tire incinerator. Maybe we can store spent nuclear fuel rods on it. The hell with that earlier promise that was implied by zoning it residential - we have an opportunity to make a couple of bucks off the backs of the residents, and that should take precedence! What are you, a friggin' communist?