What are the best, modest, incremental strategies to enhance a community’s image?
In the cities, one goal is to at least appear to be more safe than Dodge City — and livable in a middle-class sort of a way. For instance, Hartford is hard at work plotting to install a real, live, honest-to-God grocery store downtown.
The suburbs and smaller towns existing on the edge of exurban identity crisis have special image challenges. The ring suburbs on the edge of the cities fight hard to appear “suburban,” without being ridiculously snobby. On the other hand, the snobby suburbs want to be snobby, to avoid the plague of three-bedroom ranch houses with basketball hoops in the driveway.
The towns that wander between farm and suburb are torn between cows and condos, between the general store and a strip mall.
The more blue-collar suburbs are particularly complex with their image enhancements. A popular option that emerges on occasion is a ban on “commercial vehicles” (i.e., pickup trucks) in residential driveways, or a prohibition on drying clothes outside, on a clothes line, the old-fashioned way.
One of the most popular instincts in communities of all shapes, sizes and colors is the regulation or prohibition of lawn signs. Of the objectionable things one might do to despoil a community, lawn signs might seem far down the list, but the anti-lawn sign itch has been scratched across the nation, for decades.
While prohibitions on clothes lines and pickup trucks might run up against our populist sense that a man’s house is his castle, and private property is private, it is the lawn-sign business that has emerged as the more contentious effort by towns to pretty up the neighborhood.
Often with the encouragement of the American Civil Liberties Union, the sign bans have been challenged as a constitutionally dubious “free speech” prohibition — and the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have been largely sympathetic to that argument.
In theory at least, the sign restrictions conjure up the image of a sinister dictator taking over town hall and prohibiting signs that might challenge him come Election Day — or protest his despotic regime.
Even as we speak, the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union has come sniffing around the town of Mansfield, which has some restrictions on political lawn signs.
Mansfield has a complex set of political-sign regulations, which set time limits on candidate signs during election season and which prohibit general political/public policy signs on such stuff as abortion and health care reform.
On the issue of what kinds of messages are approved and what kinds are prohibited, the boys and girls from Mansfield are probably doomed. The courts frown on “message-specific” government prohibitions.
On the general matter of time restrictions on campaign signs, Mansfield might have a case that at some point long before and long after an election, candidate signs are litter, rather than “free speech.” Will the town risk an expensive court fight, which it probably wouldn’t win?
The most recent and compelling U.S. Supreme Court decision on such stuff, in 1994, prompted a unanimous ruling against a Ladue, Missouri, ban on signs in residential areas. The justices uttered the magic words, “compelling interest,” and suggested that the town didn’t have one sufficient to curb free speech.
Anti-lawn sign ordinances across Connecticut and across the country regulate size, duration, content — while some limit themselves to line-of-sight restrictions.
The sign thing is a small, odd piece of the First Amendment game, but the ACLU dutifully trots across the land, writing polite warning letters and occasionally marching into court.
No one has much to say about pink flamingos.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
