Ashley Johnson Miller walked into her municipal building with a simple question. She owns 37 acres in Wisconsin. She wanted to put a tiny home on it for her kids.
The answer was no. The property is zoned for one house.
She pushed back. Thirty-seven acres. Plenty of room. It’s for her children, so they’d have somewhere to live at 18, 19, 20. The man behind the desk kept repeating the same thing. Not zoned for that.
She posted about it. The video went viral, because most people had no idea this applied to land you own outright.
What her deed is actually worth
That’s how property works in this country now. You own it, but you don’t control it. Which means you don’t really own it in any meaningful sense.
You pay taxes on it in most states. You just can’t decide how to create value out of it unless the government approves.
Ashley had a plan for her life built on the assumption that the property was hers, because the deed has her name on it. The government, usually invisible until you fall into one of its traps, had its own plan, and the power to end hers.
This is why I talk so much about the origins of zoning and building codes. If Americans broadly understood that our property rights are conditional on the approval of unseen bureaucrats, and that there’s a way to fix it, there would be change.
The runaround
Eventually a second official was more helpful than the first. She pulled up a map. There’s five acres Ashley could parcel off to build one home.
But Ashley doesn’t want a big house. She wants three tiny homes in the back corner. A family compound.
Every solution they hand her is a vision she doesn’t have. One more big house is not her plan. It’s the government’s plan. So everything else is not allowed.
Sometimes I think the purpose of variances and rezoning is just to exhaust people, so there isn’t reform. It leaves a little hope for more freedom, which gets bogged down in the reality of fighting a bureaucracy until people give up and settle for the best they can get.
Does the government care?
Here’s what everyone needs to understand: the system and the people inside it are not the same.
You can have good people at the counter who care, who feel for you, who want to say yes to Ashley and everyone else building the life they want. They work inside a system of power, and that system says no.
This isn’t the private market, where two people cut a deal that leaves both better off. This is politics. What matters here is whether you have pull, whether you’re somebody.
We’re taught in school that government is supposed to serve us. That’s the formulation in our founding documents. But in practice government serves abstractions and special interests. The general welfare. Community safety. Equity and inclusion. Climate planning. Stakeholder collaboration.
All of it is patina over the underlying reality of the land use planning system. Post hoc justification for experts wielding power to manage the rest of us.
How this actually changes
I hope Ashley gets her tiny homes. I don’t have much hope for the variance or the rezone. The process is usually brutal.
These rural fights mostly go unseen. But we saw one break through.
Dave Lewis got too old for his split level and wanted to build a small home near his orchard so he could live close to his grandkids. The government said no. He walked into the Montana legislature and told that committee his story, and it blew them away.
Now across Montana, if there’s a home on a lot, you can build an accessory dwelling unit.
That doesn’t fix what Ashley is facing. But it’s a crack in the wall, and it happened because one man showed up where it mattered and raised his voice.
Ashley raised hers to her audience and revealed what government actually is, and how it limits the pursuit of happiness. That’s how we get property rights back. Telling these stories and naming the injustice, one case at a time.
Ashley has figured out that the American Dream is blocked. My message to her, and to you, is that blocked doesn’t mean dead. It can be unblocked. We know how. We just need the political will.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.
I’m David Rand with the Land Liberty Movement. This is Build the Dream. Let’s rebuild the American Dream together.
