Hawaii passed the first statewide land-use zoning law in 1961 to protect plantations

Evidence

Hawaii was the first state to act. With the rise of jet travel in the 1950s, the state’s economy boomed, and the city of Honolulu soon seemed a sprawling threat to the beauty and productivity of the countryside. To protect the state’s pineapple and sugarcane plantations, the legislature passed a land-use law in 1961. The act created a land-use commission to divide the entire state into urban, rural, agricultural, and conservation districts. Once the commission defined each zone, the territorial expansion of the state’s cities would be limited to the urban district. The act also gave the land-use commission the power to regulate development in the rural and agricultural districts, while the Department of Land and Natural Resources controlled the use of the state’s conservation lands. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 931

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: By 1975, 23 states had acts protecting wetlands or shorelands — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 935