Last month I had a real estate deal on a piece of vacant land in Williams Bay fall through. That a deal fell through isn’t newsworthy, rather it’s the reason that the deal fell through. The purchaser of this vacant parcel was required by the village to file for a variance in order to build on this platted parcel of land. The variance was supposed to be a slam dunk, but was denied by the board of zoning appeals. The reason? Because the lot didn’t meet the minimum lot width mandated by village ordinance. The problem here is that this parcel was a pre-platted lot in the village. It wasn’t a lot created by some form of land division, or some other recently created hindrance. Rather, this lot remains exactly the same as it was when the village was laid out roughly a century ago.

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