People like raising chickens. They give delicious eggs and people that raise them say that it’s a clean sustainable pet/food source that should be available in Teaneck.
There’s also a local ordinance prohibiting it:
Sec. 6-5: Keeping of pigs, horses and certain other animals prohibited.
[R.O. 1951, ch. 6, § 4; Ord. No. 3411, 12-20-1994, § 1.]
No person shall keep or allow to be kept in any building or premises, or on any lot of ground of which he may be the owner, tenant, lessee or occupier, any pigs, horses, mules, cows, pigeons or poultry of any age or description.
Repeal movements have come and gone since the rule was created in 1927. There’s one happening now.
It even has a Facebook Group: Keep Chickens Teaneck
So what’s the deal with chickens and this ban?
The practice of owning chickens in town was regulated in the ’20s as population density turned Teaneck from farmland to residential1. It was formally banned anywhere a decade later in 1937.
(census estimates show the population changing from 4,192 in 1920 to 16,513 in 1930 and then to 25,275 in 1940)
This ordinance is one of the oldest the municipality has.
Ordinance 412 appeared in July 1927