Let your utopian dream of people from all walks of life living happily ever after in the same fancy condo towers go peacefully into the night.

Don't waste any more precious time or city money trying to revive your failed "inclusionary zoning" law, which is scheduled to expire in January.

Let "IZ" R.I.P.

Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz launched inclusionary zoning five years ago, shortly after winning his first term.

The IZ law requires private developers to include a percentage of lower-cost units in new housing projects. The goal was to diversify the income levels of people moving into neighborhoods where housing construction occurred. That, in turn, was supposed to diversity public schools, which was supposed to improve achievement among students from low-income families.

The mayor's grand, big-government plan didn't just fall apart — it never came together.

Almost nobody wanted to buy the below-market condos because the city wanted to keep a portion of any equity that built up over time. Even after the city sweetened the deal for IZ home buyers, few stepped forward.

Instead, first-time home buyers continued to use long-standing and effective government programs to purchase fixer-uppers. A variety of proven programs help first-time buyers with low-interest loans, down payments and repair work.

After courts threw out the portion of the city's IZ law that applied to rental units — because it violated a state ban on rent control — IZ applied mostly to new condo towers and townhomes. But to offer some units at below-market prices, developers had to raise the prices on other units in their projects. Or city taxpayers had to subsidize the lower-cost units to ensure that the development went forward.

This meant ordinary, first-time homeowners in less expensive fixer-uppers were actually having to pay higher city property taxes to subsidize new condos they couldn't afford.

It was convoluted and unfair. And it wasn't even making the tiniest dent in the housing market.

In five years, only a few dozen IZ units sold — some of them to a nonprofit that itself was already being subsidized by taxpayers. IZ's complexity and uncertainty even served as an incentive for private developers to build in the suburbs rather than the city, further undermining the mayor's original goals.

The Madison City Council needs to show some mercy and allow the comatose IZ program to die a quiet death. Then the city can move ahead with existing first-time home buyer programs that actually help ordinary people buy fixer-uppers in Madison that they can afford, be proud of and earn equity in.