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AbstractProponents of deinsitutionalization and community care must become familiar with local systems of land use control in order to devise strategies for breaking down unreasonable zoning barriers. Legislatures and federal and state courts that have actively promoted normalization goals also provide the forums for attacking exclusionary zoning.

The Eighth Amendment provides little, if any, protection for the homeless. But courts can help them by striking down exclusionary zoning, which is the major cause of housing shortages that lead to homelessness.

DANIELSON DISCUSSES THE FACTORS THAT ACCOUNT FOR LOCAL RESISTANCE TO OPENING THE SUBURBS TO SUBSIDIZED HOUSING. HE ARGUES THAT LACK OF INCENTIVES FOR LOCAL OFFICIALS AND RESIDENTS, COMBINED WITH THE WEAK ARTICULATION OF LATENT SOURCES OF SUPPORT FOR OPEN HOUSING, TEND TO PRECLUDE SIGNMIFICANT POLICY CHANGE FROM WITHIN SUBURBS.

The author examines how quasi-judicial zoning requirements affect exclusionary zoning (i.e., land-use controls that exclude the poor and/or minorities from particular jurisdictions). Using a large sample of communities from nine major metropolitan areas, the analysis reveals that quasi-judicial constraints diminish the level of exclusionary zoning. This indicates that if city councils are not permitted complete legislative discretion when making zoning decisions, they may not be able to satisfy constituent demands to keep out unwanted developments and their residents.

Policy analyst Justin Hayes summarizes the reasons why conservatives, progressives, and libertarians all have reason to support zoning reform.

Coauthor Josh Braver and I argue exclusionary zoning violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

The extent to which a free society seeks to regulate sexual expression is problematic. What was defined as immoral or contra bonos mores in the 20th century, has become less of an issue in today's liberal society. Freedom of sexual intimacy and expression are, to be sure, 1st Amendment and 14th Amendment rights. But, with every assertion of a fundamental right or liberty must come a concomitant understanding that there is a co-ordinate responsibility to exercise that right reasonably. Determining the reasonableness of any conduct grounded in these two amendments must be fact sensitive and guided by community standards. Broad, open-ended moral judgments should be eschewed as foundational bases for legal judgments. Indeed, advancing moral grounds as justification for regulating personal liberties of sexual expression and association are being seen by some as invalid reasons for enacting exclusionary land use regulations - here, for the containment of activities connected with sexually oriented businesses [SOBs]. No unequivocal standard of dispositive clarity will ever be formulated which determines when conduct is unreasonable in that it is lewd and obscene or when written, electronic and photographic material pornographic in content rises to the level of obscenity and thereby subject to strict regulation. The most logical and common sense approach to this quandary is for legislators, land use planners, zoning commissioners and courts, in trying to either eliminate or contain the operation of SOBs, is to rely upon and use several tools: common law nuisance fortified by either moral, anticipatory or aesthetic iterations or models, and exclusionary zoning techniques. Difficult though determining when, under nuisance law, conduct is so unreasonable as to warrant its cessation, the Restatement of Torts Second provides a workable construct for making that determination. Both strengthened and guided by the doctrine of secondary effects, nuisance actions of all types have a clear placement in the arsenal of legal weapons which may be used to regulate effectively SOBs. The implementation of a community-based standard of morality for proper regulatory control of SOBs will always present an issue of unpredictability inherent in its underlying flexibility. For the content-neutral regulation of sexually oriented businesses, the only limiting requirement analyzed, aside from ensuring adequate alternative channels of communication, is determining if the regulation serves a significant government interest. Further, while the Supreme Court has held repeatedly that preventing a multitude of secondary effects is a significant government interest, the manner in which that goal could be served has not been meaningfully defined or limited. The secondary effects doctrine places great power, and corresponding responsibility, in the hands of each local community - but it does so at the peril of uniformity. While uniformity is not an absolute necessity in the Federalist system, the type and severity of secondary effect that can be a justification for regulating the location of a sexually oriented business should be clarified. The time, place, or manner restrictions imposed can be left up to each locality to tailor to their needs, but the triggering events for those restrictions must be more clearly defined.

The municipal zoning process in the United States has come under increasing attack as a tool to create & maintain suburban socioeconomic homogeneity by mandating sprawl-producing single-family detached houses at the expense of less costly townhouses, apartments, & mobile homes. Beginning in the 1970s, the Supreme Courts of the neighboring states of Pennsylvania & New Jersey addressed municipal exclusionary zoning in different ways: Pennsylvania empowered residential developers to compel municipalities practicing exclusionary zoning to authorize market-rate development of all types of housing, while developer empowerment in New Jersey was conditioned upon inclusion of low- & moderate-income units. Using aerial survey & housing census data over a 20-year period, this article finds that outcomes by housing type over a 20-year period in Pennsylvania municipalities around Philadelphia were more diverse than those in adjacent New Jersey municipalities. 5 Tables, 1 Figure, 42 References. [Copyright 2004 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.]

This paper empirically analyses a Massachusetts law (Chapter 40B) allowing developers of income-restricted housing to appeal local land-use decisions to a state administrative body. Based on a unique dataset, we assess whether Chapter 40B was more likely to be used by developers in municipalities that place stronger restrictions on development. We find that the use of Chapter 40B to overcome regulatory barriers depends on the type of project. For rental development, developers were more likely to use the law in municipalities that were relatively accessible to jobs and that placed relatively stringent zoning restrictions on multifamily development. The use of Chapter 40B for condominium development was more likely in larger, less well-located municipalities with relatively stringent wetlands regulations.